Tag Archives: Shades of Green

Climate Change: The Answer is Blowin’ in the Wind

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“The answer,” wrote Bob Dylan in his iconic ’60s anti-war song, “is blowin’ in the wind.” So the vicious winds that ravaged coastal BC on the morning of March 12th – sustained velocities of 100 km/hr with gusts measured at 137 km/hr – provided that answer.

Outbursts of nasty winds have been harassing coastal British Columbia with increasing frequency in recent years. Ferry sailings, the litmus test of heavy weather for islanders, have been cancelled often, reminding the attentive public and anxious travellers that the winds are once again abnormally high. The March blow, therefore, seemed almost ordinary, except for its intensity. It left 135,000 people without electricity, ripped shingles, roofing and siding off houses, sent driftwood across shoreline highways and parks, closed schools and disrupted businesses. Beloved old trees, lifetime companions, were uprooted or broken by the fierce winds, their smashed and battered parts strewn as wreckage across roads, yards, powerlines and even homes. As one stoical observer cynically noted, “It’s not global warming, it’s global wind-ing.”

If that’s the answer, the problem is that no particular weather event can be definitively attributed to global warming. Climate models predict more extreme weather for a warmer world – more severe storms, more intense rainfall and more protracted droughts. This might explain why Australia’s record “big dry” ended in record floods. And it might account for the devastating monsoons that drowned much of Pakistan. Manitoba has still not recovered a year after its flooding. Sudden storms and higher winds are just part of the parcel for an atmosphere that is hotter and more energized.

Of course, the details of weather are incredibly difficult to predict at any time, even with supercomputers. But the general principle is easily understood. Increased temperatures mean more active weather – somehow, somewhere. The global temperature rise since the beginning of industrialization about 250 years ago has been 1.6°C. BC’s experience of this trend has been a measured average increase of 0.25°C per decade for the last 65 years, an accelerating rise that has exceeded the worst case scenario predicted by the United Nations’ science experts at the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The “answer” that’s “blowin’ in the wind” will never be definitive because variations from normal weather patterns always occur; extreme variations should be rare. But frequent and extreme variations suggest something fundamental is amiss. And the trend should be worrisome.

We live and thrive in the normal. We manage our forests, catch our fish and grow our food based on the normal. We choose sites and build our houses based on normal conditions. The trees that shade them and embellish our properties do so under the grace of normal. We survive and flourish in the harmony of normal. The abnormal is always disruptive and threatening, something we don’t want to encounter. This explains why we prefer a reassuring answer to a troubling one, and why we are so reluctant to acknowledge the abnormal. Such an admission induces insecurity, anxiety and even fear.

This is the psychology underlying our collective reluctance to admit the significance of these recent windstorms and to accept the notion of global climate change. Psychologists would identify this inner dynamic as cognitive dissonance, an irresolvable conflict between preference and evidence. Our usual inclination is to favour preference – sometimes beyond the futility of denial – until dire events eventually force a reluctant realization.

Have the recent windstorms convinced anyone that global climate change is a reality? Have the heavy rains, record snowfalls on mountains, flooding events, melting permafrost, receding glaciers and pine beetle catastrophe been confirming evidence that the weather is different enough to be ascribed to something unusual? Did the mayhem caused by the March 12th storm create a moment of epiphany for those who heard the winds roar, who felt their houses tremble, who hoped anxiously that the next flying object or falling tree would miss anything they had built or owned or cherished?

Reality sometimes collides with credibility. After the March 12th wind had subsided and the weather turned an ironical and incongruous calm, the surrounding wreckage seemed alien, a bizarre figment of illusion that somehow didn’t correlate to ordinary experience. How can one day be so different from the day before? Where is the familiar tree that once filled the sky above the back yard? What flattened the fence? Has anyone seen the lawn furniture? Why is the roof leaking? The routine drive to work somehow became an obstacle course of wrenched branches, wayward driftwood, dangling powerlines and discarded possessions, as if familiar and dignified neighbourhoods had suddenly become bereft of the propriety and decorum that once identified them as orderly and respectable.

Perhaps, for some people, March 12th was no different than any other day, just another storm that brought more than the usual inconvenience – no “answer blowin’ in the wind”. But for others, the day was an epiphany, a sorry awakening, a clear answer that brought a helpless grieving for lost innocence.

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The Economics of Salmon Farms, Oil Pipelines and Natural Gas

Energy and Resources, Fracking, Oceans, Oil&Gas, Pipelines and Supertankers, Salmon Farming and Aquaculture, Water and Hydrocarbons, , , , , , ,
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Whether or not salmon farms continue operating in BC’s marine waters may depend more on economic than environmental factors. Despite withering criticism concerning the ecological safety of its open net-pen operations, the salmon farming industry has doggedly continued on its corporate course. However, two unforeseen factors may compromise its viability, thereby accomplishing what no amount of environmental censure has managed.

First, the US International Trade Commission has removed a two-decade 24 percent import duty levied on farmed salmon imported from Norway. This ruling may ultimately negate one of the major rationales Norwegian corporations used in 1991 to circumvent the duty by growing Atlantic salmon in BC waters. The removal of the duty now places a 24 percent disadvantage on farmed salmon exported from BC to the US, a trading handicap exacerbated by the rising value of the Canadian dollar.

And second, after the horrific 70 percent collapse of salmon farming in Chile due to the industry’s inadvertent importation of infectious salmon anemia, Chilean banks and governments are applying pressure for a re-start of operations. This will result in more farmed fish on the global market and will depress the price for salmon. Combined with the lower cost of growing salmon in Chile, the result may threaten operations in BC. The salmon farming industry in BC, critics note, is already precarious due to high operating costs. A flood of Chilean farmed fish on the world market and cheaper product from Norway may be lethal blows to the industry here. And, as everyone knows, the business of making money is not imbued with sentimentality – if salmon farming is not profitable here, the industry will politely express its ritual condolences and leave.

