Richard Zurawski

What a foofra. An Apollo astronaut flies off the rails and pronounces ETs to be a fait a complet and the news world goes gaga! Does he have new evidence, tangible and verifiable? Not a shred. But he was one of a dozen or so who put footprints on the moon so he has to be believed! What really concerns me is that we grab this like it is gospel and spin it round and round, till it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, its veracity confirmed by the very fact that we talk about it.

Yet again I rail on about the priorities of our culture. Where and when did we make the turn from fact to fame and hyperbole and why, I ask, do we allow the media, the fourth estate, to put this stuff out as news and information? Its as though it is a circus where its the outrageous stunts and unbelievable death defying acts that grab you by the eyeballs.

We’ve got president’s who believe in Armageddon and horoscopes, celebrities who become experts in pharmacology and new whacko religions and pop stars who take up causes and solve the world’s ills and are according to the media, far more credible and newsworthy, than any of the thousands for scientists who painstakingly plod their way through scientific research looking for ALL the facts and upon whose labours and researches we have built what to me is looking less and less like civilization.

If you have a modicum of fame, notoriety or celebrity you have influence because the clowns who run our news service care only about one thing, ratings. And what a slippery slope that one is, as newspapers begin usurp tabloids in their quest to remain viable, TV descending into reality hell and micro fame shows, and the internet….well anything goes there as vested interests and the struggle for impact negates any real progress in truth and information.

So here is what we wind up with. 6000 peer reviewed studies and 4000 scientists who have participated in the largest scientific probe in the history of humankind who still cannot get any meaningful response from government, media or industry to curb what is the direst threat to our existence in 70,000 years. Yet one astronaut whose claim to fame rests on being a just that, a space cadet, echoing Von Danniken and Velikovsky, grabs a flurry of news spots and credibility in a heartbeat. What is wrong with this picture?

Next time my car or computer goes on the fritz I’m gonna find me a shaman to lay hands on the beast and purge the evil demons from its workings. Why waste time with science when we have Intelligent Design, the Earth is flat and UFOs are just abuzzing.

Over the past few years I have become increasingly conscious of what I eat. It used to be that when I was hungry, I consumed pretty much everything that was within arm’s reach. And I was especially appreciative of fast food. Though I suspected that fast food wasn’t terribly good for me, I figured my regime of exercise and lack of really bad habits, like smoking and drinking alcohol to excess et al, would compensate for whatever might be onerous in what I ate.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Yet again I was blind-sided by our corporate greed and lack of controls on anything that generates profits. Just like the car industry that gave us SUVs, power companies who sang the king coal mantra and big tobacco who denied any connection whatsoever to any ill health from any of their products, so too was the food industry touting its list of lies for the sake of a fast buck.

Trans fats, or hydrogenated oils, a human invention that now permeates pretty much anything that comes from the processed food industry, is the nutritional equivalent of nuclear radiation. No amount is good. Not even the smallest smidgen of the stuff is safe to consume. Originally invented to be used in the margarine industry to replace butter because it would make liquid fats solid, it has found it way into literally everything we eat that is processed. It enhances taste, satisfies our cravings for fatty foods and best of all cheap and incredibly easy to manufacture. Just bubble some hydrogen through a vegetable oil and you get hydrogenated oils and fats or trans fats.

The problem is that trans fats occur in nature in only the tiniest amounts and natural foods are so low in the stuff that they are by and large devoid of trans fats. As a result your body has never developed the capacity to ingest or use trans fats, so it stores them in places that you don’t want. My cardiologist discovered evidence of fat food days clogging up an artery about five years ago that required an angioplasty and stent after I complained of chest pain while exercising. Shortly there after my eating habits underwent a remarkable transformation.

What really burns me is we have known about the ills of trans fats for a decade. And yet in most jurisdictions it is still legal to sell the stuff. Restaurants still cook with it, whether fast food or the more expensive kind. Most processed food, from breads to margarines to cookies to ice cream still have the stuff though it is the food equivalent of plutonium. And California is the only state or province that has in its wisdom banned trans fats.

Heart Disease is a killer and kills more than the testosterone laced drunks that pilot SUVs on our highways. So, why oh why do we still have this stuff in our food? And we feed it to our kids!  It money folks, same old same old. Corporate profits and a slick ad campaign and the money comes rolling it! Who cares if its not good for you!

It was vacation this month for me and during my time off I had a chance to catch up on my reading. And of course it was all about science, with my favourites, American Scientist and Scientific American, under the wettest July skies Ontario has recorded.

