Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility

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Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is a national alliance of local state and federal resource professionals. As a service organization assisting federal & state public employees, PEER allows public servants to work as "anonymous activists" so that agencies must confront the message, rather than the messenger.

[edit] Criticism

See also: Grand Canyon: A Different View

An article in the Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 edition of eSkeptic, an online newsletter of the Skeptics Society, featured a claim by PEER that the Bush administration was not allowing park rangers at Grand Canyon National Park to mention that the Grand Canyon was more than a few thousand years old. It quoted PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch as saying: "In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology."^[1] A week later, Skeptics Society Executive Director Michael Shermer published a retraction in the January 17th, 2007 edition of eSkeptic ("Fact Checking 101 How Skeptic magazine was Duped by an Environmental Activist Group"). In fact, Shermer stated that readers had found the claim to be "absolutely false" and "were outraged by both the duplicity of the claim and our failure to fact check it." A park ranger wrote: "I have NEVER been told to present non-science based programs." Shermer tells how he called and emailed PEER director Jeff Ruch to inquire about the evidence to support PEER's claim but was given a run-around. Shermer's conclusion: "...I believe we were duped by an activist group who at the very least exaggerated a claim and published it in order to gain notoriety for itself, or worse, simply made it up ... shame on PEER, for this egregious display of poor judgment and unethical behavior."^[2]