This is kind of like the article in the News Press this morning, where 7 biologists from the Fish and Wildlife service were caught planting Lynx fur on remote Washington rubbing posts to fake that there were rare and protected lynx' in the area. Their motive was to close the area to keep people out.


MoonDoggie
Santa Barbara
***************************************************************



>From newtimesla.com
Originally published by New Times L.A. Nov 29, 2001
©2001 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.



Crying Whale
Environmental groups sent out a worldwide call to save
the gray whale from a Mexican salt plant. They got
millions of dollars and thousands of new members. But
scientists found no threat to the whales.
By Michael Lacey and Jill Stewart

Big-name sophisticates like Jean-Michel Cousteau and
Robert Kennedy Jr. rejoiced when it was announced last
year that a controversial salt plant proposed in
Mexico had been stopped. As news reports crackled
across Japan, North America and Europe,
environmentalists celebrated the unprecedented victory
that saved the gray whale.
The globe-encircling crusade had aimed to stop the
Mexican government -- in partnership with corporate
giant Mitsubishi -- from building a sprawling facility
to evaporate salt from the sea off Baja's Pacific
coast. The campaign hit a nerve unlike any
environmental battle before it, inspiring 1 million
people to bury Mitsubishi in protest mail, and even
sweeping through America's grade schools, where
children protested with crayon drawings and pleas to
"stop killing Namu."

Movie stars Pierce Brosnan and Glenn Close issued
dramatic appeals for compassion toward the gray whale,
warning that the proposed salt evaporation plant
threatened the pristine lagoon that the
once-endangered leviathan uses to give birth. The
United Nations sent an international team to
investigate. The California Coastal Commission decried
the project. And 34 renowned scientists, nine of them
Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners, put their
names on full-page ads in the Los Angeles Times, New
York Times, International Herald Tribune and La
Reforma, condemning the saltworks.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) sent out
30.4 million mailers -- unprecedented for a single
environmental battle -- and collected $7 million in
donations from anxious Americans who had been
convinced the whales were in danger. Because NRDC
heavily promoted itself as protector of the gray whale
to attract new members, its size skyrocketed from
175,000 members in 1996 to more than 450,000 this
year. New membership fees directly attributable to the
gray whale campaign have added a $20 million windfall
to NRDC's coffers since 1996.

Americans opened their checkbooks because of
disturbing mass mailers such as a February 11, 1997,
letter from NRDC president (then executive director)
John Adams, which promised to "focus worldwide
attention on this new threat to gray whales." The
fund-raising letter included a form citizens could
sign and forward to corporate giant Mitsubishi,
promising a boycott and warning that "North Americans
will stand united against this reckless endangerment
of our continent's most spectacular wildlife."

With plenty of money at the ready, the
environmentalists spent freely. NRDC's partner in
battle, the cash-rich International Fund for Animal
Welfare (IFAW), did no fund-raising but spent $3.5
million on lobbying and media campaigns focused
heavily on environment-conscious California. It hired
crack Democratic political consultants who traveled
the breadth of the state, persuading 46 California
municipalities and 14 pension funds to boycott
Mitsubishi.

IFAW bought a full-page advertisement in the New York
Times and the Wall Street Journal, lauding the pension
money managers who had agreed to boycott Mitsubishi.
Beneath a large photograph of a gray whale, IFAW
stated, "When these money managers make a killing in
the stock market, it's not at the expense of an entire
species."

In addition to IFAW's expensive lobbying effort that
implied that the species was at risk, NRDC spent $12
million on the saltworks war. Much of that money went
to a mass public protest campaign and to continued
expansion of the group's red-hot membership drive.
Together, NRDC and IFAW spent $15.5 million and
mobilized nearly 2 million people globally to protest,
write, donate or otherwise act to stop the salt plant.


When former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo abruptly
canceled the joint public-private project in March
2000, the conventional wisdom was that David had
stopped Goliath.

Mitsubishi, one of the world's largest corporations,
had been defeated by environmentalists. There would be
no salt harvesting on the heat-baked El Vizcaino
Desert salt flat in Baja, a desert whose toes dip into
Laguna San Ignacio, the Pacific nursery where up to
300 gray whales migrate from Alaska and Siberia to
give birth each January.

"It was the biggest single environmental battle ever
in North America -- the mother of battles -- and an
incredible journey," says Jacob Scherr, a top NRDC
lawyer involved.

The victory at the warm blue lagoon fringed with dense
mangrove thickets and alive with dolphins and seabirds
catapulted the relatively obscure NRDC and IFAW to the
forefront of global environmental warfare.

The barnacled gray whale, known fondly to biologists
simply as "The Gray," was also suddenly vaulted up the
list of the world's charismatic species.

Word spread about the spiritual connection humans
experience at the lagoon, where sofa-size whale
infants poke their curious, gigantic, rubbery noses
right inside whale-watching skiffs, lingering there to
be petted and kissed by delighted tourists.

Clearly, most people thought the idea hammered home in
the United States in glossy mailers, public service
announcements, theater previews, bumper stickers and
newspaper ads was to save whales.

Press coverage underscored the message by focusing
almost exclusively on the proposed plant's effect on
gray whales. When Zedillo stopped the plant, media
headlines trumpeted a new era of global
environmentalism that had saved a marine mammal only
recently removed from the endangered species list.

"A decision Mexico never expected to make," said the
New York Times. "Changed the shape of environmental
policies in Mexico," declared the Boston Globe.
"Handing a stunning victory to environmentalists,"
wrote the Washington Post. "The most significant
victory of their generation," summed up Cox News
Service.

Yet the real victory was a triumph of public relations
over public policy.

In a yearlong investigation on both sides of the
border, involving extensive interviews, on-site
inspections and review of published and unpublished
scientific studies and documents, New Times has found
no scientific basis to suggest the salt plant proposed
at Laguna San Ignacio represented even a mild threat
to the baby grays or the adult whales.

