Map Maker Fired Over Arctic Chart a Cult Hero

The best thing that ever happened to Ian Thomas was losing his government job.

Thomas was a contract employee for the U.S. Geological Survey when earlier this spring he posted a map of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s caribou calving areas on a federal Web site. His bosses, for reasons still in dispute, fired him.

But thanks to the Internet and a feature role in the “Doonesbury” comic strip this week, Thomas has become a cult hero.

Environmentalists see his firing as an attempt by the Bush administration to silence criticism of its proposal to allow oil drilling in the refuge.

“He’s a legend now,” says Eric Wingerter, the national field director for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “It’s part of pop culture.”

Thomas, for his part, is somewhat of an unlikely hero. The 33-year-old native of England insists that he never wanted the spotlight when he posted the postcard-size map on the Web site at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland.

His former bosses insist politics played no role in his dismissal. They say he should have known better--posting such a map was outside the scope of his contract, which called for him to map migratory birds, not grazing mammals. Besides, they said, the map was never reviewed by anyone.

When USGS officials discovered Thomas’ map--which was based on old data that conflicted with information they had just used to brief Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton--they ordered it taken off the Internet.

“All we need is to have the media start nit-picking on how one arm of the USGS is saying one thing and the other is not,” one Interior official wrote in one e-mail recently released to PEER. Another wondered “if a hacker is involved” and noted that there needed to be “responsibility for information dissemination.”

Thomas says he gladly would have removed the map--had someone asked him. “I was really not out to cause trouble. It’s been a very crazy experience. They dropped me, and I bounced. They really didn’t give me a chance to roll over and play dead.”

In the age of computers, Thomas’ story spread around the world like a virus. The Los Angeles Times reported his firing in mid-March. Thomas e-mailed the story--and a series of e-mails about what happened to him--to fellow map makers. They in turn sent the e-mail to others. It became the topic of conversations in chat rooms of imagery specialists, self-professed geeks, librarians, political scientists, academics and--of course--environmentalists.

A member of the American Library Assn. called it censorship. An ecologist told his friends to call the president, to call Congress. “Do something about it.” A National Aeronautics and Space Administration employee expressed dismay about what had happened.

Within days, the story of Ian Thomas was posted on sites from the U.S. to Australia. Back in Maryland, the USGS removed all the maps Thomas had ever created. Amid the furor that created, they put some of them back.

But his old work had a new warning: “Since some of these maps have not been peer reviewed, they are not citable. . . . Few maps here are just plain wrong and still need work.”

As the story spread--Thomas set up his own Internet site (https://www.maptricks.com), receiving thousands of messages--the USGS struck back. Spokeswoman Trudy Harlow began answering many of the people who posted messages about Thomas’ firing, telling them there was little fact “but mostly fiction” to critics’ side of the story.

Frederick Stoss, biological sciences librarian at the State University of New York at Buffalo, got one of those messages after he messaged his peers that Thomas’ firing was “chilling news.” Stoss said the message from Harlow convinced him that the firing was more complicated than he had thought.

“He became a cult hero because this is the story that everyone wanted to hear,” Stoss said. “There is urban legend growing out of this.”

The first Thomas learned of the “Doonesbury” comic strip was when he got to work Monday at his new job at the World Wildlife Fund, where he maps freshwater ecosystems. The strip was posted to the door.

“Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau doesn’t spare anyone in the strip. He pokes fun at the Interior Department for firing Thomas: “This was not a scientific map! This was a Ted Kennedy-style liberal map,” the government official in the strip says.

Harlow said Friday that she wished Trudeau had called her before publishing the comic strip this week. “He just chose to go with one side of the story,” she said.