Richard Zurawski

It is a a lucky coincidence that one of my favourite places in all the world happens to be in our back yard. Its called Joggins and its on the extreme eastern edge of the Bay of Fundy. This is a place where water and land come together in a perfect confluence for fossil hunters. The great, massive tides of the Bay of Fundy twice a day assault the late Paleozoic sedimentary cliffs laying bare tales of life long past. A careful eye and slow meander at low tide can turn up some of the most startling finds. An imprint of a small salamander running across what was mud, now hardened into rock, is just a step away. Or the sight of what at first glance appears to be a Doric column, is actually the trunk of a great tree sized fern, standing amid a now stone forest of fossilized cycads.

At least once a year I make the trek and spend the day marveling and walking into the mists of the past. If I am careful I can almost imagine myself being transported back to that time of giant dragon flies, snakelike centipedes and pig sized amphibians, walked, slithered and crept the muddy, swampy shore some 300 million years ago.

The people who live in and around Joggins, with some help from the province are hoping that the Joggins Cliffs will be declared a World Heritage Site and I can think of no place that deserves the designation more. People like Don Reid have been trying for decades to get the world to recognize the spectacular beauty and importance of the site. From a scientific standpoint it is certainly recognized by scientists and paleontologists as such. They come and consult with Don and walk under the magic of the cliffs to seek out its treasures and further our understanding of our long lost paleontological past. But the governments and the other groups could do much worse than invest a little money and time to protect this unique resource. Having it designated as World Heritage Site would go a long way to ensuring its long term protection.

If you can, before our late fall bloom fades. Take a walk amid the fossilized cliffs and the spectacular tides and watch history unfold wave after wave. Bundle up, because the ever blowing wind has a sharp edge to it, even when the days are warm. Drop in to the Joggins Museum and look at the collections of ferns, imprints, insects, amphibians, fishes. Have a cup of Joe to warm up, a piece of pie to go with it and take back your fossilized memories to treasure over and over again.

In the past year we have had a veritable revolution in thinking and public attitude towards climate change. On the surface of it, it probably began with the Al Gore film, but on further reflection, there seems to have been a ground swell of people, who, to reference the venerable movie, Network, starring Faye Dunaway and William Holden who echo his famous quote and say “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”.

I won’t beat the dead horse of the climate change rationale right now, because I am sure that almost everybody understands that we are causing a change of biblical proportions. What I will say is has more to do with what in blazes we can and should we do. We need desperately to get off the business as usual bandwagon. As attractive as it is to let things go on-and-on-and-on ’til they can’t, we must and can change our ways. It is my generation, the boomers, who quite frankly, have left a legacy of hedonistic waste for our future generations to deal with. And deal with it they must.

We are a ingenious species and never has there been the like of humanity on earth before. We have dodged bullet after bullet in the past and it is time again for us to rise and meet the challenge. What has been our greatest achievement has now become our greatest liability. Our need to grow and to procreate and to flourish has become a millstone around not only our necks, but that of the entire eco-system.

I remember a long time ago, a wonderful old stirrer of BS, named Richard Needham, who came to my high school as a guest speaker during the time when young people were rising up against all the platitudes and hypocrisy of our fathers before us. He told us that it was time for us to make a change, that the boomers could change the world. And change the world we did, but then we wallowed in our successes and became lazy and slothful.

Now, in the name of that slick hypodermic needle, I call upon our young people to take up the mantle of change. Change our growth ethic, our economic model that makes more, bigger and conspicuous consumption our god. Convince the world that we have enough people, babies and progeny, to fill another ten planets and create a new order, economy, social ethic and responsibility.

Be mad as hell and don’t take it anymore. It’s time for change, time to stop business as usual. Its time for the new generation to teach their fathers and mothers to stop the platitudes and hypocrisy.

Its hard to escape the news these day, of the conflagration of Southern California, fanned by the roaring Santa Anna Winds. It seems that if celebrity homes and life styles are threatened then there is no shortage of coverage and news. We get it all, from pronouncements of aid to flaming castles to satellite plumes. All the stations have the obligatory coverage.

But there is something to be taken to heart in all this, aside from the obvious. Disaster is no respecter of wealth and influence. And in this case there is far more here than meets the eye. It is obvious that the drought has played a great role in the ravaging fires, by providing tinder and fuel for the fires. But what has also played a pivotal role is the fact that for the past fifty years we in North America have believed the hype that all forest fires are bad, that the adage of Smokey and cohorts were to be applied no matter what. All fires were to be extinguished. In fact this is not the case. Fire plays a crucial role in the regeneration of forests, clearing detritus and clearing the slate for species to occupied new niches. In nature fire is a necessary evil, as we have found out. It we inhibit the process, when it does inevitably break out, either naturally or through the actions of people, it becomes a devastating raging inferno from which nothing escapes alive.

