Tag Archives: Ray Grigg

Shades of Green: Globalized Bigness…and Why Santa Claus is No Longer Believable

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When Santa Claus was delivering a few token Christmas gifts to a few houses in a few little villages in northern Europe, he seemed believable because his task was possible. But a globalized Santa, required to travel at searing speeds to distribute billions of gifts to billions of households, simply boggles belief. Despite the convenience of time zones, Santa’s task has become – sorry for the bad news – so big that he his no longer believable.

Bigness is a problem elsewhere, too. Global financing has become so big that the effects of a single monetary blunder can echo around the world. Corporations have become so big that their health is inseparable from the economic well-being of nations. And our human population is now so big that its needs are destabilizing the fundamental ecological structures regulating the planet’s biosphere. The times in which we live can now be characterized as the search for bigger and bigger solutions to bigger and bigger problems.

Could it be that we are being undone by bigness? This was the position taken by the Austrian-born economist, Leopold Kohr, in his 1957 book, The Breakdown of Nations (Guardian Weekly, Sept 30/11).

Kohr’s ideas were initially dismissed by monetary and financial experts as the vapid musings of a “poet”. But his ideas are now gaining credibility as the international financial community struggles to control a contagion that seems to be tipping the economic system from recession toward depression. Trillions of dollars in new liquidity – adding big money to a big problem – don’t seem to be helping. As many national economies integrate into a global system of regulation and trade, the problems they create seem to be less and less responsive to solutions.

Kohr’s thinking contradicts the present trend toward globalization. His argument is that bigness eventually overcomes “the human scale”, that “the problem is not the thing that is big, but the bigness itself.” Within a human scale, he contends, any system will work. But “whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions.” Perhaps we simply invent complexities that are too big for us to manage. Or perhaps the problem is in the inherent instability of bigness itself – if doubling size happens to quadruple complexity, then growth is inherently self-defeating. In the “crisis of bigness”, Kohr concludes, “instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence.”

An assessment of our technological age seems to support this conclusion. Speed inspires more speed, consumerism nourishes more consumerism, population growth needs even more people to maintain demographic and economic balance. Mass travel homogenizes exotic places, and flying feels more like endurance than fun – as Yogi Berra said, in one of his famous oxymorons, “Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded.” Bigness also explains how a small electrical failure can darken half the seaboard of North America, how a single contaminated food product can threaten the safety of millions, and how a local disease can escalate to a pandemic. Kohr’s thinking would also explain why any expanding system must eventually collapse.

Bigness also explains how globalization undermines democratic processes. The bigger and more complex economic structures become as a result of international financial and trade agreements, the more are governments constrained and the less influence accrues to individual citizens – who respond to this futility by not voting.

Increasing sophistication in a highly technological society also requires increasing education – until such demands outstrip some people’s abilities to meet them. This suggests that unemployment and alienation may become an inherent part of any highly sophisticated society. People who don’t understand how things work and are unqualified to participate become disengaged, lost and bewildered amid the complexity and sophistication.

Bigness may also explain why large cities automatically break into human-scale “villages” where people have a sense of community and belonging. And bigness might also explain why people combat the depersonalization of excessive size by connecting to each other with digital devices, why they respond to industrial food production with gardening, and why they react to mass production by humanizing their possessions with artisan crafts. When big solutions can’t be found for big problems, then the task falls to the ingenuity of local communities – which is precisely what is happening.

Kohr’s “crisis of bigness” clearly relates to our current global environmental problems. Bigness has its own inexorable logic, a momentum that always justifies an escalating exploitation of nature with another mine or oil well, with more drilling, pipelines, tankers, industry, roads, consumption and growth. As Leopold Kohr discovered, questioning this theology of bigness is heretical.

But, in the great design of things, bigness is always balanced by smallness. As some things expand, others must contract. This is why our burgeoning population and our frenetic industrial activity are shrinking species diversity and narrowing ecological resilience – displacing nature’s complexity with our own. And all the heat generated by our quest for bigness is now melting Arctic ice. At present rates, the North Pole will be open ocean by the summer of 2050. And if Santa really lives there – as purported – then his house, his factory, his elves, his reindeer stables and his entire Christmas enterprise will sink into a warming sea. Not exactly a “Ho! Ho!, Ho!” event.

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Shades of Green: Agnotology – The Propagation of Doubt

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“Agnotology” is a new and useful word coined in 1992 by Dr. Robert Proctor of Stanford University to designate the study of ignorance. We give a huge amount of attention to knowing, to “gnosis”, he contended, but little attention to its opposite, “agnosis” (Guardian Weekly, July 1/11).

At first glance, agnotology seems like an oxymoron. Surely, if we know something about not-knowing then we must have shed some ignorance? Precisely. And this is the interesting twist about agnotology. It is the deliberate and skilful cultivation and dissemination of not-knowing – doubt – for the specific purpose of manufacturing confusion. And one of its most famous practitioners has been the tobacco industry.

When the awful health effects of smoking were first suspected, the tobacco industry went into damage control by using misleading studies to advertise the benefits of smoking. But its more sophisticated strategy was to create doubt about the disadvantages of smoking. This was done with an ingenious deviousness. “It is less well known,” writes Dr. Proctor, “but tobacco companies also spent large amounts subsidizing good quality bio-medical research in fields such as virology, genetics and immunology. They funded the work of several Nobel prize winners. But they only encouraged this research to serve as a distraction.” The strategic objective was not to find the cause of cancer but to generate credible evidence that diseases attributed to smoking could be caused by something else. “In court cases involving the industry, its lawyers always highlighted viral risks, the pre-disposition of certain families, and so on, to play down tobacco-related risks.”

