Schindler achieved many accomplishments in his 50+ year career. From 1968 to 1989, he directed the Experimental Lakes Area research facility in Ontario. Then, from 1989 onward, he was a Killam Memorial professor of ecology at the University of Alberta. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2004, and received more than 30 other awards and honours for his accredited work in environmental science. 

Schindler was a voice of science but also a voice of action. He spoke up about issues regarding environmental protection and policy in Canada, bringing these topics to the forefront of conversation, and always fighting to keep freshwater ecosystems free from industrial harm. In the A\J article, Schindler’s Pissed, Stephen Bocking interviewed Schindler about his thoughts on tar sands development in Canada. He shared his opinions, urging people to realize that scientific expertise is imperative to environmental assessment and decision making.

He will be remembered as an explorer, experimenter, ecologist, educator, conservationist, and much more. It is clear that his lifetime’s work of fighting for freshwater conservation will not be forgotten but will be foundational in conservation work going forward.

The post In Memory of David Schindler appeared first on A\J.

Soutar traveled across Canada investigating water as a focus of family, social, science, economic and natural encounters. The play and the associated lower Don River watershed walks, sound art installation and speakers panel ask us to revisit water, its protection and restoration.

            RELATED: Read our preview interview with the creators of The Watershed

Soutar enters into the actions of those working to maintain ELA’s vital research into the effects of industry on watersheds. She asks where economies impact our lives and what we can do about it. Director Chris Abraham’s production reveals Soutar’s research journey through an accessible and distinctively acted collage of action and setting. We don’t see factions, but rather changeable social actions and the water running through it all. The actors play multiple characters in quick vignettes in over a dozen locales using exaggerated spoken and physical actions. They visibly switch gender and age, and act in simultaneous different geographic pockets across the stage. 

The audience encounters a representative range of Canadians’ relationships to our watersheds: disaster, a hysterical broadcaster warns of Hurricane Sandy; ELA student and water advocate Diane Orihel speaks for scientists barred from doing so; a multigenerational family discusses the oil economy; conferences with water scientists; an icy lake and ELA research structures; the House of Commons debates the budget bill cutting funding to the ELA; and a Winnebago carries the playwright’s family across Canada to the oil sands.

Soutar’s two daughters learn about water flow – in their home, in their watershed, and across the country. In Fort McMurray, they interview oil sands workers and a pilot about their actions in relation to watersheds. They take on tough questions while Soutar demands documentary “openness.”

Kristen Thomson plays only Soutar, relentlessly questioning, rallying her research. Actors alternately play characters with conflicting views of the ELA. Eric Peterson is both Soutar’s Conservative father and renowned and outspoken ELA water researcher David Schindler. Tanja Jacobs is Maude Barlow, calling for a revolutionary change to our economy, and an oil company executive discrediting Schindler’s media presentations. Schindler stands elsewhere on stage defending himself..

Characters offer links between personal and shared economics. Soutar’s husband is the ever-present father – except when flying off to his acting career that stabilizes the family economy. Ngozi Paul plays Chris Abraham as co-producer talking to Panamania organizers to guarantee funding support for Soutar’s ongoing research into federal government actions.

Is there a conspiracy behind the closure of the ELA? Prime Minister Harper sings “With a little help from my friends” as Soutar drives across Canada seeking an interview from the only accessible Conservative MP. Rather than investigating these actions, the focus moves in on the watersheds. A scientist quietly negotiates a new home for the ELA. Both Soutar’s daughters and the young water advocate take on watershed advocacy and responsibility for their actions.

The changing visual design engages the audience in ever-present nature through video projected onto the two story brick stage wall: a dripping tap; deluges of rain; snow; a winter fireplace; the movies that the children watch too often and that are linked to their lack of nature and healthy food; and the cockpit of the plane flying over the oil sands. Sound creates sensual referencing: A power drill cuts a hole in lake ice for an experimental and drinking sample. Near the end, the stage is flooded in wave-like light and characters speak and move as if immersed in water. They emerge and Soutar asks a final question of her father: Can we reconcile our current economy with the health of our watersheds and our ability to make our own life choices? 

The Watershed is playing until July 19 at the Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto.

The post The Watershed appeared first on A\J.

Annabel Soutar and Chris Abraham are, respectively, the artistic directors of Montreal’s Porte Parole theatre and Toronto’s Crows Theatre. Between 2012 and 2014, the two collaborated on producing and touring Seeds, a play about the use and spread of genetically modified organisms. I spoke to them last weekend about their new play, The Watershed, funded by the Toronto 2015 Pan Am Parapan Am Games.  

The Watershed explores the controversial change in ownership of the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) after the federal government cut its funding in 2012. In 2014, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit organization in Manitoba, took over the ELA, amid questions about its continuing capabilities. Soutar began research for a play on watersheds and narrowed it down to the controversy over the ELA. She discoursed with activist scholars, government officials and her family to enter into the tense interactions between our need for sustainable watersheds and an economy based on their harm. “We share the responsibility … to protect and revitalize [our] shared and lived watersheds,” Soutar says.

As part of this journey, Soutar and her family travelled to the oil sands in Alberta. Her children dialogued about what our society does to and needs from our watersheds, while her father spoke to a resource-driven economy and the supposed need to cut government expenditures.

Soutar is a “documentarist.” She approaches people who are “trying, through action, to overcome something they can’t reconcile” and brings their stories to the world – stories that often receive limited attention either from the mainstream media because of time, money, editorial choice or because of the selectivity of social media.

If the media is often her first portal into a story, her main source is the people involved. She shares their stories in their own words. The name of her theatre, “Porte Parole” means to carry spoken language. She brings people’s language, verbatim, to the stage. She goes “behind the scenes,” into life, to discover the moments of struggle and enter into the actions they use to overcome what they are going through. She builds a network of interested participants that grows into a community of ongoing engagement as the plays are toured across the country.

As director and dramaturge, Chris Abraham has guided the writing of The Watershed, worked with actors to advance it and has now created the current production – all to fulfill the playwright’s quest to bring life to the stage and then, in turn, alter life.

“We are used to consuming stories about our public, social, our political life through screens.” In contrast, he says, the experience of having human beings stand in front of you to bear witness to somebody’s experience through verbatim language is akin to gathering around the village square and talking to somebody about what they’ve experienced.

Each actor plays multiple characters of varying interests and politics – a reflection on “a common human route,” despite Canadians’ diverse interests

For Soutar, the stage tests the truths of her script. Stage artists are creative human beings, who, through their own reality, filter what the audience will encounter, as opposed to just offering information. The audience will see the production’s presentation of the “dynamic skirmishes about the water resources in our country.” Truth is thus “a mosaic” of many peoples’ actions. Now, she says we will need imagination to facilitate change.  However, Soutar does not enforce her own truth. As a character in the play she makes her playwriting actions “transparent.” The play does not provide alternatives. It asks how “urgent this (situation ) is” and “it puts pressure on governments to do something.” The play is not an activist one; it does not rally people to one idea. It is intended to “activate public engagement”

Soutar’s plays engage their audiences by “examining a collective cultural moment” and building a community around it. The Watershed asks about Canada as a nation with significant natural resources, and how our economy relates to these resources, In so doing, she reflects on the “shifting values of our institutions, both private and public”.

The Watershed is in previews now and runs from July 12 to 19. The July 12 performance will be followed by a panel of environmental researchers, some of whom were written into the play. Maude Barlow is on the panel. Stay tuned for our full review of the play.

Learn more about the ELA
Check out “Up Close and Personal“, “Schindler’s Pissed“, and “We Saved the ELA: Now What?” for some of our past coverage of the Experimental Lakes Area.

The post New Play about the Experimental Lakes Area, The Watershed, Opens in Toronto This Week appeared first on A\J.

In 2011, the CEOs of oil companies operating in the tar sands were found guilty of ecocide in a mock trial staged by the Eradicating Ecocide Global Initiative. The trial was part of British lawyer Polly Higgins’ campaign to have ecocide recognized as an international crime by the United Nations. The UN already acknowledges “widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment” as a war crime in the Rome Statute, but there’s no peacetime equivalent.

In Canada, the David Suzuki Foundation and Ecojustice are currently fighting to have the right to a healthy environment enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. About 100 other countries’ constitutions have already recognized this right, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has gone the opposite direction, chipping away at environmental protections, research and programs over the last seven years.

Harper has been Canada’s worst prime minister from an environmental perspective, says David Boyd, lawyer and author of The Right to a Healthy Environment. He argues that Canadians have failed in their responsibility to hold Harper accountable by re-electing him, “eroding our reputation as a green nation.”

Boyd says that if the Right to a Healthy Environment campaign is successful, we’ll have more opportunity than elections to ensure accountability. “Non-regression,” a common principle in countries recognizing environmental rights, sets existing standards as “a baseline that can only be improved, and not weakened,” explains Boyd. “Thus, the recent weakening of key Canadian environmental laws … would have been unconstitutional!”

