I think the organization that Myron works for is an organization that is funded by the coal industry, by the oil industry. And for 20 years, they've been trying to deceive the American public by housing these phony scientists. We call them biostitutes who are lying and deceiving the American public and saying there's no such thing as global warming.

Call it Murphy's law: To preserve species and their land, you sometimes have to destroy them as well.

"That is the reality of this dirty work we do in conservation planning on private property — that the bulldozers are going to roll," he says. "But if you help direct where they roll, and you have contributed to the conservation of that open space that's left over, there is a certain satisfaction there."

That reasoning angers Murphy's critics, who say that he and others like him are little more than "rent-a-scientists" paid to testify before planning commissions, in court and in environmental impact reports. The critics have even coined a name for them: biostitutes.

The combination of these factors forced universities to swallow an "institutional mindset against corporate sponsorship," said Licatta. "I remember in graduate school, biologists went on to work in an academic setting or for the government. Biostitutes went to work in the corporate setting or for a consultant."