Sound familiar? “In fact,” writes the science historian Peter Galison of Harvard University, “those who seek to produce ignorance on a given topic generally advocate more research. The fact that all the details have not been resolved sustains the illusion of an ongoing debate on the whole subject. A key concern of American neocreationists is to ‘Teach the controversy’.” Or, in a memo from the tobacco company Brown & Williamson that phrases the strategy even more bluntly, “Doubt is our product.” The objective is to create the impression that doubt exists in the scientific community when, in fact, there is none on the basic issue.

While this strategy has been used to defend smoking and creationism, it has also been used to cast doubt on solid scientific evidence concerning acid rain, ozone depletion, species extinction, melting glaciers, ocean acidification and the larger issue of anthropogenic climate change. When Naomi Oreskes, a science historian from the University of California, was trying to understand the basis for criticism of her book, Merchants of Doubt, she found that three scientists were the primary source. They were founders in 1984 of the conservative George C. Marshall Institute, originally funded by the tobacco industry and more recently by fossil-fuel interests. This Institute is solely driven by a political ideology that takes umbrage with any science that interferes with America’s free-market economy and freedom-of-choice philosophy. Controlling global climate change requires constraints that the Institute construes as another form of the communist threat, a threat combatted with a sophisticated pseudo science that looks authoritative but isn’t.

So, how is the lay public to know the difference between real science and pseudo-science? This is the obvious problem created by agnotology and cultivated by those who want to propagate doubt. Some hints are obvious. First, pseudo-science tends to be contrarian, arguing against a momentum of scientific evidence reached by peer-reviewed research and careful empiricism. Second, those who have economic interests usually take a position that favours their profits – so follow the money. Three, use one of Einstein’s “thought experiments” to imaginatively extend the claim to its logical extreme – if the extremity is absurd then the claim is questionable. And four, consider ideologies. Pseudo-science usually supports a belief system. Real science is evidence-based and follows where the data leads, regardless of threats to paradigms of thought or to individual and corporate interests.

Now apply this information to any current, local or global issue. It might be the expansion of the Quinsam Coal facilities in Campbell River, the proposed Raven coal mine in the Comox Valley, the construction of the Northern Gateway oil pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to the West Coast at Kitimat, the threat to wild fish from sea-lice and disease emanating from open net-pen salmon farms. It might be climate change, ocean acidification, genetic engineering or pesticide use. Those with vested financial interests are inclined to construe evidence to support these interests by minimizing calculated risks, providing assurances of safety – however thin and speculative – and contesting scientific evidence by quibbling about details. Ideology can easily override considerations of public health, social benefit and ecological impact. Indeed, ideology can even colour any sense of evidence and perspective. And, as is now becoming obvious, manufactured doubt can cause environmental and social havoc.

Doubt is normal, healthy and useful. But it can also be exploited by ill-will, self interest and blind ideology. At some point in its confrontation with overwhelming evidence, it becomes obstinate, manipulative, dishonest and destructive. An awareness of agnotology may raise our discrimination sufficiently to discern the difference between legitimate assurances and deceit. The task is challenging and requires constant vigilance. But our future depends on it.

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Shades of Green: Breaking Contracts

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Our environmental problems and our current economic problems both stem from breaking contracts. In the case of the environment, the contract is with nature; in the case of economics, the contract is with society. This similarity is worth exploring because the tumult of the 20th century provides insights into who we are, how we behave, and what we might do to mend these contracts.

At the end of two world wars in 1945, a new world economic era began. The bloodshed and chaos became the cooperation and sacrifice needed to rebuild a shattered world. Business, labour and government all entered into a social contract, an implicit agreement that all would work together to lift the prosperity and security of society as a whole. This social contract was never formalized but everyone understood that business and workers alike would share in the profits of renewed economic activity, government would legislate the fair distribution of wealth, and everyone would benefit as services and infrastructure permeated the community and kept people healthy, educated and safe. The result was nearly three decades of growth, stability and security for business, labourers and society.

Then something went wrong. Perhaps it was the fading memory of the war years coupled with the corrupting power of affluence. But creeping greed relaxed the regulations and constraints that kept business in compliance with the social contract. A marker date for this transformation – a symptom as much as a cause – was August 15th, 1971, when the United States abandoned the gold standard, the formal exchange rate that had stabilized currency markets, controlled inflation, guaranteed employment, and kept economies from slipping into unsupported debt.

In an illuminating analysis by Larry Elliott, “Why the System’s Ready to Blow” (The Guardian Weekly, Aug. 19/11), he describes the loss of a moral anchor that once regulated the social conduct of business. Examples include invented financial stratagems that make money for a few but pass the costs to the many, fraudulent bank dealings, the mortgage fiasco, an expanding disregard for fairness and decency, and corporations that manipulate governments to legislate in their service. When corporations make billions in profits but pay no taxes, when their CEOs earn millions per year as their employees lose jobs and suffer shrinking wages, when food banks proliferate and families struggle for financial security amid incredible wealth, then the social contract is broken.

“For a while in the late 1980s,” writes Elliott, “the easy availability of money provided the illusion of wealth, but there was a shift from a debt-averse world where financial crises were almost unknown to a debt-sodden world constantly on the brink of banking armageddon.” This broken social contract is confirmed by the presence of Occupy protesters in at least 900 of the world’s cities. While their complaints may differ in detail, they are all objecting to social and economic injustice.