Oil raises more complicated and serious issues than salmon farming. And Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, that intends to move tar sands bitumen from Alberta to BC’s West Coast, may cause far more economic damage than a few salmon farms abandoning Canada. To assess this damage, we need to know something about oil pricing.

Most North Americans are likely unaware that the price of oil is determined in two ways. The Canadian and US price is set “at a confluence of pipelines at Cushing, Oklahoma, where prices are determined for a specified grade of crude termed West Texas Intermediate” (Island Tides, Mar. 8/12). WTI is presently priced at about $108 per barrel. But for the rest of the world, in regions such as Asia and Europe, their oil is priced by international markets at a higher “Brent” rate. The Brent price is presently about $126 per barrel. The price difference is important to the oil industry. And this explains the significance of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline.

Alberta crude from the tar sands would not pass through the pricing gate in Cushing, Oklahoma. Indeed, it would be destined for Asia where the Brent rather than the WTI price applies. Any corporation producing oil from the tar sands would benefit measurably from the premium value of Brent and would push for this pricing structure. At the very least, in free market conditions, the price difference between Brent and WTI would force up the cost of oil to consumers in Canada.

The same cost pressure would apply to natural gas. Its North American price is determined by the volume moving through “a confluence of thirteen pipelines at Erath, Louisiana”, the so-called “Henry Hub” (Ibid.). This price is linked to the WTI price of oil, and is presently selling at between $2 to $3 per million British thermal units (MMBtu). But natural gas in Asia and elsewhere is linked to the Brent oil price, where it commonly sells for two to four times the North American price. The huge volume of natural gas that would be diverted from BC and Alberta to several liquid natural gas (LNG) plants on the West Coast would bypass the Henry Hub on its way to Asia. Besides depleting a non-renewable resource with massive exports, the new market would force up the price of natural gas – if not for Canadians, then certainly for British Columbians.

Beyond the litany of environmental problems created by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to retrieve natural gas from shale, and the inevitable spills associated with the pipeline and tanker movement of oil from the West Coast, British Columbians in particular – and Canadians in general – can expect to pay more for their petroleum based energy.

Globalization always has the effect of shifting prices toward a common denominator. In the case of wages, it pulls down high earnings to match lower Asian rates. In the case of energy such as oil and natural gas, it lifts prices toward matching the higher rates that apply beyond North America.

Even without considering the environmental costs and risks of producing and transporting oil and gas, opening our markets to Asia and elsewhere is an unwise strategy for British Columbians and Canadians. The oil and gas industry should be jubilant at the prospects of pipelines and tankers. But everyone else in this country should be worried. The social and economic costs of a few closed salmon farms in BC would pale beside the damage inflicted by higher energy prices.

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Tipping Points: The Haunting Uncertainties

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Tipping points are haunting uncertainties because they pertain to the unpredictable moment when the cumulative effects of environmental disturbance can trigger feedback loops of unstoppable change that can collapse entire ecosystems. They apply everywhere, from species loss and climate change to ocean acidification and food production. The best predictors are mostly intelligent estimates based on projected effects. Tipping points leaves scientists anxious because of the combination of uncertainty and extremely serious consequences.

We have, however, learned of the occasional tipping point from experience. The collapse of Newfoundland’s Grand Banks’ cod, for example, occurred when over fishing lowered populations below a critical threshold and a once stupendously rich resource simply vanished from commercial value. So we usually learn in retrospect what the critical conditions were. But by then the tipping point has been reached and the sorry end is a foregone conclusion.

Of course, we have warnings. But we never know how seriously to take them because we can’t be certain how to assess the risks. When does the concentration of open net-pen salmon farms in BC’s marine ecology create the conditions that undermine the viability of wild salmon? And when does the gradual loss of wild salmon trigger a fatal collapse in orca populations? We don’t know that either. That’s another experiment we are running.

On a larger scale, we know that plastic particles are accumulating in our marine ecosystems but we don’t know when their toxic effects will render species inedible or poison the entire food chain. We know we are disturbing the planet’s nitrogen cycle because ocean dead zones have increased from just a few to over 400 in the last two decades but we don’t know when this should cause alarm. We know that carbon dioxide emissions are increasing the production of oceanic carbonic acid but we don’t know when the acidifying process will trigger a chain reaction that collapses the entire structure of marine life.

This uncertainty is risk. So we need to decide what risks we are willing to take with tipping points. Climatologists estimate that we could court climate disaster if we raise biosphere temperatures above 2°C. We are already at 1.6°C, with global greenhouse gas emissions still climbing by record amounts and no serious constraints planned until 2020. Some climatologists argue that “thermal inertia”, the delayed response of climate to emissions, means we are already committed to a temperature increase of at least 4°C by 2050 and 5.5°C to 7°C by 2100.

If we don’t know exactly where most tipping points are, then how do we know when our behaviour is safe or foolish? We don’t know ‹ yet. But we already have evidence that large quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas held in storage by cold water and frozen tundra, are being released in alarming quantities as Arctic regions warm at a rate almost four times faster than elsewhere. And measurements indicate that methane is venting along the entire interface of the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans. Both events worry scientists because this methane release suggests we may have already exceeded a crucial tipping point.

Now we are getting disturbing information about food production on a warming planet. Satellite images of maturing wheat can identify when green plants stop growing and turn to brown. Previous indications were that a 2°C temperature increase would reduce these crop yields by 30 percent. New data from surveying the Ganges Plain suggest the reduction is 45 to 50 percent (Island Tides, Feb. 9/12).