"We who study the gray whale suspected there would not
be much," says biologist Jorge Urban, Mexico's leading
gray whale authority. "First, whales already coexist
with salt plants. Second, we know the gray whale is
quite adaptable because its population has recovered
even though it spends much of its life traveling
through a world of industry and humans, from Alaska to
Baja and back. I participated in the EIA
, and my confidence
is high that there would be no ill effects."

The truth dwelt quietly for half a century just up the
road from Laguna San Ignacio.

About 100 miles north, an existing Mitsubishi-Mexico
partnership known as Exportadora del Sal (ESSA)
operates a huge salt plant in the town of Guerrero
Negro. The ESSA saltworks is of the very same design
as proposed at Laguna San Ignacio, utilizing thousands
of acres of natural salt flats in the Baja desert to
create vast, shallow ponds of evaporating seawater and
miles of snow-white, salt-harvesting fields.

These are the crucial facts few Americans ever heard:
The ESSA salt plant sits directly on the shore of
stunning Scammon's Lagoon -- the world's largest gray
whale nursery, and by far the most popular with
pregnant gray whales. One thousand of them return
every year to calve in the deep waters of the lagoon,
which is more than double the size of Laguna San
Ignacio.

During the nearly five decades the saltworks has
operated next to Scammon's Lagoon, gray whale calves
have prospered and cavorted in its clear blue waters.
Indeed, the population of calves and mothers who live
in Scammon's waters from January to March each year
before heading home to Alaska and the Arctic has
steadily increased over 40 years.

But the public, especially Americans, rarely heard
about Guerrero Negro.

Even the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO), persuaded during an
intense global lobbying effort by NRDC and IFAW to
send a team to Baja to examine the threat to whales by
the proposed saltworks at San Ignacio, found the
existing salt plant at Scammon's was compatible with
whale calving and breeding.

Indeed, its team concluded that the proposed salt
facility at Laguna San Ignacio appeared to create only
one major environmental concern -- dramatic
transformation of the desert landscape on the north
side of the lagoon by huge tracts of manmade salt
ponds.

Undeterred by UNESCO's report or by decades of
existing studies conducted by whale experts at
Scammon's Lagoon dating back to the '60s,
environmentalists insisted the whales were at risk.
Key environmentalists began to savage the ethics of
top scientists, who had agreed to conduct the most
massive environmental impact study in Mexico's history
into the proposed saltworks.

With the passage of time, environmental leaders --
while continuing to insist the whales were in danger
-- have become quite candid that the save-the-whale
battle cry was a tool, campaign rhetoric to achieve
their principal goal, the cessation of development.

"Anyone who believes this was ever a debate on the
science of gray whales is naive," says Vermont
humpback whale researcher Roger Payne, the sole whale
expert among 34 award-winning scientists named in ads
opposed to the plant. "This was only about politics
and stopping the world's largest corporation from
ignoring legal protections on land where nothing
should ever be built, no matter how many jobs it
brings."

The anti-salt plant groups were indeed out to stop a
slippery-slope phenomenon they saw as more important
than any threat to whales: development of lands in the
buffer zone of a presidentially decreed biosphere
reserve that also contained a UNESCO World Heritage
site, whale preserve and bird sanctuary.

Mark Spalding, the top consultant NRDC hired, says,
"Early on, I was clear in saying the whale biologists
could be right, it won't hurt the whales, but this
project was an illegal precedent. It was going to be
too complex to explain all these legal issues to
people, and everyone knew the gray whale would impact
with the American public."

Spalding may have warned his employers, the NRDC and
IFAW, internally that the marine biologists might be
proved correct, but that is far from the message the
environmentalists fed to the public.

The solicitation for donations and support sent out in
the winter of 1997 by NRDC president John Adams was
typical of the genre:

"Our continent's most spectacular wildlife nursery is
in grave danger..."

"Giant diesel engines will pump six thousand gallons
of water out of the lagoon every second, reducing the
precious salinity that is so vital to newborn
whales..."

"A mile-long pier will cut directly across the path of
the whales, causing potential injury and death to
those whales that attempt to navigate under it..."

"Have failed to investigate fully the threat to
whales..."

"The Mexican government will not reject this latest
threat to whales..."

"Focus worldwide attention on this new threat to gray
whales..."

"If you endanger whales you will pay a heavy price in
the U.S. marketplace..."

Adams' letter went on for five single-spaced pages, a
length that suggests there was ample room to explain
complex legal issues, had that been the goal.

Saying that the legal issues and "illegal precedent"
were too complicated for the public to embrace doesn't
wash with some independent scientists who were close
to the battle but never took sides.

Whale expert Steve Swartz says: "To say, look, we
don't have that many wild areas left and this one is
already protected and it's worth more as an
undeveloped area like a national park than anything
man could put there, the public readily understands
that."

Swartz sat on a committee of marine biologists from
the United States, Europe, South America and Mexico
who, at the request of the Mexican government and with
the blessings of the environmentalists, hammered out a
lengthy list of studies that Mitsubishi was required
to complete in the environmental impact study.

Today he works for the U.S. National Marine Fisheries
Service. But speaking as a private citizen, he says:
"Whales get people's attention because they are sexier
than park rangers in uniform. The environmentalists
did not want to make the more difficult argument for
leaving the land untouched, so they used the gray
whale. There was a lot going on in this battle, but it
had nothing to do with risk to whales."

Once the plant was canceled, the environmental study
that Swartz helped shape -- though completed -- was
never released.

The research, several thousand pages, was the most
detailed examination of the gray whale's lagoons ever
and Mexico's most comprehensive environmental impact
assessment.

The EIA concluded that the proposed saltworks posed no
threat to gray whales or any creatures in Laguna San
Ignacio: "From an environmental standpoint, the
project is feasible and compatible with the biosphere
reserve's objectives and with the objectives of the
World Heritage site system. The project would not
adversely affect gray whales or other marine or
terrestrial species of plants and animals and it could
actually benefit species by creating ponds that are
attractive to birds and other species."

