Fired biologist won't let up on wildlife service
Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Vero Beach , Fla. -- Visitors to Andy Eller's little apartment, far from the beach in this central Florida beach town, have a choice: Sit on the floor or wait for their host to go get the fold-up camping chair out of his truck.
Eller, now one of the most talked-about wildlife experts in Florida, has evolved into something of an ascetic. A small pile of toy stuffed animals -- mostly endangered species, of course -- passes for home decor. He has no wife, no kids, no obligations.
This helps explain why an introvert with a tendency to speak in a barely audible monotone has swelled into a force to be reckoned with. Quite plainly, he doesn't have much to lose. Freed from most of the usual temporal worries, Eller has mounted a one-man campaign against what he says is a corrupt system within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that favors politically wired real estate developers over, well, fish and wildlife.
So far, it hasn't gone so well.
Eller, 46, was dismissed from his biologist job the day after November's presidential election. He was escorted out of his 18-year career carrying a pile of papers, a sweater and a frame holding postcards of paintings by the renowned Florida landscape artist A.E. "Bean" Backus.
Jeff Ruch, of the national advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, says the firing turned Eller into Exhibit A in an underground war between Fish and Wildlife scientists and upper management.
A survey released last month by Ruch's group and the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that hundreds of the agency's scientists think scientific findings have been altered to help business or political interests at the expense of wildlife. Many scientists, the survey said, are afraid to speak out. When the survey was released, an agency spokesman disputed its conclusions.
PEER and its lawyers, who are engaged in a protracted legal contest to have Eller reinstated, have cast him as a classic whistle-blower, a martyr whose passion for protecting Florida panther habitat from development ran afoul of ethically compromised bureaucrats.
The Fish and Wildlife Service sees Eller differently -- essentially as a slacker, a habitually tardy employee who routinely failed to complete assignments on time despite written warnings to shape up. Agency officials, while declining to discuss specifics, have also repeatedly said his firing has nothing to do with politics or with his string of publicly aired criticisms.
These competing versions of Andy Eller are being played out in a legal action that may peak when his case for reinstatement goes before the Merit Systems Protection Board this spring.
Eller can get a bit gushy about the Florida panther, a sleek and endangered subspecies of the puma that might have disappeared if not for the cougars that have been shipped from Texas to buck up populations at breeding time.
In 1993, while Eller was working for Fish and Wildlife in Atlanta, acquiring conservation land in the Southeast, a supervisor came by with a dream opportunity: a gig working on panther habitat protection in Florida.
"You know," Eller recalled his boss told him, "this means you're going to have to leave this cute little redheaded woman behind."
Panthers or girlfriend? Girlfriend or panthers?
He chose the panthers.
In Florida, Eller met Dave Maehr, then the most renowned expert on the Florida panther. Maehr, a former state wildlife scientist who became a development consultant, had authored the definitive scientific studies about the Florida panther's habits. By the late 1990s, Eller said, he was certain that Maehr's work was riddled with errors that favored developers -- as when it said, for instance, that the wide-ranging panther seldom strayed far from forests. But Eller had no leverage to air his concerns.
"He couldn't counter 'the world's greatest expert on panthers,' " said Jane Comiskey, a University of Tennessee researcher who sat on a review committee that was critical of Maehr's work. "It would have been, 'Who are you?' " Southwest Florida was booming at the time, and Eller said the 1993 panther-protection plan that he helped write -- which said development threatened to make the panther extinct -- was being trumped by Maehr's work. New roads, mines, golf courses and housing tracts were flying from blueprint to groundbreaking. "It was like watching a slow-motion nuclear bomb," Eller said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service was rubber-stamping development projects and forcing Eller and others to place flawed science in their reports, he said. In December 2001, Eller said, he was ordered to overstate the health of the panther population so as not to impede an expansion of Southwest Florida International Airport, outside Naples. He caved.
"Essentially, I was a patsy," Eller said. "I lost a lot of innocence."
Agonizing over what he'd done, Eller said, he decided to begin challenging management, especially the agency's regional head, James "Jay" Slack.
"Jay's ability to move up the ladder is contingent on doing favors for powerful, influential people," Eller said.
Slack disputes Eller's characterization, saying he is motivated by a desire to "do good conservation." Slack said that his office has done much to protect the panther, such as setting aside habitat, and that the agency has been "the catalyst" for improving scientific analysis of the panther's habits.
Eller said his work life deteriorated after the airport confrontation. He accuses the agency of dumping impossible workloads on him to make it appear he wasn't keeping up. Repeatedly, he said, he was asked to include false data in his reports. So he began to talk.
The once-shy biologist found reporters were eager to listen.
"I think I found a new drug -- the novelty of the media buzz," he said. "A lot of my co-workers said I looked better than I had in years."
By 2003, Maehr's work had been discredited, deemed "bad science" by a scientific review board appointed jointly by Fish and Wildlife and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. (Maehr said in a recent interview that he stands by the main conclusions of his study and described Eller as unqualified to take positions on panther habits.) But less than a year later, Eller was out of a job.
There have been flashes of vindication, such as being honored in January by the Everglades Coalition, a consortium of environmental groups, as the person in public service who has contributed the most to the health of the Everglades. But primarily, Eller spends his days sifting through stacks of paper, trying to build a case in the little apartment in Vero Beach -- alone.