More exacting studies in the US confirm the tipping point for three crucial crops ‹ maize (corn), cotton and soybean ‹ is 29°C. Up to that temperature, plant growth increases. Beyond that, for each degree-day spent above 29°C, production falls by 0.6 percent. (A degree-day measures the intensity and duration of temperatures above 29°C.) US agriculture regions in 2009 spend 57 degree-days above that threshold; climate models predict 413 degree-days by 2100. This means an 83 percent reduction in maize crops. Even the most optimistic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions would incur a 30 to 46 percent loss by 2050 (New Scientist, Aug. 26/09).

We have used and settled our planet based on the opportunities provided by combinations of circumstances. We can’t shift traditional agricultural areas to cooler locations without the soil, water or terrain needed for the industrial production of food. We don’t have other oceans to fish. Forests are not easily moved. Warmer temperatures increase the activity of the hydrological cycle, causing weather extremes of more storms, more rain, more droughts, more wind. And even weather has tipping points, moments during gradual change when extremes suddenly occur ‹ this process, called “emergence”, has created a new and enigmatic branch of science.

Change means tipping points for us, too. When fish fall below a certain threshold, we suddenly stop being fishers. When trees die of disease, we suddenly stop being loggers. When crops no longer grow, we suddenly stop being farmers.

So far, our adaptive skills have allowed us to moderate the impact of these environmental changes. But global trends promise both a rate and extent of change that will be unimaginably swift, dramatic and pervasive. Multiple tipping points lurk almost everywhere in our uncertain future. We can be certain, however, that we won’t want to experience what they might be.

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Northern Gateway: Pipeline to Problems

Energy and Resources, Oil&Gas, Pipelines and Supertankers, , , ,
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Enbridge’s proposal to build a 1,172 km Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to Kitimat through some of the most challenging and remote territory on the planet exposes wild rivers, landscapes and a pristine BC coast to inevitable oil spills. This is the most obvious argument against building this project. But a closer and deeper scrutiny reveals more fundamental flaws that are not immediately obvious.

While Enbridge may assume responsibility for the safety of its pipeline – offered with the usual over-confidence of a developer promoting its project – it cannot claim responsibility for the fleet of international tankers that would arrive almost daily to transport the oil to foreign ports. Such tanker traffic is risky enough in open waterways and accessible harbours. But a trip to Kitimat to back to sea again would require huge and notoriously unmanoeuvrable ships to navigate 580 km of narrow, winding channels. Reefs, storms, tide rips, fog, extreme waves and complex course changes make the passage treacherous. And who guarantees the quality of the ships and seamanship that would ply BC waters? Foreign captains and crews on vessels registered in countries of convenience introduce risks for oils spills that are beyond the control of Enbridge.

Enbridge’s focus, of course, is the pipeline, a $5.5 billion investment that would provide considerable employment when being built but little thereafter – except to the burgeoning oil industry processing bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands. And, as critics rightly point out, the pipeline would be a viable investment only if it operates at capacity. The pipeline, therefore, is a means to both justify and encourage the development of the tar sands, a source of oil that is recognized as “dirty” because of pollution and the huge quantities of energy and water used in production. These larger implications compound the need for a careful examination of the whole project.

So, why the hurry and why the federal government’s objections to a thorough environmental assessment of the Northern Gateway project? Because other oil supplies will soon be available when new technologies are extracting oil from the vast shale sources being discovered elsewhere. The hurry is to secure markets before the opportunity evaporates, a race that inevitably leads to miscalculations, undue risk and promised trouble. And future competition could make this pipeline less than profitable, subjecting it to the eventual cost-cutting measures that are prelude to disaster.

The rush to build the Northern Gateway also obscures long-term perspectives. Canada has no national energy policy. The $20 billion invested in the tar sands by China may be in China’s interests, but what of Canada’s? The eastern half of this country gets its oil from foreign sources arriving in Atlantic ports, a compromise to national energy security. Why not develop the tar sands to meet Canadian interests, refine our own oil on site, and thereby gain energy self-reliance and extra jobs?

This raises the issue of “ethical oil”, an argument used by advocates for the Keystone XL pipeline that is proposed to transport Alberta crude to America’s Gulf States. Foreign oil, they argue, is deemed “unethical” because it comes from countries of dubious political reputation. The same argument is being applied to the Northern Gateway pipeline. Although Alberta’s oil is environmentally “dirty” and the transportation route is risky, at least Asia, like the US, would be receiving Canada’s “ethical oil”. Curiously, the argument doesn’t seem to apply to the half of Canada presently receiving its oil from the same international sources as other countries. Why is the issue of “ethical oil” applicable to the US and Asia but not to Canada? Wouldn’t we be more “ethical” by supplying ourselves with our own “ethically” superior oil?

Money, of course, lurks behind the facade of “ethics”. Huge amounts are to be made by building the Northern Gateway pipeline. Most of the benefits, however, would go to Alberta and the oil industry operating there. Canada would benefit from thousands of new jobs. But as usual, the issue is more complicated than first appearances. Robyn Allen, a noted Canadian economist, points out in her study of the Northern Gateway project that the premium price received for oil going to Asia would force up the price in Canada by $2-3 per barrel, an effect that would dampen the Canadian economy and counteract any benefits accruing from the pipeline. The multi national investors in Alberta’s oil industry would benefit at the expense of everyone else in Canada.

And this raises the phenomenon of the so-called “Dutch Disease”. The Dutch discovered to their chagrin that a huge influx of revenue from oil inflated the value of their currency, made their exports more expensive and less competitive, increased unemployment and weakened their entire economy.

Other disadvantages of oil-supported economies are also noteworthy. Unstable boom-and-bust economic cycles are created by fluxuating oil prices. And a single source of monetary wealth tends to cause governments to neglect the other vital drivers in their economies.The resulting loss of diversity is diminished democracy, alienation, cynicism and social unrest. The eventual outcome is the failed petro-state so reviled for its “unethical” characteristics.

