A breakfast among peers: environmental whistleblowers have some stories to tell.

According to stereotype, the government whistleblower sits at an empty desk all day, stirring coffee, waiting for reporters to call. He or she may be dynamite on 60 Minutes, exposing dangerous fraud and incompetence, but back in the office the lonely hero is a disgruntled employee, a pariah around the water cooler, a naive moralist who won't adapt to an imperfect world.

But this morning in Manhattan, seated around a coffee shop table in the Madison Hotel, the six members of a new group called PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) must have forgotten their stereotypes at home. They're friendly, joking about the hotel's steam heat, which seems to be turned up for an Arctic winter, not the spring day outside. They're impressed by the Big Apple, or at least by the five-story-tall balloon of Arnold Schwarzenegger that they saw ruling Times Square last night, promoting The Last Action Hero. And they're keeping the waitress busy circling with her pot of coffee, until Jeff DeBonis brings the gathering to order by explaining the purpose of PEER.

An idealist who once served in the Peace Corps, DeBonis joined the U.S. Forest Service because he loved the out-of-doors -- and chafed for 12 years in an agency biased to the timber industry. One day his boss asked him to visit a site in Oregon's Willamette National Forest to do the paperwork for a timber sale. Instead, he found the green hell of logging already run amok in the valley, with huge landslides left by earlier clearcuts. "It was beyond belief," he says. Back in the office, he wrote a report based on scientific research done by the Forest Service itself. "My district ranger said, 'You can't write that. You've just written an appeal for the environmentalists.' It was easier to blow the whistle than to continue to lie." In 1989, he founded AFSEEE (Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics) which has grown to 11,000 members.

His story can be found at many agencies. Only the industry changes, from mining to grazing to agriculture. So last January, DeBonis helped launch PEER for reformers from the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and state government agencies. PEER now lobbies the Clinton team and the media with meetings and position papers. And it offers members legal support from the private Government Accountability Project (GAP). But DeBonis says, "Once you become a whistleblower, you're on the wrong end of the power curve. The damage is already done." If PEER succeeds, whistle-blowers will be able to do their best work at their desks, not on 60 Minutes. But for now, they must take their story to the press.

How much does the public not know about the inner workings of these agencies, E Magazine asks the table? "Tremendous...Tons...It's unreal...It's scary," answer four voices at once. Then they offer some proof.

Phillip Doe, a senior manager from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in Denver, Colorado, resembles Jack Kemp with his perfect silver hair, crisp blue suit and friendly team spirit. The Bureau runs over eight million acres of land and has built dams and canals for crop irrigation across the West. Doe has helped organize a quarter of the roughly 250 people in his office into a reform group for more honest government.

"Congress passed a law in 1982, 'The Reclamation Reform Act,' which it really hasn't been, and I was in charge of writing and implementing the rules and regulations for administering the Act. I constantly came into conflict with agribusiness and its lawyers, so after six years I was unceremoniously moved to hazardous waste, which I knew nothing about. During those years, as more and more concessions were made to special interests, I started leaking information to Congress and the press, and eventually I went on 60 Minutes. Since then, I haven't made any long term career plans or invested in business cards! [He has criticized giveaways that cost taxpayers millions of dollars, such as giving Stockdale, Arizona hundreds of federal acres for a PGA golf course, a polo club and an exclusive restaurant. The agency paid $4,600 per acre for the land, but gets nothing in return. And the PGA charges $90 a round to play on this public land.] All of the people I've worked with, with maybe one or two exceptions, went on to work for the people they were supposed to be regulating. In that kind of environment, you're not going to get very good government.

"The Bureau of Reclamation was chartered to provide opportunities for small family farming. So it's interesting to see the consolidation of wealth that has occurred in this supposedly social program. About three percent of the farms control about 30 percent of the land. The subsidies overwhelmingly go to agribusiness. A few years ago, a small farm advocate gave evidence to Congress that one of the largest operations in the West, Boswell Farms [now West Haven Trust], made $18 million in net profit in each of the seven years between 1982 and 1988! Their chief operating cost--water--is paid for by the American taxpayer. It's imbecilic. But we encourage it. Agribusiness has become a way for investors to diversify their portfolio, because the government has eliminated almost all of the risk. It'll buy the crops even if there's no value, and it'll pay the water bill. The subsidies are about 85 to 95 percent of the cost. Our agency will pay the power bill, too. Irrigators get a tremendous discount--[paying] as low as two or three mil when the market value is 40 to 60 mil. Large companies are the primary users. Why wouldn't they be? They've got economists who can see the advantages.

