Perspectives of a Lawyer Who Works on Policy and Swims with the Scientists

My work as an attorney for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council has coincided neatly with the establishment and growing use of the independent science panels. What I do most often involves marrying technical information (including the advice of the science panels) to policy, legal and management considerations to help frame and support the decisions of the Council consistent with the protection and mitigation responsibilities in the Northwest Power Act. I also had the unique counter-perspective of serving in 2008 on an independent review panel of mostly scientists reviewing the anadromous fish programs for the Central Valley Project. And having our very good report largely ignored by the agency.

The work of the independent science panels has enormously benefitted the Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program. The Program’s conceptual framework and planning processes make far more sense than before, are much better grounded in technical assessments and consistent scientific principles, and are more honest and explicit in terms of the assumptions that link actions to objectives. The projects that implement the Program are much more technically sound and better linked to the Program than before, and we have a better handle on the right things to monitor to match the premises and actions of the Program. And we have managed well the sometimes conflicting and occasionally disappointed expectations of the science panels and the resource managers.

And yet... I am not sure we have realized the real potential of the insights of the science panels, especially in terms of what should be the necessary scale and direction of a habitat-based program. Adaptive management continues to be more comfortable fiction than reality, largely because of a lack of rigorous reporting and critical evaluation of results. On the other hand, at times the independent science panels engage at levels of either detail or abstraction that are not as useful to decisionmakers as could be, or repeat recommendations on issues that the decisionmakers have moved past, for better or worse. And so the lines of communication from the decisionmakers to the scientists as to what is useful in a review could always be improved, too.