The greed that has broken the social contract is the same greed that has broken the nature contract. Ecologies can tolerate a certain amount of stress – a forgiving relationship that has existed between ourselves and nature since the very beginning of our human existence. But the rabid exploitation that is currently taking place in the guise of hyper progress and exorbitant profit is now so disproportionate to nature’s resilience that many of the foundational ecosystems of our planet are stressed to breaking. The commons is being pillaged and trashed by wanton use and abuse. The ocean’s bounty, a resource of the commons, is being hooked, dragged and netted to oblivion. The atmosphere is being clogged with greenhouse gas emissions, the seas are acidifying, ice caps are melting, soils are being exhausted, and the complex network of species that give vitality to ecosystems are collapsing. As Larry Elliott notes of the chaos that has permeated the international currency exchange since the loss of the gold standard, “The system is an utter mess.”

Poor nature. The extent of industrialization is evident everywhere, but particularly in agriculture where the lavish generosity we have teased from nature’s bounty is no longer deemed good enough. Our genetic engineering is now manipulating the very building blocks of life by warping and mixing different species into unnatural concoctions of convenience, usually for the purpose of devising custom made plants that safeguard corporate power and profit. The risk of contaminating the purity of surrounding crops or unleashing some invented contagion is dismissed by the corporate imperative to thrive and control.

In the process, an increasing number of today’s farmers are becoming the serfs of corporations, merely the dehumanized operators of industrial sites where chickens, pigs, cows and grains are grown in factory conditions for mass processing to mass markets. Species diversity, the source of nature’s strength and resilience, is being converted by industrialization to monocultures, kept from calamity by antibiotics if animal, by pesticides if plant. In this system where profit is the primary motive, the collateral damage to nature is dismissed with a shrug of unfortunate inadvertence.

But people are bigger than systems, and nature is bigger than business. Just as humans have an essential sense of fairness, so too does nature. Violate the social contract and people will resort to revolution to re-establish the norms of respect and decency. Violate the nature contract and the laws of biology, chemistry and physics allow no forgiveness. We are getting clear signals that these two essential contracts are being broken. Reasoned prudence invites us to change our behaviour.

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photo by Mark Brooks

Shades of Green: The Keystone XL Protests and the Occupy Movement

Energy and Resources, Oil&Gas, Tar Sands, , , ,
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The protest against the 2,763 km Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to America’s Gulf States’ oil refineries are driven by a deeper concern than risk to Nebraska’s Sand Hills region and its underlying Ogallala aquifer. The same applies to The worldwide Occupy movement, too, is motivated by a deeper concern than unregulated banking practices and the growing disparity between rich and poor.

This deeper concern could be interpreted as criticism of the industrial and financial institutions that comprise the economic engines of our modern age. But even this is not deep enough. Both protests, it seems, have their deepest common cause in a loss of confidence in the system itself, a foreboding created by repeated warnings of profound environmental transformations that could traumatize our present civilization.

Granted, not everyone articulates this foreboding. But decades of multiple environmental warnings have been eroding confidence in a system that seems more interested in its own success than the ecological havoc it is causing. The cumulative effect of these warnings is a growing sense of anxiety and pessimism. Some people respond by entrenching their faith in the system and doing what they have always done; others are challenging the system by demanding change.

One of the forces behind the Keystone XL pipeline protests, for example, is an organization called 350.org. It contends that the continual burning of oil – especially the “dirty” oil of the Alberta tar sands – is environmental folly. Developing the tar sands simply entrenches an indefinite commitment to oil and prevents the necessary shift toward clean, renewable energies. 350.org believes that our reliance on fossil fuels is untenable so it is “defusing the carbon bomb” – 44 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from coal, 36 percent from oil and 20 percent from natural gas. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has now reached 393 parts per million from a historical level of 280 ppm, climate stability can only be assured at 350 ppm, and emissions are on a course for 450 ppm, a concentration that could reach the feared “tipping point” beyond which our planet’s ecology would shift into uncontrollable warming.

Science supports this prediction. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that by 2015, given our present global emission rates, we will have lost 90 percent of our safety margin for avoiding this tipping point. By 2017, without radical reductions in greenhouse gases, we will have reached this point. So, for 350.org, stopping the Keystone XL pipeline is literally a life-or-death issue. The next struggle will be to stop the Northern Gateway pipeline, a project by transnational corporations that intends to export Alberta’s tar sands oil from BC’s West Coast to Asia.

The Occupy movement is responding differently to the same foreboding. It implicates transnational corporations in a wide range of social, financial and environmental wrongs. While these corporations have generated considerable global wealth, they have done so by exploiting the disadvantaged at the expense of everyone else – the earnings of the world’s middle class have remained almost unchanged since the 1970s. Meanwhile, income of the wealthiest 1 percent has increased manyfold – the average 2009 income for each CEO of the 500 largest corporations was $8 million.

The Occupy movement also blames financial corporations for the Great Recession of 2008, the consequences of which are still echoing around the planet. The trillions of dollars borrowed by countries to shore up their banks and avert a financial collapse became an excessive burden on precarious economies already stressed by debt.

The other wrong that motivates the Occupy movement is the undue political and economic influence held by transnational corporations. Indeed, this influence is deemed so powerful that most nations equate economic health with corporate health. Meanwhile, these corporations show no allegiance to any particular nation – they invest where the constraints are lowest and the profits are highest. An analysis by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of the interlocking relationships of the world’s 43,000 transnational corporations revealed that a core of 1,318 controlled 80 percent of the world’s operating revenue. Within this core, 147 controlled 40 percent of all wealth (New Scientist, www.bit.ly/onkFR2). So these corporations own at least this share of the record 30.6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases emitted in 2010.

Meanwhile, transnational corporate investments continue in oil, gas and coal, helped by global government subsidies in 2010 of $470 billion. To the many billions already invested in the Alberta tar sands, an estimated $253 billion will be spent over the next 25 years. The $7 billion to build the Keystone XL pipeline is an extension of this investment. So, too, is the $5.5 billion for the 1,172 km Northern Gateway proposal. Then add the multiple LNG plants proposed for coastal BC. The Sacred Headwaters of the Skeena, Nass and Stikine Rivers in central BC, described by the renowned ethnobiologist Wade Davis as a world wilderness treasure, will be trashed by the planned gas, oil and mining industrial development there. Corporate salmon farms operate with the same intrusive aggression. Indeed, few places on Earth can escape corporate capital and its hunger to exploit resources and feed its market.

