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Back a year or so ago, people were griping about Craig Manson, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks who systematically rewrote scientific opinions to better suit developers and big corporate farming operations. Then Manson retired, and his sidekick, Julie MacDonald, effectively took the controls.

Now there's hard, fast evidence [link: Washington Post exclusive] that Bush appointee MacDonald, a civil engineer with no training in biology, has been up to the same old tricks.

Documents unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act show that MacDonald wrote snarky comments in the margins of perfectly credible scientific documents pertaining to the potential listing of the white-tailed prairie dog, the California tiger salamander and round-tailed chub of the Colorado River basin, among others. As a result, U.S. Fish and Wildlife declined to list the prairie dog, which is threatened by oil and gas drilling, even though the creature has disappeared from 90 percent of its habitat in several Western states; and the salamander was downlisted, although a court decision later relisted it, saying that MacDonald's meddling skewed the scientific process.

This is nothing new, really. Says Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity, "We’ve just been able over time to build more of a case that there’s a been a systematic pattern of interference to subvert science."

But Greenwald also acknowledges that little has been done to stop this stuff, legislatively speaking. "There haven’t been any heads rolling or anything," although there is an Inspector General's report in progress, and Rep. Nick J. Rahall II of West Virginia has promised congressional hearings. "We’re hoping there’s going to be focus [in those hearings] on Julie McDonald," Greenwald told me today.

It would really help Rahall a lot, of course, if the balance of power in the House could shift to the Democrats on Tuesday. In fact, Rahall says he needs it.

I've said it all before but it bears repeating: We protect species not because we value the lives of cute little prairie dogs over the economic futures of humans, but becasue the extinction of a species, when caused by human activity, indicates that something has gone seriously awry in the ecosystem. The species we save may one day be our own.

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