Myth of the Martyred Mapmaker Fired Contractor Turned Into Hero http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53125-2001May20.html By Michael Grunwald Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, May 21, 2001; Page A01 Two months ago, Ian Thomas was an anonymous government cartographer, posting wildlife maps on the U.S. Geological Survey's Web site. Today, he is a martyr of the environmental movement, celebrated as a victim of the Bush administration's supposed hostility to nature. Thomas was fired March 12 for posting a map of caribou migrations in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the pristine swath of tundra where the new administration hopes to promote oil exploration. Within days, green groups were trashing Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton for playing politics, and Thomas's tale of suppressed science was making international news. Last week, he even made the funny pages, as Garry Trudeau recounted his plight in six "Doonesbury" strips. "It turned out that the Alaska caribou calve exactly where Secretary Norton wants to drill!" Trudeau's fictional Washington Post reporter declared. "So the offending map was yanked off the Net, and the unwitting mapmaker was sacked." It's quite a story. But it's not quite a true story. It certainly isn't the whole story. For starters: Thomas was a contract worker, not a federal employee, and he had been in trouble with his USGS bosses before, once for posting sensitive Department of Defense data on their Web site. The decision to cancel his contract was made not by Norton or any other Bush appointee, but by the top biologist at his research center, a self-described liberal Democrat who opposes drilling in the Arctic refuge. Another career bureaucrat -- the chief USGS biologist, who is also a Democrat and a conservationist -- made the call to pull the caribou map off the Web. The real reason Thomas lost his job, according to internal USGS e-mails from March and interviews last week, is that he posted an inaccurate map related to a hypersensitive issue that was far outside his Maryland office's turf and even farther outside the scope of his contract. His bosses had already decided not to renew his $39.71-an-hour deal before the incident, and his immediate superior -- yet another self-described liberal Democrat -- had recently refused to continue as his manager, calling him "a bit out of control." USGS is part of Interior, but there is no evidence that Norton or her aides played any role in his termination. In fact, USGS officials say the oil industry would have loved the Thomas map, which actually understated the caribou calving grounds by relying on obsolete data. "There were absolutely no political overtones to this whatsoever," said Jay Hestbeck, the biologist who terminated Thomas's contract. "That's just something people want to believe. It's pure fantasy, but it's a perfect story for people who want to see the world that way." Even Thomas now says that his dismissal was less about political interference than bureaucratic panic, and that it would have gone unnoticed if environmentalists hadn't been so eager for ammunition to use against the Arctic drilling plan. But with mobilized green groups vociferously linking the administration to Big Oil, King Coal and arsenic in the water supply, the symbolism of this case quickly overtook the facts. Thomas still believes that Bush and Norton have created a climate of fear at federal agencies that handle energy issues, but he says he is no longer pushing "Doonesbury"-style conspiracy theories about his own plight. "It's gone so far beyond anything I ever dreamed of happening," said Thomas, who accepted a job offer from the World Wildlife Fund the day after he was fired. "It's crazy!" Still, his saga keeps spreading: from the Los Angeles Times to French television to a three-page spread in the Guardian of London to Jim Romenesko's media gossip Web site to the Reuters wire. Thomas even rated a brief mention in the Chinese version of Elle magazine -- along with an '80s pop band that understands the vagaries of sudden celebrity. "I have no idea what it says except it goes: Ian Thomas, blah, blah, blah, Duran Duran," Thomas explained in an e-mail. "Very cool!" 'A Bit Out of Control' Ian Thomas is 33. He lives in a group house in Mount Pleasant with five vegans and two dogs and a votenader.org sticker on the door. He shows up for an interview wearing an unraveling red sweater and faded green denim jeans. It would appear from the scruffy patches around his face that he has not yet learned how to shave. He is an international chess master. He reads science fiction. He is a passionate enviro. He seems like a very nice man, but not exactly an Organization Man. Thomas, a London native, came to the United States a decade ago after completing a civil engineering degree, and worked on hydrologic models for the National Audubon Society. He later took a job at the Smithsonian's environmental research center, where he taught himself to make computerized maps out of satellite imagery. He is not a scientist, but the people he has worked for say he has become a talented and diligent high-tech cartographer. In 1998, his flair