A growing number of critics now recognize this trend as pathological and dangerous – and others are beginning to recognize their complicity. This is the awareness that is motivating the Keystone XL protesters. The global Occupy movement is motivated by a similar awareness. Its action was inspired by a single question posed in Vancouver’s Adbusters magazine: “What is our one demand?” Both protest groups would probably agree that a complicated answer is coalescing into a few simple words: “Give us back our countries, our democracies and our planet.”

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Shades of Green: This is the Way the World Ends

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One of the most insightful and profound poets of the 20th century was T.S. Eliot, and one of his most powerful poems was The Hollow Men, a disturbing portrait of a people paralyzed by doubt, uncertainty, confusion and a debilitating faith that nourished resignation rather than conviction and action. “We are the hollow men,” he wrote, “the stuffed men”, and “Our dried voices, when / We whisper together / Are quiet and meaningless / As wind and dry grass / Or rats’ feet over broken glass / In our dry cellar.” The poem ends with a simple, mindless and infectious incantation that anticipates a sorry future earned by default rather than intention:

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Ecologists with a philosophical perspective are quick to remind us that the world is not going to end. It has already survived at least five other cataclysms that were as traumatic as anything we are capable of inflicting on it, so regardless of what we do, it will still be here. The future in question is not our physical planet but our civilization as we presently know it.

We get some glimpse of this future from the Canadian government’s advisory panel, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. Its report, Paying the Price: The Economic Impacts of Climate Change for Canada, is “the first of its kind to analyze Canadian trends in the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, population and the economy in the context of climate change science” (Times Colonist, Sept. 30/11). The findings and implications are sobering.

If “governments reject the science that links human activity and greenhouse gas pollution to global warming” and do not actively and immediately undertake emission reductions, then we can expect very costly damage from flooding, rising oceans, extreme weather and ecological transformations that will cause “dramatic changes to the forest industry and other sectors” (Ibid.). By 2020 these costs are expected to be $5 billion per year, escalating to as much as $43 billion per year by 2050. This means that money being spent on health, education, infrastructure and services will be diverted to preventing or repairing damage done by climate change.

BC, with its coastal cities and inhabited shorelines, is particularly vulnerable. As ocean levels rise, dykes in the greater Vancouver area will have to be heightened and reinforced. Higher ocean levels mean rivers will evacuate less effectively so lowland flooding will be more common. Extreme rainfall will increase this risk. “The annual cost of flood damage to dwellings in British Columbia by the 2050s is estimated to be between $2.2 billion at the baseline level to $7.6 billion under the ‘high-climate change’ scenario” (Ibid.). (“Baseline level” probably means the costs to which we are committed by climate change conditions already set in motion.) The per-capita costs to British Columbians will be between $565 to $2,146 per year, a huge drain on the economic viability of our present way of life – not to mention the grief, loss, trauma and social stresses caused by the damage and dislocation. Unusual wind, snow and heat will add other costly complexities. The report concludes that, “Ignoring climate change costs now will cost us more later.”

Individual communities and provinces have initiated modest steps to avoid climate change by slowly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. BC, for example, has an escalating carbon tax and Ontario is phasing out coal-fired power plants. But BC’s insistence on exporting increasing quantities of coal and Alberta’s energy-intensive production of oil from its tar sands are counteracting these benefits.

Meanwhile, Canada’s emphasis has been on adaptation, a term that really means easing the consequences of climate change rather than preventing them. Despite having a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emission to 1990 levels within a vague 10 to 15 years, Canada’s casual measures do not match the urgency being advocated by climatologists. Furthermore, the global community has generally rated Canada’s historic contributions to international agreements as dismal.

So this is our present situation. Despite local, provincial, national and international efforts, global greenhouse gases emissions continue to rise rather than fall. Although new technology is responsible for incremental reductions, it is not supplying the breakthrough inventions needed to counteract the effects of soaring populations ever hungry for more energy, resources and consumer goods. The world’s present economic system is not saving us from the future that climate science is predicting. And politics is not yet reflecting the severity of this unfolding environmental crisis. We know with increasing clarity that “humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet”, as Jeffrey Sachs wisely notes in his book, Common Wealth, but this insight is not yet powerful enough to motivate us to collective, corrective action.

The most sobering prospect – the one intimated by T.S. Eliot – is one in which most people anticipate the ominous arrival of global climate change but only an ineffective few have the convictions to act to avoid it. The result of this collective inertia will be that we abdicate choice for the implacable forces of nature. If this happens, we will eventually be responding to a succession of calamities that become progressively more costly and debilitating. Adaptation will become defeat, a tragic process of repairing and then retreating from those cherished places and conditions where we once prospered.

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Shades of Green: Pleading Guilty – “By their deeds shall ye know them”

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Perspective is an illuminating rarity that can take years to occur. Disparate pieces drift in an incoherent jumble until they begin to coalesce into a understandable pattern. Then clarity reveals connections and relationships. Insight comes out of confusion. Order replaces chaos. The pieces cohere into a meaningful whole. The design becomes obvious. Explanations are then both possible and credible. And the catalyst that makes all this happen can be something fairly small and innocuous.