The exhaustive EIA confirmed existing, if incomplete,
research that had been conducted over decades at the
salt plant at Guerrero Negro. Independent scientists,
staff at the Biosphere and, more recently, Jorge Urban
under contract to ESSA, had all examined the whale
population -- primarily performing head counts -- in
Scammon's Lagoon.

Globally respected conservationist Exequiel Ezcurra,
president of Mexico's National Institute of Ecology,
who has been called the "Mexican Bruce Babbitt,"
commented about the environmentalists and their
tactics: "What they did was morally incorrect and
politically incorrect... They squeezed money out of
Americans by promoting borderline racism that Mexico
is a place without laws, that the gray whale was in
trouble, and that Americans were the only ones to the
rescue. I beg to differ."



----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

The environmental groups hoped to, in effect, change
the rules involving the boundaries and protections of
Baja's El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, already Latin
America's largest land preserve. The Biosphere -- a
designation of specially protected land granted by
UNESCO -- is divided into two zones: a core and a
buffer. Development is allowed in the buffer zone --
so long as it does no serious harm to the plants or
animals -- and is forbidden in the core.

Both the existing and proposed salt plants are located
in the vast buffer zone, but the environmentalists
wanted the proposed saltworks at Laguna San Ignacio
treated as if it were going to be plopped into the
sensitive core area. They opposed development anywhere
around Laguna San Ignacio.

Payne, the humpback whale specialist who led the
charge against the salt plant by scientists in
nationwide newspaper ads, opined that it was "land
where nothing should ever be built."

Yet the land is hardly wilderness. The Biosphere's
guidelines describe the area as containing "40,000
people...mainly concentrated in the towns...
Inhabitants are dependent upon intensive agriculture,
fishing, extensive livestock grazing, mining and
tourism."

One Biosphere administrator says it is wrong to
suggest that people inside the buffer zones should not
have access to productive jobs. Indeed, the
international management plan for the Biospheres,
known as the Seville Strategy '95, contemplates that
the world's Biospheres should have a mix of economic
and social activities including "agriculture,
forestry, hunting and extracting, water and energy
supply, fisheries, tourism, recreation and research"
to ensure benefits to local peoples.

Mexico itself said much the same when the El Vizcaino
reserve was first created.

According to the environmental impact study, the
executive order that created the Biosphere "expressly
allows productive activities within the buffer zone
and acknowledges the importance of solar evaporation
salt extraction."

Because salt plants rely upon solar and wind power and
use a renewable resource -- ocean water -- they have
relatively little impact on the environment. They have
some impact, but are usually not seen as an enemy of
nature.

It's the assault upon the eyes that sullies their
reputation, even as the salt plants play a role in the
planet's health.

The world's evaporation salt facilities, including one
in San Francisco Bay, pull seawater into massive,
diked evaporation ponds to dry. Saltworks are ugly and
otherworldly places, filled with vast pools of
drifting wads of beige foam, and blocks and blocks of
crunchy, snowlike crystals.

Despite their looks, they create a major seabird
habitat rich in brine shrimp and other tiny edibles.
In the Bay Area, environmentalists are unhappy their
unattractive saltworks may close, since its loss will
hurt the seabird ecosystem.

The existing saltworks in Baja is equally important.

The Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network has
designated the Guerrero Negro saltworks owned by ESSA
as a site of "international importance" because nearly
200,000 migratory birds annually utilize its salt
ponds as a sanctuary.

"ESSA has had a very important role in the
conservation efforts in this area for many years,"
said Victor Sánchez Sotomayor, director of the El
Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, in a statement distributed
by the salt plant. "The company has been very
cooperative in its studies of land, whales and in
particular birds...and building structures to protect
falcon and peregrine nests."




----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----


The Brilliant Campaign
If you destroy a home, they call it vandalism.
Terrorize a neighborhood and you're a menace. Threaten
a life and it's assault. Unless the victims are
whales. Then it's just business. Laguna San Ignacio is
the last pristine birthing site for the gray whale...
The last one.

-- public service announcement widely heard in the
United States, 1998

The very friendly lawyer Joel Reynolds was pretty
clear, in his meeting with the very affable lawyer Jim
Brumm. NRDC was not going to let anybody build a giant
salt facility in the buffer zone of a nationally
protected biosphere on the shores of a lagoon filled
each winter with baby whales.

"I told him I didn't care what any studies showed, we
were going to oppose it to the end," Reynolds recalls.


Brumm, a vice president of Mitsubishi International
who was making a new habit of flying to Baja from New
York to deal with salt plant troubles, thought
Reynolds was bluffing: Mitsubishi was willing to live
with any decision the Mexican government made once an
extensive environmental impact assessment was
complete. Why wouldn't Reynolds?

>From the beginning, back in 1995, the salt plant crowd
thought the fight should be about science. But the
environmental crowd thought the fight should be about
ideas.

Brumm conceded that if the research showed any danger
to the whales, the plant should be scuttled. But
Exportadora del Sal, the joint Mexico-Mitsubishi
company that owned the salt plant up north at Guerrero
Negro, said if a safe plant could be designed for the
El Vizcaino Desert at Laguna San Ignacio, it should be
allowed.

Environmentalists said it shouldn't be done at all.
Aesthetically, politically and ecologically, it was a
bad way to go.

That's when the environmental crowd's brilliant
backroom strategy began to jell. The environmentalists
would encourage ESSA to fight out an exhausting battle
on the science side, by baiting the company with
charges of ecological wrongdoing and demanding
scientific studies, while they launched a punishing
campaign on the political side.

"It was just very important, from an international law
and policy viewpoint, that we succeed and prevent such
a precedent," says Reynolds. "We were happy to watch
Mitsubishi spend $2 million on environmental studies
while we made sure the project never happened."

NRDC was one third of the troika that launched the
salt plant battle, after being alerted by Homero
Aridjis, respected cofounder of Mexico's Group of 100,
a committee fighting, among other things, for cleaner
air in Mexico City. Aridjis and his wife, Betty, had
reached out to NRDC. The third major player was IFAW,
with its international influence and $60 million
budget.

