Volume 26 · Number 3 · Spring 2009
Informed Dissent
(Page 4 of 5)
James Carey: flies (and moths) in the ointment
James Carey was a new assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology teaching a class in insect ecology when, in June 1980, the Mediterranean fruit fly swarmed into California’s multibillion dollar agricultural industry. Inspired by a unique opportunity to connect his class with an event happening in real time, Carey developed an extensive set of handouts on the population dynamics and demography of the medfly. Those handouts became a manuscript and then a published paper, which led to Carey’s being acknowledged as an expert on that destructive pest and to an invitation to participate on the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Mediterranean Fruit Fly Scientific Advisory Panel.
James Carey
“Of course it was flattering to be asked,” Carey says, assuming the bid had come “because of my knowledge and wisdom.” But when the medfly reappeared in 1987 he had to seriously weigh the consequences of sharing that wisdom again.
“I was still a young researcher,” Carey says, and leery of being labeled a gadfly. The choice, he said, was between going along with what the state officials were saying publicly and what he’d been telling them on the panel. He believed that the medfly had permanently established itself in California and that its reappearances weren’t reintroductions into the state after eradication — an opinion with enormous consequences for California’s agriculture industry.
“It gave me pause,” he says. “But I just decided I had to go with the science. That is exactly what I do here at the University of California. So I testified that it was established.”
Now, two decades later, Carey is back in the news, this time challenging as ineffective the Department of Food and Agriculture’s efforts to control an outbreak in the Bay Area of the light brown apple moth, decalred by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to be a Class A pest. He doesn’t believe the aerial spraying of pheromones over the nine-county area will eliminate the pest.
“There’s always talk about ‘stakeholders,’” Carey says. “The stakeholders are also the public; they’re the ones who are going to have this pheromone rained down on them.” Based on his knowledge of invasive species biology, he, along with colleagues Frank Zalom and Bruce Hammock, wrote U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer, asking that the program be re-evaluated.
“Isn’t this why the public is paying my salary here at the University of California?” Carey asks, “to render my honest opinion about the efficacy of these different tools? Who’s going to stand up for the public and present their views? I feel like I’m in a position where I can do this.