The second point to notice is the sprawl of our population. We are now building in places that we shouldn’t, because we are crowding ourselves out of our cities. We are building beside forests which have become tinder boxes, on the slopes of mountains that can come crashing down on us when the earth moves and close to ocean shores that turn deadly when storms turn the waters to towering waves and floods.

What began the process was the incredible drought that has affected not only North America, but also China, India, Africa and Australia. Somehow it is more newsworthy when it affect the denizens of Malibu, than it does the African Sahel.

What we can learn from the California conflagration is that sometimes when you play with fire, you can get burned. What are we in the Maritimes going to get burned by? Just like the West Coasters we treat the environment as disposable at our our peril. We have our own disasters waiting to take their turn. Consider the Gulf Stream, our prime disaster waiting to happen. Or our storms, hurricanes and ETs being generated with increasing freuency and intensity. Or our new climate with its prolonged summer and feeble winters. California and Santa Anna wind fires are not so far away after all.

In all the world, there is probably no more prestigious award that we have, a recognition of achievement and innovation of the best and brightest who see and have seen further than the rest of us.

This year Al Gore shared in the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to publicize the need to stem the tide of human induced climate change. Perhaps there were more deserving people, people who have had a greater impact in the climate change arena, but I am not sure who they might have been.

I am an unabashed fan of the man who might have been president. I have heard others deride his achievements, saying that he was the recipient merely because of his political stature. But consider this. Climate change is a silent killer and the numbers who are affected, who die and suffer because of the effects of the changes that we have induced on our frail and fragile planet probably now number in the millions. When a heat wave, or a hurricane, or typhoon, drought flood or any of the other myriad of weather disasters strike we now have to ask is it because of our activities? Is it because of our relentless drive to drive, fly, play with fossil fuels and consume energy at an unprecedented rate that creates this havoc? Most likely it is. The possibility that it is part of a natural cycle is now virtually, totally discounted. Only the hardest of craniums still beat that contrarian drum. So thank you Al for helping to make a dent, a divot in those who would deny, deny, deny.

And its not just people who are in peril. Ecological disaster induced by climate change is but a heartbeat away for thousands of our co-species who have no choice but to whither and die in the face of changing ecological conditions. Whether polar bear or nematode or conifer, they are all sitting ducks to our whim and fancy to fire up the combustion engine and pretend that it has no consequences.

So, even if there were more deserving peace prize recipients, I still applaud the Nobel committee for their selection. By choosing Mr. Gore, they raised the awareness of global climate change another notch. And maybe the nay sayers, the obfuscators, the upstream swimmers, the soap boxer in need of attention, will be pushed back a bit, into the darkness shared by Holocaust Deniers, Flat Earthers and Religious Cults.

Thank you Al Gore. You do deserve the Nobel prize.

In the course of my Friday Science Files with Andrew Krystal I often touch upon the risks that we as a species are faced with, the things that threaten our survival. It is a fact that 99.9 per cent of all the species that have ever existed in the past roughly four-billion years of life on the Earth are now extinct, gone forever more. That means that only one in a thousand species that has ever lived is alive today. In its crudest, most simplistic expression it means that the half life, the average life span that we can expect of a species is in the order of four million years.

Some species live longer, some shorter, but the equation is the same for all plants, animals, fungi and microbes, we live to die as individuals and as species. What seems to be certain is that the tapestry of life continues, with constant ebbing and flowing of species.

Probably the most successful of all creatures were the anaerobes that held the dominant sway over the earth for almost three billion years. In the end most of the archaic anaerobes fell victim to their our successes and three billion years passed and new better adapted more complex life succeeded them. If we take the anaerobes and and their time out of the lifeline and just deal with the past half-billion years, we hone the average lifetime of a species considerably. The average lifetime of a species falls to roughly half-a-million years.

Why do I mention this? Homo Sapiens Sapiens, (read: you and I) have graced Terra Firma, as a species, for something like between 200 and 300,000 years. That is preciously close to the average life span of a species on this planet.

Now, that average of half-a-million years is for species that do not nudge, push and mangle their environment, but rather live within its confines. It seems that as long as the ecosystem remains stable the odds of a species surviving goes up. As soon as changes happen to the ecosystem, extinction rates climb. Look around you. Everything seems to be changing as far as the weather and the climate and the make up of the atmosphere are concerned.