Together, the groups stopped the first proposal for
the plant in 1995, which lacked serious environmental
mitigation and was rejected by the Mexican government.


The second battle, however, promised to be a doozy.
Mitsubishi was not backing down, and it was suddenly
agreeing to all manner of tough environmental
requirements not even U.S. laws would mandate.

The green coalition hired consultant Mark Spalding,
who launched a negative research operation to ferret
out anything that could throw a dark shadow over ESSA,
which had for decades operated the existing salt
evaporation ponds 100 miles north of San Ignacio next
to Scammon's Lagoon.

Spalding, a sharp biologist who speaks fluent Spanish,
spent several days meeting villagers, talking to salt
plant people and fishermen, snapping photos from the
air, digging up research, chatting with scientists and
poring over the laws.

Among his first moves, he suggested to NRDC that the
company was secretly conspiring to close down the salt
plant at Scammon's Lagoon, and essentially shift the
population of the dusty town of Guerrero Negro -- with
its untidy strip malls and bright lights -- down to
the tidy, proud village of Punta Abreojos.

Spalding, lacking so much as a single company memo to
that effect, didn't need proof. This was politics, not
science. The rumor spread throughout the region. "The
battle was to mold vivid impressions, not to prove
some piece of data about the world market for salt,"
he says.

One of his cohorts was Alberto Szekely, a top
environmental attorney in Mexico City paid by IFAW,
who ratcheted up the political attacks by filing
numerous claims of wrongdoing against ESSA and the
government. Szekely thought the government did indeed
want to grow a town around the proposed plant at San
Ignacio, "and that is precisely what we feared, the
chaotic, disastrous nightmare that Guerrero Negro is
-- the entire town is dirty."

Numerous on-site interviews with ESSA managers and
employees, from vice presidents to job trainers to
union leaders, all contradicted the rumor of a plant
closing or the establishment of a new town.

The plant-relocating rumor made ESSA look bad in the
small fishing village of Punta Abreojos. Many of the
town's residents oppose any growth, and are proud of
the fact they can be reached only by a kidney-jarring
90-minute ride over washboard and blowing sand.

While environmental groups fanned the plant relocation
rumor, they scored a more direct hit with an
allegation that made headlines and inspired the first
big public outcry against ESSA: the great turtle
die-off of 1997.

Just before Christmas that year, 94 endangered sea
turtles were found dead, floating in the sea off the
Pacific coast. The environmental groups quickly blamed
the Guerrero Negro saltworks for killing the turtles
with an accidental spill of brine -- a thick,
mineral-laden, toxic byproduct of salt evaporation.

"It was the most dramatic evidence to show that
Guerrero Negro was not environmentally benign," says
NRDC's Reynolds.

"We documented several environmental crimes, including
the release of brine that killed turtles and fish,"
says Szekely.

Officials at ESSA, however, said there had been no
spills, and their records support this. While the
skeptical had every right not to accept company
paperwork without further proof, ESSA had a logical
explanation for the dead turtles, which it would
eventually buttress with a scientific probe.

The company blamed local fishermen, whom salt plant
officials said had illegally killed the protected
turtles because they are popular fare at Christmas.
ESSA suggested the fishermen dumped them as inspectors
approached.

The turtle die-off went international and badly
bruised ESSA. Reynolds debated the issue against
Mitsubishi's Brumm on KCET's Life and Times, and came
away crowing.

"No matter what audience we came before, or what the
topic, I could always convince everybody that ESSA was
wrong and we were right, because fundamentally that
was true," Reynolds says.

But in the science wars over the salt plant, the truth
was hardly ever clear.

The turtles are an endangered species because local
fishermen have harvested them to the point of
extinction and continue to poach them -- despite the
law -- because of lax enforcement.

"Almost nothing happens to those who take the
turtles," biologist Sánchez, of El Vizcaino Biosphere,
told New Times. "They pay a small fine but there is no
jail time. We look to catch them three or four times
so that a judge can get them a very high fine or jail
time."

When the turtle kill became a story in the
international press, it was ultrasensitive because
Mexico was at the same moment trying to negotiate a
tuna fishing quota with the United States, after a
ruinous nine-year boycott that targeted Mexico's
fishermen.

The last thing the Mexican government wanted just then
was a scandal that made their fishermen look like
high-seas scofflaws.

Instead, the Mexican government investigated the
turtle die-off for seven months, and ultimately
theorized that a brine spill from the salt plant at
Guerrero Negro must have made its way to the sea and
poisoned the turtles.

Furious, ESSA promptly appointed a panel of scientists
who found that brine did not kill the turtles. Some of
the dead turtles had been found frozen, a good trick
in balmy Baja. And the turtles had blood accumulated
in "the ventral region or plastron," according to the
ESSA panel -- suggesting they had been stored on their
stomachs in a freezer, the traditional practice aboard
a fishing vessel.

The report also noted: "Analysis of the liver, kidneys
and stomach contents of the turtles did not detect
lead and nickel," and the concentrations of magnesium,
sodium and cadmium were all normal. "These are common
elements in brine, and should have been present if a
release of brine had been a factor in their deaths,"
the panel said.

And there was plain common sense. Marine biologist
Steve Swartz and other independent scientists not
hired by ESSA toured the salt plant and saw brine
being stored relatively close to the shore.
Nevertheless, he says, "I don't know what happened,
but I do know that turtles do not group together in
the sea, and it's very unlikely they would have been
together or gotten into a brine spill together that
killed them. Turtles don't congregate."

Furthermore, had there been a brine spill, the turtles
would not have been the only creatures found dead. A
visible fish kill would be expected, as well as the
death of other marine life in the immediate area.

Only dead turtles were found.

In the spring of 1999, nearly two years after the
turtle scare, environmental organizations in Mexico
opposed to the new salt plant filed a criminal
complaint accusing ESSA of killing whales. Homero
Aridjis, with the watchdog Group of 100, publicly
accused ESSA of killing 18 whales in the lagoons of
Guerrero Negro.

