MAP MAKER LOSES JOB AND BECOMES AN URBAN LEGEND

by Naomi Lubick

How often do you open an e-mail message to find a mass mailing, hysterical in nature, claiming a crisis is at hand? You hit the delete key and don't give it a second thought, knowing that National Public Radio will continue to be funded and the electronic petition on women and the Taliban is three years old.

But earlier this year, an e-mail from a friend at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) had a slightly different tone-enough so that I read it carefully. A USGS cartographer had been fired for posting on the Web a map of caribou birthing regions in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Because of the Bush administration's stance on oil drilling in the ANWR, the information was considered sensitive enough for an employee to lose his job, or so went the gist of the e-mail. If true, it was censorship and frightened me as a geologist, journalist, and admitted environmentalist.

Mapmaker Ian Thomas posted his caribou map on March 7, 2001, and was fired a few days later. He immediately sent out a series of e-mails to mapmaking colleagues around the world describing his plight. In no time at all, Thomas was the subject of chat-room discussions by imagery specialists, librarians, political scientists, academics, and environmentalists.

I considered pursuing the story, but did not. And when I failed to find mention of it in the press, I thought maybe it wasn't legitimate after all. I let it go.

Two months later, in a curious intersection of e-mail and political cartooning, the story resurfaced.In a series of five Doonesbury comic strips, published May 14 through 18, Garry Trudeau painted in broad strokes the firing of Thomas from his job at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, in Laurel, Md. Trudeau chastised not only the Department of the Interior and ANWR for their treatment of Thomas but also took a swipe at the media for not picking up the story in the first place.

In the series, Rick Redfern, a fictional reporter for the Washington Post (his c.v. includes a stint at People), tells his wife, Joanie, that he's working on a story about an "unwitting" mapmaker, fired for making a map of caribou birthing areas in Alaska just where Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton "wants to drill." As the strip progresses, you find the DOI deputy secretary knows nothing about it (which turned out to be true, according to USGS e-mail correspondence), and President George W. Bush knows nothing about it ("I grew up around maps--good, strong maps!").

At one point in the series, Joanie says, "Thank God for an alert free press." Redfern's punch line: "This happened two months ago."

So was there a story and journalists missed it?

Lisa Getter, of the Los Angeles Times' Washington bureau, broke the story on March 15, three days after Thomas was fired. She heard about it from a source she developed while working on a story involving another federal agency.

Getter wrote, "The episode illustrates the political sensitivity of the refuge proposal as Congress and the administration prepare to deal with the issue (of drilling in the ANWR)." The URL to the news article was included in a March 16 e-mail that was quickly spread by sympathetic parties.

Frederick W. Stoss, an associate librarian in biology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, admits that he was responsible for some of the initial firestorm. When he learned of Thomas' situation in March, Stoss wrote an impassioned plea, calling for action from major professional organizations-a plea that featured prominently in subsequent e-mails sent 'round the world.

"It was the story that so many people wanted to believe," Stoss later wrote. "It was the story that so many people cited as exactly how our environment and the scientists who study it were going to be treated by the Bush administration. It was the story that so many people wanted to use as a rally point to protect our environment and natural resources."

Stoss forwarded Thomas's letter to several e-mail newsgroups. But he later regretted the action after doing some checking of his own and discovering more complexity than meets the eye. In April, he wrote an editorial for the Electronic Green Journal titled "A Good Story Ruined by the Facts?" Among the facts are that Thomas was not a government employee but a contract employee without authority to post data on the USGS Web site; the map was outside the scope of his contract, which called for him to map migratory birds (not grazing mammals); and finally, the map never underwent proper scientific review.

I spoke with Stoss at the American Library Association meeting in San Francisco last summer. "This thing appeared to be a personnel issue, not some kind of high-end decision that was made in the upper echelons of the administration," he said. Stoss even provided me with an inch-thick stack of papers documenting the USGS Web-posting procedures that Thomas had ignored.

But he found that information long after the story was off and running.

The next published report in a major newspaper appeared across the pond in The Guardian. According to David Stanford, one of Trudeau's support staff, it was The Guardian piece and Stoss' earlier comments that provided fodder for the cartoon series.

After the Doonesbury series ended, the Los Angeles Times ran a follow-up piece by Getter in which she reported that the reasons Thomas lost his job remain unclear, but what is certain is that the Internet and Doonesbury had created an urban legend.

"I was pretty surprised," Thomas said in a telephone conversation, regarding the subsequent press coverage. "I think (the media) got very defensive. Doonesbury was (just) making fun of them for not covering it."

Perhaps in reaction to fictional character Redfern being cast as a Washington Post reporter, the Post ran a front-page story by Mike Grunwald shortly after the Doonesbury series concluded.

Grunwald told me he received at least 20 e-mails about Thomas in March. "At the time I was skeptical," he said. "I saw the LA Times had done something, but I didn't feel like it answered much." He, too, saw The Guardian story and felt that it missed some key questions, as well as made accusations about how much "the top" knew when Thomas was let go. He kept the story, but didn't do anything about it until the Doonesbury series.

"Then I thought if this was true, then that would be really criminal on the part of the administration," Grunwald said. He set out to write a straight story, talking to as many people as he could at the USGS. "This was not management 101," he said. "Reasonable people can disagree whether this guy should have been fired or whether it should have gotten to this point anyway." Grunwald wanted to make the point that the firing was not part of a right-wing conspiracy.

Science writer Sara Pratt, a former geologist and USGS employee, observed, "The whole thing is really just another example of preemptive spin, i.e. source-initiated as opposed to reporter-initiated news, much like a press release. But the difference here is that if Thomas had issued a press release along established channels, you and I would never have heard of this."
Indeed, both Sara and I received initial reports from geo-friends via the Internet. So what does this mean for the future of journalism?

"The rise of the Internet means everyone can now publish their own version of a story," said Pratt. "From here on out it means that it's just going to be that much more complicated, involving that many more players, playing that many more angles. But that's okay. It may take a bit longer, like it did in this case, but sorting it all out is what journalists do."

In the end, Thomas has a job with the World Wildlife Fund, drilling in the ANWR is still up for debate, and the scientists at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, thousands of miles away, are still tracking birds.

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(Source: Frederick W. Stoss' editorial in Electronic Green Journal, Spring 2001)

Naomi Lubick is a freelance writer in Folsom, Calif.