GAG-ORDERED NO MORE

Czech, a conservation biologist, details the incompetence, dishonesty, and corruption he witnessed at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service during his employment there.

In 1999, when the author began working at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he did so with a surfeit of enthusiasm. He believed it was the “the most important conservation organization in the world” and that it set an example for the rest of the world to emulate. Czech wanted the agency to raise awareness about the “800-Pound Gorilla” (his sobriquet for economic growth), which he saw as the single greatest challenge to conservation. According to the author, unchecked economic growth is patently incompatible with ecological conservation, a position he articulates with impressive lucidity and power: “It’s a fact of ecological macroeconomics that the human economy grows at the competitive exclusion of non-human species in the aggregate. It’s a closely related fact of ecological macroeconomics that there is a conflict between economic growth and ecological integrity.” However, per the author, even though most of his superiors agreed, they not only thwarted his efforts but suppressed his speech, imposing onerous gag orders upon him followed by reprimands and suspensions. In Czech’s telling, a “bureaucratically inbred chain of command” (the author’s prose is a rollicking delight) made certain he was “harassed, hamstrung, and humiliated” until he finally resigned. The author not only documents what he considers to be the ineptitude of the agency at large but also explains, in accessible language, why breakneck economic growth is such a threat to the environment, and how a “steady state economy” could alleviate a considerable measure of the stress the natural environment suffers under. His rhetoric can be searingly strident, and he does not persuasively make a case that the “ecological integrity of the nation and planet is unravelling before our eyes.” However, his articulation of the tension between economic growth and ecological integrity is provocative, and his critique of his former employer is unsettling and edifying.

A rare and winning combination of policy analysis and expose.