for wildlife mapping got him a contract with USGS -- motto: Science for a Changing World -- at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md. "Ian's a very clever guy," said biologist John Sauer, who oversaw his work at Patuxent. "No question: He was good at his job." That job required Thomas to . . . well, it was often a bit unclear what it required him to do. He was supposed to support staff at Patuxent, which specializes in bird studies, so he created a lot of migratory bird maps of the Americas. But he was also encouraged to troll for new satellite images and wildlife data, which led to more eclectic projects, including a "global environmental atlas" that won an agency award for Best Geospatial Web site. "I loved working at Patuxent," he said. "I never had a complaint about a map being bad." Last September, though, Thomas did get into "a spot of trouble," he recalled. He had discovered U.S. military data about elevations in the Koreas, China and Moscow in a British library, and had sent out e-mail notifying the cartography community of his find. The problem was, the Pentagon considered the data too sensitive for general release; it had been restricted to "limited distribution." National Imagery and Mapping Agency officials sent brusque e-mails to USGS when they learned about the posting and demanded an investigation. "This individual . . . is causing great damage to the close partnership our two agencies ha[ve] had for the past decades," one NIMA officer wrote. Thomas kept the restricted material to himself. But within months, a new problem had arisen: No one at USGS was sure what Thomas was doing. There were some bird and amphibian tasks in his contract, but those were complete. And Thomas was not filling out time sheets -- "I got lazy," he conceded -- to document his work. Sauer and Marian Clark, an administrative assistant, sent their bosses a series of e-mails, complaining that Thomas was working on projects with no connection to his contract, and that there was no strategy for using him efficiently. "This whole thing is a drag . . . I do not know who he is even working for anymore," Sauer wrote on Jan. 18. "Things are a bit out of control," he added on Jan. 21. Finally, on Feb. 5, Sauer declared he would no longer oversee Thomas: "I got enough pressures in my life right now." Hestbeck, the research director, now wishes he had terminated the contract back then. "Lesson learned!" he said in an interview. But at the time, Hestbeck was preoccupied with endangered whooping cranes, crumbling buildings, budget cuts. Thomas was just an eccentric computer guy with too much freedom, a "smoldering problem." Hestbeck's serious problems were already on fire. Or so he thought. On March 7, Thomas sparked the blaze that would consume his agency's oxygen for weeks. He posted a new cache of global jet navigation charts, maps of world wildlife ecoregions, a tiger conservation atlas. And one map the size of a postcard, created in 15 minutes: a crude sketch of the "Important Caribou Calving Areas" in the Arctic refuge. "I don't know what to make of this??" David Douglas, a USGS scientist in Alaska, e-mailed to his boss after seeing the map. "Why are they doing this? It's not even the right data to be using. Seems this kind of behavior could come back to haunt USGS." Posting Out-of-Date Data The USGS is supposed to be all about science. But scientists read the news. So inside USGS, the science of the Arctic was assigned exclusively to biologists in the Alaska division who knew the issue cold. Those experts had just finished briefing Norton on their data -- they had told her that the oil-rich coastal plain is "an important component of the biological integrity for the entire refuge" -- when they discovered that a low-level mapmaker in Maryland had posted a different set of data on their agency's Web site. They were not pleased. "The material you have posted is terribly out of date," USGS caribou biologist Brad Griffith e-mailed Thomas. "It is inconceivable that you have posted this outdated material in view of the recent and intense interest in" the refuge. A wild scramble began within the agency. William Seitz, director of the Alaska research division, e-mailed his boss: "You need to address this ASAP. . . . All we need is to have the media start nitpicking on how one arm of the USGS is saying one thing and the other is not." His boss called the chief USGS biologist, Dennis Fenn, who ordered the material off the Web site. One official was so confused that she assumed a hacker had posted the map. "It didn't make any sense: What the heck was the bird center doing mucking around with the Arctic refuge?" Fenn recalled. "I just shuddered and said, oh, gosh, of all the issues." But Fenn did not recommend any disciplinary action. That was up to Hestbeck, a wildlife biologist who has published papers about the sanctity of the scientific method. Hestbeck, 48, a bald man with a neatly trimmed white beard, describes himself as "a zealot for process." Thomas, he said, blatantly violated the process: He publicly released invalid conclusions about inappropriate data without submitting them to peer review. "That is heresy!" Hestbeck said. In a three-hour meeting