One of articles that caught my interest was that about the super sunstorms that rise up every 500 years or so. The sun is what keeps us warm and toasty and so what happens to this orb should of great interest to all of us, not just the science types. It seems that back in the mid 1800s we had a doozy of a storm on the sun that wreaked havoc on the Earth. How do we know? It was recorded in the local papers and in the climate record. Compasses went haywire, telegraphs were off line and the ozone layer was zapped. And the northern lights were seen all around the world. In the north, the lights were so bright people thought the sun had risen.

So why do I mention this other than my personal predisposition for all things science? Well, it’s my preoccupation with under estimated catastrophic occurrences, that makes me wonder whether here again is something that will catch us with our collective knickers down.

Here is what we can expect when the next solar superstorm erupts. The cascade of photons and protons will light up the sky through the northern lights like something out of Hollywood. Not just in the north, but all around the world. Then the fun starts. First the satellites will be zapped and I mean zapped. Many will be outright obliterated and in the remainder life expectancies dramatically shortened.The The powergrid will suffer huge black outs and brown outs. It is estimated that the surges will fry many of the circuits that could be out for weeks. Then there are the computers and the internet. The ones that are switched off will be protected, but those that are on could have their insides scrambled or discombobulated to the point of non function.

The off shoot of all this is that it could affect billions and in North America and Europe, where computers and power systems are not only conveniences, but necessary for life and limb, deaths in the thousands are not only possible but likely.

During the past 50 years or we have had a few solar storms that have played havoc with our power and communications systems, but nothing we have experienced begins to detail the magnitude of what will happen. A super storm will deliver a wallop 100 times greater and do as much damage from solar flares in 10 minutes as we have experienced in the past 50 years. Trillions of dollars wasted.

The good news is that we are in a downturn of the 11-year solar cycle and we have time to think about how to protect our nascent and frail global communications and power systems from the solar onslaught. But when it happens, and it will, it will be with a fury that reminds us that the sun is after all just another nuclear reactor … a huge and necessary one, but a reactor nonetheless.

Last week I was on vacation, having taking time off to research my genealogical roots in the Ukrainian city of L’viv. My father was a holocaust survivor and forever scarred by the loss of his entire family to the insane Nazi eugenics machine. To cut to the chase, the scars of the second world war, the former communist government and now the assault of big business to capture yet another market has the Ukraine doing worse than she should and should be a reminder to us all of the profound turmoil that chaos and unplanned change brings to nations.

As I walked the streets of L’viv, once a centre of culture and learning that inspired not only the Hapsburg government of the mid 1800s, but the world, I listened to the echoes of the past and saw everywhere ghosts of vanished Jews and Poles, and I drank in the lesson that says, “Those who do not learn from History are doomed to repeat it”.

What am I talking about?

It is a tragedy that our human timeframes are so short, making us feel as though the present is immutable and cast in temporal concrete, giving us the perception that we are different and outside the great forces that knock at our gates, as they did time and again for our predecessors. 1939 was such a time, when the political forces of Europe reached a roiling cusp that forever altered the world and threw away reason and compromise. Almost seventy years later so many of us still walk in that terrible shadow trying to make sense of it. I could not help but wonder, whether today we too are in a bubble of smug delusion, watching not political forces or human armies alining themselves against us, but those of the environment. Will our children, seventy years from now search the ruins of what once was, for some tiny understanding, explanation of why it was that when so many sounded salient warnings, we still marched off in lockstep to be annihilated by our own hubris?

Will we look at the leaders of our political and business world of today and in the aftermath of a wrecked environment demand an ecological Nuremberg? Are these so called leaders with their shortsightedness and myopic perspective, today through their inaction inviting those who survive to issue proclamations of crimes not only against humanity, but of crimes against life itself?

If we invite chaos into the world, knowingly risking so much for so many, are we not guilty as charged? Are not the companies and their boards of directors and the governments who supported them, those who sidestepped and subverted all the rules and moral guidelines for profit, obfuscated until there was nothing but chaos and destruction, as guilty as the warmongers of seventy years ago?

Just a question that came to mind as I searched for the boy who played amid the towering chestnut trees in long ago Lvov.