And a final argument against the Northern Gateway pipeline is the extra carbon dioxide emissions it will encourage. Refining Alberta’s tar sands already produces about 6 percent of Canada’s total greenhouse gases. A doubling of production will double emissions to about 12 percent – an annual 90 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2020. This output further handicaps Canada’s ability to meet its reduction obligations to the global community and further vilifies Canada’s already dismal environmental reputation. From every conceivable perspective, the Northern Gateway is a pipeline to problems.

Postscript: In order “…to find the best solution for Canada”, Enbridge is considering changing its pipeline port from Kitimat to Prince Rupert (Globe & Mail, Feb. 10/12).

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Globalization: The New Pangea

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About 250 million years ago, all the distinct continents on Earth existed as one large land mass called Pangea. Over millions of years, at a speed comparable to the growth of fingernails, the shifting tectonic plates of the planet fractured and separated Pangea into the different continents we know today. Some of the puzzle’s pieces still fit together, although many of the shapes are now deformed by various geological dynamics. The east side of South America, for example, fits nicely against the west side of Africa, and North America can be moved across the Atlantic so that the Caribbean snuggles into the northwest bulge of Morocco.

The division of Pangea into separate continents had huge environmental implications. First, and perhaps foremost, it meant that species could no longer move freely around one large land mass. The fractures that filled with oceans isolated them, the drifting segments slowly developed very unique ecologies, and distinctive plants and animals evolved in adaptation to those local peculiarities.

This was the situation encountered by humans as they began moving around the planet about 70,000 years ago. Just a mere 500 years ago, during a surge of exploration and colonization, Europe was sending ships to North and South America, to Asia, Africa and elsewhere. The continents, once ecologically isolated for millions of years, were now being reconnected – not geologically by the movement of tectonic plates but by the physical movement of humans transporting commercial products, plants, animals, viruses and their own particular cultures. The world would never again be the same.

Clearly, this process did not suddenly begin with the arrival of Columbus on a remote Caribbean island in 1492. Commercial products and ideas were travelling between Europe and Asia before then. The Bubonic Plague reached Venice from an eastern seaport a few years prior to 1348, before ravishing Europe in successive waves of pandemic death. But the diseases to which Europeans had developed some immunity – smallpox, measles, mumps, chicken pox, rubella, typhus and cholera – were transported to the New World by later explorers, with devastating consequences to the native populations. Think of this as the beginning of globalization.

Globalization is, in effect, a return to Pangea. In the blink of a geological eye, all the barriers that once separated the continents into distinct ecologies are now being dismantled by the international movement of goods, species and people. Norway rats reached most of the world’s ports on sailing ships, traumatizing every ecology where they arrived – sometimes remedial efforts compounded the trauma by introducing other species that were supposed to predate the rats. Eccentric immigrants imported rabbits to Australia and starlings to North America, both species inflicting devastating damage across their respective continents.

Indeed, globalization is a kind of ecological short-circuiting that throws biological systems into pandemonium. More than 250 foreign marine species now inhabit San Francisco Bay, transported there by ballast water discharged by freighters from around the world. The same process has brought an estimated 300 exotic plants and animals to the Great Lakes. The Asian carp that now threaten the entire diversity of the Missouri and Mississippi River systems came from a few fish that washed away from nearby ponds during a flood – these voracious fish are now poised to reach the Great Lakes, expanding their sphere of ecological catastrophe. Atlantic salmon, which belong in the Atlantic Ocean, were deliberately imported to the Pacific for commercial reasons, with complex impacts that could damage an entire marine ecology.

Globalization has essentially removed the barriers of time and space that once protected ecologies from contamination and disruption. Diseases, fungi, insects, mammals, amphibians, birds and plants are all distributed helter-skelter around the planet by ships, planes, cars, luggage, souvenirs, shoes, bodies and just about anything else that moves. The various results are species displacement, population explosions and extinctions.

Ecologies that are wholly incapable of dealing with oil get blanketed in it as international pipelines and global tanker traffic disperse this crude energy from sites of supply to demand. AIDS, a world killer of millions, escaped from an isolated African village because of the mass movement of people around the planet. An obscure disease such as West Nile virus spreads across North America after it inadvertently arrives in a mosquito aboard an airplane arriving in New York from southern Europe. Deadly influenzas skitter around the world with the tides of international travellers.

This globalizing process is even wreaking havoc on distinctive human cultures, as travel, technology and media contaminate unique ways of thinking and understanding. Well-adapted lifestyles are destroyed during this great homogenization process. Languages, essential to preserving and perpetuating cultures, are being obliterated at the rate of one per week. And globalization confuses and debilitates national and local politics as every trade agreement erodes the democratic process by shrinking individual autonomy and robbing resident people of self-determination.

Large as Pangea must have been, it had valleys, deserts, mountains and rivers that would have constrained the movement of species. But, in the New Pangea, no obstacle is great enough to halt the massive tide of movement that is sweeping over the planet. The ecological disturbances it creates are unparalleled in Earth’s history.

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Promoetheus, who stole fire from Zeus and paid the price

Four Myths: Insights into Change

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Everything that science can tell us about the environmental challenges unfolding around us must pass through layers of attitudes and values before we can identify or remedy them – “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it,” was Marshall McLuhan’s noted comment on this subject. Evidence alone will neither make us aware nor change our behaviour when all experience must be filtered before it registers as real. This difficult subject is illuminated by Professor Michael Hulme of the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia. Although his expertise is climate change, his insights apply to broader environmental subjects (New Scientist, Sept. 5/09).

Professor Hulme proposes that we consider four myths of our Western culture, the “stories we tell that embody deeper assumptions about the world around us” – and here he means “myths” in the anthropological sense, the frameworks we create to give meaning to our individual and collective experiences.

Myths, in this sense, are culturally true – not absolutely true – and are continually changing with time and circumstance. Indeed, conflict within a culture usually occurs when newly-evolving myths generated by fresh evidence and experience collide with old myths, precisely what is happening today as we measure the inability of our natural world to maintain its equilibrium under the impact of our collective human behaviour. This conflict of limits is also a conflict of myths.

