{"id":6886,"date":"2012-02-28T00:41:28","date_gmt":"2012-02-28T05:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/?p=6886"},"modified":"2012-02-28T00:41:28","modified_gmt":"2012-02-28T05:41:28","slug":"in-ecology-news-heartland-leak-hydrofracking-law-and-conservation-in-pictures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/2012\/02\/28\/in-ecology-news-heartland-leak-hydrofracking-law-and-conservation-in-pictures\/","title":{"rendered":"In Ecology News: Heartland leak, hydrofracking law, and conservation in pictures"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Liza Lester, ESA communications officer
\n\"Rob<\/a><\/p>\n

A dead pronghorn (Antilocapra americana<\/em>) on a back road of the Thunder Basin National Grassland in northeastern Wyoming. Coal, oil and gas development in the basin have brought more vehicles, and more conflicts with wildlife. Rob Mutch<\/a>, 2004.<\/h6>\n

FRESH water scientist (and MacArthur Fellow and member of the National Academy of Sciences) Peter Gleick<\/a> was all over conservation news last week with the shocking revelation that he impersonated a board member of the libertarian Heartland Institute in a ruse to extract private documents concerning climate change strategy. The documents had been in the news for several days after arriving anonymously in the inboxes of environmental reporters and bloggers, with Heartland stating that the documents were fake and obtained fraudulently, and threatening bloggers with legal action for publicly posting them in connection with Heartland. The documents revealed the identities of anonymous Heartland supporters and included a memo outlining plans to develop materials for teaching climate change skepticism in schools. Gleick confessed in his Huffington<\/em> Post<\/em><\/a> column on Monday night, writing that he sought to confirm the provenance of documents that he<\/em> had received anonymously. He asserted that he had not altered any of the documents that he got from Heartland. But Megan McArdle of The Atlantic<\/em> has echoed bloggers\u2019 suspicions about the credibility of the memo.<\/p>\n

Gleick has taken a leave of absence from the presidency of the Pacific Institute, which he co-founded in 1987, and resigned from the American Geophysical Union\u2019s task force on science ethics. Institutions are hurrying to dissociate themselves from him, and the damage is widespread. Gleick has been a major figure in science policy. Public trust in scientists and scientific institutions requires unblemished reputations, conservation columnist Andy Revkin pointed out, in grief and in anger, in his New York Times<\/em> Dot Earth blog last week. Talk show hosts and anonymous hackers can pull shenanigans without damage to their message, but scientists cannot, as was amply demonstrated by the 2009 theft of private emails and files from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.<\/p>\n