It turned out to be a wild allegation.

In fact, more than 600 gray whales did die in 1999 and
2000 -- an unprecedented number. But the carcasses
were scattered all along the migratory route that
follows the western coastline of Mexico, the United
States, Canada and Alaska. The die-off was not
centered in the lagoons near the salt plant.

Scientists are investigating evidence that the whales
starved. They are focused on the gray whale's food
source, shrimplike amphipods that live in the mud on
the bottom of the Bering Sea, at the opposite end of
the earth from Guerrero Negro (see "Conundrum," by
Patti Epler, November 15-21).

There is not a single, credible whale scientist who
has suggested brine contamination caused the die-off
of whales in Baja, or that the 18 dead whales were
anything other than local evidence of a hemispheric
problem facing all grays. But that did not stop the
media from printing Aridjis' allegations, unaware that
a worldwide die-off of gray whales was under way.

Had journalists done a simple Internet search, they
would have uncovered numerous articles from December
1998 through the winter of 1999 documenting a gray
whale die-off stretching across a vast habitat from
Siberia to Baja. But reporters didn't attempt to put
things in context. As a result, the vehement denials
of guilt by Mitsubishi and ESSA left them sounding
like perpetrators caught with a smoking gun.

Urged on by environmental groups, members of the
public sent the Mexican environment ministry 20,000
letters demanding that Mexico stop killing whales. The
agency head, Julia Carabias Lillo, saying NRDC was
responsible for the letter-writing campaign, told
Mexico's Chamber of Deputies that the smear was
"offensive and unacceptable."

If cabinet ministers in Mexico were outraged,
employees of the Guerrero Negro salt works were
shell-shocked.

"We had always gotten great press," says Joaquin
Ardura, technical director of ESSA. "Every year during
whale season the Mexican media would come and see our
salt ponds filled with migrating birds, and go far out
to the lagoon to see the baby whales. We patrol to
make sure no unauthorized boats disrupt the habitat.
We have the most strict protections of any lagoon in
Baja. But after the Mexican environmental groups
joined the Americans, the media turned on us. They
started attacking us over the whales. For years it was
whales, whales, whales."

Some ESSA employees could hardly bear the criticisms.
Years before, ESSA had adopted a gray whale as its
logo. Employees prided themselves on protecting
against human encroachment at Scammon's Lagoon. They
took ESSA's well-heeled customers from Asia and the
United States on special trips to the deep waters,
where they would await the prized closeup visits from
curious baby whales.

But now employees were crying in hallways, baffled.
"We would go somewhere for a business trip, and people
would say, "Oh, you're the whale killers,'" Edmundo
Elorduy, vice president of marine operations at ESSA,
says, laughing bitterly.

ESSA's president, the brash Juan Bremmer, had no idea
how to respond to an American-style media blitz. Here
he was, offering an extremely rare chance for more
than 200 middle-class jobs in Baja, and people were
angry. He could not grasp why.

"What did they want?" asks Bremmer today. "I never
could get them to explain what they wanted."

Had Bremmer understood the breadth of the forces
gathering against him, he probably would not have
gotten any satisfaction.

The environmental effort grew exponentially. The three
original groups brought in the highly activist,
Baja-based estuary and wetlands protectors known as
Pro Esteros, plus 50 groups including Greenpeace
Mexico and the World Wildlife Fund. Local
environmentalists like the Martinez sisters of
Ensenada helped lead the ground forces who organized
protests and influenced Mexican media coverage.

Poet Aridjis recruited famous Mexican citizens,
including Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes. A huge boost
came when Andreas Rozental, one of Mexico's most
revered diplomats, joined the cause and brought his
substantial international clout with him.

As part of a 10-element plan to stop the plant,
attorney Szekely began issuing dramatic charges that
the whales were in danger -- stories that were fed to
the Mexico City press by a topflight public relations
firm Rozental had brought in.

Part of their core strategy was to divert ESSA and the
Mexican authorities on science issues and
environmental claims while they mounted a global
political attack.

Environmental groups demanded, for example, that the
scope of ESSA's environmental impact assessment not be
set by Mexico's Institute of Ecology (the Mexican
version of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency),
since ESSA was 51 percent owned by the Mexican
government. They demanded that a panel of independent
international scientists decide what environmental
issues should be studied. That blue-ribbon panel spent
months holding "scoping hearings" to hammer out "terms
of reference" -- the questions that had to be
researched and mitigated if a salt plant were ever
built at San Ignacio.

With ESSA thus busied, the environmentalists ramped up
their efforts to create mass opposition to the
saltworks in the press and public.

NRDC membership vice president Linda Lopez launched a
direct mail campaign in September 1996 to 2.9 million
Americans in the environmental and animal rights
communities. In the world of direct mail, the response
was fantastic. Some 42,000 people sent NRDC money, and
120,000 signed petitions to Mitsubishi opposing the
saltworks. NRDC membership exploded, growing from
175,000 to 350,000.

"We worked with a consulting team, and this one
creative consultant did the genius work," says Lopez.
"He told us our mail should say, "There is this whale
nursery down in Baja, and we have to preserve paradise
for this species.' It so perfectly captured the
imagination of people, those whales traveling 5,000
miles, this whole mythic thing of them going to this
quiet lagoon. I could cry even now, as I talk about
it, and that's how our members felt."

In what is believed to be the most successful direct
mail campaign ever conducted by environmentalists,
Lopez and the team struck gold.

In 1997, 8.6 million letters went to the public, while
857,000 pieces of mail went to members. They got back
checks averaging $15 each and raised $2.3 million that
year -- not including sizable individual bequests
inspired by the fight and $1,000 donations from the
group's Council of 1000. NRDC membership rolls shot up
again, from 350,000 to 458,000. Directed by NRDC to
sign petitions blasting Mitsubishi, 300,000 people
demanded that the stunned company stop the project.

In 1997 and following years, the nonprofit NRDC board
agreed to plow the new membership funds right back
into the direct mail campaign.

