[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 116 (Tuesday, July 18, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1449]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


          MICHIGAN NEEDS THE NATIONAL BIOLOGICAL SERVICE [NBS]

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                          HON. DAVID E. BONIOR

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                          Monday, July 17, 1995
  Mr. BONIOR. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my strong opposition 
to Speaker Gingrich and the congressional Republican efforts to 
eliminate the National Biological Service [NBS] in the Interior 
Appropriations bill. Eliminating the NBS is yet another attempt to roll 
back the progress we have made in improving our water quality.
  The current Interior Appropriations bill will result in shutting down 
four biological science facilities--including the one in Ann Arbor, MI. 
The Ann Arbor facility has been instrumental in contributing 
information and knowledge about zebra mussels and water quality issues 
in Lake St. Clair.
  This ill-conceived bill also transfers the responsibility of 
researching living resources to the U.S. Geological Survey--an agency 
which has never in its entire existence studied a living resource let 
alone a foreign species like the zebra mussel.
  For those of us who live along the lake wondering each and every day 
if the water is safe, scientific research is the only way we can 
control foreign organisms and find solutions to what is happening in 
Lake St. Clair. With this legislation, Congress is saying to the people 
in the 10th District of Michigan, and to everyone along the Great 
Lakes, that they don't care about one of the most important economic 
and recreational resources we have--our water.
  It is time to stop turning back the clock. We don't want our lakes to 
become ecologically dead or our rivers to become so polluted that they 
catch on fire again. What we want is to move forward, to find solutions 
and provide answers. That's what the National Biological Service does 
and that's why we should be funding its research--not abolishing it.
  Perhaps my feelings about the elimination of the NBS are best stated 
by a recent Detroit Free Press editorial, which I would now like to 
submit for the Record.
          [From the Detroit Free Press, Monday, July 10, 1995]

     Risky Reform--Cutting the NBS Would Harm Great Lakes and More

       If Congress carries out its threat to kill or castrate the 
     National Biological Service, the Great Lakes will be enormous 
     losers. Most people in Michigan may never have heard of the 
     NBS, but while the name may be new and unfamiliar, the 
     federal research activities it comprises have been around for 
     a while, and are much too valuable to lose.
       It is the unhappy fate of the NBS that it was put together 
     in 1993 by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who is widely 
     regarded by the Wise Use Gang as a traitor to his class--a 
     rancher who doesn't believe that beef cattle are God's second 
     highest creation, or that the federal government should butt 
     out of everything west of the 100th meridian. The mere fact 
     that Mr. Babbitt's fingerprints are on the NBS has made it a 
     prime target of the anti-science, anti-environment, anti-
     government crowd.
       The NBS houses many research activities formerly conducted 
     under the letterhead of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 
     It includes 16 regional science centers, including the Great 
     Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor, which is high on the hit 
     list if NBS funding is eliminated or curtailed.
       Closing up shop in Ann Arbor would break the chain of 
     nearly 100 years of science and fishery data compiled there, 
     and cripple efforts to protect the lakes. Working with other 
     state and federal agencies, the center has helped identify 
     DDT as a problem in eagles, mercury as a threat in Lake Erie 
     walleye, PCBs as a bioaccumulating toxin in a wide range of 
     species. It helped to solve the alewife problem (remember the 
     stinking mounds of trash fish that once piled up on some 
     Great Lakes beaches?) and to develop methods to control the 
     voracious lamprey.
       Across the country, the agencies that make up the NBS have 
     performed similar services for science, commerce, recreation, 
     water quality, protection of species and habitat. The famed 
     wildlife center at Patuxent, Md., brought back the whooping 
     crane from the edge of extinction. Rachel Carson worked at 
     Patuxent, and relied on data from there and Ann Arbor to 
     write ``Silent Spring.'' This is the scientific tradition and 
     research base whose existence and continuity are now at risk.
       The NBS, despite the propaganda of its detractors, doesn't 
     regulate a flea; it merely provides information on which 
     others may act. Sometimes that information is inconvenient, 
     as when it shows how reckless logging practices are 
     destroying the Pacific salmon fishery. What the country 
     should do about logs vs. salmon is a legitimate policy 
     question; at least we ought to know what's happening out 
     there before we answer it.
       The people with knives out for the NBS want to conduct the 
     debate without the science. In the Great Lakes, that sort of 
     know-nothingism could be fatal to the fishery, to water 
     quality, to health, recreation and tourism. Michigan's 
     members of Congress may differ on environmental issues, but 
     they ought to share a genuine interest in preserving Great 
     Lakes science and research--and the mission of the NBS 
     nationally, for the same reasons.
       It's one thing to argue over policies and decisions, 
     another to trash the bioscientific base on which they should 
     be made. The environment can survive a few wrongheaded policy 
     decisions. It's doubtful any of us can survive the kind of 
     willful ignorance the NBS' detractors seek to impose.
     

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