Is the Harper administration guilty of ecocide? You be the judge. Review the evidence and deliver your verdict below.

The charge: Promoting willful ignorance by eliminating advisory bodies, restricting data gathering and destroying scientific records.

The evidence:

•  In January 2008, the Office of the National Science Adviser was phased out.
•  The mandatory long-form census was replaced with a voluntary national household survey in July 2010, reducing the availability of reliable and detailed data.
•  The 2012 budget halved $5-million in annual funding for the First Nations Statistical Institute and eliminated it completely in 2013, leading to 23 staff layoffs.
•  The 25-year-old National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy was shut down in March 2013 because the government didn’t agree with its reports. The NRTEE was prohibited from publishing its final report online and from transferring historical materials to another organization. (They circulated them anyway.)
• New January 2014: After seven out of nine Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries were closed in 2013, decades of public research documents the government claimed would be digitized were dumped in the garbage, sent straight to landfills or even burned, according to numerous reports from government scientists. Affected institutions inlude the Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg; the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland and the St. Andrews Biological Station (SABS) in New Brunswick, where Rachel Carson conducted research for Silent Spring. The destroyed documents included critical baseline data from up to 100 years ago.
• New January 2015: Environment Canada is accused of attempting to halt further investigations after the Commission of Environmental Co-operation, a part of NAFTA, was called to action to find out whether tailings ponds in Alberta are leaking into nearby water sources, thus breaking Canada’s Federal Fisheries Act. 

The charge: Preventing knowledge from reaching the public by muzzling government scientists.

The evidence: 

•  Restrictive new protocols were implemented at Environment Canada in 2007 and Natural Resources Canada in 2010 requiring scientists to obtain government permission before speaking to the media. Meanwhile, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has restricted scientists from publishing research prior to screening for “concerns/impacts to DFO policy.”
•  A lengthy 2008 guide to “Meeting the Media” instructs DFO employees to “refer to the Department or the Government in your answers and do not use the personal pronoun ‘I’. After all you’re a DFO spokesperson and not an opinionated commentator.” (The guide is included in a report from Democracy Watch.)
•  In April 2010, Natural Resources Canada prohibited geologist Scott Dallimore from speaking to reporters regarding his Nature paper about a flood that occurred about 13,000 years ago without his answers being vetted in advance – despite it having nothing to do with NRC’s identified “hot topics,” such as minerals, energy or anthropogenic climate change.
•  The National Research Council Press was privatized in September 2010, revoking free access to 17 journals.
•  From January to August 2011, DFO researcher Kristi Miller was not allowed to give interviews about her 2011 paper on a virus suspected of killing wild sockeye salmon in BC.
•  In summer 2011, Environment Canada denied water researcher Marley Waiser permission to speak about two papers disclosing the presence of chemicals and pharmaceuticals in Saskatchewan’s Wascana Creek.
•  In October 2011, federal scientist David Tarasick was prohibited from discussing the discovery of one of the largest ozone holes above the Arctic until after media interest waned.
•  Environment Canada scientists were shadowed and monitored by media-relations handlers at the International Polar Year conference in April 2012.
•  Libraries at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria and the Northern Forestry Centre in Edmonton were closed to the public in October 2012.
•  In November 2012, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency successfully lobbied to have the research lab at the Atlantic Veterinary College-University of PEI stripped of its international credentials for revealing evidence of infectious salmon anemia in BC salmon, thereby threatening exports.
•  In April 2013, the DFO required scientists working on a joint Canada-US Arctic research project to sign an exhaustive confidentiality agreement. (Some of the US scientists, including University of Delaware oceanographer Andreas Muenchow, refused.)
•  The new Library and Archives Canada code of conduct, released in March 2013, prohibits employees from participating in professional conferences, teaching and other “personal activities” without permission and adherence to strict criteria, including that the subject matter not be “related to the mandate or activities of LAC.” The mandate of the LAC is “to facilitate co-operation among communities involved in the acquisition, preservation and diffusion of knowledge.” In other words, the LAC is not allowed to fulfill its own mandate.
•  A June 2013 survey by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada found that 90 per cent of federal scientists “feel they are not allowed to speak freely to the media” about their work – and one-third have been actively prevented from doing so.

The charge: Systematically dismantling decades of environmental protection legislation.

The evidence: 

•  Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in December 2011, sidestepping an estimated $14-billion in penalties for noncompliance with reducing emissions targets below 1990 levels. A much easier federal target of 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020 was announced.
•  With omnibus Bill C-38, key portions of the Fisheries Act were repealed in June 2012, endangering habitats and removing triggers for impact assessments. Bill C-38 also replaced the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act with a much weaker version that restricts public participation in assessment hearings, and neutered the Species at Risk Act, including removing time limits on permits.
•  In December 2012, environmental oversight was reduced by changes proposed by the pipeline industry to the Navigable Waters Protection Act.
•  Canada became the only country to withdraw from the UN anti-drought convention in March 2013.
•  In April 2013, legislation proposed by the oil and gas industry amended the list of industrial projects requiring environmental reviews, removing provincially regulated pipelines and tar sands processing facilities.
• NEW OCTOBER 2014: A report from Canada’s Environment Commissioner found that the federal government lacks clear guidelines about environmental assessment requirements, stating a concern that “some significant projects may not be assessed.”
• NEW OCTOBER 2014: The same report revealed that a draft of emissions regulations for the oil and gas sector promised in 2006 – and crucial to meeting fast-approaching reduction targets – has been ready for a year, but no public consultation has taken place. The bulk of consultation so far has been with industry and one province (three guesses which one…).

The charge: Limiting scientists’ ability to provide perspective by reducing environmental research and think tank funding.

The evidence:

•  In 2007, Harper announced a new Science, Technology and Innovation Council to prioritize industry goals and economics over scientific perspective.
•  The government announced it would not renew funding for the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences in March 2010 (although the facility stopped receiving money in
• 2006). Since 2000, CFCAS funded more than $110-million of research into prairie drought, air quality and other pressing issues.
•  In April 2010, 86 workers were laid off at the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, the country’s national science library and leading publisher of scientific information.
•  Funding for the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) ran out in February 2012. Significant pressure from the scientific community won a partial reprieve of $5-million over five years – well short of the Nunavut-based facility’s $1.5-million annual operating budget.
•  The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council reallocated more than $15-million from basic research to industry partnership programs in 2012, continuing a trend that began in 2005. NSERC ended its major resources support program in May 2012, which provided operational funding for 37 organizations and research stations – including the Kluane Lake Research Station in the Yukon (which lost half of its operating budget after more than 50 years) and the world-renowned Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre on Vancouver Island (which lost $500,000 in annual funding it had been receiving since 1970).
•  The May 2012 federal budget also cut $2-million in annual funding for the Experimental Lakes Area in Northern Ontario. An interim agreement between the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the provinces of Ontario and Manitoba is keeping the 45-year-old globally renowned freshwater research laboratory open until at least March 2014. But in September 2013, the federal government cancelled the agreement that allowed whole-ecosystem experiments to take place, making the kind of research done at ELA illegal.
•  In 2013, the National Research Council was told to focus on science with practical business applications.
• New March 2014: The Canada Centre for Inland Waters in Burlington, ON is down to 40 scientists as of January 2014, from 63 in 2012. Researchers here study topics like pollution, toxicity and climate change in the Great Lakes area and beyond. Many of them have been reassigned to study the Alberta oil sands, and scientists say important research on the Great Lakes environment and public health is being compromised.
• NEW SEPTEMBER 2014: The non-partisan international development research organization North-South Institute announced its closure due to federal funding cuts, another blow to evidence-based policy-making.

The charge: Undermining conservation and monitoring efforts by cutting funding, staff and programs.

The evidence:

•  The 2011-2012 Environment Canada budget was reduced by $222.2-million over the previous year and 1,211 jobs were cut. Among the hardest-hit programs were Climate Change and Clean Air, Weather and Environmental Services, Water Resources and Internal Services, the Action Plan on Clean Water and the Federal Contaminated Sites Action Plan. The Chemicals Management Plan, the Clean Air Agenda and the Air Quality Health Index and the Species at Risk programs were eliminated.
•  In April 2012, the Sustainable Water Management Division of Environment Canada ended its work on water-use efficiency and conservation, including the Municipal Water and Wastewater Survey, because of $1.5-million in budget cuts.
•  Four national marine conservation areas and 42 national parks lost operational capacity when 638 Parks Canada jobs were declared surplus in April 2012.
•  To save $79.3-million, 400 jobs were cut at the DFO in May 2012, affecting research stations, fish hatcheries and libraries. The DFO’s Ocean Contaminants & Marine Toxicology Program was also cancelled entirely. A year later, the DFO’s budget was reduced by $100-million over three years, replaced by $10-million for local organizations to do fish habitat work.
•  Other casualties of the 2012 budget included the Centre for Offshore Oil, Gas and Energy Research, whose work on the ecological effects of oil and gas was phased out in spite of its experience helping with the BP oil spill cleanup in 2010. The Smokestacks Emissions Monitoring Team was also dismantled to save $718,000, and the Mersey Biodiversity Centre in Milton, Nova Scotia, was slated for closure by April 1, 2014.
•  On the 20th anniversary of the UV index in October 2012, Environment Canada’s ozone monitoring department was eliminated by a $13.3-million budget cut. (The first ozone hole over the Arctic was discovered in 2011.)
• NEW OCTOBER 2014: A report from Canada’s Environment Commissioner found delays in Joint Oil Sands Monitoring (JOSM) program initiatives, no concrete plans for monitoring beyond 2015 and that one of two emissions reduction committees hasn’t met since 2011.