The first myth Professor Hulme proposes is the Edenic one. It uses “the language of lament and nostalgia” to reflect our loss of simplicity and innocence, and urges a return to circumstances when we lived in greater harmony with the natural world. In this myth, our environment is understood as giving and generous, as fragile and sacred. The power we have amassed to affect it makes us apprehensive. Our fear is that our wisdom is not sufficient to manage nature’s intricate complexity. The damage we do could be fatal, tantamount to another expulsion from Paradise.

Second is the Apocalyptic Myth. Its “language of fear and disaster” reflects our anxiety about the future. In a time of radical change – history on steroids would accurately describe our present age – this anxiety is amplified. Implicit in this myth is our inherent sense of humility and insecurity, an awareness that we must not disturb the physical and biological forces that regulate the living world which we must inhabit.

Third is the Promethean Myth, “named after the Greek deity who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to the mortals” – we got our fire but Zeus punished Prometheus eternally for the theft. In this myth, we use the power of technology to exercise control over nature, “revealing our desire for dominance and mastery”. But this authority also comes with a “lack of wisdom and humility to exercise it.” In this myth, we have little sense of the great design we are working within, little awareness of the potency of our power, or how we are to live harmoniously with the multitude of natural forces operating the physical and biological complexity of our planet. This myth reminds us of the folly of reaching beyond our ability to regulate and control the planet that keeps us.

Fourth is the Themisian Myth, “named after the Greek goddess of natural law and order.” This myth couches environmental issues in “the language of justice and equity.” It implicitly condemns us for inflicting harm on others by emitting toxins, by disturbing weather and ecologies, by destroying habitat that wrongs plant and animal species, and by depleting resources that will be unavailable for future generations. The planet, in other words, is a moral place where we must carefully consider the consequences of whatever we do.

These four myths are all at play, in different combinations, within each of us. We use them to identify and interpret the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and to give motivation, direction and meaning to our actions. They are the means by which we guide and judge our behaviour.

Our predicament today is that the change occurring around us is so rapid and dramatic that we can’t adapt our myths quickly enough. The technological power at our disposal is so huge and our numbers are so many that we are re-shaping the planet as never before in human history. The myths loom in front of us as dilemmas, on a scale and intensity that matches the steroidal history we are moving through. The particular myth that we each might favour – how we are inclined to interpret the world – yields our assessment of our present environmental situation, and this establishes our relationship with others who may stress different myths. As the speed and intensity of our civilization increases, the tumult increases.

Those favouring the Edenic Myth lament the loss of an old innocence. Those disposed to the Apocalyptic Myth anticipate widespread mayhem from our injudicious behaviour. Those with faith in the Promethean Myth trust in the power of technologies. Those inclined toward the Themisian Myth are concerned with the morality of all we do. And modern science, with its pervasive and obsessive quest for information and understanding, provides insights that heighten the intensity of each of these myths. We experience their collisions as conflicts reverberating throughout our social, political, ethical and material lives.

Professor Hulme doesn’t suggest how these conflicts will or can be resolved. But, like the Greek myths themselves, knowing about them heightens the awareness of living by reminding us that the chasm of tragedy is always just a mistake away.

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Willful Blindness and Sick Salmon – Lessons from Cohen Commission

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The mystery of the disappearing wild salmon may be closer to being solved due to the reconvened Cohen Commission and the extraordinary three days of hearings held in December, 2011. As earlier testimony revealed, many environmental factors affect the survival of wild salmon but imported diseases from the aquaculture industry may be the largest single cause of their decline. A plausible scenario now explains how these diseases could have arrived in our West Coast ecology.

Evidence now confirms that government policy supports the salmon farming industry, and that the industry has been willing to exploit this advantage to win regulatory concessions for its economic gain – in the words of one Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) official, the industry seemed “to dictate” policy. These concessions included relaxed importation, inspection and quarantine of Atlantic salmon eggs, and inadequate supervision of fish health.

Summary statements written by Gregory McDade and Lisa Glowaki, two of the lawyers representing Alexandra Morton at the inquiry, describe how DFO failed to pursue evidence indicating that ISAv was in wild salmon, despite an independent 2004 test that suggested all Cultus Lake sockeye were infected. “Instead it buried the results completely for seven years,” notes the summary, and “decided to not test any further wild salmon. This reaction is not consistent with the scientific method or a precautionary approach – rather it shows action of a political nature – denial and suppression of an inconvenient fact. In legal terms, it is known as willful blindness, also characterized in some circumstances as gross negligence.” This opinion is reinforced by DFO’s failure to submit any ISAv documentation to the Commission.

McDade and Glowaki suggest that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) was also implicated in this scheme of “willful blindness”. It had no interest in the well-being of wild salmon per se; its mandate was to monitor diseases and promote the economic value of food products. Fish diseases were inconveniences that complicated this commercial objective. ISAv was a reportable infection that would have alerted trade partners and the international community to risk, thereby incurring trade damage. “Safe trade” is the subject of testimony given by Dr. Kim Klotins, a senior CFIA official, to Krista Robertson, a lawyer acting for First Nations:

Robertson: “But is it also part of the mandate of the CFIA to ensure that… trade interests of Canadian companies or companies operating in Canada such as Norwegian fish farm companies, are not harmed by any kind of finding or allegation of disease?”

Dr. Klotins: “So if, let’s say, we do find ISA in B.C. and all of a sudden markets are closed, our role [CFIA] is then to try to renegotiate or negotiate market access to those countries. Now what it will be is a matter of they’ll let us know what the requirements are. We’ll let them know what we can do and whether we can meet that market access. If we can’t meet it, then there will be no trade basically.”