"NRDC -- it's not well-known or the greatest name in
the world, because it was chosen by a bunch of
lawyers," says Lopez. "But we had a huge name in Bobby
Kennedy, who is an attorney for our board. When we put
his cover letter into our package -- and he is totally
into the idea of leaving a pristine area pristine --
it made people feel totally confident in us."

Joel Reynolds, who even detractors at ESSA concede is
a brilliant strategist, meanwhile was orchestrating an
incredibly detailed political drive behind the scenes.


"For example," says Reynolds, "when Bobby Kennedy went
down and spent time diving with the abalone fishermen
of Punta Abreojos...that was to provide political
cover to the fishermen who were going to side with us
and say no to local jobs. On environmental battles,
you have to have the locals, or you don't win."

American environmentalists were not above playing
serious hardball with locals who didn't get with the
program. Raul Lopez, a fisherman who co-manages
Kuyima, one of three $120-a-night and up "fish camps"
for whale watchers, found absurd the claim that the
whales might be hurt. Pointing to the thriving whales
near the salt plant in Guerrero Negro, Lopez refused
to back the environmentalists' plan to toughen Mexican
law to make the salt flats protected from all
development. He believed such a blanket law could hurt
the area's economic future, and his own fishing.

"I was pressured to agree to a completely protected
zone, and I refused, so they wrote letters that Kuyima
was no good because we are not in the whale war," says
Lopez. "They would not deal with us to our faces, so
we did not trust or respect them. The environmental
groups behaved the worst in this fight, because we did
not follow them like sheep. Ba-aaah!"

But on the local political scene, Mitsubishi and ESSA
were nevertheless hopelessly outfoxed. They were mired
in a growing debate over science issues that the
environmental groups were only too happy to fuel.

In a widely accepted practice that Mexico copied
directly from U.S. standards, ESSA was expected to
finance the research for the environmental assessment.
The company surprised its critics by gathering a
top-notch team of North American gray whale experts
from places like Scripps Institute, University of
California at Santa Cruz, University of California at
San Diego and the University of Mexico at La Paz.

Roger Payne, who from his country home in Vermont was
trying to draft world-renowned scientists to oppose
the salt plant, grew furious that ESSA was trying to
look like a responsible organization. Payne and NRDC
biologist Mark Spalding began lashing out at the
respected scientists who had agreed to conduct the
salt plant/gray whale research.

"These scientists were taking money from a major
corporation, globally huge, so I don't think you
should have much respect for them," Payne snaps. "If
you want to confuse things, you do exactly what
Mitsubishi did, and pull in some scientists who are
good, but are paid. And that is a disgrace to those
scientists. Nobody in our case was paid or offered to
be paid, and it never came up."

But in fact, New Times has learned that Payne himself
was being paid -- by NRDC, according to Reynolds --
and his job was to lobby top scientists and Nobel
laureates to join the ad, written largely by Payne,
that opposed the salt plant. Payne, who did not
disclose publicly that he was on hire, was hardly an
outside observer.

"My disgust is complete," says Paul Dayton, a Scripps
Institute biologist whom Payne criticized.

"Besides Mark Spalding, Roger Payne was among those
who attacked us again and again for being paid by one
of the sides in the battle," says Dayton, "yet now I
learn he was being paid by the other side specifically
to go on the attack -- something we were never asked
to do."

In one particularly nasty incident, Spalding denounced
Dayton and oceanographer Cliff Winant at a public
forum. In addition, the leaders of IFAW and NRDC sent
a letter to the director of Scripps Institute
attacking Dayton and Winant and demanding a meeting
with the director. According to Dayton, when the
Scripps director failed to respond -- because he was
out of town -- environmentalists announced in Mexico
City that the director had backed away from Dayton and
Winant.

"We were supposedly two renegades who'd suddenly sold
out our careers for a year's worth of research
funding," says Dayton, who was determining the effect
on wetland worms of taking saltwater from the lagoon.
"When he first made an appointment to pop into Cliff's
office, we were very open with Spalding, showed him
our work, opened the files. The research was looking
like no harm was going to come to creatures in the
lagoon. So suddenly, we were evil incarnate."

One pivotal victory during this time came when the
California Coastal Commission ignored its staff
recommendation to do further research into the science
debate, and voted to oppose the saltworks. The ESSA
crowd was furious, because Sara Wan, chairwoman of the
commission, was an active NRDC member and a close
friend of Joel Reynolds, and did not disclose her
connection despite joining in the passionate debate.

Wan says she sees "no problem" with her dual roles.
Months later, when President Zedillo canceled the salt
plant project, Reynolds recalls, "Sara left a message
on my machine, and she was crying, she was so happy."

That's how the gray whale affected people, and those
emotions proved far too powerful for research or
technical debates to overcome.

Of the 10 elements in the coalition's strategy to stop
the salt plant, Reynolds believes "our idea of
creating a debate among scientists was one of the most
effective. A lot of people think the full-page ads in
the New York Times and L.A. Times turned the tide and
put us on the road to victory."

For that ad, the heavy hitters came out. The ad
condemned the saltworks as "an unacceptable risk" to
gray whales. Its signers included E.O. Wilson of
Harvard, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner; Peter
Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Gardens;
David Baltimore, president of Cal Tech and Nobel Prize
winner in medicine; Roger Guillemin of the Salk
Institute with dual Nobel prizes in medicine and
physiology; Mario Molina of MIT, Nobel Prize winner in
chemistry; John Terborgh, director of Duke
University's Center for Tropical Conservation; Paul
Ehrlich, head of Stanford's Center for Conservation
Biology; George Woodwell, director of the Woods Hole
Research Center; and Sir Aaron Klug, Nobel
Prize-winning president of the Royal Society.

Scientists directly involved in the research saw their
reputations being tarnished and fought back. Dayton
and Winant of Scripps, as well as Burney Le Boeuf of
UC Santa Cruz, sent protests to several of the most
renowned scientists in the ad, and asked them to take
a second look.