The charge: Obstructing and threatening environmental education and advocacy efforts.

The evidence:

•  In April 2006, the government suddenly stopped funding the $45-million One-Tonne Challenge program carried out by local groups across Canada.
•  Environment Canada backed out on $547,000 in promised funding for the Canadian Environmental Network (RCEN) in October 2011, forcing the network to lay off its entire staff. The RCEN is more than 30 years old and has 600 member organizations.
•  In January 2012, the Prime Minister’s office threatened Tides Canada’s charitable status for supporting advocacy group ForestEthics. With an audit of Tides Canada already underway, the government ordered the Canadian Revenue Agency to increase its monitoring of charities’ spending in March 2012.
•  In February 2012, Public Safety Canada identified environmentalists as “issue-based domestic terrorists” in its counter-terrorism strategy.
•  The Centre of the Universe astronomy interpretive centre and 100-year-old telescope in Saanich, BC, were closed to the public as of fall 2013 due to National Research Council cuts.
• New February 2014: The CBC released a list of seven environmental groups being audited by the CRA: The David Suzuki Foundation, Tides Canada, West Coast Environmental Law, The Pembina Foundation, Environmental Defence, Equiterre and Ecology Action Centre. John Bennett of Sierra Club Canada called it “a war against the sector.” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has said he’s considering far stricter rules about charities using any funds for anything political (currently 10% of spending can go to non-partisan advocacy efforts). Complaints from pro-oil-sands group Ethical Oil are likely behind at least some of the audits. Ethical Oil is believed to be funded largely by industry groups and was founded by Alykhan Velshi, now director of issues management for Harper.
  Note: 10 per cent of those organizations’ budgets combined would be $4.8-million – about the same amount Enbridge spent on just one Northern Gateway campaign in 2012.

Read even more about the two-front war on science by checking out David Boyd’s blog, John Dupuis’ extensive list at ScienceBlogs and Chris Turner’s new book The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper’s Canada, and watch the “In Defence of Science” panel discussion we presented in September 2012 with the University of Ottawa’s Institute for the Environment.

Or, join the resistance movement with the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecojustice, Evidence for Democracy, Democracy Watch, and Shit Harper Did, just some of the groups working to expose and fight attacks on environmental protection and science.

Read Laura’s blog post “Why You Need to Talk About Science More” for more on how you can help build a science-friendly society and Janet Kimantas’ post on DFO library closures.

The post Crimes Against Ecology appeared first on A\J.

This article is part of A\J’s web series Night School. In celebration of back-to-school time and our Night issue, the A\J web team brought you a series of quick lessons, posted between September 16 to October 11, 2013, covering everything from activism tactics and canning tips to how factory farms breed disease.

A\J has always held a pretty wide definition of “environmental,” recognizing the interconnectedness of ecological, social, economic, cultural and political interests. This week in A\J History class, we look at our coverage of a concept that shares this sense of interconnectedness: ecosystem ecology (we also reveal our best-selling issues in a bonus lesson at the end).

In a 1994 issue dedicated to the topic, Stephen Bocking defines ecosystem ecology as “a comprehensive, holistic, integrated approach” to “the study of living species and their physical environment as an integrated whole.” Bocking recounts an extensive history of the concept, starting with its inception in 1935 by British ecologist Arthur Tansley (featured on the cover; you can download the articles below).

Detailing the “contradictory objectives” of protection and control to which ecosystems ecology (and ecology in general) has been put to use over the years, Bocking emphasizes that the lens through which we view and interpret nature both shapes and is shaped by “the concerns and priorities of society.” This continues to resonate strongly today, given the threat of climate change and the political nature of Canada’s response – or lack thereof.

Bocking explains that (up until the 1990s, at least), “most Canadian ecological research has been tied more or less closely to immediate resource management concerns” – fisheries, for example. The establishment of the Experimental Lakes Area has been a notable exception. The significance of the ELA’s long-term, whole-ecosystem approach is explained in our interview with David Schindler from 2012, and its defunding by the federal government is arguably emblematic of the lens through which the current government prefers to view nature.

Bocking goes on to lament a turn away from ecosystems ecology starting in the early 1970s in pursuit of easier answers, but A\J has continued to provide space for ecosystems thinking and other equally nuanced approaches. In what then-editor and current Editorial Board chair Bob Gibson named as A\J’s “most influential” article, James Kay and Eric Schneider argue against over-simplified, managerial approaches to nature in favour of “Embracing Complexity.” Kay and Schneider said it better than I can summarize:

If we are going to deal successfully with our biosphere, we are going to have to change how we do science and management. We will have to learn that we don’t manage ecosystems, we manage our interaction with them. Furthermore, the search for simple rules of ecosystem behaviour is futile.

Ecosystem self-organization unfolds like a symphony. Our challenge is to understand the rules of composition and the limitations and directions they place on the organization process…. However we should not expect to a have a science of ecology which allows us to predict the next note.

In 2008’s “Thinking Like an Ecosystem,” Chris McLaughlin again calls for a move away from “our business-as-usual approach to natural resources management,” with a quirky but effective Humpty Dumpty metaphor and an homage to Aldo Leopold’s Thinking Like a Mountain. Resiliency is the key word this time, promoted as the best approach to dealing with the inevitable uncertainties of nature.

One year later, an issue on The New Ecology featured Thomas Homer-Dixon arguing that ecology will be the “master science” of the 21^st century, and Stephen Bocking back again, arguing that, in the current political climate, no field of science will lead society. “Science can inform,” he writes, but “it cannot lead, and the essential environmental questions are political, not scientific.” He also warns that “ecology can also oppress when science is allowed to displace other forms of knowledge and experience,” such as local or Indigenous knowledge.

While these and other articles in The New Ecology show that many ecologists have, in fact, embraced complexity, it’s also clear that isn’t enough: we need everyone else to do so as well. I encourage you to check out the articles for more insight and solutions.

Read the articles:

• From the 1994 Making Sense of the Ecosystem Approach issue (in one PDF):
• The End of the World as We Know It, Bob Gibson’s editorial
• Visions of Nature and Society: A History of the Ecosystem Concept, by Stephen Bocking
• Embracing Complexity: The Challenge of the Ecosystem Approach, by James J. Kay and Eric Schneider
• Thinking Like an Ecosystem, by Chris McLaughlin
• The Newest Science, by Thomas Homer-Dixon
• Leopold’s Challenge, by Stephen Bocking

Buy these issues for even more on ecosystems:

• Making Sense of the Ecosystem Approach 20.3
• Sustainability Taken Seriously 34.4
• The New Ecology 35.4
• Building Resilience 36.2 (a best-selling issue!)

You can get any of these issues or our best-sellers below for just $4 each (regular $6) using the coupon “nightschool4” at checkout. 

Bonus lesson: A\J best-sellers!

I was surprised to find out that our best-selling issue on newsstands was Out of the Box from January 2008. It’s not a particularly eye-catching cover – until you see the last headline in the list: “Harry Potter and Death.” Apparently we’ve got a lot of Harry Potter fans out there.

Runners up included Building Resilience from March 2010, EcoBooks from May 2011 (featuring a naked David Suzuki; no surprise there), and our November 2011 40^th Anniversary issue, a favourite of Bob Gibson’s. Founder Bob Paehlke’s favourite issue? The hard-hitting In Defence of Science, featuring what he named our all-time best headline – “Schindler’s Pissed.“

The post The Evolution of Ecosystems Thinking in AJ appeared first on A\J.

MANY GRADUATE STUDENTS have helped conduct research at Ontario’s Experimental Lakes Area. The dozen scientists profiled below are broadly representative of at least 47 PhD recipients who completed their degrees using research they participated in at the ELA. In addition, more than 80 master’s theses have been produced from ELA projects.

Of course, many of the ELA master’s students, including those who have gone on to earn PhDs at other locations, have subsequently made their marks in the environmental sciences. Many of the hundreds of undergraduates who worked at the ELA as seasonal research assistants have also had successful careers in environmental research and/or management.