In other words, the discovery of ISAv in BC wild or farmed salmon could be an economic disaster that could even end trade in fish products. The CFIA didn’t want to find ISAv, and the evidence suggests it took active measures to confiscate fish samples that indicated ISAv was here. DFO – which supported the salmon farming industry – didn’t want to find ISAv either, and took active measures to hide findings and suppress research that would have exposed it. And the salmon farming industry certainly didn’t want to discover ISAv in its brood stock or net-pens – such a discovery would have had devastating environmental, market and public relations ramifications.

So, why did salmon farmers not find ISAv in their testing of more than 4,700 samples of farmed fish? The sole veterinarian testing their fish was Dr. Gary Marty, who noted more than 1,100 instances of lesions that were commensurate with ISAv, but he always recorded negative results for the viral infection. The industry, therefore, could confidently announce, as it frequently did, “that the ISA virus has never been found in British Columbia” (Times-Colonist, Dec. 16/11).

McDade and Glowaki explain this puzzle. First, not all ISAv strains are lethal so salmon farms might not notice high mortality. Like an influenza, it can exist as a low level infection that only becomes virulent when it mutates – particularly in high population densities at fish farms and hatcheries. But ISAv does impair fish health – especially wild fish in stressful survival conditions – and it leaves identifiable cellular markers. This is what the genomic specialists Drs. Kristi Miller, Fredrick Kibenge and Are Nylund found in their independent sampling of wild salmon tissue – they couldn’t find it in farmed salmon because the industry thwarted efforts to test these fish.

Was the salmon farming industry concealing evidence of ISAv? Not exactly. The following is the McDade and Glowaki technical explanation: “The evidence is now clear that Dr. Marty was conducting PCR tests with no confirmed validity. His PCR test was developed in-house, by a master’s student. This methodology used a primer that was different from that approved by the OIE or by the Moncton lab. It was a primer that had never been through the validation process, nor even apparently a peer-reviewed publication. Dr. Kibenge testified that in his opinion this test would not be sensitive to finding ISA.” So the “self-invented” test had no validity and “in our respectful submission, this ‘non-disclosure’ is tantamount to deliberate deception”. Since the salmon farming industry didn’t want to find ISAv, DFO had chosen to be “willfully blind” by relying only on the invalid testing of this single lab, and the CFIA was contented to avoid the complexities of discovering ISAv, no such disease was ever found by anyone responsible for detecting it.

The ISAv evidence will eventually be weighed by Judge Bruce Cohen. But the virus is now in the realm of public awareness, and the seismic effects could eventually shake the salmon farming industry, the wild fishery, and the government agencies that were supposed to be safeguarding an invaluable marine ecology.

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Salmon Politics and the Egg Trade

Fisheries, Oceans, Salmon Farming and Aquaculture, , , , ,
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The source of the infectious salmon anemia virus (ISAv) now being found in BC’s wild salmon is almost certainly from imported Atlantic salmon eggs, the international trade that has provided coastal salmon farms with most of their stock. The salmon farming industry, of course, is still denying that ISAv is here, although evidence given at the Cohen Commission’s extraordinary three days of hearings on December 15th, 16th and 19th essentially obliterates that defence.

Of four labs testing for ISAv in wild fish samples, the only one seemingly unable to find it is the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s facility in Moncton, New Brunswick, a lab whose detection capability is known by experts to be notoriously insensitive and inconsistent – an inaccuracy compounded by attempting to use degraded tissue samples. Research tests by a reputable lab in 2004 found 100 percent infection in Cultus Lake sockeye – inexplicably never pursued by federal agencies responsible for the health of wild salmon. Testimony from Dr. Kristi Miller showing genomic markers in archaic samples of BC wild salmon indicates that ISAv has been here since 1986.

Documents presented at the Cohen Commission suggest that the arrival of ISAv coincides with the early importation of Atlantic salmon eggs to West Coast salmon farms. Supporting this connection is a recorded litany of warnings from experts in BC’s Ministry of Environment (MOE) and the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), all alarmed about the inherent danger of importing exotic diseases to the West Coast ecology through Atlantic salmon eggs. This evidence is worth noting.

  • 1982: representatives of Canada’s government meet with Norwegian and Canadian business interests to consider “alternative approaches to inspection and certification of salmon culture facilities” for the importation of Atlantic salmon material from Norway.
  • 1984: Canada’s DFO approves limited importation of Atlantic salmon material, an event that is not announced publicly.
  •  1985: 300,000 eggs are imported, subject to a “Draft Importation of Salmonids Policy” requiring a 12 month quarantine. But Dave Narver of MOE expresses concern to his Assistant Deputy Minister about the policy. “I am getting increasingly anxious about our importing of Atlantic eggs,” he writes. “My concern is shared by many of my colleagues in both provincial and federal agencies. The fish health measures agreed to jointly by DFO and ourselves in the fall of 1984 are not foolproof. They are based on statistical sampling, so we are taking a risk when it comes to the introductions of virus. That means a risk to the nearly one-billion-dollar wild salmonid fisheries of British Columbia.” An additional 130,000 Atlantic salmon eggs are imported from Scotland.
  • 1986: Narver reiterates his concerns to Pacific Aqua Foods about an unsigned and non-public policy. “We are deeply concerned with the fact that the risk of exotic diseases is dependent on both the number of imports and their size. Government has made a commitment to support aquaculture, but surely not at the risk of a nearly $1 billion resource in the wild salmon fisheries of British Columbia. The direction the aquaculture industry wants us to go will insure that we import unwanted diseases that can impact on government hatcheries and wild stocks.” Narver sends a similar letter of concern to Stolt Sea Farm Canada Inc. “To start with a general comment, I am disappointed with what appears to be the prevailing attitude of a number of companies, that fish health regulations to protect wild stocks are great, but if we continue the way the aquaculture industry seems to dictate, we can expect to introduce new diseases.” 1,144,000 eggs are imported from Scotland.
  • 1987: Federal-Provincial Policy for the Importation of Live Salmonids is signed, but quarantine time is reduced to 4 months to reduce the industry’s cost of dealing with waste water. Pat Chamut of DFO expresses a trade concern. “If challenged in court over denial of any imports, what is the legal likelihood we would be successful in denying imports?” 1,281,000 eggs are imported from Scotland and Washington State.
  • 1990: Salmon farmers in the US claim Canada’s import restrictions are a trade barrier. Chamut reiterates his concerns to the Policy Division of Pacific Rim and Trade. “Continued large-scale introductions from areas of the world including Washington State, Scotland, Norway and even eastern Canada would eventually result in the introduction of exotic disease agents of which the potential impact on both cultured and wild salmonids in BC could be both biologically damaging to the resource and economically devastating to its user groups.”
  • 1991: Numerous warnings are written by DFO and MOE officials, all concerning the dangers of importing diseases from foreign salmon eggs – a danger compounded by trade agreements allowing the salmon farming industry to import larger numbers of eggs. Narver’s letter from MOE to DFO is typical for 1991. “The proposed revisions not only open the window indefinitely but essentially allow for unlimited numbers of eggs. I know your Department argues that this has to done to avoid a Free Trade ruling.” Subsequent to these warnings comes a 1991 letter from BC Packers’ Director of Aquaculture to DFO. “As we have no other disease-free source available [other than Iceland] anywhere in the world, I am requesting that you reconsider your position, particularly in the light of the expected change in the DFO regulations.” Regulations are duly relaxed and from 1991 to 2010 at least 23 million eggs are imported into BC waters, mostly from sources other than Iceland.

