A Sellout, or Just Practical?

Dennis Murphy so pleased Riverside County developers last year, they gave him a brand-new Audi convertible with a big bow on it.

It was an unusual gift for builders to bestow on a conservation biologist, but Murphy is a man of many gifts himself.

Among those gifts are the abilities he honed in his 14 years as head of Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology, where he became a world expert on endangered butterflies. He built a resume that has made him invaluable to home builders, timber companies and landfill operators, who have repeatedly hired him to craft deals to overcome environmental stumbling blocks.

Murphy champions his beliefs in rapid-fire, sweeping pronouncements. He is described by fellow scientists, sometimes in the same breath, as either one of the most creative new faces of the U.S. environmental movement or a leader of a seamy offshoot: peddling science for profit.

“Dennis is never going to be the small, neutral person in the background nobody pays attention to,” said his longtime mentor, Paul Ehrlich, a well-known Stanford conservation biologist and “no growth” advocate. “That is one of his best talents and one of his difficulties at the same time.”

Murphy, 51, helped negotiate pacts that allowed timbering in spotted-owl habitat and development where the Southern California gnatcatcher lives. He devised scientific principles underlying state and federal land swaps that permit killing endangered species in one locale in exchange for preservation elsewhere. When U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Harry Reid (D-Nevada) needed someone in 1997 to lead a study for a $900-million Lake Tahoe environmental rescue project, the job went to Murphy.

“Dennis and I have been friends for many years,” Reid said as he opened congressional hearings in 1999 on controversial changes to the Endangered Species Act, which Murphy had helped devise.

Murphy says he has attracted tens of millions of dollars in research and teaching funds from private donors and government agencies to the University of Nevada at Reno, where he is now a tenured professor, and to Stanford. He also earns up to $5,000 a day working for developers caught in pitched battles over local land use.

Money Yes, Money No

Yet he insists that he isn’t in it for the money, that it is a sometimes embarrassing offshoot of what really matters: protecting endangered species with pragmatic compromises.

Call it Murphy’s law: To preserve species and their land, you sometimes have to destroy them as well.

“That is the reality of this dirty work we do in conservation planning on private property -- that the bulldozers are going to roll,” he says. “But if you help direct where they roll, and you have contributed to the conservation of that open space that’s left over, there is a certain satisfaction there.”

That reasoning angers Murphy’s critics, who say that he and others like him are little more than “rent-a-scientists” paid to testify before planning commissions, in court and in environmental impact reports. The critics have even coined a name for them: biostitutes.

“He’s the kingpin among biostitutes,” said Ken Osborne, a Riverside-based biologist who specializes in the same rare insects as Murphy. Osborne said he has twice found endangered species on land slated for development where Murphy said they did not exist.

Murphy retorts that he outranks Osborne in academic pedigree, and adds: “He loves nature more than I do? I’ll have a slap fight over that.” He says he doubts that Osborne saw the species, and if he did, Murphy says, they were simply passing through.

A fifth-generation Northern Californian who has spent every summer at Lake Tahoe, Murphy said he began collecting butterflies as a child and never stopped. His office is stacked with wooden cases full of thousands of neatly impaled butterfly species from across the globe.

He earned his bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley and his doctorate at Stanford in 1981, publishing a dissertation on checkerspot butterflies.

The Endangered Species Act and private property rights were beginning to clash politically and in court, and that showdown fascinated Murphy from the start. He was a member of the Sierra Club at age 16, but was also the grandson of a well-known Northern California builder.

While working for Ehrlich’s lab at Stanford in the early 1980s, he tried to have the fast-dwindling bay checkerspot butterfly put on the endangered species list. He said the resulting “incendiary politics” was a life-changing experience.

One habitat site was owned by defense contractor United Technologies. Norman Y. Mineta -- then a California congressman, now the secretary of Transportation -- went to bat for the contractor against the listing.

So Murphy cut his first deal with the help of trash hauling giant Waste Management Inc., which wanted to build a landfill on other property nearby, where the butterfly also lived.

Moment for Publicity

Waste Management saw Murphy’s proposal to create a butterfly preserve alongside the Kirby Canyon landfill as a rare public relations opportunity. “We wanted to show you could have a development occur as well as protect the habitat,” said Rich Thompson, a director of environmental compliance for the firm.

Thompson said Waste Management sent its lobbyists in Washington to go “head-on against United Technologies” in a very public battle to get the butterfly listed.

“It was a time for Waste Management to say, ‘We know we are an environmental company and we want to do more for the environment,’ ” Thompson said.

The company later showcased its efforts in a 30-second commercial on network television, and kicked in $500,000 to Murphy’s Stanford research lab.

Although the effort to list the bay checkerspot was successful, Murphy concedes that populations of the butterfly on the site slipped from a high of more than 1 million in 1990 to about 10,000 by 2000. But he says the land swap concept is sound and that the experience galvanized him to develop ever larger plans.

“I believe myself to be ‘green,’ ” he says. His colleagues are “very often narrow in their view of the ecological world,” he says, insisting on the impossible -- that every acre be saved -- rather than determining which areas are more important.

Murphy’s thoughts about the marbled murrelet, the tiny creature at the heart of the Headwaters Forest controversy in Northern California, encapsulate his pragmatic style. “The marbled murrelet is a dumb bird. It’s as dumb as they come,” he says, because although it is an ocean bird, it migrates 40 miles inland to nest and “drops an egg in a moss pile on top of a 300-foot tree standing in the middle of a clear-cut.”

As far as he’s concerned, the bird had better learn to survive on what is left for it, rather than counting on generous land set-asides.

