Government acting as industry cheerleaders

We pride ourselves on being a rational species. Yet many of the most important choices we make ignore data that scientists have collected. Instead, we make public policy or decisions that are based on convenience and/or profit. Global warming, genetically engineered food, the tar sands. The list is endless and should convince us that it is business and the need for economic growth that is our bottom line. I wrote about the tar sands on January 9, but another great example of this is aquaculture and, in particular, salmon farming.

Alex Morton is a marine wildlife biologist who has studied orcas on Vancouver Island for over 30 years. For the past two decades Morton's studies of salmon farms have led to her vehement opposition to the practice, as it endangers wildlife in the area and leads to environmental destruction. Her movie, Salmon Confidential, is worth watching.

On the opposite coast, the Friends of Port Mouton Bay have been studying the impact of open-net salmon farms in their bay on the south shore of Nova Scotia, previously a wonderful lobster ground. Scientists, fishers, and other concerned citizens have spent countless hours collecting scientific data that has clearly indicated that farming practices have led to a degradation of the lobster fishery and a devastation of the local economy. Although the FPMB have two professional oceanographers on their team and reams of high-quality scientific data to back up their claims, they are virtually ignored by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and shut out of any consultation.

Clean Up Salmon Farming provides science-based information for those wanting to know about the threat of open net pen salmon farming to Atlantic salmon and East Coast communities.

Here we have another prime example of the federal and provincial governments (in Nova Scotia and BC) acting as industry cheerleaders as opposed to the disinterested third party arbitrators they should be.

Animal-friendly Meat . . . yum?

You have to love Twitter. Friends tweeted two items, almost simultaneously, that have a lot in common and yet are very different.

First, I saw this ad, narrated by Elvis Costello, for Linda McCartney's line of vegan food. Obviously animal friendly. The song is called Heart of The Country by Sir Paul hisself.

Then my talented friend, Andrew Hazelden, who shares an interest in 3D printing, sent me this story of a US company, Modern Meadow, that has technology to make meat with a bio-printer. Also, I assume from first look, animal friendly.

Modern Meadow aims to print raw meat using bioprinter

So, if you like meat but not the way animals are raised and slaughtered, then there might one day soon be an option. But is it one that we want? Is it ethical?

The Catastrophe of Alberta Oil Sands Development

We are obsessed with scientific proof, best practices, and hard data. We rarely make our decisions based on that, but we do like to dot our 'i's and cross our 't's. Sometimes that information is used to justify a political decision. At other times it's ignored as insufficient to change the status quo (see climate change).

We saw a good example of this phenomenon this week when a report out of Queen's University gave us scientific evidence of what we already intuit: the Alberta tar sands are an environmental catastrophe.

Tar sands processing on the Athabasca River. Photo: S. Jocz.
from The Tyee http://thetyee.ca/Views/2008/01/25/TarSands/

We learned this week from a study published in PNAS, co-authored by Dr. John Smol, Canadian Research Chair in Environmental Change, that development of the Athabaskan tar sands since the 1960s has adversely affected environmental health. Levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) have increased dramatically in lake depositions since bitumen extraction began five decades ago. PAHs are a serious health concern, causing cancer, birth defects, and increased chances of childhood asthma. What is most troubling is that Canadian guidelines for lake sediment (set by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment in 1999) have been exceeded for seven PAHs in the Athabasca region, including ones that are known carcinogens, mutagens, and teratogens. In the case of benz(a)anthracene, chrysene, benzo(a)pyrene, and dibenz(a,h)anthracene - four compounds known to cause cancer - the guidelines have been exceeded for about twenty years.

From Eradicating Ecocide in Canada
http://www.eradicatingecocideincanada.org/this-is-ecocide-draft/

                          
It will be interesting to see how the federal government reacts to this evidence.

Close Encounters With Science

I am so grateful that CBC Canada Writes asked me to be one of the two evaluators for their Close Encounters With Science writing competition. There are two distinct times for the author of a book. There is the writing and there is promotion. Writing is mostly a solitary process; the effort and joy of publishing and promotion are community events. Since my book was published in April I have been meeting lots of new people: Canadian authors, book lovers, bookstore owners, librarians. It's been fun and rewarding in a different way than writing is rewarding.

The latest person I've met was the other judge of CBC's writing competition, Beverly Akerman. Beverly has the distinction of being the only novelist who has sequenced her own DNA. Makes me even more excited to read her stuff. I look forward to reading The Meaning of Children, a collection of stories.

My Experience Evaluating the Writing of Others

I was recently asked to evaluate public submissions to CBC Canada Writes’ Special Series: Close Encounters With Science competition. Public submissions came in chronicling significant encounters that people had with science or technology and I was charged with creating a shortlist of the best.

There were many stories about children remembering their first TV set, Neil Armstrong’s step on the moon, and the night sky. There were wonderful tales of medical miracles, of heart surgeries that saved a life or an in utero surgery that saved a baby’s life. There were too many stories of people surviving cancer or suffering the treatment. There were stories of children discovering small miracles of the natural world because a grownup took the time to guide them, such as the big brother teaching his little sister about the solar system with a flashlight and Tupperware containers way past her bedtime. And, if this is a good sample of Canadian childhood experience, there were a lot pyromaniacs and budding explosive experts out there. Potassium chlorate and sugar were two ingredients that kept recurring.