Such a catalyst was a small newspaper report that Marine Harvest, BC’s largest salmon farming corporation, was pleading guilty to two violations of the Fisheries Act (Courier-Islander, Nov. 2/11). Specifically, after two years of pleading innocent, Marine Harvest was now accepting responsibility for “incidental bycatch” in 2009 at two of its northern Vancouver Island facilities. Wild salmon and herring were captured and killed during the netting and transfer of farmed fish, adequate measures were not taken to prevent, recover and release the wild fish to minimize harm and mortality, and the bycatch was neither recorded nor reported as required by law.

“By their deeds shall ye know them” – the gospel of Matthew 7:16.

In the great scheme of things, the incident may seem small. But it is symbolic, important and revealing. Witnesses were present for the obvious infraction. They took photographs, collected the wild fish from beneath the trucks, then presented the evidence to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. DFO did not prosecute, an incredible lapse considering the violation was so obvious and the evidence so incriminating. So charges were laid by Alexandra Morton, a private citizen who decided to act when the appropriate enforcing agency would not. Furthermore, the Department of Justice apparently perceived DFO’s negligence to be so serious that it undertook the prosecution itself – “the first time the Department of Justice had made such a move with a private prosecution,” noted the newspaper report.

This simple incident raises a host of significant questions. Given the obvious evidence, why did DFO not lay charges? What was the relationship between DFO and Marine Harvest that warranted overlooking such an obvious violation of the Fisheries Act? When charges were laid and the evidence was so damning, why did Marine Harvest initially plead innocence? How does such a plea reflect on its attitude to the law, to the marine environment in which it operates its open net-pens, and to its role as a responsible corporate citizen? If Marine Harvest is capable of flagrant violations of the law and of denying obvious guilt, what other regulations is it capable of neglecting, disregarding or bending to its advantage? Does it perceive itself to be a law unto itself, a corporate body that is responsible only to its shareholders but not to the country or environment that host it?

Even worse, the federal agency that is supposed to supervise the salmon farming corporations seems to have abdicated its authority. First, DFO delegated that authority to the provinces, a transfer of power that the courts deemed to be a violation of its constitutional mandate. Now that this supervisory responsibility has been imposed by the courts, the salmon farms seem to function with impunity, as if DFO were a mere spectator rather than an enforcer of regulations. Leniency that DFO would never allow an individual violator is granted with apparent blessing to corporations: to suffocate the benthic environment with fish feces, to allow a restricted pesticide to be routinely used, to kill seals and sea-lions by the thousands (an astounding 6,243 between 1989 and 2000), to displace orcas and other marine threats with sonic scare devices, and to permit diseases and parasites from open net-pens to infect migrating wild salmon. And then, in two acts that hover somewhere between ludicrous and surreal, DFO has attempted to muzzle scientists critical of salmon farming and has allegedly financed the industry’s attempt to win organic certification.

DFO and its political masters have effectively ceded portions of the ocean to corporate control, giving them the sovereign authority to do whatever they please. Restrictive regulations are mere formalities routinely excused. And the corporations have willingly assumed ownership, not just of their leases but of the entire marine ecology in which they operate. DFO seems to measure environmental risk and damage by its inconvenience to the corporations.

This description comes close to giving shape to the situation pertaining to salmon farms in BC’s West Coast. The relationship of government to salmon farming corporations is too close and too accommodating to be healthy for society and for the environment. A loss of distinction is occurring between political and corporate interests. Supervision has become licence. While such an arrangement may benefit salmon farming employees, society as a whole perceives an unfair application of the law and suffers a loss of confidence in an agency that is supposed to protect their collective interests. The ceding of power to corporations disempowers people and erodes their confidence in democracy.

This ceding of power is the same motive force that is driving the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, an international reaction to the corporate behaviour that is bypassing democratic processes, stressing the global financial system, accentuating economic inequalities and causing environmental wreckage. The corporations that operate salmon farms in BC are now a noticeable example of this larger problem. “By their deeds shall ye know them.”

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Alexandra Morton testing wild salmon for ISAv on the Puntledge River earlier this week

Shades of Green: ISAv – Threat, Fear, Mystery and Warning

Oceans, Salmon Farming and Aquaculture, , , ,
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The recent news that the European strain of Infectious Salmon Anemia virus had been found in two Rivers Inlet sockeye smolts sent a shiver of fear throughout the North Pacific region. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) dutifully notified Japan, Russia and the United States, the countries with an economic interest in the safety, security and health of wild salmon and other marine fish. The US states of Oregon, California, Idaho and Alaska all expressed alarm, one defining the situation as an “emergency”.

The immediate panic subsided with the CFIA’s recent announcement that re-testing of the sockeye samples did not find ISAv. Were the samples now too old? Had they been improperly stored? Could the original tests, done by one of the world’s reference labs for ISAv, have been faulty? Were the CFIA’s tests faulty? Why had the many tests done on farmed fish not detected ISAv? Why had the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) not been testing for the disease in wild salmon? Why did no federal agency have a protocol for responding to an ISAv emergency?

As this mystery deepens, the undisputed evidence of ISAv as an international threat was made abundantly clear. BC and its Norwegian salmon farming corporations, together with Canada’s DFO, are playing a high-risk game with extremely serious consequences. Should protective measures fail, an unleashed exotic virus in the North Pacific would be a serious international incident with immeasurable consequences and inestimable costs. Is the gamble worth it?

Meanwhile, more positive tests have been reported for the European strain of ISAv in Pacific wild salmon on the Harrison River, a tributary of the Fraser that is 600 km from Rivers Inlet. A group of worried people led by Alexandra Morton netted a dead, unspawned coho salmon. It’s heart and gill tissue tested positive for ISAv. So did the gill tissue of a “severely jaundiced” Fraser River chinook and a “silver-bright” chum salmon. Finding the virus only in the gills of these fish suggests they were recently infected with ISA (alexandramorton.typepad.com).