"Those guys in the ad were opposed to the idea of the
salt plant," says Dayton. "Look, I am also personally
opposed to the idea of changing this relatively
untouched area, but you don't put your name as a
scientist on something that's a lie."

Dayton and other researchers pointed out that claim
after claim by the environmental groups was gradually
being disproved by research.

For example, the coalition said noise from the power
pumps used to draw seawater from San Ignacio Lagoon
would bother the gray whale mothers and babies, some
of whom lived in the lagoon from as early as late
December until late March.

But researchers at UC San Diego found that the pumps,
on the edge of the salt flat, would be so distant from
the deep waters of the lagoon where whales lived that
the faint sounds would be drowned out by the normal
background noise of the ocean.

Le Boeuf, an expert on gray whale feeding who was
hired as an adviser to Mitsubishi early on, says
angrily, "Snapping shrimp make more background noise
than those pumps!"

Le Boeuf was appalled that the science-based attacks
by the coalition had little factual basis, and he made
a stink about it. He was particularly irritated that
the environmental groups claimed that ESSA was a bad
company that had "298 environmental violations" at
Scammon's Lagoon in Guerrero Negro.

As Le Boeuf points out, the company joined a
government-sponsored "clean company" program. Firms
qualified for a clean rating by inviting a government
inspection, getting a list of things to fix, then
fixing them. The 298 supposed violations touted by the
environmentalists, Le Boeuf notes, were in fact a list
of problems ESSA had asked the government to identify
so that ESSA could voluntarily fix them and earn the
"clean company" rating.

"That's how the nonprofits played the game -- dirty,
dirty, dirty," says Le Boeuf. "They played the
cheapest kind of warfare I can think of."

The environmental leaders, for example, suggested that
the milelong pier that ESSA proposed just off the
village of Punta Abreojos would kill, injure or scare
off gray whales trying to enter Laguna San Ignacio.
They did not inform supporters that the location of
the pier was not near the lagoon but was, in fact, 15
miles to the west.

New Times obtained a list of predigested responses
Payne wrote up for the famous scientists to utter if
they were challenged on the pier or other hotly
disputed science issues. He recommended that the 33
other scientists use the following rebuttal regarding
the pier: "Where the entrance to the lagoon stops and
the open sea begins is just a matter of opinion. Many
people, when shown a map...commented that
is located in the mouth of the lagoon, an area of
particularly frequent whale sightings." Moreover,
Payne told them to claim that "It is obvious that
brine disposals and fuel spills would be entrained in
tides entering the lagoon."

Ultimately, few of the renowned scientists backed off.
And those who did, did so in private.

E.O. Wilson, for example, wrote to Le Boeuf that he
regretted not looking more deeply into the issue
before agreeing to lend his name to the ad that ran in
the New York Times and other publications. "Many
thanks for your detailed and obviously firsthand,
expert letter on gray whales and the Laguna San
Ignacio saltworks," Wilson wrote. "Needless to say, I
wish I had this memo in hand when responding to the
protest against the saltworks. At the very least it
would have caused me to question and dig deeper. It is
an illustration of the need for environmentalists to
cast a wide net for expertise on issues before
committing their goodwill capital, so as to have
maximum effect on urgent cases where scientific data
and opinion are decisive."

Wilson, Woodwell, Baltimore, Kennedy, Terborgh, Raven
and Ehrlich all failed to return phone calls and
e-mailed requests for interviews from New Times.
Ehrlich's secretary at Stanford insisted, "You cannot
name him in an article about gray whales if he will
not speak to you."

NRDC direct-mail expert Linda Lopez remembers that the
U.S. media were slow to pick up the salt plant story
in far-off Baja. It wasn't until March 1999 that the
New York Times ran its first major piece. The
scientists' ad hit four months later, in July.

Not that the environmentalists didn't try. U.S. media
were openly wooed. Several journalists were invited
along on the costly $60,000 retreats sponsored by NRDC
and IFAW that airlifted Pierce Brosnan, Glenn Close,
Robert Kennedy Jr. and other prominent Americans to
the parched fishing village of Punta Abreojos or to
the whale-watching fish camps along Laguna San
Ignacio.

Pampered journalists were even personally chauffeured
in trucks by NRDC staffers over the washboard dirt
roads, sand dunes and ancient volcanic flows that
separate the tourist areas on the far southeastern
side of the lagoon from Punta Abreojos, four hours
northwest by land.

Joaquin Ardura, a vice president at ESSA, says he
realized they could never win with the media, when the
World Heritage Committee of UNESCO came out with its
long-awaited report on whether the salt plant would
harm the World Heritage site and other protected land
and water at San Ignacio.

"UNESCO said we were a safe industry, that we had not
hurt the whales, that only the landscape would change
if we opened our plant at San Ignacio," says Ardura.
"But somehow, the media twisted it to say UNESCO had
found against us."

In fact, although they never admitted it in public,
the UNESCO findings were a big blow to the
environmental groups.

The UNESCO investigative mission wrote, in a nod to
the rich bird environments promoted by saltworks, that
"production of salt in coastal lagoon systems
constitutes one of the most well-integrated and
best-adapted of all human activities that involve
these environments." The team also found that, at the
existing saltworks, "the whale population is not
endangered and continues to increase."

But UNESCO found one problem, and the
environmentalists used it -- and the media -- to their
advantage:

The scrubby El Vizcaino Desert, a desolate place
crisscrossed with impromptu truck routes, its dry
washes and hillocks dotted with blowing litter that is
ubiquitous to Baja, would be dramatically altered by a
salt facility the size of the city of San Francisco.
None of the evaporation ponds, conveyor belts or
harvesting machines would be visible from the
waterfront or main roads, but it was more than enough
for the environmentalists.

"UNESCO was manipulated by the Mexican government into
putting a number of Mexicans on the UNESCO team to
water down their report, but we got what we needed,"
says Spalding. "We had a world-level group saying
there was a problem."

