In the beginning, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game was born of science. In the end, it has become more and more about politics. The agency that stopped federal efforts to eradicate wolves in Alaska, because the science didn't support it, has become the agency leading a fight against listing the polar bear as an endangered species even though the consensus of state wildlife biologists is that the bears clearly qualify for listing.

"It is a very sad state of affairs," said former state biologist John Schoen. "As alumni of an organization I was once very proud of, Fish and Game is, more and more over the past years, being managed under a political ideology, not science."

Schoen is by no means alone in that view. It is echoed by many former Fish and Game employees and quietly voiced by a fair number who still labor within the agency. Among the latter, there is now fear their jobs could be in danger if they say anything publicly. How, some wonder, has this fate befallen an organization that was supposed to be largely free of politics?

Even before Alaska became a state in 1959, the Alaska Legislature wrote laws intended to isolate Fish and Game from politics. Instead of rolling its responsibilities into a broad-based Department of Natural Resources that govern mining, forestry, oil and gas exploration, parks and more, as many states do, the authors of Alaska's Constitution called for an agency devoted to nothing but fish and wildlife, with a constitutional mandate to focus on the science needed to manage resources on a sustained yield basis.

To try to maintain the scientific focus within the agency, the Legislature set up a special regulatory Board to do the political dirty work of allocating resources between highly-competitive user groups in the 49th state. The Joint Board of Fisheries and Game, along with a Board-picked commissioner, were supposed to insulate the scientists from politics. The governor was left with the authority to fire a commissioner who went too far, but the Board and the Legislature were given unprecedented powers to control the process. The Board was to put together the list of commissioner candidates, from which a governor was to select one to be approved by the Legislature. Alaska's early governors usually left the Board alone to make its recommendations, and then picked from the Board's list.

Flash forward 50 years, though, and a lot has changed. Gov. Sean Parnell this year flipped the process of picking a commissioner on its head and handed the now Joint Boards of Fish and Game his pick without waiting for them to provide "a list of qualified persons" as statutorily mandated. And Parnell's pick is not a biologist trained in fisheries or wildlife management, or a scientific researcher. His pick is a former fisheries aide in the governor's office with a bachelor's degree in education and a background as an advocate for commercial fishing interests.

Those who know now-acting commissioner Cora Campbell praise her as smart and hardworking, but even some of her backers wonder how the Department of Fish and Game -- an agency that finds itself regularly under fire from commercial fishermen, anglers, wolf lovers, hunters, bird watchers and who knows who else -- can continue to function as a respected scientific organization as its leadership shifts steadily away from science toward politics.

As Campbell sees it, the way to do that is to push the science as it has always been pushed. "We have a cadre of biologists, and they do a lot of good work." She sees her role as an advocate for what they do best. "I have a lot of experience in policy," she said, and adds that she's taking over a department with a very capable staff that can help her with the tasks that are new. She is young, enthusiastic and seemingly well aware of her relative lack of experience.

"I know there has been some discussion of that issue," Campbell said response to criticism about her inexperience with wildlife management. But, she said she believes that in some ways what she is doing as Fish and Game commissioner is the same as what she was doing as an adviser to Gov. Sean Parnell. "You really are working on the same issues," Campbell said. "I've been doing this stuff."