Undoubtedly, these tests will be contested. But, as Alexandra Morton writes in her blog (Ibid.), the arrival of ISAv is inevitable.

“I don’t know how no one saw this coming…Every country with salmon farms has taken this path. I am so exhausted with trying to explain this to Ministers, bureaucrats, streamkeepers, environmentalists, fishermen. People just don’t want to believe it…

Look, it is simple. Salmon farms break the natural laws and viruses, bacteria and parasites are the beneficiaries of this behaviour. If you move diseases across the world and brew them among local pathogens, in an environment where predators are not allowed to remove the sick – you get pestilence. There is no other outcome.

The reason I can see this, and where we are headed, is not because I am particularly bright, it is because I have taken great care not to allow myself to become dependent on anyone’s money. I am not climbing any social ladder. I don’t want to be a politician, academic, or CEO of a ‘save the environment’ company. I just want to be able to live between Kingcome and Knight Inlet and not watch it die.”

Her indictment rings too true to be refuted. The salmon farming corporations owe their allegiance to shareholders perpetually hungry for higher profits. In the particular case of ISAv, they are creating a false assurance that will eventually release its viral tragedy. Politicians in power – local, provincial and federal – are busy juggling image, votes and economic considerations. Government bureaucrats and employees are reluctant to rile their political masters. And the majority of the public don’t have the attention or imagination to comprehend and stop this promised catastrophe. The result will be yet another environmental mess.

Are we now witnessing the beginning of this shadowed future? We don’t yet know for certain. As Morton writes so candidly in her blog, she had the premonition of defeat, believing she has “failed in the mission that has consumed my life. I wish now I had put the blinders on and continued studying whales, because it does not matter how the fish die, whether by sea lice, or viruses, they will be dead.”

If the fish die, her failure will be our failure. Because we live on a planet in which all the parts are interconnected, when we threaten or diminish wild salmon, we do the same to ourselves. Their vulnerability is our vulnerability. Or, to put it more ominously, as we dismantle nature’s services, corporate services will rise to fill the void. So the gracious bounty that once was given freely will then be subject to price and profit, a cost that we will pay in currency, dignity and servitude. If ISA is now brewing in our West Coast waters, it will be a classical example of how, piece by piece and place by place, we are dismantling the ecology of our planet. Such a “pestilence” will mark an erosion of our innocence and freedom, a diminishment of ourselves that could have been prevented if only we had possessed a modicum of perspective and caution.

Morton suggests a strategy for prevention and hope. Get the salmon farms out of our marine environment. Now. Immediately. Eliminate the only known source of ISAv and the unnatural concentrations of fish that breed mutations and virulence. This may also mean closing hatcheries for wild fish, too. Should the virus be here, then maybe – just maybe – it will dilute and dissipate in nature’s forgiveness. And if it is not here, the scare was real and instructive, a useful reminder that our folly is as far away as a single virus.

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Shades of Green: The Drug War and Free-Market Capitalism

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Ciudad Juarez, a city on Mexico’s border with the US state of Texas, is described by Ed Vulliamy as “the most murderous city in the world” (Guardian Weekly , July 1/11). The 40,000 homicides claimed so far by Mexico’s recent drug war didn’t all occur in Ciudad Juarez. But enough were committed there to make the city a focus of attention and a symbol of socio-economic failure, a glimpse into a future in which the quest for profit is pursued to its logical extreme. Put simply, a demand for drugs exists in America and Europe, a supply is available, and competing entrepreneurs are eager to meet need of the market place.

The drug cartels don’t dirty themselves with messy killing. Like a corporation that hires an advertising or public relations agency to promote a product or project, they hire gangs to do their work. Shootings, beheadings, mutilations and torture are increasing in frequency and brutality. The killers proudly post their atrocities on YouTube, linking their identity to their own gruesome method of killing. In the marketplace of illegal drugs and murder, they brand themselves with their particular form of violence. Morality is irrelevant. The system is fed by market share, profit and pride of service. In Vulliamy’s language, it is “capitalism gone mad”.

The residents of Ciudad Juarez have adapted to the war occurring among them. Malls are open for shopping. Restaurants serve meals throughout the day. In the cool evenings, people gather to eat, drink and socialize. The only difference, Vulliamy reports, is that the eery “semblance of normality” is “punctuated by gunfire”. The bloodshed, torture and violence has become so normal that ordinary people barely notice it.

But other people have noticed Ciudad Juarez. Like a flash of light in the dark, it illuminates and reveals. The co-existence of chaos and order in this Mexican city can be related to an event at a New York Wal-Mart in November, 2008, when a security guard, unable to climb to safety on nearby vending machines, was trampled to death by a mob of 2,000 “frenzied shoppers” who pushed in the doors and stampeded to the bargain specials (Ibid. July 8/11).

And events in Ciudad Juarez can also be related to brutal international trade and monetary forces that are undermining the autonomy of individual nations, thereby rendering democracies less and less able to determine their own policies and futures. In another Guardian Weekly article, Democracy is No Match for Market Power, Gary Younge asks, “How can we render democratic engagement viable at the national level within the context of globalization?” (Ibid.). If market forces predetermine economic and social policy, why bother to vote – which is Younge’s explanation for declining voting rates in most modern democracies.

In another event that echoes the morality of the drug war in Ciudad Juarez, Younge describes a law passed unanimously by the Haitian parliament in June, 2009, which raised the daily minimum wage to $5.00 per day. The US corporate interests that make high-end brand apparel in Haiti protested the increased wages. According to a WikiLeaks document, a senior US embassy official argued that the law “did not take economic reality into account” (Ibid.). Political pressure and intensive lobbying forced a special concession on Haiti’s garment industry – the minimum wage would be $3.00 per day.

