In 1970, Arnold Bolle, then dean of the forestry school at the University of Montana, released the findings of a startling scientific investigation examining timber management of the Bitterroot National Forest.

Contrary to what the U.S. Forest Service had been telling the public since the 1960 Multiple UseÐSustained Yield Act, Bolle declared that “multiple use management, in fact, does not exist as a governing principle.”

While the pronouncement by itself was momentous, it served more importantly as a catalyst in bringing forth the most comprehensive set of legal reforms in the way public lands and wildlife are managed in the United States. The new environmental laws ushered in a new era for the agency, one that fostered a climate in which whistleblowing was sometimes the only option for concerned employees.

The same year that the Bolle Report was released, the public demonstrated a growing ecological awareness by celebrating the first-ever Earth Day, and President Richard Nixon pledged to create the Environmental Protection Agency.

Congress also passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which shone a spotlight on national forest supervisors trained in forestry schools. The supervisors had historically exercised discretionary authority in carrying out industrial (and unsustainable) logging—logging that was affecting the survival of a number of species and watersheds. The act also gave the public the right to comment on land management decisions and challenge them through administrative means.

The National Environmental Policy Act “was not meant to be a quiet addition to the United States Code,” noted Patrick A. Parenteau, writing in Audubon magazine on the thirtieth anniversary of its passage. “It was meant to shake things up, to challenge conventional thinking, even to make people uncomfortable, most of all the bureaucrats concealed within the thick gray walls of the federal establishment in Washington.”

At the same time that the Bitterroot and the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming were prompting congressional field hearings, similar abuses on the Monongahela National Forest were erupting in West Virginia. The latter became the subject of a lawsuit filed by the Izaak Walton League that resulted in each national forest in the country—as a product of the National Forest Management Act—being required to write a ten-year management plan that gave ecological values an equal footing with timber volume.

“The Forest Service…has both a responsibility and an opportunity to be a leader in assuring that the nation maintains a natural resource conservation posture that will meet the requirements of our people in perpetuity,” the act asserts. The same year, Congress passed its first substantial draft of the Clean Water Act.

The real force of these acts comes from what they set in motion by requiring that all natural resource decisions be based upon sound science. In order to meet that mandate, natural resource agencies, including the Forest Service, had to hire scientists skilled in a wide range of natural resource specialties—wildlife and fisheries biologists, hydrologists, botanists—who could not only monitor the effects of say, logging, after the fact but would advise the agency to avoid problems in the planning process. In essence, they were considered bedrock “look before you leap” provisions of federal environmental law.

The rise of modern whistleblowing is rooted in the clash between scientific professionals who are legally mandated to call attention to resource abuses and colleagues, superiors or politicians who want the information muted or covered up.