Maybe, just maybe its time to listen for footsteps. The last group of species to mess with the environment were the anaerobes almost one-billion years ago and just before the end they were so dominant and populous, numbering in the quintillions that it seemed like things would never change. But change they did and now they are just a fossil memory.

One of the most popular topics that Andrew and I do on the Friday Science Files is space travel. It seems to resonate with just about everyone and every time we cover the topic we get a fabulous response.

Space travel and getting into orbit or to the moon or to the next planet and even the next star seems to touch the adventurer in us all. And as our technology grows we find that what was once the purview of science fiction and fantasy is in fact, reality.

Our efforts to conquer space is about our technology and how the pursuit of outer space in turn modifies and molds our society and even defines it. We can get a perspective of its dramatic effects by looking at the the changes that have been wrought on us by our pursuit of all things space. The past fifty years has been very instructive and enlightning.

Why is it that the United States was able to become the world’s preeminent country and pretty much the defacto global leader? It all has to do with a quirk of conquest and disadvantage turned into advantage. And all this is tied to the space race.

At the end of the Second World War Germany was an undisputed leader in rocket technology. The the best and brightest rocket scientists were German. As fate would have it, as the Soviets swept through the east towards Berlin it scooped up all the scientists it could, realizing that its future security lay in its ability to pilfer their discoveries. The US in turn got the leftovers.

The Soviets with their new found cache of knowledge in rocketry began to close the technological gap with the West with frightening rapidity. While the United States and the West languished in rocket science, the Soviets, with their captive German technology jumped into space. Fifty years ago the tiny bleep of Sputnik shocked the United States out of its complacency. If the Soviets were able to send a satellite into orbit they could also send nuclear tipped intercontinental rockets to the United States at hypersonic speeds and far outstrip the nuclear B-52s.

Because the US had an inferior rocket program, it was hopelessly outclassed in the ability to muscle payloads into orbit. It was forced to miniaturize. The Soviets had no such constraints. Its brute force ability meant it didn’t need to make small satellites. It could send huge payloads into orbit. A quick comparison between the total tonnage lifted into space tells a story. The USSR was on average sending satellites that were almost ten times as massive. It appeared that the US was outclassed by the once backward Soviets.

But, because the US was forced to miniaturize, in its never ending quest to downsize payloads, it developed transistors, then integrated circuits, then nano technology. In fact the whole computer revolution happened precisely because of the disadvantage. The USSR’s advantage became its Achille’s Heel. Its brute force meant its computer technology stagnated and stultified. Soon the average US home computer of the mid eighties has more processing power than Soviet mainframes. It was not enough to have massive rockets. Computers to model, modify, project,plan and virtually test gave the US a technological lead that has defined the past fifty years. Cell phones, ipods, fuel efficient transportation, nano technology, medicine have all benefited from a strange quirk of conquest. Imagine what Stalin would have done to the world if he had our modern technology.

Once you find a good topic its hard to let it go, so again I will stay on the topic of Oxygen. Its hard to say too much about a good thing and definitely Oxygen falls into that category. Oxygen is a good thing if you are have an aerobic metabolism. If you are an anaerobe, a creature that has a metabolism doesn’t use oxygen and that produces oxygen as a waste, chances are that it not so good.

So the benefits of oxygen are a matter of perspective. Here is some of the raw chemistry. Oxygen is the second most reactive element on the periodic table. That means it is always on the hunt to bond with something. That is what makes it so important for you and me. It is more reactive than chlorine and almost as reactive as fluorine, both incredibly toxic and dangerous. In fact, if it wasn’t so necessary for metabolism and life, oxygen would be extremely dangerous. And its why the anaerobes did themselves in a billion years ago and lost control over the ecosystem that they had created. It was extremely toxic to them. In fact oxidation is also something that can be detrimental to the aerobic creatures as well. It ages us, creates mutations and invades our DNA and RNA and degrades our organs. Yet its impossible to do without it. Its absolutely necessary for almost all life and at the same time is responsible for our death. Talk about a two edged sword. You can’t do without and if you live with it, it will kill you.

We get a huge amount of energy from combining things with all the surplus oxygen that we have in the atmosphere created by our busy plants and microbes. When we eat we use oxygen and its incredibly voracious appetite to bond with our food that releases energy. Its called oxidation. When we burn wood, coal, natural gas and oil we oxidize carbon. When we drive our cars and our trucks, when we fly, when we breathe and when we die and rot, we consume oxygen. Its everywhere from the macroscopic to the microscopic. We are saturated in Oxygen.