Steven Emerson, professor of Oceanography, College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences, College of the Environment, University of Washington

Emerson studied the carbon cycle of the ocean, with an emphasis on the mechanisms of atmosphere-ocean CO2 exchange. He was the first to complete a PhD at ELA (1970-74), as a student of Wallace Broecker at Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory, Columbia University, studying gas exchange rates using radioactive tracers. Emerson has also supervised many graduate students, and he co-authored the 2008 book, Chemical Oceanography and the Marine Carbon Cycle.

John W. M. Rudd, retired scientist-in-charge, Experimental Lakes Area, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and principal, Rudd & Kelly Research, Saltspring Island, BC

Rudd is an international expert on methyl mercury, and co-leader of the multidisciplinary research teams that conducted the ELARP and METAALICUS experimental studies at the ELA beginning in 1991. He conducted his PhD research (1972-76) on methane cycling at the ELA under the supervision of N. Campbell and R.D. Hamilton from the University of Manitoba.

Raymond H. Hesslein, retired scientist-in-charge and senior scientist, Experimental Lakes Area, Fisheries and Oceans Canada

An international expert in biogeochemical processes and modelling, Hesslein is currently advising the Lake Winnipeg Research Foundation. He conducted PhD research on chemical fluxes between sediments and water at ELA (1971-76) as a student of Wallace Broecker, Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory, Columbia University.

Robert J. Flett, founder and chief scientist, Flett Research Ltd., Winnipeg, and adjunct professor of Microbiology, University of Manitoba

Flett Research is an environmental laboratory and consulting firm that specializes in analyzing mercury and environmental radioisotopes, with clients in North and South America, Europe and Asia. Flett received both his master’s (1973) and PhD (1977) from the University of Manitoba, conducting his research at the ELA on nitrogen fixation in lakes.

Sherry Schiff, professor of Earth Sciences, and research chair in biogeochemistry of watersheds at the Water Institute, University of Waterloo

Schiff first worked at the ELA as a summer research assistant in 1974, and later earned her PhD in 1986 from Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory, Columbia University, while studying acid neutralization in sediments.

Mark Servos, professor of Biology, Canada Research Chair in water quality protection, University of Waterloo

Formerly a research scientist at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters, Servos investigates the impact of contaminants on aquatic life, beginning with gene expression and including whole communities of fish. He earned his PhD (1988) from the University of Manitoba by studying the fate and availability of dioxins in ELA waters under Derek Muir and Barry Webster.

Jean-Pierre Sweerts, chairman of the DOB Foundation, treasurer of the Ecological Management Foundation and board member of the Micro Water Facility.

Sweerts is the founder of Linius Capital, which finances and supports business development of clean energy and technology projects, companies and funds. Under the guidance of John Rudd, Sweerts conducted some of his research on chemical fluxes in the sediment-water interface at the ELA for his PhD (1990) from Rijksuniveriteit Groningen (Netherlands).

Vincent St. Louis, professor of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta.

St. Louis is an expert on methyl mercury and greenhouse gases who focuses on the natural biogeochemical cycling of elements in the environment, and the human disruptions to these cycles. He first worked at the ELA as a summer research assistant, and later earned his PhD from the University of Toronto with work at the ELA on how lake acidification impacts tree swallows.

Peter Delorme, former director of product regulation and acting director general, Environmental Assessment Directorate, Health Canada. Died in February 2012.

Delorme made a career of fervently promoting the need for science-based solutions to protect Canadians and their environment. He earned his PhD in 1995 from the University of Manitoba, conducting research at the ELA on pesticides in fish.

Sebastien Lamontagne, research scientist and project leader, Regional Water and Healthy Water Ecosystems, CSIRO (Australia), and chairperson of the Hydrological Society of South Australia.

Lamontagne focuses on groundwater hydrology, environmental tracers and biogeochemistry, aiming to understand how water regime changes impact river and wetland ecosystems. He earned his PhD (1998) from the University of Waterloo, conducting research at the ELA on nitrogen cycling in upland boreal forests.

Brian Branfireun, associate professor of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto, and Canada Research Chair in environment and sustainability, University of Western Ontario.

Branfireun specializes in ecohydrology, and earned his PhD (1999) from McGill University while studying under Nigel Roulet. He also contributed to the ELA Reservoir Project, working on catchment-scale hydrology and methylmercury biogeochemistry.

Marguerite Xenopoulos, associate professor of Biology, Trent University.

Xenopoulos’ research focuses on understanding how human activities affect ecosystem structure and function in lakes and rivers, both at the local and global scale. She earned her PhD (2002) from the University of Alberta while conducting ELA research on solar radiation and water-column mixing under the supervision of David Schindler. Xenopoulos was also granted a university faculty award position from NSERC and the early researcher award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation.

The post Web Exclusive: ELA Alumni Make a Splash appeared first on A\J.

AN IMPORTANT PART of any student’s education is hands-on experience. In 1968, a rare opportunity to put this maxim into practice materialized as the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) in northwestern Ontario. Some have referred to it as a summer camp for scientists.

The ELA provided an ideal field site to train graduate students and get them involved in world-changing science. Researchers and students from around the world have come to the ELA for more than 40 years to conduct whole-ecosystem experiments. These experiments are done on small lakes because laboratory-based studies fail to represent the real world. Small lakes, the kind you could canoe across in a leisurely 15 minutes, provide the realism required for applied freshwater research.

This idea is simple yet powerful: to study lakes before, during and after they are subjected to experimental changes. Lakes and rivers around the world are altered as human populations alter the flow of water and add wastewater nutrients, toxic compounds and acid rain. At the ELA, these same manipulations are conducted in a controlled setting that is unavailable in and around cities and towns. For each experiment, the planet’s best researchers and students are assembled, and their work becomes relevant everywhere. The educational opportunities at this freshwater incubator are immense, and its results are invaluable.

And yet, the Government of Canada wants to close the ELA, just when we need it most. This past May, federal employees were abruptly told that the facility would be shut down as a result of 2012 budget cuts.

Distinguished ecologist James Elser from Arizona State University recently likened the closure of the ELA to “sort of like the US government shutting down Los Alamos – its most important nuclear-physics site – or taking the world’s best telescope and turning it off.”

Peter Dillon, a Royal Society of Canada fellow and watershed biogeochemistry expert, calls the ELA “Canada’s flagship environmental research centre. The work done at this site has been instrumental in providing information that has been the foundation of many of Canada’s environmental policies and regulations concerning our aquatic resources.”

Findings by ELA researchers and their students led to phosphorus being eliminated from detergents to save Lake Erie, which in the 1960s and early-70s was plagued by algal blooms, unswimmable waters and beaches littered with dead fish. The 1991 Canada-USA Air Quality Agreement to reduce acid rain was signed because ELA research showed that regulations were not nearly stringent enough to protect lakes and fish populations. The US government now limits mercury emissions from coal-fired plants because ELA scientists showed that doing so would reduce neurotoxin exposure in fish, and therefore humans. More recently, studies of high concentrations of estrogen in freshwater ecosystems have identified the need for better wastewater treatment technologies and product regulation.

Both graduate and undergrad students have always been in the thick of this big research with global significance. Many ELA graduate students have gone on to successful academic careers, including geochemist Paul Quay and Canada Research chairs Mark Servos and Brian Branfireun. In addition to the more than 1000 scientific articles produced by ELA research teams, more than 125 graduate theses – both master’s and doctoral – were completed on site. It is not hard to find ELA alumni as high-level scientists all over the planet.

John Shearer came to the ELA near the end of his bachelor’s degree in the summer of 1969. The excitement and atmosphere of world-class research ultimately kept him working there in the field, lab and eventually as the operations manager until his retirement in 2007. Shearer describes the origins of the ELA as a direct response to the problems with Lake Erie. Ultimately, an international group of researchers was assembled to figure out the causes of numerous environmental problems and the strategies needed to deal with them. Shearer says the effect has been like a scientific immersion program for graduate students.

Until the 1970s, most freshwater research in Canada was heavily focused on fisheries, and the ELA brought together scientists from Canada, the US and UK, Europe and Japan, all at the same time. “There’s no question that working at ELA was the most formative educational experience I’ve had, and you see the mark of the ELA on university departments across the country,” says Helen Baulch, an alumna who became an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan. “It’s the reason that Canada has been a leading nation in freshwater research.”

Baulch’s master’s research combined new experimentation on near-shore microbial communities using decades of biological, chemical and meteorological monitoring data to assess the impact of climate warming on lakes. She applied the results to her PhD about nitrogen loading into agricultural streams and the production of nitrous oxide, a strong greenhouse gas and destroyer of ozone. “Working at ELA informs your entire perspective,” says Baulch, “and most importantly, my time at the ELA helped me start to see and understand environmental problems at the scale of whole ecosystems. It’ll be a career-long challenge to think and work at the ecosystem scale, but one that the ELA has proven to be possible, and to be absolutely critical in understanding today’s water issues.”

