Another particularly influential group of conservation biologists, the Northwest Power Planning Council's Independent Scientific Group, issued a widely-heralded report entitled Return to the River on September 18, 1996. The Group asserts that the virtue of the report is not to provide new scientific information to policymakers. Because higher spring flows were present before dams, many conservation biologists simply filter out the evidence that increasing spring flows with flow augmentation doesn't help recover salmon. But real scientists don't filter out data. They revise their theories to be consistent with the data.
Data are real.
Theories may not be. This bias is held by many who are frankly antiscientific, and opposed to scientific and industrial progress. We contend that a Natural State, idealized by movements with a tendency to look toward the past, does not exist and probably has not existed since man's first appearance in the biosphere. . . . The greatest evils that stalk our Earth are ignorance and oppression, not technology and industry. So too does oppression of citizens who try and tell the truth about it.