“No one is going to come forth with a conservation plan that is necessary to preserve the full extent of habitat that is needed by this bird. If in fact you need 19 out of 20 acres, it is not going to get it. It’s a political reality,” he said. “The question becomes: Can we do everything we can to get 12 acres, and configure and manage them in a way to sustain the species?”

He counts more than 160 papers and books published in his name, and he has successfully petitioned to have several butterfly species protected under federal law. He’s now the man developers call when those butterflies get in their way. Murphy was flown in last fall when the Center for Biological Diversity sued to stop a proposed toll road in San Diego County and thousands of proposed homes around it. A federal judge is expected to rule on the case soon.

The center contends that the development would destroy some of the delicate quino checkerspot butterfly’s last known populations. Murphy, who earlier won endangered species status for the quino, dismisses those claims as “totally false” and says there are more than a dozen newly discovered populations of the butterfly ringing the proposed road area.

“For a biologist who is the quino expert of the universe to say it’s fine to increase the slide toward extinction, it’s fine to kill endangered species, is incredibly disheartening,” said Kieran Suckling, the center’s executive director. “Dennis seems to think [that] if he personally doesn’t think it’s important, then the project should be exempt from the Endangered Species Act.”

But Laer Pearce, a consultant for major Southern California builders, said of Murphy: “He seems to be a very serious scientist

Self-described anti-growth activist Ehrlich also comes to his student’s defense.

“If I had my way, we wouldn’t develop another square inch in the U.S.,” he said. “But I’m pie in the sky. Dennis is on the ground trying to save what can be saved.”

In 1994, Murphy wrote a state plan that set a national precedent. The presence of the gnatcatcher, a tiny, rare bird, was threatening to halt construction on lands owned by the Irvine Co. and other politically powerful Southern California developers.

The Governor Calls

Murphy was asked by then-Gov. Pete Wilson’s staff to craft scientific principles for state land swaps. Called Natural Communities Conservation Plans, the swaps allow landowners to develop areas inhabited by an imperiled species in exchange for preserving other land.

“There were a lot of very high-powered phone calls made [to the governor’s office],” Murphy said. “I got called because folks in the development community saw me as a reasonable person.”

The nation’s Interior secretary at the time, Bruce Babbitt, was impressed, and realized that a little-noticed clause in the Endangered Species Act known as “habitat conservation planning” could be used the same way. Murphy said he wrote conservation principles for such plans on his back porch. The new plans would guarantee that a development would not be halted if more endangered species were unexpectedly found as construction proceeded.

Babbitt and Irvine Co. owner Donald Bren shook hands on the first “no surprises” habitat conservation plan that year in Shady Canyon, a zone in Irvine that’s home to the gnatcatcher and other rare species. The company has since done $30 million worth of grading in the canyon to build custom home lots that sell for $3 million to $4 million. In exchange, the company set aside nearby Bommer Canyon and other land.

Babbitt put the concept to use nationwide, and current Interior Secretary Gail A. Norton also backs it. There are now close to 400 of the plans across the U.S., with more on the way.

But some say there is no scientific proof that the land swaps will save species in the long run. In 1995, 30 scientists chastised Murphy in writing for his support of another proposed land swap that he had originally criticized but then abruptly changed his mind about after being flown in by the landowner.

“It was not fun to write a letter attacking your colleague,” said Paul Beier, a Northern Arizona University professor and one of the nation’s leading mountain lion experts. Beier said he and others felt forced to act because Murphy “did a horrible job.... It was most unhelpful to have somebody who is a respected scientist writing a letter supporting a horrible plan.... It was as bad as a random map drawn by a monkey.”

Murphy dismisses the letter as “a necessary dialogue among colleagues” and notes that neither the planned road nor housing has been built, “so I guess they got their way.”

Busy, Busy

As many as three or four times a month, Murphy jets into one California county or another to assist an embattled landowner.

He was recently summoned to Murrieta by the developer of a 780-home project who was not pleased when the city’s environmental consultant found gnatcatchers on the property. The report threatened to set the builder back $2 million -- the cost of preserving habitat for the songbirds. Murphy said there was no need. His conclusion: The birds didn’t live there but were merely passing through. The local consultant quit after the city asked him to change his report to reflect Murphy’s finding.

Environmental attorney Ray Johnson compared the case to a doctor, who has had a patient for years, coming up with a diagnosis, then having a hired gun from an insurance company saying treatment is unnecessary.

Murphy dismissed critics of his Murrieta report as emotional open-space advocates misusing science to push a no-growth agenda. He says the same about many wildlife regulators.

Last year, Murphy said a group of smaller-scale Riverside County landowners asked for his help in “getting out of the regulatory morass” by putting together a land swap. He talked with federal regulators and mentioned the possibility of such a deal. “They said, ‘Put the pieces together; go for it.’ ”

Murphy said he refused to bill them because they weren’t major landowners. In gratitude, they had the brand-new Audi delivered to his front door. Murphy seems abashed by the gesture and said he still drives his older-model four-wheel-drive vehicle.

“What do I do? Send it back? I didn’t do any science for them; I did not lobby for them. I helped them put together [a plan]. “

Although colleagues’ criticism hasn’t dented Murphy’s ability to attract top-notch assignments, it clearly rankles him.

“The idea that I’ve got no moral center regarding the very issues that I’ve studied is ... inconsistent,” he said. “I remember a lawyer who said, ‘Would you feel differently about Sisyphus if he had been compensated for rolling his rock continuously up the slope?’ ”

Asked for his answer, Murphy says: “Depends on the compensation.... Bottom line is, I don’t think I have been bought.”