A related force in the capitalist free-market economy, Vulliamy argues, is fuelling the slaughter in Ciudad Juarez. “Recruits for the drug war come from the vast, sprawling maquiladora…”. These “bonded assembly plants” that once payed “rock bottom wages” to fill America’s supermarkets are now being closed because labour is cheaper in Asia. In a “city that follows religiously the philosophy of a free market” (Ibid., July 7/11), the unemployed are being hired by the drug cartels to secure territory and market share. “It’s a city based on markets and on trash,” notes a local photographer. “Killing and drug addiction are activities in the economy, and the economy is based on what happens when you treat people like trash” (Ibid.).

What happens to people and to societies when everything they do is measured by economic value? What happens to morals and ethics when the market transposes key social structures into materialism and consumerism? What then happens to the bounds that keep societies civil? If people are treated like “trash” by free-market capitalism, do they eventually adopt these same values and abandon the civilizing bounds of decency and humanity? And to those who want to protest this degenerating process, Vulliamy poignantly as, “How can you march against the market?”

Vulliamy argues that Mexico’s drug war is different than other wars because it is simply the struggle for market share gone amok. “It belongs to the world of belligerent hyper-materialism, in which the only ideology left… is greed.” The Mexican drug cartels are merely the logical extension of a free-market economy. They have been living the “North American free-trade agreement long before it was dreamed up”, merely practicing what multinational corporations practice – albeit with somewhat less restraint and subtlety.

But not necessarily. The compounding environmental crisis presently facing our planet is another outcome of this same “belligerent hyper-materialism”, a system that is eminently successful at making profit while inflicting murderous ecological ruin in the process. Like the people of Ciudad Juarez, we too have become accustomed to an eery “semblance of normality” that is “punctuated by gunfire”. We shop and eat and socialize amid environmental mayhem, making the best of a situation that seems beyond our ability to change – hoping, all the while, that the stray bullets don’t hit us.

Post Script: The present “Occupy Wall Street” movement that has spread to cities around the world is an attempt to “march against the market” and correct some of the political, economic and social problems created by abject greed.

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Chief Bob Chamberlin and salmon biologist Alexandra Morton display test results confirming ISAv is here in BC's wild salmon

Shades of Green: The Arrival of Infectious Salmon Anemia Virus

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PEI’s Atlantic Veterinary College – cited as the reference lab for Infectious Salmon Anemia – has confirmed that the virus has officially arrived in BC’s West Coast waters. Critics of open net-pen salmon farms have warned that this arrival was inevitable given the history of the disease’s spread from Norway to Scotland, Ireland, Canada’s East Coast and Chile via transported Atlantic salmon eggs used by the industry. Those who are closely attuned to the health of wild salmon and are skeptical of the official monitoring and testing protocols have suspected that ISAv has been here for several years.

The presence of ISAv in wild Pacific salmon is ominous, a threat that casts a foreboding shadow on the entire marine ecology supported by these iconic fish. The disease is highly infectious, prone to mutation and potentially lethal. As an exotic disease previously unknown in the Pacific Northwest, its effect could cause havoc, shaping indefinitely the direction and focus of conservation efforts. The economic, social and ecological costs could be staggering. In short, ISAv’s arrival – almost certainly courtesy of the salmon farming industry – is a potential catastrophe.

As usual, the industry is minimizing the significance of ISAv’s arrival on the West Coast. As a Marine Harvest environmental officer said, “Just because it is present in these Pacific salmon doesn’t mean it’s a health issue…Pacific salmon are not as affected by ISA as Atlantic salmon” (Postmedia News, Oct. 19/11). Indeed. The industry’s gift of ISAv to Canada’s Maritimes is now creating the same problems that salmon farming has caused Europe, probably the near extinction of a population of wild Atlantic salmon in Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy. Meanwhile, the industry’s gift to coastal BC is just beginning to be measured.

So, what is the meaning of “Pacific salmon are not as affected by ISA as Atlantic salmon”? The underweight wild smolts identified with ISAv came from BC’s Rivers Inlet, a sockeye rearing area that has declined in five years from Canada’s second largest producer to 1 percent of its historical output – and it’s 100 km from the nearest salmon farm. On the banks of the Fraser River, thousands of unspawned dead sockeye salmon are washing ashore, apparently the victims of damaged livers. Are these some of the “not as affected” effects? In the complex, stressful and unforgiving dynamic of wild salmon surviving a dangerous life at sea and then heroically struggling up their nascent rivers to spawn, “not as affected” can be a lethal handicap.

The 4,726 tissue tests of farmed salmon over eight years, the industry contends, found no evidence of ISAv, although critics say a series of at least 35 reports from provincial government labs have indicated its presence in BC waters – a curious anomaly that is consistent with the self-serving interests that have occupied the industry. Almost without exception, these corporations have shown little more than a token concern for the marine environment that houses their open net-pens. Their public relations strategy has been to minimize their image of environmental damage. Sea lice are natural to marine ecologies, therefore persistent and concentrated infections in open net-pens on the out-migration routes of vulnerable wild salmon smolts are deemed normal. Viral diseases are found in natural ecologies, therefore dense infections that spread billions of viral particles from infected farmed salmon into the surrounding ocean are also normal. Seals and sea lions inevitably die, therefore the wholesale slaughter of them by the thousands is normalized with such a dismissive term as “cull”. If the industry viewed BC as anything other than a place to make money, it would have taken steps years ago to reform its practices and eliminate its environmental impacts.