One critical part of the ELA approach to science is that everyone lives in a field camp together in the boreal forest. When Baulch was there in 2000, she “could grab a coffee and eat breakfast with top researchers, discussing new science or getting insight into my own science. I could canoe out to sites where some of the most pivotal aquatic research has been done – affecting environmental policy around the world – and learn from the amazing diversity of research going on on-site.”

Britt Hall, associate professor at the University of Regina, did her graduate work at ELA in the late-1990s and early-2000s. She looked at how quickly mercury content increased in water – and the subsequent bioaccumulation in fish – in the aftermath of flooding to create hydroelectric reservoirs. The problem of mercury in commercial and sport fish rising above safe consumption levels became apparent in the 1970s, after the construction of very large reservoirs in Manitoba, Quebec and Labrador. It has remained high in some reservoirs for decades. Recommendations from research done by Hall and her colleagues have since been used by Manitoba Hydro to design reservoirs that reduce the risk of elevated mercury in fish.

Working at the ELA had a substantial impact not only on Hall’s research, but also on her life. “You live five months of the year with a diverse set of people that you are united with because of a passion for the environment and science. I met lifelong friends there. I was exposed to art and music and books that I would never have discovered. I started an amazing journey of self-discovery there that I am still continuing, albeit at a much slower rate. It makes me sick that others may not experience that. It makes me sick that I won’t be able to take my kids there and tell them how being at the ELA changed my life.”

The interaction with scientists that Baulch and Hall describe has also left an indelible mark in my mind. During the summers of 1999 to 2003, I did my graduate research at the ELA, and volunteered to do field work with many research groups. I collected samples for mercury testing in Teflon bottles, took plankton samples, collected fish data and clipped vegetation. Whether sitting in a boat or walking through the forest, I learned why those other researchers sampled the way they did and why they looked at a lake differently than I did. These experiences markedly improved my own research, which focuses on greenhouse gas production in hydroelectric reservoirs and nutrient cycling in rivers.

Without the kind of detailed, multi-year, whole-ecosystem research done at the ELA, government policy aimed at managing the planet’s freshwater sources would be like a shot in the dark. It would take another generation of researchers to rebuild this capability if we lost it, which is what will happen if the ELA is shut down in March 2013.

I was at the ELA in June 2012, a month after the closure announcement was made. There were new projects underway and excited grad students in tow. But the concern for the ELA’s fate was palpable. Would this be the last time any of us would be there? Would students have their theses cancelled? Would Canada lose its ability to protect freshwater and fish using critical research? Would we lose the next generation of aquatic scientists?

I recall times at the ELA when more than a dozen PhDs would be sitting around with grad students, talking about great science and how to produce it. The lessons I learned in that setting were wider, deeper and more illuminating than anything I could have learned from a small advisory committee with a narrow research focus. Without the wisdom that comes out of those 58 lakes in northwestern Ontario, we’ll end up floating through that dark in a canoe with no paddles, trying to save ourselves with ideas that may not hold any water.

Learn more and/or lend your support to the Coalition to Save ELA at saveela.org.

To demonstrate the impact that ELA Alumni have made on the professional science community, we asked Shearer to identify a dozen former student researchers who have gone on to do important work with other institutions. Read Shearer’s profiles of their achievements.

Read A\J’s exclusive (and extensive) interview with David Schindler, who helped establish the ELA and became one of the country’s freshwater science pioneers.

The post Up Close and Personal appeared first on A\J.

DAVID SCHINDLER is one of Canada’s most influential environmental scientists, both at home and abroad. Between 1968 and 1989, he directed the Experimental Lakes Area research facility in Ontario, leading experiments on freshwater ecosystems that advanced our understanding of the effects of nutrient enrichment, acid rain and climate change. An Officer of the Order of Canada and recipient of many awards, Schindler is now a Killam Memorial professor of ecology at the University of Alberta. He and his colleagues have tracked contaminants from tar sands developments, underlining the need for effective monitoring of industry. Schindler has also been a leading environmental advocate, opposing recent efforts to weaken the Fisheries Act and other federal legislation and asserting the importance of basing decisions on sound scientific knowledge. Environmental historian Stephen Bocking interviewed Schindler in April of this year, before the summer of scientific discontent.

Stephen Bocking: How do you feel about the future of environmental protection in Canada?

David Schindler: I would say it’s more under attack now than it’s ever been. When I moved to Canada [from the US] in the mid-1960s, it was probably the best it had been. Shortly after that, habitat provisions were added to the Fisheries Act, and back in those days we had government science organizations that were proactive and communicated with the public, not kept behind closed doors, reporting only to politicians as their private tools.

I’m referring to the Fisheries Research Board of Canada, which answered to senior scientists, not a bureaucrat. Compare that with today, when they’re removing the habitat provisions, despite the fact that 80 per cent of all species in decline are in decline because their habitat is under attack. I think pea-brained is the only term that fits.

Environmental assessments are now going to be done by the provinces, very few of which have any science capacity, or the National Energy Board, or the atomic energy equivalent. None of those organizations have significant ecological or fisheries expertise, so habitat protection and the ecosystems in general are under attack in the name of industrial development.

SB: With scientific capacity and monitoring being eroded, which environmental changes do you think won’t be dealt with properly?
DS: One thing that is certainly eroded is fish habitat protection. The DFO [Department of Fisheries and Oceans] has announced that it is cutting the number of stations with habitat protection units from 63 to 14. People see things every day that affect fish habitat and don’t realize what’s happening.

Before habitats were protected, a road building company would go out and they’d throw the smallest culvert they could into a stream and cover it with dirt. It silted up the downstream environment and nobody looked at whether it was spawning habitat or otherwise used by fish. Often the end of the culvert was hanging, so that it would cut off fish migration upstream. I’ve seen individual cases in Alberta where one hanging culvert cut off 60 per cent of the habitat for bull trout, a red-listed species.

Simple acts like that are going to go by the wayside to focus on big projects. Yet those small projects are important. They don’t hold up the approval of the big projects very much. I know that well because my daughter did that kind of assessment for DFO for several years. With few exceptions, there’s been pretty good relations between the fisheries people who do those assessments and the companies that are trying to design road crossings, because nobody really wants to destroy habitat or species.

I think the federal government and oil sands companies are anxious to get things like this Northern Gateway pipeline through. There are hundreds of individual streams and road crossings there, so by removing these habitat rules, there are no regulations to break by putting in bad stream crossings. I don’t see how that can bode very well for the many salmon and trout streams that’ll be crossed.

SB: What would be an appropriate process for assessing the impact of something like Northern Gateway, and how should it be done?
DS: There probably should not even be a process for that pipeline. We already have two pipelines to the coast, one to Vancouver and one to Prince Rupert. Why, having already put one corridor in for each of those, do we need yet a third? If we need it, why not run an additional pipeline down one of the existing corridors? Both end up in areas less vulnerable than the sound at Kitimat, which is a long, narrow fjord.

SB: Why do you think there is interest in a third corridor?
DS: I think it’s because companies are reluctant to share their corridors with their competitors. But, to me, that’s the sort of thing that a government that has any strength should be able to overcome and say, ‘You’re putting it in that common corridor, and that’s it, period.’

SB: Can you explain some of your concerns about the direct environmental impacts of Alberta’s oil sands development?
DS: Well, I would say there’s a whole suite of them, probably too many for me to remember. But, I would say greenhouse gas emissions, for me, ranks well down the list.

SB: Down the list?
DS: Down the list. Greenhouse gas emissions are the one problemthat most people are concerned about, but if you look at the extraction-to-wheels figures, it’s not that much higher than a lot of other oil. [GHG emissions are 23 per cent higher in the tar sands, according to The Pembina Institute.]

Of greater concern are the huge pits that are being left in the ground and the inadequacy of restoration that’s going on. We have a huge reclamation deficit. As the Royal Society report pointed out [Environmental and Health Impacts of Canada’s Oil Sands Industry, December 2010], we’re putting aside less than 10 per cent of what it’s likely to cost to restore that area. So taxpayers are on the hook for this. It won’t be our generation of taxpayers, because with current policies they’re putting off restoration for almost two generations. But our grandchildren are not going to be very happy with us.

Close behind that is the disregard for treaty rights. That whole area’s covered by provisions of Treaty 8 of 1899. The promises that were made are well documented – [the treaty] would support native people living a subsistence lifestyle ’til the sun quits shining and the rivers quit flowing, which, I guess, cynically, is what they’re trying to do up there with industrial development. It gives you a creepy feeling to be part of a society that has this little regard for native people. It’s downright racist.

Right now there’s really not a problem with water quality, which I’ve investigated pretty thoroughly. The big concern is the monitoring, which is so poor that we cannot tell if things are increasing at a rate that will be a threat in the future. When projects are taking around a decade from planning to completion, with an investment of a couple of billion dollars, you have to know in the early design stages of that plan what has to be done to protect the environment. The current mentality is, “Well, when we start getting exceedances [the amount by which something, especially a pollutant, exceeds a permissible measurement], then we’ll figure out what we need to do to fix them.” We know that the least expensive way to avoid pollution is to prevent it in the first place, not to try and clean it up after it happens.

