WASHINGTON — The best thing that ever happened to Ian Thomas was losing his government job.
Thomas was a contract employee for the U.S. Geological Survey when earlier this spring he posted a map of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's caribou calving areas on a federal Web site. His bosses, for reasons still in dispute, fired him.
But thanks to the Internet and a feature role in the "Doonesbury" comic strip this week, Thomas has become a cult hero.
Environmentalists see his firing as an attempt by the Bush administration to silence criticism of its proposal to allow oil drilling in the refuge.
"He's a legend now," says Eric Wingerter, the national field director for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. "It's part of pop culture."
Thomas, for his part, is somewhat of an unlikely hero. The 33-year-old native of England insists that he never wanted the spotlight when he posted the postcard-size map on the Web site at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland.
His former bosses insist politics played no role in his dismissal. They say he should have known better--posting such a map was outside the scope of his contract, which called for him to map migratory birds, not grazing mammals. Besides, they said, the map was never reviewed by anyone.
When USGS officials discovered Thomas' map--which was based on old data that conflicted with information they had just used to brief Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton--they ordered it taken off the Internet.
"All we need is to have the media start nit-picking on how one arm of the USGS is saying one thing and the other is not," one Interior official wrote in one e-mail recently released to PEER. Another wondered "if a hacker is involved" and noted that there needed to be "responsibility for information dissemination."
Thomas says he gladly would have removed the map--had someone asked him. "I was really not out to cause trouble. It's been a very crazy experience. They dropped me, and I bounced. They really didn't give me a chance to roll over and play dead."
In the age of computers, Thomas' story spread around the world like a virus. The Los Angeles Times reported his firing in mid-March. Thomas e-mailed the story--and a series of e-mails about what happened to him--to fellow map makers. They in turn sent the e-mail to others. It became the topic of conversations in chat rooms of imagery specialists, self-professed geeks, librarians, political scientists, academics and--of course--environmentalists.