"But if we reduce the subsidies, we should do it selectively. We should raise the cost of water more for investors than for farmers, and above a certain level we should do away with the subsidy. The mean family income in the U.S. is $30,000. Why should the half of our population below that line be paying the water bill for someone making $18 million a year net profit? We should go back to subsidizing what these programs were established for: small family farms. This country has a growing problem with jobs. There probably could be more people living on the land and farming it responsibly, if these programs were reformed to follow their original purpose."

Casey Ruud, an employee at the Washington State Department of Ecology, looks about as troublesome as a class president, sitting up tall and eager to get into the conversation. In the 80s, he worked at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation for Westinghouse, which processed plutonium for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As an auditor, he evaluated the company's compliance with environmental and safety regulations.

"It was obvious we were risking a catastrophic accident. But they were getting paid massive awards and bonuses in the millions of dollars to continue production. I begged them, please, you have got to shut down these plants, but they weren't doing it. I worked within the system as long as I could. Then one day the company president told me he was going on a TV news conference, and he would report that I never said to shut down the plants--that it was all an administrative problem that would be resolved internally. I said, you can't do that. I knew that Congress could put me under oath, so I would have to tell the truth. His answer was, Casey, you're a big boy now, it's time to shit or get off the pot. I watched him go on TV--with my reports laying there and my name exposed--and say that there was no problem. That's when I called a Seattle Times reporter and said come on over. The next day I flew to Washington, DC under an assumed name and met with Congress. They shut down the plutonium processing, and it's been down ever since. Hanford is no longer a production facility, it's a cleanup facility.

"They ran me out of there. But after the U.S. Department of Labor ruled in my favor, Westinghouse and I reached a settlement, and they agreed never to cause me problems again. I ended up two years later at the Savannah River Nuclear Plant, a subcontractor to Westinghouse, and when they found out they had me ousted. I had just moved my family and bought a new house, but back we went to Hanford, where I finally got a job at the state Department of Ecology overseeing Westinghouse and the DOE.

"In January, I filed suit against Westinghouse for harassing employees at Hanford and violating our first amendment right of free speech. We even have signed affidavits from people at Westinghouse that they put together a War Room on me, a 'Ruud Room,' a security department that investigated everything. Reportedly, they spent $6 million on me. And Westinghouse now gets paid by the U.S. government to fight my case. They get reimbursed for their costs, plus profits, plus bonuses. Why would they not want to fight it? They've got an entire law firm in Seattle on this case. It took me two years to hunt all over the country to find my attorneys. Fortunately, they love to beat up on giant corporations. Normally a whistleblower gets an attorney, who bails out once they realize the power of these corporations.

"There's no accountability in the system. If you do horrible bad things and waste hundreds of millions of dollars, there's no retribution. You get promoted and move on. A lot of people think you need to change things from the top down, and a lot of people think the key is empowering the workers at the bottom. But you've got that impermeable middle layer. PEER is trying to develop a top and bottom system that can work with the agency heads and protect the employees.

"I'm the person PEER is trying to eliminate. We don't want more Casey Ruuds--it's not something people should have to go through. The mentality must change to make it OK to 'do the right thing.' All of the other attempts by Congress and the DOE headquarters haven't been successful. I think PEER has the most potential in helping make the desperately needed changes."

"Anonymous" works for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which has over 266 million acres, more than any other federal agency.

"I'm one of the people PEER is trying to protect. If I became a whistleblower it probably wouldn't do any good--it would just result in a huge attempt to discredit me and undermine the real issues. But we're hopeful that Secretary Babbitt and the BLM director will be amenable to the things we're saying.

"The BLM is the great unknown in the U.S. It has more land than all of the states that border the East Coast combined. But once you leave the West where BLM has most of its land, people have never heard of us. Even in the West, people associate us with firefighting and wild horses. Being unknown plays into industry's hands in that the agency is accountable to them, not to the public who owns the land. We have mining and forestry, but the main impacts are from livestock grazing. The rhetoric heard over and over again is that our rangelands are in the best condition in many, many years. Yet a case can be made for the exact opposite. In the last 10 years, the BLM hasn't even collected any data on what the range conditions really are. One problem with rangelands is that it's not like a forest where you can tell the difference between old growth and a clearcut. It's much more subtle. Livestock grazing is so ubiquitous in the West that most areas are deteriorated, but people don't realize it because they don't have any areas without grazing for comparison. So it's easy for the BLM, the range universities and the politicians to mislead the public. Unless you're trained in rangeland science, you wouldn't know the difference.