Then there are social problems. People downstream are still trying to make at least a partially subsistence living, and probably the most threatened thing is their source of protein. And it isn’t just because the food is polluted; we really don’t know if it’s polluted, because nobody’s looked. The government has taken the position that the oil sands are not putting anything in the river – which we now know is untrue [see “Damage Control,” page 18] – therefore none of the problems that these people are claiming can be caused by oil sands. I think that is now slowly turning around; there are planned health studies. We already know that there are fish with tumors and other abnormalities in the river, and even if they’re not contaminated to a degree that would harm human health, I don’t think people will eat them. They certainly wouldn’t sell in a Safeway store. I don’t know why we would expect native people to eat fish with big tumors and hematomas and two tails and all of the other deformities that we’re seeing in that system.

And then there’s Fort McMurray, which has the worst growing pains I’ve ever seen. When I first went there it was seven or eight thousand people, and now it’s at least tenfold that, with little hidden bush camps all over the place. They admit they can’t even get a complete census. Every doctor in the hospital is exhausted, and the papers have been full of stories about the poorly constructed buildings that have had to be evacuated. It’s just a crazy way to develop any sort of industry, in my view. Housing prices are high, and the highway connecting the city to the outside world is known as the “highway of death.”

SB: Some people would argue that the oil sands are an example of a fundamentally unsustainable industry. Do you think there is a place for the oil sands if Canada genuinely embraces sustainability?
DS: I think there is, but my development of it would be very slow. I would put a lot more emphasis on reclamation and set some big reserves aside, so that we wouldn’t have species like woodland caribou in the area going extinct in 20 or 30 years. I’d tell those companies, “Once you have reclaimed your mined area to the state where it can support these iconic species, then we’ll give you a new chunk of land to exploit,” not just give it all to them for cheap prices – and to hell with the boreal flora and fauna.

I think that if they were given that challenge, companies would really do it. Companies are falling all over themselves to get a share in the profits now; they know it’s a fire sale going on and they want to be there. Companies are greedy.

SB: How will the Harper government’s plan to close the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) in Ontario impact the average Canadian citizen?
DS: It is hard to say what Canadians will miss if the ELA is closed. Probably the best answer is to look back: If there had been no ELA, we would probably be controlling several elements in sewage at great expense – not doing a good job on any – and wondering why our lakes turn green. Instead, we have relatively inexpensive control of one nutrient, phosphorus, and where we have controlled it well enough, lakes have recovered. Lots of lakes are still green, but the answers now lie with weak-willed regulators, not with science.

Similarly, with acid rain, we would probably believe that most of our lakes were not in jeopardy. We would not know that 50 per cent of the species were disappearing, and we would still have sulphur oxides pouring out of smelters and coal-fired power plants. In both of these cases, the whole-ecosystem approach at ELA exposed significant flaws in the conclusions of smaller-scale experiments. With no ELA, it is these smaller scales that we must fall back to as guides to water policy.

While they have not yet visibly affected national policy, the [more recent] reservoir, endocrine disruptor and mercury experiments at ELA should eventually have similar impacts. If used effectively, the experimental lakes should continue to yield reliable information about emerging problems.

SB: You’ve been both a very productive scientist and a contributor to public debate. Is it enough for scientists to do good research, or do they need to speak publicly about what their results might mean for policy?
DS: I think the latter. If you’re doing stuff that’s of no importance to policy, I’d say fine, put it on the shelves in the ivory tower library. But if what you’re doing has policy implications it ought to be known, and ministers ought to be healthy enough to consider it. And it certainly wouldn’t offend me if a minister said, “Yeah, we’ve read that study and it was well done, but we’re not going to follow the recommendations and here’s why.” What I really object to is them trying to say, “That’s not good science and we don’t agree with that and this scientist over here says something else,” pointing to some industry hack or some two-bit program. I’d like to see the whole debate become much more open and healthy. I certainly wouldn’t want scientists setting policy – I think it would be a disaster – but I think science should be done and well-considered before policy is made, and it should be a part of the decision.

SB: I can understand that when interest groups attack scientists publicly, it can have a chilling effect.
DS: I think it does. It certainly doesn’t make you feel good when you get attacked. Probably the worst case I know of is what happened with climate change. I’ve never seen a field where there are so many people with no knowledge on whether the climate is changing who consider themselves to be instant experts. You can’t suggest there’s climate change resulting from human activity without all of these creeps coming out of the woodwork and telling you, “There’s people who disagree with you, and it isn’t decided, and look at Climategate and how horrible that was,” on and on and on. A lot of people out there simply don’t get it, because they don’t understand how science works. The politicians are one thing to deal with, but you also have to deal with the lunatic fringe.

SB: Are you optimistic or otherwise about the prospects of Canada taking action on climate change?
DS: I think it’s going to be after some major catastrophe. I think something like a total crop failure in the West, or the Great Lakes dropping low enough that it cuts off all shipping, or something like that.

Depends on who’s in government, too. It’s interesting that my experience – in almost 50 years now of dealing with it – is that Conservatives never seek the advice of scientists. Liberals are pretty good about seeking advice, though they often ignore it. The NDP are very good at seeking advice, but we have no idea how well they would use it because they have not been in power.

On several occasions, Jack Layton just phoned up and asked, if he came by, if we could talk about climate for an hour. And I know he did that with other people, too. And just a few months ago, Thomas Mulcair did the same thing. I’d never heard of him, he hadn’t been elected leader yet. But he was curious, he knew it was an important issue and he wanted to talk about climate and the oil sands. The provincial NDP are the same way. In Manitoba’s case, they have an excellent record, with the protection of the eastern shores of Lake Winnipeg and proposed action to control phosphorus inputs.

Politicians who at least try to understand the scientific dimensions of problems get high marks from me. At least they’re curious enough to want to know what’s going on; whether they pay attention or not afterward is another thing. But I suspect that if we were to have an NDP government, we’d see some action on environmental issues fairly fast right now. I guess that’s no more remote a hope than the US having a black president, which seemed impossible five years ago.

Read the extended interview with David Schindler, including discussion of his early research at the ELA

Get involved in the campaign to preserve the ELA at saveela.org.

The following issue of Alternatives also features a report on why the ELA is so vital to Canadian scientists, policy makers and citizens – and information is nine-tenths of your boot in Harper’s ass. (Full disclosure: This statistic has not been scientifically derived. But it sure was fun to write.)

The post Schindler’s Pissed appeared first on A\J.

Stephen Bocking: Would you say that this is the most critical period in environmental protection, at least going back to the 1960s?

Read the first half of the interview that was published in In Defence of Science.

Stephen Bocking: Would you say that this is the most critical period in environmental protection, at least going back to the 1960s?

David Schindler: Yes, I would say so. In the last few years, the Canadian government has reversed many of the advances made in the last several decades, including weakening of the Fisheries Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Process. Meanwhile, I’ve seen the US moving in the other direction. Back in the 60s, they didn’t even have an environmental protection agency. Since then, the EPA was founded and has turned out to be a pretty solid organization. They also have a species at risk act which is a very good, clear and unchallengeable law – one that can’t be beaten right from the start, as compared to the weak one that we have, which is fraught with ministerial discretion and, for anything but federal lands, completely lacks habitat protection. Most species at risk are listed because of damage to their habitats. On top of that, at a time when our current government has been suppressing communication of its scientists with the media and Canadian public, the US has lifted muzzling of its federal scientists. It’s bizarre.

SB: Right. My sense is that the Obama administration has done a fair amount of damage repair after the Bush administration, so they’re moving in one direction and Canada’s moving in the opposite direction.

DS: I think that’s fair to say. I think part of the reason is that Obama has some very good scientific advisors. His own personal science advisor, John Holdren, is well known as being a stellar environmental scientist; physics nobelist Steven Chu is the Secretary of Energy; Jane Lubchenco at NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] is a very well known ecologist. On this side of the border, there seems to be a move to discount environmental science of any sort as some sort of radical environmentalism.

SB: Yes, if you think about things like the proposed changes to the census, there seems to be a general desire to remove empirical information from the policy process. Would you say that’s true?

DS: I would say it is, and it’s not only at present that we’re going to suffer, but in the future. The lack of current information is going to hinder our ability to see what species are in decline in the future, and how species are affected by climate change. It’s going to leave a huge hole in our long-term databases, and it’s going to leave even the well-intentioned future policy-makers without critical data that are necessary to make informed decisions.

SB: You’ve also been vocal about the role of environmental regulation in Alberta. Are there any general comments you’d like to add about the role of the provinces in environmental monitoring and regulation?