The news is, that if I wanted to, I could for the first time in a generation take a swim in the Halifax Harbour, assuming I had sufficient insulation to brave the 10 degree Celsius chill. The detritus, fecal and otherwise, that has flowed into the harbour in gargantuan proportions for decades, is now filtered and extracted from the Haligonian water dicharge and what remains is benign and cleaner than it has ever been. And in July, once the Dartmouth sewage facility comes on line, it will be cleaner yet. Wonderful news all, and about bloody time! In the twenty years I have lived in Halifax and watched with disgust the city discharge untreated waste into the waters that surround us, I have often wondered about our priorities. How is it that it took so long? And now that we have done it, we trumpet how much better it will be for tourism and that the visitors with fat wallets will not be offended. But I wonder, why is it without an immediate money benefit, we rarely do anything because it is just better, the right thing to do. It appears that only in the guise of good business are we motivated to clean up after ourselves and stop using the environment as a waste bucket. Don’t get me wrong, I am the first to applaud the efforts of the city to clean the stench and filth that gagged us all on the waterfront, but isn’t that the issue these days? Isn’t it “the can’t afford to clean up” mentality what is holding us back on what is turning out to be the major issue of the times, climate change. The “can’t afford to slow the economy, or lose jobs, or slow down industry” lobby is spewing its ecological invective into the general stream of understanding and gumming up the what should be obvious to even the most mired in the mud diplodicus. A clean harbour is a good thing to behold and goodness knows, my nose will appreciate the break, but what about the issue that is steamrolling its way along while we dither. If the harbour stayed filthy for another decade, we could hold our collective noses, but other than that be none the worse for wear. Maybe a few cruise ship occupants would wax eloquent about the funny brown fuzzy floaters in the water while wandering the foot of the hoi-paloi Spring Garden Road and a few sales would be missed.

However, if we do nothing about carbon emissions, which we appear to be well on our way to doing, we will close a window, a door of enormous opportunity and free fall our way to a dystopian future. Never mind the lost jobs, the slowing of industry, the cost. They will pale in the face of invasive species, new diseases, more devastating storms, higher water levels, erratic weather patterns, species extinction and the refugees from around the world. Clean up the harbour, and good for you, but don’t let that make you lose sight of a much larger and more dangerous challenge that sits before us all. Every time you start your lawnmower, car or jack up the air conditioner, think flush, harbour and waste without the stench and the obvious brown floaters. The time to stop flushing away our future is now.

Almost two weeks ago we weekend we, in Halifax, again had a taste of the raw power mother nature. Twin forest fires in Tantallon and Porters Lake let us know that forces of nature are not just what we see on TV or what we read in the newspaper. They happen to us as well. We are not exempt. We are certainly no strangers weather related events and flooding. If we were, Hurricane Juan, Extra Tropical storm Noel and this past winter’s record snowfall and ensuing spring melt and flooding, laid those misperceptions to rest.

Forest fires on the other hand are something that most of us have little experience with. We are used to seeing their effects in California or in Australia or in British Columbia. And while we have forest fires each and every year in many rural areas of both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, all, in my experience, have been at a distance and far removed from the large urban regions. This past weekend brought home quite viscerally the fact that no one is immune and that there no safe haven from the unexpected ravages of nature.

It leads me to believe that perhaps we have been living in a bit of a perception bubble. Perhaps we have underestimated the chances of disaster. It is too late to mitigate the damage after the disasters have happened. The reason that we have governments is to protect us and to provide planning for bad times when the come. And to do that we have to have planning, the foresight to see what will affect us adversely.

We have lived through a remarkably stable time these past two millennia. And that has made us complacent. As a  result, our expectations are that the stable, unchanging times will continue. And that is unrealistic. For generations we have been able to rely on constant conditions and circumstances and that coupled with relatively short life spans we have come to think of the weather and climate as unchangeable.

That perception also extends to the other major disasters that befall the Earth from time to time. Even though in some areas of the world, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and severe storms are common place, disaster happens infrequently in a given area. We have grown used to the idea that things on the Earth are reliable and by and large safe. It shakes our understanding of what is “common sense” when we think and consider the massive changes that we have ahead of us as we leave this remarkably stable reliable period and enter a period of turbulence, chaos and upset. How we treat changes that are counter to what we have experienced will determine how easy or how hard those changes will be. Underestimating the probability of change and the likelihood of disaster makes us vulnerable and unprepared. Just talking about it is a valuable and useful beginning.

When people talk about science writers they most often think about the people who write articles for print; books and magazines and newspapers. But there are other wordsmiths, people who craft ideas and concepts for what is probably the  most influential and most pervasive medium of all time, television. And in spite of what the proponents and gurus of new media have to say, the dominant place of television in the media pantheon is unlikely to change much in the near future. Television is still king of the block.

As as independent producer of predominantly science programming, I attend many conferences each year in order to keep current, sell my shows and to get new science programming off the ground. And in the past few years, this is what I have noticed. Science commissioning has fallen off dramatically. Production of programming itself has not fallen off, but science production seems to have.

