Crying Whale

In a widely accepted practice that Mexico copied directly from U.S. standards, ESSA was expected to finance the research for the environmental assessment. The company surprised its critics by gathering a topnotch team of North American gray whale experts from places like Scripps Institute, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of California at San Diego, and the University of Mexico at La Paz.

Roger Payne, who from his country home in Vermont was trying to draft world-renowned scientists to oppose the salt plant, grew furious that ESSA was trying to look like a responsible organization. Payne and Spalding began lashing out at the respected scientists who had agreed to conduct the salt plant/gray whale research.

"These scientists were taking money from a major corporation, globally huge, so I don't think you should have much respect for them," Payne snaps even today. "If you want to confuse things, you do exactly what Mitsubishi did, and pull in some scientists who are good, but are paid. And that is a disgrace to those scientists. Nobody in our case was paid or offered to be paid, and it never came up."

But in fact, New Times has learned that Payne himself was being paid -- by NRDC, according to Reynolds -- and his job was to lobby top scientists and Nobel laureates to join the ad, written largely by Payne, that opposed the salt plant. Payne, who did not disclose publicly that he was on hire, was hardly an outside observer.

"My disgust is complete," says Paul Dayton, a Scripps Institute biologist whom Payne criticized.

"Roger Payne attacked us again and again for being paid by one of the sides in the battle," says Dayton, "yet now I learn he was being paid by the other side specifically to go on the attack -- something we were never asked to do."

In one particularly nasty incident, Spalding claimed at a public forum that the director of Scripps Institute was distancing himself from Dayton and oceanographer Cliff Winant because the two scientists had been tainted by agreeing to do the salt plant research.

"We were supposedly two renegades who'd suddenly sold out our careers for a year's worth of research funding," says Dayton, who was determining the effect on wetland worms of taking saltwater from the lagoon. "When he first popped into my office, I was very open with Spalding, showed him my work, opened the files. The research was looking like no harm was going to come to creatures in the lagoon. So suddenly, I was evil incarnate."

One pivotal victory during this time came when the California Coastal Commission ignored its staff recommendation to do further research into the science debate, and voted to oppose the saltworks. The ESSA crowd was furious, because Sara Wan, chairwoman of the commission, was an active member of NRDC and a close friend of Joel Reynolds, and did not disclose her connection despite joining in the passionate debate.

Wan says she sees "no problem" with her dual roles. Months later, when President Zedillo canceled the salt plant project, Reynolds recalls, "Sara left a message on my machine, and she was crying, she was so happy."

That's how the gray whale affected people, and those emotions proved far too powerful for research or technical debates to overcome.

Of the 10 elements in the coalition's strategy to stop the salt plant, Reynolds believes "our idea of creating a debate among scientists was one of the most effective. A lot of people think the full-page ads in the New York Times and L.A. Times turned the tide and put us on the road to victory."

For that ad, the heavy hitters came out. The ad condemned the saltworks as "an unacceptable risk" to gray whales. Scientists named included, among others: E.O. Wilson of Harvard, a dual Pulitzer Prize winner; Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Gardens; David Baltimore, president of Caltech and a Nobel Prize winner in medicine; Roger Guillemin of Salk Institute with dual Nobel Prizes in medicine and physiology; Mario Molina of MIT, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry; John Terborgh, director of Duke University's Center for Tropical Conservation; Paul Ehrlich, head of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology; George Woodwell, director of Woods Hole Research Center; and Sir Aaron Klug, Nobel Prize- winning president of the Royal Society.

Scientists directly involved in the research saw their reputations being tarnished and fought back. Dayton and Winant of Scripps, as well as Burney Le Boeuf of UC Santa Cruz, sent protests to several of the most renowned scientists in the ad and asked them to take a second look.

"Those guys in the ad were opposed to the idea of the salt plant," says Dayton. "Look, I am also personally opposed to the idea of changing this relatively untouched area, but you don't put your name as a scientist on something that's a lie."

Dayton and other researchers pointed out that claim after claim by the environmental groups was gradually being disproved by research.