DS: We’ve had successive cuts to departments of environment at both the federal and provincial levels going back 30 years. How is it that we have industrial development, which here in Alberta is increasing at an average rate of seven-and-a-half per cent per year, compounded, and yet all of our environment departments get successive cuts, year after year? I don’t think in anyone’s mind that equation allows us to be able to assess – let alone protect – the environment.

I also look at Alberta Environment and there’s scarcely a PhD on their staff. Their Athabasca River program was $300,000 two years ago – at least that’s what I’m told by the fellow who headed it, who’s now gone – and, meanwhile, the province just out of the blue put up $25-million to propagandize the oil sands. Those numbers are so out of balance that I don’t think there’s any hope of reasonable environmental protection at present at all.

SB: What would you say about Environment Canada’s capacity to fill the role that some provinces aren’t, given how its scientific capacities have been reduced in recent years?

DS: More than a decade ago, I was a member of Environment Canada’s science advisory panel for three years. It was a good panel, and during 1999-2000, the group of us reviewed the capacity of the department. We found that it had already dropped by half in 10 years. The then-Deputy Minister got very excited about that, and directed his senior scientists to prepare a submission to the Treasury Board in 2001 to reinvigorate the department. We all know what happened to all of the federal money in 2001 – I think of it every time I go through an airport screening. If the Taliban has won a major victory, it’s at the expense of the Canadian environment.

There’s been no effort under either party that’s been in power since then to resurrect the Department of Environment in any way, so it was already a department becoming very weak when Harper became Prime Minister. There are still some good scientists there today, but most of them are going to be retiring in a few years, and I doubt they’ll be replaced. If I’ve read the language correctly from the announcements made this year, it’s not going to be a department that does science at all. It’ll probably just hand out glossy pamphlets that will promote the environmental agenda of whoever happens to be Prime Minister or Minister of Environment at the time. George Orwell would be pleased that his predictions of how government can obfuscate information were so accurate, though it took a bit longer than 1984…

SB: You’ve also called for a more moderate approach to developing the oil sands. Could you describe what that moderate approach might look like?

DS: I think that the inexpensive and responsible way to develop the oil sands would be to develop at a rate that would keep the skilled labour force of Alberta employed without needing to take in massive immigration from other provinces or countries. That way, we wouldn’t have to worry about building more roads, schools and hospitals, because you would have the capacity to deal with the number of people. And because you would deal with skilled labour and the capacity of existing businesses that make oil sands machinery, we wouldn’t have the present mad cost inflation. We’re really pricing ourselves out of a lucrative business with this rush to get everything out of the ground at once, and adding to the cost by having to build infrastructure at the same time.

If they could count on an annual growth rate of two or three per cent, most politicians I know would be very content, and they should be able to run a very prosperous province on that amount of money. If they need more capacity than that, the logical way to do it would be to develop other industries to use the oil, rather than trying to put in all the pipelines to ship it somewhere else, where others get the secondary and tertiary benefits. Other countries want the bitumen because they can use it make products and sell them back to us. Why don’t we set up some ability to produce those things we need here? We could start some light industries that don’t need to mow down trees and otherwise damage the environment, and get more value added by employing skilled people and using our own oil to make and sell products, rather than those secondary and tertiary profits going to other countries.

Our mad rush really just reinforces the old image of Canadians as simpleton hewers of wood and drawers of water. It appears that’s the only vision our leaders have for us.

SB: Earlier this year the Alberta government announced the oil sands technology and research authority. Do you think that could have a useful or effective contribution?

DS: It could, if they would put the right kind of people in it. But, as things go, boards like that tend to be dominated by ex-oil company CEOs and petrochemical toadies.

For example, a number of years ago the provincial government started an Alberta Water Research Institute. They put it under the direction of an unusually forward-looking former minister of environment, who put together a board of outstanding water experts from around the world to advise the program. They formed an international review panel, which I headed, to ensure that research money went to the best water projects proposed. The philosophy was, “Get the best people that you can,” so we did. By the third-year review, people were saying, “Wow, has this research capacity ever developed rapidly.” Outsiders were calling the program “world-class,” which is usually a term that you only hear applied to provincial agencies by Alberta politicians. But, at that point, politicians cut the whole program, disbanded the board and the review committee, and turned the program into a section of Alberta Ingenuity, which is under the direction of a bunch of oil guys, rather than anyone with any sense of what needs to be done to protect water in the province. It’s like there’s only one thing on people’s minds – money; Alberta truly is a petro-state.

SB: Do you have any other general comments you’d like to make about the oil sands, or about environmental regulation and policy-making in Alberta?

DS: When I moved here 23 years ago, it was a shock. I was used to governments that were eager to change practices that were destroying the environment. Here, all they want to do is shovel them under the rug. As former Premier Ralph Klein famously exclaimed when mad cow disease was discovered in Alberta herds, farmers should “shoot, shovel and shut up.” That attitude really hasn’t changed much over the years. It would get a little bit better with some ministers of environment and some premiers, and then a bit worse with others, but the bottom line is visible when you look at how rapidly development has been pursued at all costs.

Alberta politicians can’t ever see that they’re making a mistake. There always has to be a new silver bullet that can make lots of money, and no other criterion seems to be considered.

The other thing that drives me crazy is that they don’t stabilize anything. Everything depends on recent oil revenues, so they treat doctors, nurses and university professors like ditch-diggers: if the province is short of money, it fires them. The mentality is, ‘Well, when we’re rich again, then we can have a two-week training course and we’ll have them all back.’ This short-term planning does not work well for people who must invest a decade and more in their education. Nobody looks back and says, ‘Hey, we did that last time and it didn’t work, maybe we’d better try something better.’ It’s like there’s no sense of history at all here. It’s the most sophomoric system of government I’ve seen anywhere. As a result, the medical and educational systems are in chaos.

SB: Okay, so switching channels a bit, I’d be really interested to chat about your involvement in the history of environmental science, starting with the Experimental Lakes Area. Could you summarize what you see as the essential and unique contribution that the ELA has made to our environmental knowledge over the last few decades?

DS: I think the big thing is that, in several key experiments, we exposed the fact that there are large, important ecosystem processes that change only very slowly when ecosystems are stressed by humans. These need to be taken into account in managing whole ecosystems. Such processes cannot be estimated using little bottles and mesocosms – you have to study them at full-scale in ecosystems. That being said, there was a companion project run by two of the people at the Freshwater Institute, Everett Fee and Bob Hecky, on a range of lakes just like the ones at ELA, except they were scaled up in size – all the way up to the size of Lake Superior. They showed that small ecosystems have all the important scales represented, but the processes change in intensity with ecosystem size. There are predictable scaling-up factors that you can use to extrapolate from small to larger ecosystems, but smaller than ecosystem scales do not yield science that is a reliable basis for policy. Those studies, together with the ability to do experiments at whole-lake scales, make ELA a critical facility.

The vision for ELA was not mine; it came from the founding director of the Freshwater Institute, Wally Johnson. He got the idea when he was a student working in Wisconsin with a fisheries scientist named Art Hasler, who had separated two dark-water lakes and limed one side to make it clearer, to see if that would increase the productivity of bass. Johnson was so impressed by how convincing such large-scale work was that he decided it had to be a part of his new Freshwater Institute.

His idea was to go dump a few bags of nutrients in a lake and see what happens. In the early years, he and I used to have some pretty ferocious squabbles because I wanted to do detailed biogeochemistry, productivity studies, nutrient cycling studies and that sort of thing. Fortunately, we had an intermediate who could understand what we were both saying and acted as peacemaker: Jack Vallentyne.

Early on, I just did straight science at the ELA. I didn’t do any public communication. All of that was done by Vallentyne. Those days seemed magical. Our first and only mandate was to do eutrophication experiments related to the Great Lakes. Vallentyne would take our most recent results and go off and talk to the International Joint Commission, without having to check what he said with politicians or bureaucrats. It took about three years to turn our results into legislation to protect the Great Lakes from nutrients, with government being receptive every step of the way.

The US was not that receptive. They didn’t have an Environmental Protection Agency until 1973, and even then it was weak and understaffed, so they decided to let every state make its own decision on nutrients. It took 17 years for all of them to control phosphorus inputs to the Great Lakes.

Meanwhile, on this side of the border, all the constitutional nonsense was taking place and a lot of environmental responsibility that had formerly been handled federally was delegated to the provinces. The Fisheries Research Board, which had previously done and reported science without any political spin, was disbanded, and its staff was rolled into the Department of Environment, then the department of Fisheries and Oceans. At that point, looking at the long chain of bureaucrats who were going to descend on us, Vallentyne left. Before he left, he called me into his office and said, “Look, this communication to policymakers is really important. I’m not going to be here to do it, so you’ve got to do it.” At that point I was pretty unwilling, but I got thrown into a series of US state hearings and western provincial hearings, and then the acid rain hearings. It just became part of my job.