The thin edge of the science television programming wedge happens in the newsroom. Journalists seek to cover science the same way that they might cover City Hall or political news, but in general there is very little interest to cover science, unless its the spectacle type, tornado devastates the midwest, or NASA launches a new mission to Jupiter. The reason is pretty simple and should come as no surprise. Most journalists have little background in science and see little of interest, unless it anthropomorphized. Put more simply, science stories need to pass the “who cares” test. 

If a scientist makes the claim that a great breakthrough in the study of Higgs Bosons has been made, the first thing a journalist would seek to do is find someone who could explain to him or her what the hell a Higgs Boson is and why it is important. This is even before the for cross referencing and verification to make sure that what the first scientist claims to be true is in fact true. The journalist, having very little backing in science is not able to make even the smallest inroad to understanding what the scientist is talking about. This should not be surprising, because science is not the part of the colloquial language. Even common terms like force, energy, gravity are confusing to the science illiterate. These terms are very specifically defined in science and mathematics, but may have multiple and even vague meanings in common parlance.

We seek to anthropomorphize science. And if we cannot then its relevance and importance is questioned. The science itself takes a back seat while the human interest story becomes the primary reason for the story.

In long format science documentaries, most of the commissioning editors, the gatekeepers of programming, cut their chops in television news rooms, and for the most part, come from a journalistic approach, not a scientific one. It means they are long on method and short on science. Their knowledge and understanding of science is generally quite low. They are interested in a primarily ratings and whether the programming will grab viewers. Because the level of understanding of science in journalists and the general population is low, what is considered to be entertaining, interesting or relevant and at the same time is science is also low. And its a trend that seems to be accelerating as all broadcasters discover the cash cow of reality programming, shows where the people and their behavior become the central thrust rather than the science. Shows like Junk Yard Wars, Monster Garages and American Chopper being equated as science programming, while real science and relevant and interesting science is passed over as being too esoteric and boring.

It is very tough to convince people, once they have made up their minds about what something is, but in the case of science and television, it is too important to let pass. Our societal, environmental and social problems have to be solved, if we are to survive the coming years. And education and understanding are the keys. If we abandon television to pure entertainment without content, we abandon an opportunity to change the perception that science is boring, hard to understand and needs to dressed and sugar coated to make it palatable.

Time to shine a light on science programming and take back the night.

In my efforts to lower my greenhouse gas and consumption footprint, I have decided that I am going look at food differently. Fast foods, prepared foods, processed foods are all out the window now for the sole reason that I am perfectly capable of buying local and doing things like peeling the potatoes and carrots, seasoning the fish, making my own fruit salad and sandwiches. It also means that I delete massive amounts of plastic packaging, energy consuming mass processing, shipping from all corners of the globe and waste. As a result, I have more compostable material and given the fact that vegetable and fruit peelings and ends accumulate quickly I have the opportunity to experiment.

I feel kind of silly hauling my waste scraps to the green bin and then having them trucked them off to some site for composting. In the old days, when I was a boy, we had a compost pile, in behind the garden, where all the peelings and vegie matter wound up. Whenever we dumped a bin of scraps on to the pile we were sure to cover them with soil to keep the inevitable scavengers at bay. We lived in the country so we had a big garden and everything, especially during the summer came from that garden. The preserve making ritual in the fall was a sight and kept us going through the winter. It was spectacular and for the life of me it doesn’t compare to what the supermarket has to offer…but more on that another time.

It is the compost that I want focus on. I don’t live on the farm anymore so I have to make a bit of effort to get the same result. I have decided that I will compost my own plant material with an indoor worm compost. I went on line, and I have to admit that the on line resources on just about anything are spectacular, and downloaded a number of site with instruction on what to do. All you need are a couple of large bins, one deep with a lid a shaded cool place and worms, lotsa worms! Apparently they can munch through a week’s worth of vegie and fruit cast-offs in a week and produce the best soil and compost you could imagine. Its simple, clean and efficient. And what’s better is that I get to elevate my “holier than thou” approach to life another notch!

Now that is the theory. The bins have been set up. I have chosen the location and now its just getting the worms, thousands of them, to munch through my waste and having the diligence to take their product to my garden. I promise to keep you apprised on the project. My wife and I wonder about things like smell, loose worms, dying worms and really how fast we can process all the vegie matter.

It will be fun and it will interesting. If all else fails and they don’t work out, you can catch me fishing. After all I do have the worms!

