Want Another Carp?

Under President Clinton the US Fish and Wildlife Service did well compared to its performances under past administrations. There were, of course, high points and low points. This column is about one of the latter. My devout hope is that the Bush administration can use the information to avoid similar disasters, reverse a gross injustice to one of the agency’s most talented and dedicated professionals and, in the process, save the Mississippi River system from yet another Asian carp.

In 1990 the Fish and Wildlife Service assigned fisheries biologist Jerry Rasmussen, a 15-year agency vet with superb performance reports and eight major awards, to coordinate a new 28-state organization for cooperative fish management called the Mississippi Interstate Cooperative Resource Association (MICRA). Rasmussen was directed in writing, via a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the MICRA states, to “promote MICRA’s interests,” not the interests of the Fish and Wildlife Service as they are sometimes imagined by certain of its senior bureaucrats.

Without even a secretary Rasmussen built MICRA into a powerful, effective force for fish conservation and restoration. He did everything, even produced MICRA’s nationally acclaimed bimonthly publication, River Crossings. To a man, the state fisheries chiefs—who represent their agencies at MICRA meetings—adored him. In 1994 he received personal letters of commendation from Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Vice President Al Gore. In 1995 he became one of the few federal employees ever to get the American Fisheries Society’s coveted President’s Conservation Award. With one of the 12 agency awards for his work at MICRA came a letter signed by regional director Sam Marler and assistant regional director John Christian, which read in part: “We are stretched very thin, and some dedicated federal employees respond to this challenge by working smarter and for longer hours than can be reasonably expected. They commit more of themselves for the resource than their job requires.”

But in helping the 28 states in their effort to stop the aquaculture industry from infecting the Mississippi drainage with a fourth Asian carp Rasmussen committed a bit more of himself than some people in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Washington office had counted on. By doing his job—that is, telling the truth about the black carp, largest and most ecologically dangerous of the imported Asian carps, and helping the MICRA states defend themselves against it — he so irritated the industry that it complained to US Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), who had worked for Clinton when he was that state’s governor. On July 24, 2000 Sen. Lincoln hauled Fish and Wildlife Service Director Jamie Clark into her office and sat her down in front of two industry spokesman who had set up the meeting and who also had worked for Clinton while he was governor.

The spokesmen were black-carp producer Mike Freeze, of England, Arkansas, and Ted McNulty, vice president for agriculture and aquaculture at the Arkansas Development Finance Authority. Prior to the meeting, neither man had been shy about letting Clark know how he felt. “I want to voice my objection to USFWS subsidizing a radical and uninformed organization such as MICRA,” McNulty had written in response to a notice she had posted in the Federal Register soliciting comments on a proposal to list the black carp as an injurious species under the Lacey Act. “Taxpayer money is being spent to post lobbying positions on a government web page and to accuse people trying to make a living of being selfish. At best this is a waste of money and might be considered illegal. I ask that the USFWS immediately sever all connections with MICRA and end its memorandum of understanding with the MICRA states immediately.”

The charge against Rasmussen (conflict of interest) was first raised by USFWS fisheries chief Cathleen Short, a delegate to MICRA who never bothered to attend a single meeting. Short claimed that Rasmussen had helped the 28 states prepare a petition to his own agency (the Fish and Wildlife Service) to list the black carp as injurious. It was true. But it was also true that Rasmussen’s written orders in the MOU required him to do precisely this—i.e. “promote MICRA’s interests.” Before Clark got leaned on by the “Arkansas Mafia” (as some Fish and Wildlife Service personnel now refer to Sen. Lincoln and her Clinton-connected aquaculture constituents) and while the MICRA states were still preparing their petition, Rasmussen met with or spoke with his supervisors dozens of times and never once was the issue of conflict of interest mentioned.

Getting 28 states to agree on anything, much less a strongly worded petition on the dangers of an alien fish, should have been grounds for yet another award. Instead Washington demanded Rasmussen’s head on a platter. At that point the regional office stepped in, asking that it be allowed to at least reassign him to an invisible position at the Rock Island, Illinois office of the La Crosse, Wisconsin Fishery Resource Office. In agency doublespeak, he was being shielded from “a situation that could be perceived as conflict of interest.” So when I asked Short about Rasmussen’s treatment she was able to accurately state: “That really was a regional decision and a regional action.” Then she said, not so accurately, that her “whole involvement has been relative to the petition to list black carp under the injurious wildlife provision of the Lacey Act.”

According to the Public Employees for Environmental Ethics (PEER), which came to Rasmussen’s defense, he has been ordered not to talk to anyone, especially the press. However, I had no trouble getting information from his many friends and colleagues inside and outside federal government, among them Dennis Riecke, a fisheries biologist with the Mississippi Dept. of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks.

“We were told [via the feds] you don’t talk to him,” says Riecke. “That’s bullshit. Someone who’s not my employer is gonna tell me I can’t talk to someone in the United States?”

It was Dennis Reicke who blew the whistle to MICRA about what was going on in Mississippi where, as in so many other southern states, resource agencies run and jump for aquaculture as if they were circus poodles. To understand the black carp crisis in Mississippi you have to go back 10 years to when Donald Robohm, president of SeaChick fish farm in the south coastal town of Escatawpa, wanted to raise tilapia—a sunfish analogue from Africa that was already wreaking ecological havoc in Florida. When Robohm, a prolific and passionate letter writer, was informed that state law prevented this, he took his case to the legislature, which promptly changed the law. The best the state could do was require him to install screens and filters to guard against escapement, which is about like guarding against an amphibious landing by planting poison ivy. In short order the tilapia were loose and reproducing in the Thompson’s Branch of the Pascagoula River, where they remain to this day. It was the fault of ospreys, says Robohm. When the mouth-brooding male tilapia get taloned they spew fry over any water that happens to be underneath.