This evidence from the Cohen Commission confirms that international sources of eggs were known to be rife with disease and that the aquaculture industry was perfectly willing to import these eggs, despite known risks and repeated warnings. Given trade agreements and the political leverage of the salmon farming industry to reduce precautionary regulations – the direction it “seems to dictate”, in Dave Narver’s damning words – the arrival of ISAv and other exotic diseases in BC’s marine ecology was inevitable.

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Salmon Virus Cover-up About Protecting Markets, Not Fish

Oceans, Salmon Farming and Aquaculture, , , , ,
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Judge Bruce Cohen obviously thought that recent evidence of the Infectious Salmon Anemia (ISAv) in BC’s wild salmon was serious enough to warrant a reconvening of his Commission of inquiry into the mysterious disappearance of Fraser River sockeye. The three days of exceptional December hearings were revelatory, confusing and clarifying. We have ISAv in BC waters but we don’t have disease. We have different labs getting positive and negative test results on the same fish samples. We have critically important research curtailed just when such vital information is most needed. We have intimations of openness in a practice of obstruction and censure. And we have huge financial benefits accruing to corporate interests if BC’s farmed and wild salmon can be marketed free of the stigma of disease.

The salmon farming industry has been habitually skewing information to bolster its practices and image – it’s been doing this for decades. And, as recent history has revealed, the credibility of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) has been compromised by its conflicting mandates of managing wild salmon and promoting salmon farming. Now we discover that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has its own conflicting mandates of suppressing pathogens while enhancing marketing opportunities for fish products. Consequently, when a viral disease is reported and the commercial value of fish is threatened, the CFIA assumes a defensive position by questioning the findings of the testing labs, by re-testing the degraded samples of infected fish with its notoriously inaccurate technology, and then recording “inconclusive” results as “negative”.

This strategy is evident in an e-mail from a CFIA executive, Joseph Beres, to his colleagues, congratulating them on a conference call to the media that was intended to quell concerns about allegations of ISAv in BC salmon. “It is clear that we are turning the PR tide to our favour,” he writes, “and this is because of the very successful performance of our spokes at the Tech Briefing yesterday…Congratulations! One battle is won, now we have to nail the surveillance piece, and we will win the war also.” This is the response of a promoter concerned about reputation and market, not the response of a scientist concerned about the danger of an ecosystem-threatening virus.

This might explain why the CFIA didn’t submit to the Cohen Commission evidence of ISAv in more than 100 wild salmon a decade ago. And why DFO advised its molecular geneticist, Dr. Kristi Miller, to curtail her research on ISAv – precisely the opposite of how prudence and science should respond to such an urgent situation.

Indeed, the Cohen Commission has exposed a systemic history of closeted secretiveness, hidden motives and contrived deception, all exposed since the initial October revelation that ISAv has been found in wild BC salmon. Dr. Sally Goldes, a 17-year fish health section head for the BC Environment Ministry, testified during the reconvened Cohen inquiry that “current Canada Fish Health Protection Rules do not provide a high level of regulatory security against the introduction of ISAv into British Columbia.” To underscore her concern, she noted, “If you really look closely at the regulations, from a scientific basis, there is not the high degree of protection that the government, and particularly DFO, states that they have.” In her opinion, the DFO and CFIA press conference that announced no ISAv in BC “was entirely premature.” In other words, ISAv could have leaked into BC waters from Atlantic egg sources used by salmon farms, and government agencies are systematically hiding that possibility.

Dr. Kristi Miller, one of the key DFO scientists in this process, took the initiative to do her own testing on wild and farmed salmon. She concluded that an ISA virus, or something that is 95 percent similar to the strain afflicting farmed Atlantic salmon in Norway, Scotland, Maritime Canada and Chile, is present in BC waters. And her review of DFO’s archival fish samples shows that markers for ISAv have been present in BC since 1986 – shortly after Atlantic salmon were first farmed here. A study by Dr. Molly Kibenge suggested that ISAv was here in 2004. Despite a UN convention that requires “evidence or suspicion” of ISAv to be reported, this was never done. Neither was evidence of ISAv reported to the initial phase of the Cohen Commission hearings.