After this past winter’s heavy snowfall and melt, a boon to the low water tables of the Maritimes and to farmers who desperately need a wet season to get their crops started on the right track, we are now harvesting another crop, one that most assuredly does not gladden the hearts of those who partake of its bounty. I speak of the denizens of the glades and woodlands, the ubiquitous and infuriating insects we call black flies and mosquitoes. Numbering in the trillions in a normal season, I can only imagine what astronomical, near infinity, numefaction that would have to used to express their arithmetic value.

As in all things there is a Ying and Yang and so it is with the water and the tide of it bounty. With the still ponds and puddles, the rippling creeks and brooks, these biting critters have had a population explosion that beggars anything we mere mortals can inflict on the planet. A quick stroll through any of the rural regions of the Maritimes without benefit of chemical counter persuasion will have one beating a hastier exit than entrance to hill and dale.

Being one who having spent much of his youth in the rural regions of Canada, I am all too familiar with the buzz, whine, tickle, slap choreography that is required anytime one is outdoors during the late spring and early summer months, whether it be to sizzle a steak on the barbie or relieve the boredom of my hyperactive border collies with a brisk wooded ambulation. It is during these times that I must sing the praises of our modern chemical warfare against the gossamer lacewinged mosquito and the inexorable speck of black, aerial dust, the aptly and obviously named, blackfly. I speak of DEET, or N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide, a chemical pesticide that stops them in mid flight and to quote an ancient TV commercial for one of the purveyors of a juice made of the stuff, “they don’t bite, they don’t even like!”.

Now every once in a while you hear about an amazing substance, either a skin treatment or a mouthwash, or a gizmo that miraculously clears the air of the pesky things. Invariably, I have found, the stuff if not pure hocum is hiding the facts enough to get away from being branded an outright fraud and is they only to part you from your money. The things work only for five minutes or under certain conditions or in the the case of the zapping gizmos, do not tell you that the populations of mosquitoes and blackflies are so big, no matter how effect the invention is at dispatching them, its akin to emptying a lake with a straw. Yes there are dead pests piling up, but nature abhors a vacuum and faster than you day say DEET, two more enter the fray proboscis at the ready.

Yes DEET is a toxic chemical, but after 40 years of use it is still the best way to avoid being an insect hors d’ouvres, and relatively safe, though some people do develop reactions to the stuff. For my money is best way to enjoy the outside even when the little buzzers are around.

In the past year or so I have noticed a very interesting phenomenon. It seems the more the our governments dither and obstruct any real action to combat climate change caused by human activity and the more our media confuses the issues and ignores the importance of the climate change, the more groups of people hunger for information and  action. It’s fascinating to watch. The people that you would expect to take action, lead the initiatives and give us guidance are the biggest problem. 

Every week on the Science Files with AK, I inevitably get questions from callers about what is happening, who to believe, how to mitigate what is happening etc. And I am finding that its not government, the media or large companies and corporations that are leading the way on talking, planning and implementing meaningful changes, its small groups from churches, schools and other ethical organizations that are our new leaders.

Governments have failed miserably when it comes to doing anything other than talking. They have completely underestimated the will of the common person to do the right thing when it comes to climate change. And as the days, months and years role on without anything other than rhetoric, small groups of concerned folks are beginning to recycle, reduce and eschew the lack of planning by business oriented governments whose mandate is to keep the status quo.

And so, by and large have the media failed to keep us in the loop in reporting accurately on climate change. In North America, the mainstream media is so woefully inept at reporting on anything other than lurid sexual escapades of insipid cabinet ministers that they have created an information vacuum or even worse a confusion vortex as the planet and it’s eco-systems cook. Most reporters are so woefully under-educated in the sciences and fall regularly for the climate equivalent of the “Nigerian Internet scam” that they are worse than no information at all.

Big business on the other hand, especially the transportation and oil behemoths are as close to an “evil empire” as anything I have witnessed in this society. Just like IBM, GM and Bayer were complicit in the Holocaust of the Nazis seventy years ago, so to are our current business giants in the climate change Holocaust that we are witnessing.

In the past year however, I have witnessed a remarkable about face in the grassroots ethical groups who are finally understanding the implications of business as usual, hear no evil, see no evil and say no evil, triumvirate of climate monkeys. Starving for real information and analysis they have invited speakers, created forums, asked penetrating questions and begun to demand change to our wayward practices. Again it is the individual who comes to the fore, who will make the sacrifices, while those who are supposed to lead, governments, media and business, who are supposed to represent us and our way of life who are wanting and missing in action.