After the eutrophication work had been completed, the government actually wanted to disband the ELA. Once we became part of the federal civil service, the new regime wanted to get rid of some science programs because they had bureaucratic needs, such as appearances and propaganda dissemination. Instead of five-and-a-half floors of scientists and a few administrators in our building, they soon had two floors full of administrators. I understand bureaucracy now occupies four floors out of six.

Anyway, they had called ELA a “sunset program,” and said they didn’t need us anymore. So that’s when I started looking for acid rain money. I had a young scientist working with me at ELA, Dick Beamish, who had done his thesis on acid rain in Ontario, and I had friends doing acid rain work in Europe as well. It was easy to see that it was a real problem here, with highly acidifying emissions arriving from the USA and extremely acid sensitive lakes. Fisheries and Oceans initially wouldn’t fund acid rain research. When I made a presentation to senior management, one middle manager accused me of inventing the problem to keep the ELA alive.

SB: Inventing acid rain?

DS: Yeah.

SB: Wow, that’d be quite a trick.

DS: So I got money from the oil sands, which were just starting up. They knew they were going to be putting out a lot of sulfur emissions. They had a road-less area that would be very expensive to work in. Because their freshwater ecosystems had a lot of the same species that we did at ELA and their most sensitive lakes were like ours, I proposed that they could give us their money and we’d get a lot more bang for the buck. So they funded us for the first three years, when ELA was still with the Fisheries Research Board.

Later, during constitutional negotiations, it was decided that the Alberta oil sands environmental research program would be turned over to the province. So they disbanded that group too, and that was the end of the Fisheries Research Board and the end of our funding. But, by then, DFO could see that acid rain was a real problem. Senior bureaucrats were happy to claim that they were foresighted enough to have a program that had been studying the problem for four years at ELA! So the pariah program re-emerged as important. Talk about crazy sets of circumstances.

Funding to continue our work at the ELA was all soft money, so-called B-budget funding, and by 1989 we were pretty well at the end of that. Meanwhile, we had some long enough records that I was able to put together in papers describing how climate warming and fire affected ELA lakes and boreal watersheds. Otherwise, I was ready to get out of DFO – things were already going downhill rapidly, and I didn’t want to be part of that federal organization any longer. My wife and I ended up here in Edmonton because there were two positions available at the University of Alberta, and we were invited to fill them.

The ELA continued to produce research, mostly on money from American scientists and industrial partners after that. I continued to stay involved to some degree, first by sending graduate students there and getting involved in some of the projects. I still am involved in some of the long-term data interpretations, most recently because they don’t have enough scientists left who can do it.

SB: Really?

DS: Yeah, well, during the past three years, the last of the old technical people who I hired for ELA have retired, including some amazing individuals. One of them actually hadn’t even finished high school when he started working for me, and spent 40-some years there. By the end of that period he had produced more scientific papers than most of the PhDs at the Freshwater Institute. Another dedicated person who retired last year, had been there since 1968 doing the hydrology studies. Those were really irreplaceable people. ELA has recruited a few young scientists, but the federal salary scales and startup packages can’t compete with universities at all anymore, so if they get someone good, they’re very lucky.

SB: Right. And then hold onto them.

DS: Yea, and what they’ve been lacking recently, are scientists who have some sort of general limnological oversight. There’s a need for someone who can take a synthetic view of all of the pieces. When I was at ELA, I tried to write synthetic papers that didn’t undercut the publications that other scientists and technicians did themselves, instead taking an overview of things that they had never thought of. So for others, who were co-authors, it was more like icing on the cake rather than my stealing a piece of their cake. It’s hard to build that kind of trust with a staff – it takes years. But once they’re into it and they can see the power of doing it, they get very enthusiastic about it. A new scientist dealing with a new staff would have to start from scratch again to do that. Meanwhile, ELA has got huge new buildings and facilities that we could never even dream of having. Most of our work was done out of a bunch of rotten old trailers. But everything else, from money for research to sufficient staff to do ecosystem scale experiments is missing.

SB: I guess it can be a fragile thing for a place to have that kind of working atmosphere, where what different scientists are doing all adds up to more than the sum of the parts, rather than the scientists just going off and doing their own little specialties.

DS: Yes, and a lot of that was because we all ate together. Most of our ideas for new science were impromptu, developed at meals or morning coffee. Somebody would bring in some data, and there would be some argument about how it should be interpreted, how uncertainties could be resolved, and pretty soon there would be a new way of looking at it, or a new experiment devised to determine who was right. It was really a fantastic working environment – one not matched by universities, where everybody bustles around without time to think, and if you want to plan some new science you have to have a formal planning meeting and spend two days beating your head against the wall to force out a plan, whether you’re in the mood or not.

SB: Did you folks at the ELA have much interaction with the people at other big landscape-level experiments? I’m thinking, at Hubbard Brook, for example?

DS: Gene Likens, Herb Bormann and I have always been good friends. We would trade data and look at each other’s work, and I was part of the group consulted when responsibility for the Hubbard Brook project was moved to The Institute for Ecosystem Studies. The projects strongly supported each other, but collaboration between them just didn’t develop. In part, their focus was more on long-term monitoring, while ours was primarily on applied ecosystem experiments. What did develop at ELA, though, was a totally different sort of relationship with biogeochemists at Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, starting back when the theory was that you needed to control carbon to control eutrophication.

I invited Wally Broecker – the world-renowned oceanographer and gas exchange expert from Lamont – to come up to ELA to advise us on how to measure carbon exchange between lakes and the atmosphere. As it turned out he and several other eminent oceanographers were just launching the geochemical ocean sections program (GEOSECS), which was going to take several years. Wally was worried that his graduate students would get lost in that huge program and end up being a pair of hands on a ship somewhere so, for about five years, he sent them all to ELA to work on biogeochemical problems. It boosted our research funding because he’d get all the money for his part of research from the US National Science Foundation. In return, I’d go down and spend six weeks in the winter giving a short course in limnology for oceanography students at Lamont-Doherty.

While I was down there, we shared Wally’s office. He had a huge office, and we had two desks in there. We’d spend most of the day just sitting and arguing about interpretations of data and discussing what key experiments we should do next. It was tremendous fun brainstorming with him, because he was full of large-scale ideas on how to quantify chemical processes. Overall I think there were 14 or 15 PhDs from Lamont that came out of ELA, including people who are now in senior professorship positions all over the US and Canada.

SB: In terms of the ELA’s policy influence, I get the sense that a lot stemmed from its distinctive approach to whole lake experiments.

DS: I would say that. It also stemmed a lot from me, and in turn, from Jack Vallentyne, who was always more concerned about science-based policy than about nice academic publications that would fill the shelves of some ivory tower where policy makers would never see them. On the acid rain problem, I just continued doing what I’d been doing with the eutrophication science, but because the system had become more politicized, I increasingly got into trouble for communicating things the bureaucrats did not like. As a result, I got a couple of letters of reprimand. To me, a letter of reprimand for doing what you felt had to be done was not something to be ashamed of. To be effective, a democracy relies on well-informed citizens, not propagandized ones.

SB: Can you think of other organizations that are similar to the ELA in terms of their working environment?

DS: I think some elements of it are in places like Hubbard Brook and Dorset Field Station in Ontario, but probably not to the extreme degree that we had it at ELA. Even after we became part of the civil service, the attitude of most of our scientific and technical staff was, “Well, they’re not going to give us the money to do a key study, but they can’t stop us.” There were a lot of people who’d put in evenings and weekends to make something work despite lack of funding, just to spite the bureaucracy. We had a well-informed group, as the result of weekly seminars on a variety of projects going on at ELA. I also tried to make all of the participants in a project feel as if their part was important. If they believed it was scientifically important, they didn’t care whether the bureaucrats thought it was related to the department’s mandate or even whether they got overtime pay to do it. So they would just go out and do the necessary work. ELA became a world standard for performing “guerilla science,” building our own equipment and putting in our own time to get things done, if that is what it took.

SB: Wow. That’s fascinating. It’s sort of like a safe environment for being creative.

DS: That’s right.

SB: How does that compare to your experience working at university? You’ve played a role as a very productive scientist, but also as a contributor to public debate, and I’m curious about how that’s worked out as far as having an impact on your own position at the University of Alberta?

DS: Well, it’s worked out well because I came here as a senior scientist with tenure. I don’t think I would have been able to do it if I’d come here as a non-tenured new assistant professor, expected to recruit graduate students, raise money for research, design research and write several papers a year. There is simply not enough time to have a life. But, that being said, the University of Alberta has always been very supportive. I’m sure on some occasions the president must have been tearing his or her hair out because, well, it’s no secret that in the course of my tenure here, I’ve offended some of the industries that have been their big donors and the province’s most powerful politicians. But I have to give the U of A very high marks for following its tenure rules and its very strict rules about grants from industries, which include everything from big tobacco to oil sands. I also give a lot of credit to the Isaac Walton Killam Foundation, which has provided support far beyond my salary.

Read the first half of the interview that was published in In Defence of Science.

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