"There's a huge push to raise grazing fees as a panacea to solve some of the problem. But that may not improve the deteriorating range conditions. Right now many of the state lands in the West charge two or three times what the BLM does, but those lands aren't in very good shape, either. Many resource specialists who I know wouldn't care if we let them use it for free -- if it was managed sustainably. The taxpayers would even be better off. They will have to pay for the long term costs in biodiversity health, and for compliance with the Endangered Species Act. Overstocking is causing a deterioration that native plants and animals just can't put up with. But the Endangered Species Act is the fall guy when there are all kinds of other laws, which if they were followed, would keep things from ever coming down to that Act. But there's no real accountability to make the resource managers follow those laws, so the Endangered Species Act is the only club to use on them."

Dwight Welch, a thin man who looks much younger than his pewter hair, bores into a conversation, drilling hypocrisy after hypocrisy, while looking intently at his coffee cup. He has worked in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) pesticide program for 17 years, and also serves as the president elect of the EPA's professional union.

"If you're going to be a whistleblower and survive, you just can't go off every time something bothers you. You've got to pick a battle you know you can win. Most whistleblowers go under. As a union leader, I helped a woman win an Equal Employment Opportunity case hands down. A month later, they fired her for something completely unrelated, after going through all her records and finding a small error. 'You lied on your application, you're fired.' Yet the Inspector General reviewed hundreds of similar cases and the most that they got was a reprimand. The only two who got fired lied about a drug trafficking conviction and another felony. But the Inspector General and the Office of the Special Counsel which should protect our rights are really the cops for the bad guys. The EPA has rampant scientific fraud, yet who are they investigating? Whistleblowers. One employee went to a town meeting in Alexandria, Virginia to protest dimilin spraying for gypsy moths. He did not represent himself as being in the agency, although he is a Ph.D. ecologist. The EPA spent one and a half years and tens of thousands of taxpayers dollars investigating him. People in the EPA refer to the agency as 'the plantation' because of this kind of treatment.

"I worked under the system from the late 70s until the mid-80s before I went public. I found a loophole in the pesticide regulations--they test for flammability for combustible liquids, but they ignore it for solids and gases. After they banned CFCs from aerosol sprays in 1978 because they destroy the ozone layer, the sprays used hydrocarbon gases such as propane and butane. The problem is that under certain conditions they explode. I blew the whistle after getting a call from a lady who had a can of Raid under her sink--this was her crime -- and she heard a 'pisst' sound. When she opened her cabinet to investigate, the fumes rolled out and hit the stove pilot light. Boom. The explosion threw her right out of the room. She got second degree burns on her exposed skin, burned her hair, and went through six months of pain. Her settlement was $55 for doctors' bills. She asked me, why is there no warning label? I wouldn't have put it in my kitchen if I had known it was flammable. [Welch recently appeared on Street Stories to discuss exploding aerosols. The EPA says it won't reach a decision for another two years.]

"Our own building has been so toxic that we've got over 50 people whose health is permanently damaged. One of our Virginia offices had an illegal asbestos removal at night, so there was loose asbestos all over the place in the morning. The desks were so covered with dust you could write your name in it. We took 24 samples -- 23 were positive and 17 had one percent asbestos or above. Under EPA school guidelines, if you find a single bulk sample over one percent you shut it down. The EPA kept us working. We had a protest rally of 500 people, and took a signed petition to the administrator's office. When we exited, the place was flooded with federal security, district police, park police. They had surrounded the building. We said, you put us in an asbestos-laden environment. People are getting bronchitis and asthma attacks now, 20 years down the line they'll have lung cancer and mesothelioma. This is the EPA? Give us a break. William Reilly did precious little to protect his own employees, let alone citizens whose lives are ruined by EPA's failure to carry out its mandate.

"Why am I still here? If I walk away, who's going to do it? Over the past 12 years, I've seen slews of excellent people get disgusted and leave. But I believe people in the EPA will join PEER. A lot of managers are sympathetic to the environmental ethic, but because they have nobody to look out for them, they keep their mouths shut."

Contact: PEER, P.O. Box 482, Eugene, OR 97440/[phone]; AFSEEE, P.O. Box 11615, Eugene, OR 97440/[phone]; GAP, 810 First Street NE, Washington, DC 20002/[phone].