It was the stories of human interactions, of people being kind or discovering something about each other, that captivated me. There was the woman who was told she was in the midst of a miscarriage who is then shown the beating heart of her baby, a child that would have died before the time of ultrasounds. There was the young man who watches his father fall to a heart attack, recover, and years later hug his grandson. There was the lab tech exhilarated to diagnose his first leukemia, then realize it’s a death sentence to a little girl. The mother who finally gets to hear what her son wants to tell her, after eight years of silence. What does he ask for with the computer technology that allows him to speak? For his Mom to give him a big hug. The child whose uncle, who cannot hear or speak, communicates to her through a handheld calculator that she bought with her savings. And, of course, the mother living through chemo hell, describing the red devil chemo cocktail that burns her insides, and admitting she is only doing this for her daughters.

Somehow I had to create a shortlist from all this, which I found challenging for three reasons. First, there were hundreds of submissions, each up to 500 words in length. That’s a lot of reading. Second, there were so many good ones, making my initial shortlist ridiculously long. Culling that wasn’t easy. It was the third reason, however, that I found the most difficult. Judging someone’s writing is a large responsibility and I had to do this hundreds of times. It is the responsibility of knowing that, if I were to choose not to read an entry, it might not be read at all and would die on the page. I’m not sure this kind of evaluation is something that writers should do.

On not being nominated for a literary prize

‘Tis the season for the three big Canadian literary prizes: the Giller Prize, Rogers Trust Prize, and the Governor General’s Awards. Being shortlisted or nominated for any of these is a big deal, boosts book sales, and gets you invited to the fall writers’ festivals, such as the IFOA in Toronto. I imagine that it is generally a good experience.

I say “I imagine” because my book wasn’t nominated. The jury for the GGs had 241 books to choose from, and the Giller jury had even more. Certainly, a large number of them are worthy of a nomination – only five get it.

After not seeing my name on the Giller longlist I was disappointed. I felt badly for feeling disappointed, as though the emotion were shameful or selfish. I went for a run and told myself that the longlisted authors were deserving, that not everyone can be nominated, that it was OK that The Rest Is Silence didn’t “win”. A wise friend who has watched me and supported me through the entire process of writing the book gave me some great advice.

“Feel your feelings," she said. "Respect them because they are real. Don't try to ignore them or make them go away. Just sit with them.”

I did that and, by the end of that day, I no longer felt disappointed. The disappointment was replaced by gratitude: that my book was published, that people have read it, and that many people have approached me to tell me that they liked it.

This morning, when the GG list was announced, that familiar disappointment reappeared. Then I remembered the people I had met at a Chapters in Halifax last week. There was the retired nurse who was buying my book because her father had wanted “The Rest Is Silence” written on his tombstone. There was a 14-year-old short story writer who talked to me about her obsession with writing and another young woman who was a voracious reader and asked me to sign the book she had in her hand by someone named Rick Riordan. When I smiled and suggested she should probably get Rick to sign it, she said she assumed I could sign it because I was famous. She then got her mother to buy my book.

I would have liked to have been nominated for one of those prizes. But I’m so grateful that Bethany Gibson (my editor) convinced Goose Lane to take a chance on me; that I get to see my book in bookstores; that high school friends, as well as strangers, are writing to say they’ve read the book, and like it; and that I’m making friends with other Canadian authors.

P.S. Carrie Snyder, nominated today for a GG for The Juliet Stories, has a great blog post about her reaction to the news. (No longer) Obscure CanLit Mama

Contest Winners

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest. There were great ideas. It was difficult to pick winners so I put all the best ones in a hat and pulled out five names. Here they are:

Andrew Hazelden – RepRap machines. So beyond my technical understanding. Self-replicating robots? I need Andrew to tell me how these things work and what products you can make from them.

Greg Smith – Suggests the counterintuitive idea of paying people to return plastic bags. I like the idea, except that we’d also have to charge for bags (which I’m in favour of since it’s proven to reduce their use by up to 90%) so new ones weren’t being returned unused for the cash.

Stephanie Dearing – Low impact, self-sufficient. I likes. Reduce, reduce, reduce. If you can’t reduce, then reuse and repurpose. Being an avid gardener myself, her suggestion for repurposing pop bottles as mini cloches for her lettuce plants resonates.

Michael Petryk – Incinerating plastic at high heat. Incineration has always had a bad rap. I picture billowing black smoke from a backyard firepit. Yuck. I look forward to learning more about this. We all use oil for fuel (for heating and transportation) so this might just make sense.

Chiasmus – Had two suggestions. Here’s a moving video showing the kind of ingenuity we need to solve this monumental problem: Pop bottles used as power-free light bulbs

Now, winners, I need you to somehow send me your snail mail addresses so I can get a copy of The Rest Is Silence into your innovative hands.