Tom Knudsen, a Baja expert with the Sacramento Bee,
wrote one of the few stories in the heavily slanted
U.S. press that emphasized that UNESCO had found the
whales to be flourishing near an existing salt plant,
and in no apparent danger. Reynolds says Knudsen "was
the one reporter who bought all the garbage from
ESSA." Knudsen retorts: "Journalists worldwide were
stuck in serious group-think on Laguna San Ignacio."

With that August 1999 victory over media spin to cheer
it on, IFAW ramped up a boycott and disinvestment
campaign against Mitsubishi.

If the controversial "unacceptable risk" newspaper ads
were the turning point in this war, some say the
California-based Mitsubishi boycott and disinvestment
campaign was the clincher. The campaign was crafted
just like a political election, using a team of
seasoned Democratic political consultants from Boston,
Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

IFAW had already paid for a poll which showed that
Americans on the West Coast and in the Northeast were
by far the most pro-animal welfare and
pro-environment. And as Boston political consultant
Michael Shea noted in a case study he wrote for
Campaigns & Elections magazine, "Californians viewed
the gray whales as theirs."

Phil Giarrizzo, a Democratic campaign consultant from
Sacramento, devised a plan to convince California
public pension funds to disinvest in Mitsubishi. That
effort was expanded to include socially conscious
mutual funds. And Giarrizzo set about convincing 46
city councils and county boards of supervisors to
condemn Mitsubishi.

Tom Ammiano, a member of the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors, was typical of political leaders who
believed -- and still believe -- the whales faced
grave danger.

"The environmentalists came to my office and presented
a case that the whales in particular were in trouble
because of the salt plant, which would interfere with
breeding," he says. "There were many problems, and it
certainly made sense to me. We passed a resolution
urging them not to build it. It was a good
resolution."

Having won over so many adults in the business and
political sectors, NRDC in early 2000 prepared to
dramatically increase the involvement of
schoolchildren in the "Don't Buy It!" attacks on
Mitsubishi. It was a tactic, concedes Linda Lopez,
that "might make some people uncomfortable."

Lopez had completed a new mass mailing filled with
colorful stickers so kids and schools could get
involved in the boycott. "We got kids and classrooms
so involved in this campaign -- the kids were just
nuts about saving the whales," says Lopez. "One high
school kid, one of those amazing kinds of kids, even
brought in Joel to debate Mitsubishi."

But, one early March day, a surprise call came to
Lopez's New York office. Out of nowhere, the salt
plant was being canceled. Choked up, Lopez hurriedly
made arrangements to alter millions of mailers. They
were stamped over with the words, "We Won!"




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The Debate on Ethics
With debates heating up over global warming, energy
policies and nuclear waste disposal, some argue that
the public must be able to trust science for impartial
assessments that are crucial to democratic
decision-making.

The tactics employed in the gray whale fight raise the
question of the role of scientific research in the
decision-making arena. How much should public policy
be shaped by the data and findings provided by
research, and how much by public fears and beliefs
shaped by political campaigns and the media?

Today, NRDC, IFAW and other groups are claiming
threats to the health of another charismatic species,
the caribou, in the pitched battle against oil
drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The
caribou may indeed be in danger. But if
environmentalists are seen as crassly manipulating the
science that underlies such claims, their battles
could begin to backfire.

Mitsubishi International vice president Jim Brumm says
the world essentially accepted the "unacceptable risk"
claim made by scientists named in the New York Times,
and the U.S. media accepted without much digging the
environmental-degradation accusations against ESSA.

"It makes me scared for pure science," says Brumm. "We
know science isn't perfect because there are things we
cannot know, but we rely on scientists to be
objective. What happens when scientists lose that
ability?"

Jacob Scherr, of NRDC, who has worked on environmental
campaigns all over the world, says that broadly shared
feelings against development should be enough to stop
a project, whether scientific proofs of actual damage
are available or not.

"I have no question that the technical people who did
the individual studies on the salt plant were
honorable men and women who did a very good job," says
Scherr. "But I have never seen an environmental impact
statement that did not conclude that the project
should go forward. They always conclude it can be
mitigated. So society has to ask the larger question,
"Yes, but do we want it?'"

That, of course, is a reasonable question to ask of
"society." But Scherr, Reynolds, Payne and others
inside the movement, once they agreed among themselves
to kill the project, essentially asked the public a
different question: Should the gray whale's health be
jeopardized?

Ethicists and others who follow many of the raging
debates over technology, the environment and
development disagree on how far environmentalists
should go in order to win.

William Vitek, an environmental philosopher and
applied ethicist at Clarkson University in New York,
says, "The public and the insiders do not benefit from
hyperbole on either side, and it is unethical to
knowingly distort the facts. But I actually think,
though I can't support this with proof, that most
corporations and most environmental groups actually
believe what they are saying, so to accuse them of
purposely misleading might not get to the heart of
what is going on."

Corporations tend to be in a hurry to build or produce
things, and prefer to look at short-term proofs that
their plans will cause no major damage. The mindset of
environmentalists, he says, is nearly the opposite,
and is motivated by what is known as the
"precautionary principle." This principle says that
"we are pretty sure this development is bad, or we
don't know for sure that it's safe, so we are going to
tell you there are problems even if we don't have data
and we are going to play it safe and wait as long as
needed for that data."

Vitek points to the use of lead in gasoline for
decades to control the pinging in engines as the
classic example that shapes environmentalists' heavily
precautionary nature.

"A lot of people said we know lead is bad, but Ethyl
Corporation and Standard Oil said society needed lead
in its gas," says Vitek. "So they went out and studied
garage mechanics who worked around leaded gas every
day and said, "Look, they are fine.' But the truth
was, lead's effects were cumulative and eventually
profound. Now we have lead even in deep snow in the
Arctic, and you could make the argument no pristine
places are left because of leaded gas."

Environmentalists argue that they have been forced to
lie or mislead because they are fighting corporations
that have been shown to lie and obfuscate in order to
sway public opinion.

Brian Smith, West Coast media spokesman for
Earthjustice and a veteran of battles to save forests
in California and elsewhere, points out how the timber
companies claimed the economy of the N