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Pink slips in the parks: the Bush administration privatizes our public treasures.

Article Excerpt
JOHN MEYER, FIRST GOT HOOKED on fish as a boy wading the streams of Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Today, when the National Park Service biologist speaks, it's in a slow current of words rippled by his enthusiasms, especially the prospect of salmon returning to the upper Elwha River. When the conversation meanders away from fish, he curves it back.

Some might find Meyer single-minded, but his passion has paid off': Under his guidance, Olympic National Park has emerged as one of the best hopes for restoring the wild runs that once filled western rivers with millions of spawning steelhead and chinook, sockeye, chum, coho, and pink salmon.

Middle-aged, Meyer has a short-cropped gray beard and wears a flannel shirt, jeans, and aviator glasses. The floor of his pickup truck is freckled with generations of river mud and latte stains. "Salmon affect bears and eagles and 135 other vertebrate species," he says. "They feed in the ocean and when they return to freshwater to die, they have marine isotopes in their carcasses that you can trace through the ecosystem. The number of bald-eagle eggs and chick vitality have been directly correlated to the number of returning salmon."

Over the decades, dams and timber clearcuts destroyed fish habitats. As the salmon population declined, so did the rest of the forest's flora and fauna. Since 1986, when he was hired at Olympic, Meyer has labored to reverse that pattern. Based on studies that he and others conducted, two dams on Washington's Elwha River will be destroyed in 2007--the first ones in the nation to be removed specifically to restore fish habitat.

In his early research on the Elwha, Meyer's team worked side by side with privately contracted scientists. Both groups initially assumed that fish passages around the dams might bring back the upstream runs. But the more he tracked the fish, the more Meyer became convinced the passages wouldn't allow enough salmon into the upper river to restore their populations. When he presented his data, the private team balked.

They were good scientists, good biologists, but they just had a different perspective," Meyer says. Since the other scientists were under contract to the dams' owners, they needed results that didn't threaten the dams. Their objections timed local opposition to the dams' removal. It was then that Meyer learned if he was to be an effective park biologist, he had to defend the fish, not just study them.

Now, under a Bush administration initiative, natural-resource scientists like Meyer, along with thousands of other National Park Service employees, may lose their jobs to private contractors. More than a quarter of the Park Service's 20,000 jobs could be privatized in just a few years.

ACROSS PUGET SOUND FROM OLYMPIC, MOUNT Rainier National Park would be one of the hardest hit by the Bush plan. Claiming-it would eviscerate a dedicated corps of employees, Mount Rainier superintendent David Uberuaga calls the initiative "the gravest contemporary threat to the park's resources...

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