Complicating the issue is a technical definition of “disease”. The CFIA takes the position that a suite of characteristics are needed to classify ISAv as such. Dr. Miller recognized this criterion in her testimony to the Commission when she said, “And obviously we have not established that [ISAv] causes disease.” Without evidence of dying or debilitated fish, there is no “disease”. But evidence does exist. A postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Miller, Brad Davis, notes ample data suggesting “that the virus is causing enough damage to elicit a strong response in salmon…. Therefore, we cannot at this point assume that this virus does not cause disease in these fish.” Regular reports cite adult Fraser River salmon inexplicably dying as they migrate upstream, sometimes just days before spawning. Cultus Lake salmon have long been exhibiting the same strange behaviour. Until now, no explanation has been available.

The CFIA has pledged to investigate by subjecting 7,700 salmon to more than 20,000 tests over the next two years. But this does not promise to clarify the mystery of BC’s disappearing wild salmon. The CFIA’s self-declared “surveillance objectives are to determine the absence/presence of three diseases of trade significance… [and] to support international trade negotiations by making [a] disease-freedom declaration that will stand international scrutiny.” If the CFIA’s version of science is to start with a trade-friendly conclusion and then research to support it, this does not bode well for BC’s wild salmon and the entire marine ecology founded on this iconic fish.

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Shades of Green: Kaleidoscope 2011

Climate Change, ,
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The kaleidoscope turns, the patterns change, but the colours remain mostly dark and sombre. This year, last year, and the years before are sobering because the dramatic changes in awareness, policy and mechanisms we need to address our major environmental challenges do not match the urgency they require.

Everyone who is informed on environmental matters is justifiably subdued because our corrective actions are not even slowing the erosion of the fundamental ecosystems that provide us with our essential comfort and security. Some individual and local efforts have been heroic. Some European countries have met or exceeded their Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gas reduction targets. But the record for the collective human community has been dismal. Most measures indicate deteriorating ecological conditions. Science confirms that our multiple environmental problems are escalating from serious to crisis.

The ethical reflex of those who are concerned about these environmental threats is to go where the problem is, to assume a critical position and highlight shortcomings for correction and future avoidance. This is not only a journalistic inclination but a moral imperative. If we are to confront our behaviour and its consequences realistically then we must examine ourselves with a blunt and painful honestly. We can applaud our successes – and we have many of them – but they mostly measure small against the enormity of the challenges we face. Changing to more energy efficient lights bulbs, building biking routes or buying a fuel efficient car may make us feel better but they are corrective actions that barely register against the magnitude of the changes we must accomplish. Complacence and an exaggerated sense of accomplishment is dangerous self-deception. As for solutions in progress, they no longer need attention because they are now effecting their benefits. The big worries are the big problems. And 2011 addressed them poorly.

The United Nations’ December climate talks in Durban were mostly unsuccessful, a formal exercise in futility that succeeded only by rescuing delay from the jaws of total failure. If climatologists are correct, we don’t have another eight years of grace to negotiate and implement an international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions. This strategy is so fraught with procrastination, pitfalls and vague commitments that – if precedent is any indication – either nothing will happen in 2020 or binding reductions will happen too late to avoid serious climate change.

A recent study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for example, compares the economic damage in 2050 by two strategies: by either making low-cost reductions in greenhouse gases immediately or by delaying major reductions until 2020. The worldwide impact on “real income” for the first option was minus-6 percent and minus-9 percent for the second option. According to the OECD projections, Canada would fare worse than the world average with both options: minus-12 percent for immediate reductions versus minus-15 percent for delayed reductions (Globe & Mail, Nov. 28/11).

And this is just the impact on “real income”. The UN has estimated that by 2030, the economic damage from climate change alone will be about $100 billion annually, a figure that counts only added health expenses, farming adaptation and infrastructure repairs. A broader assessment of costs, considering flooding, storms, manufacturing impacts and ecosystem restoration at least triples that annual amount to $300 billion. And even this amount may be too low because the UN’s worst-case scenarios for carbon dioxide emissions are regularly exceeded. In 2011 alone, the United States had a total of $52 billion in damages from a record of 12 major weather events (Ibid., Dec. 9/11). Statistically, 75 percent of all natural disasters are now climate related. The obvious conclusion to be reached from this trend is that greenhouse gases have incontrovertible adverse effects on weather and, from a purely economic perspective, we would find it cheaper to cut emissions now rather than later.

But that’s just climate change. We have other critical issues that need immediate attention. Species extinction is in freefall. The world’s industrial fishing fleets are exhausting the oceans of fish, the source of protein for one-fifth of humanity. Why is no emergency action being taken to create protective marine reserves? Acidification, dead zones and pollution beleaguer our oceans, problems that need immediate action. Canada, instead of subverting action on climate change and muzzling scientific dialogue, could be leading the world community toward sustainable uses of our oceans and resources. It could be spearheading a universal carbon tax on all CO2 production, a levy that could be directed toward preventative measures such as energy research, mass transit and ecological protection. (Both BC and Australia have a variation of this tax.) Instead of subsidizing the fossil fuel industry and encouraging Alberta’s dirty tar sands, Canada could be financing geothermal energy, a massive source of clean and renewable power that could meet our nation’s entire electrical needs with as few as 100 projects (Times-Colonist, Sept. 14/11).

So a review of 2011 provides the sobering realization that the world community – and Canada in particular – is moving backwards rather than forwards on key environmental issues. Circumstances are getting worse rather than better. We are not rising to meet our environmental challenges. If we were at least moving in a positive direction perhaps some optimism would be warranted. Criticism and negativity are prevalent because humanity – and particularly Canada – is failing the most important test in our history as a species. Cynicism is rising measurably. Political leaders seem to lack the insight, will or ability to take the necessary remedial action. And voters seem to lack the perspective, conviction or resolve to direct them to do what is increasingly imperative.

If this changes, then the colours in the kaleidoscope will brighten. Maybe 2012 will be a better year.

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