March 12 in Hestbeck's office, Sauer argued that Thomas should be allowed to stay until his contract ran out in three weeks. "He definitely messed up, but I thought it was pretty harsh to kick him out," Sauer said. But Sauer ultimately backed down. Hestbeck and other Patuxent officials still hoped to find Thomas a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but they decided to terminate his USGS contract immediately. Thomas acknowledges that he should have determined whether more recent data was available. But he thinks his ouster was "ridiculous and stupid," an overreaction by nervous bureaucrats. He had posted more than 20,000 maps on the Web site, never submitting any for peer review. He never saw why he should: He was mostly repackaging public information into a clearer visual format. And nobody ever warned him to avoid the Arctic. "I could have taken that map down in five seconds," he said. Thomas stayed in his office until 5 a.m. after he lost his job, and sent off a mass e-mail decrying the "plain and simple censorship . . . god knows what happens to any federal scientist working in Alaska who says anything against the party line." Within days, he received more than 2,000 e-mails of support. Even Griffith, the USGS biologist who had excoriated Thomas, dropped a note to wish him well, saying he doubted anyone would have noticed the map if the refuge had not been a "super hot topic with the new administration." USGS spokeswoman Trudy Harlow has struggled at times to explain her agency's handling of the case. She has suggested, for example, that Thomas was never supposed to work on anything west of the Mississippi, which is not true. Although Harlow now concedes that her agency is not going to win any management awards over this, she insists that Thomas must be held responsible for his actions. "However bureaucratic it may sound, we're a publicly funded organization, and we have to follow the rules," she said. "He's an adult." Turning Into a Celebrity On Thursday, "Doonesbury" 's Post reporter had a question for the deputy interior secretary: "Do you think scientific maps should be suppressed when they fail to support administration policy?" The politico's answer: "This was NOT a scientific map! This was a Ted Kennedy-style liberal map! . . . You could've eaten BRIE off this map!" "Doonesbury," of course, is satire. But the notion that the Bush administration ousted Thomas for political reasons has taken root around the world, thanks to the power of the Internet and the tenacity of environmentalists. The group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has cited the Thomas case in demanding a nonretaliation policy at Interior, and groups such as the Endangered Species Coalition and the Sierra Club have taken up his cause as well. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) invited Thomas to a breakfast in honor of a new book of essays about the refuge. Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and John F. Tierney (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Norton on Friday, expressing concern that "this severe and sudden action may have a chilling effect on scientists in the Department who may fear that their job is in jeopardy if they publish findings that are counter to the Administration's positions." But everyone involved agrees that the issue never went any higher than Fenn, the top USGS biologist, and that the decision to terminate Thomas's contract didn't reach the director of Patuxent. USGS director Chip Groat, a Clinton appointee who has been retained by Bush, was never consulted about the caribou map. In fact, Norton is the only confirmed political appointee at Interior; career civil servants are running most of the department. "Oh, please, the administration had no idea what was going on," Fenn said. "The reality is, there is no administration yet." But Norton has been at the center of the debate over drilling in the Arctic, and that has given the story legs. In mid-March, she held a news conference to announce that the Aleutian Canada goose was off the endangered species list; all five questions were about the refuge. Her spokesman, Mark Pfeifle, grumbles that "if USGS scientists accidentally discovered a cure for cancer, everyone would still scream: What about [the refuge]?" So the myth of Ian Thomas has flourished. The Guardian, for example, used Thomas as new evidence that the administration "actually appears to bear a grudge against the natural world." In a letter to Norton, PEER and 87 other groups warned that the mere perception of political retaliation against Thomas -- a perception that they have promoted all over cyberspace -- had sent "a chilling message to all government scientists," and that many scientists were already complaining that "Mr. Thomas' firing has changed the way they approach their jobs." Thus, perception appears to be metastasizing into reality. Sauer has heard about fellow scientists turning down government jobs because of the supposed right-wing conspiracy to suppress science. He considers himself a lefty, but he figures he must be part of the conspiracy, too. "It's incredibly scary," he said. "A little personnel issue, and suddenly it's in 'Doonesbury.' "