The response of the industry to the newly discovered presence of ISAv in wild West Coast salmon is typical. Says Marine Harvest’s environmental officer – a self serving title that is conspicuously oxymoronic – “As far as we know [Marine Harvest] is clean of this disease and we want to keep it that way” (Ibid.). Of course they do. Given the industry’s $2 billion fiasco with ISAv in Chile, keeping “clean” of the disease is the primary objective. But the real issue of concern is not the business of growing farmed salmon but the health of the entire West Coast marine ecology and its keystone species. Significantly, the initiative to test the Rivers Inlet sockeye didn’t come from the industry or their government supervisors but from Simon Fraser University fisheries statistician Rick Routledge, at the urging of Alexandra Morton.

The next steps of the salmon farming corporations are predictable. They will concede that the information is interesting but that further study is needed. They will argue that identification of the European strain of ISAv found in two of the 48 sockeye smolts from Rivers Inlet could be a mistake or was too small to be meaningful. Or they will argue that the sample was contaminated or misidentified by an unexplainable anomaly. As in the past, their operative strategy will be to deny, delay and obscure.

Because the ISAv was detected in Rivers Inlet’s out-migrating sockeye smolts, this means the virus has likely been in BC waters for at least several years and is now firmly established in the ecosystem. Fish pathology indicates that it may also be in the Fraser River watershed. Indeed, it may now be endemic in BC’s marine ecology. Salmon farming corporations have released this monstrous little genie from its bottle and no amount of effort is likely to capture it.

As for what’s next, brace for a long, slow, tortuous and complicated catastrophe. This uncontrollable contagion could spread southward to California and northward to Alaska via infected herring, wild salmon and other fish species.

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Shades of Green: Well-Informed Futility Syndrome

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Ever get the feeling that our environmental problems are just too big to solve? Ever cringe when hearing of another “unprecedented weather event”, when reading of another species on the verge of extinction, or seeing headlines of another sobering report from climatologists, biologists or toxicologists? Ever feel numbed because the onslaught of gloomy forecasts is overwhelming? Ever suspect that the entire environmental mess could be a fictional concoction designed by conspirators to overthrow the economic system that has brought us prosperity? Welcome to a psychological condition called “well-informed futility syndrome”.

“Well-informed futility syndrome” was first identified in 1973 by the American psychologist Gerhart Wiebe who was examining the response of television viewers to the real-time Vietnam war news they were receiving in their own living rooms. The more they saw and learned about the disastrous complexity of the issues, the more paralyzed they felt by a sense of futility.

Denial is futility’s close relative. Peter Sandman, an expert on risk communication, describes how we intuitively avoid information that elicits uncomfortable feelings. Because we don’t want to confront fear or guilt, we reflexively exercise the mental gymnastics that avoid confrontations with such emotional experiences. So we follow the easy way out when we receive any uncomfortable messages that contain incongruities or inconsistencies. As Sandra Steingraber notes so succinctly in her powerful book, Raising Elijah, if we are told we have a dire environmental problem (such as mass extinctions or melting icecaps) but the proposed solutions seem so trivial (such as buying new light bulbs or recycling office paper) then the discontinuity between the problem and the solution provides the opportunity to conclude that the problem is not so dire. Denial combines with futility, she writes, to create a “retreat into silent paralysis”.

Denial, futility and paralysis all combine into a syndrome that results in inaction, a forestalling of plans, initiatives and undertakings that would begin to address the multiple waves of environmental problems coming at us. And the irony is that this inaction only increases the severity of the syndrome – very much like denying the existence of credit card debt only increases the accumulation of interest charges, or getting depressed about feeling depressed only increases the severity of the depression.

The cure for the “well-informed futility syndrome” is action. But not just any action. While conscientiously bringing reusable shopping bags to the grocery store is important and careful recycling helps to solve environmental problems, the cure to futility is in the larger thinking that addresses the root causes. Our environmental problems are the symptoms of something deeper that’s amiss. Unless the structural faults are corrected, the problems will continue to bedevil us. We can attempt to rehabilitate a salmon stream but unless we curtail the clearcut logging of watersheds, all efforts are likely to be useless. We can sandbag a rising river but unless we reduce the greenhouse gases that are activating the hydrological cycle, the torrential rains will guarantee future floods. We can search for cures to cancer but unless we reduce the levels of chemical contamination permeating our civilization, our successes will be frustratingly small. We can devise more ingenious ways of drilling for oil but without a decrease in our dependence on it, the social, political, economic and environmental costs will continue to escalate.

An increasing number of people are successfully counteracting the “well-informed futility syndrome” by becoming environmentally active – particularly in countries like Canada where the national government is doing so little to alleviate a rising sense of helplessness. Action is the only escape from the grip of paralysis. So people form salmon enhancement societies, naturalists clubs and conservancy organizations. Others become involved in the Georgia Strait Alliance, the Sierra Club, Ecojustice, Common Sense Canadians, CoalWatch, the BC Sustainable Energy Association, and the Living Oceans Society. Support for more activist approaches offered by Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Society remains solid. The list continues to expand as the frustration in a well-informed public continues to build. It even includes the Raging Grannies – some may regard them as entertaining eccentrics but they are invariably mature and experienced women who are repositories of tradition and wisdom. They are merely trying to change behaviour that is ruining our planet’s ecology and risking the foundations of our civilization.

Those who are activated to counteract the numbing and paralyzing effects of the “well-informed futility syndrome” are simply responding as best they can to a complex problem that is not being adequately addressed by the agencies and governments representing them. Their actions, however rational or extreme, however practical or bizarre, are their responses to a pervasive feeling of frustration and helplessness to a problem that is not being solved.

As a child, Steingraber recalls the Cuban Missile Crisis of the 1960s when American school children were taught to protect themselves from a nuclear attack by taking cover under a desk. The fear of annihilation by a Russian attack was real and immediate in those Cold War years. When asked about their future lives, all her classmates thought they would die from an atom bomb – except for one optimistic girl whose parents were engaged as peace activists.

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