With all this oxidation going on and understanding that oxygen is so highly reactive, you’d think that we would run out of the stuff in short order. In fact we would if it weren’t for the plants and microbes that are busy making the stuff as quickly as we use it.

If they stopped for some reason. If they died off or they just quit making oxygen we would use it all up in less than a century and everything would stop.

The punch line to this oxygen story is this. When we delve into the distant past we find that the levels of oxygen have varied dramatically. There were times in the past where oxygen has been as high as 40 to 45%. Life in those times was lush and varied and spectacular. There are also times when the level have plummeted below 20%, lower than they are today. That happened during the great dying when massive volcanism ignited the huge forests that spewed fires and carbon dioxide almost without end, while consuming oxygen. The Earth heated up the oceans released hydrogen cyanide and life almost died out.

Could it happen again? Its worth considering. Breathe deeply folks.

Take a deep breath. Feels good doesn’t it? No matter where you are on the face of the Earth you can always fill your lungs with life giving, sustaining, wonderful air. And the stuff that feels so good in each breath is oxygen. In fact, it is the second most common gas in the atmosphere. Twenty-one per cent of the entire atmosphere is made up of this remarkable gas. We are so used to having oxygen around us, ready for the breath of life or fires or any form of combustion from the myriad of engines that zip us from place to place, cut our lawns or blow our leaves.

The surprising thing about this gas is that it if it was not constantly being regenerated it would entirely disappear. Free oxygen is the product of biological activity. In fact there is a bit of irony that we can all learn about in a little oxygen story. In the course of the story we will also get a feeling for how entwined all life is. Mess with it at you own peril.

The Earth is about 4.65 billion years old give or take 150 million years. About half a billion years after the Earth was created, it is estimated that life had already gained a toehold in the relatively newly condensed oceans of the world. But if you could do a bit of time travel and seek yourself back to that nascent Earth, you would find it a very forbidding and alien place. What you would notice just before you expired because of a lack of oxygen to breathe is that the atmosphere was almost all carbon dioxide and the sky a dull brownish, the sun was much dimmer and there was nothing in either the oceans or on land that you could call life. The life that did exist was anaerobic, microscopic and and most closely resembled the life forms called stromatolites, today only found in ultra saline tropical pools.

For over three billion years the only life on the Earth were anaerobic single celled microscopic sludge-like colonies. They consumed the vast quantities of carbon dioxide available from the atmosphere and through energy from the sun used photosynthesis to live, multiply and dominate the Earth’s ecosystems like no other group of creatures have since. In numbers too large to believe they probably covered the oceans in thick sludge mats, sucking back CO2 and sunlight and excreting oxygen. Year after year they lived.

At first the oxygen the anaerobes excreted was absorbed by the environment. Oxygen is highly reactive and tries to bond with just about anything around it. First the iron bonded with oxygen to create rust. Then other elements absorbed the effluent. But eventually the environment became saturated. Even single celled microbes if they number in the countless quardrillions will eventually have an effect on the environment. And what an effect they had. Soon the oxygen began to pile up in the atmosphere. And the CO2 levels began to fall correspondingly to meet the need of the voracious anaerobes. This was twofold whammy.

Firstly oxygen is highly toxic to the anaerobes and where oxygen built up they died off. Secondly the CO2 was being replaced by a gas that wasn’t a very good greenhouse gas, oxygen. The temperature plummeted on the Earth and we had the first ever Ice Age. It took over three billion years to happen and in that time the humble little anaerobes had transformed the Earth. Oxygen levels had risen and carbon dioxide fallen so that when the Ice Age hit, you and I could breathe the air and the sky was clear and blue. But the anaerobes were buried under their own effluent.

Soon the entire Earth froze and for 200 million years the deep freeze lasted. The anaerobes almost died off and even the tropical oceans were covered in ice. From space the Earth must have been a spectacular glittering ice diamond. It was the first mass extinction and caused entirely by a species that had dominated the Earth for over three billion years. It was the first and only time, so far, that life itself had been a factor in climate change and in changing the ecosystem wholesale. The first, that is until humankind.

Out of the ice grew an entire new ecosystem, from which all the life that we call familiar is descended, plate tectonics released more CO2 and with a few thousands of years the ice melted and the great tapestry of life with creatures that could not only tolerate, but thrive in an oxygen environment came to dominate the world. But the legacy of oxygen and its catastrophic introduction echoed throughout the geologic ages. Today microbes, anaerobes and plants share the burden of producing the oxygen we all need to exist.

Every time you take a deep breath, think about the fate of those marvelous, over productive anaerobes and how they changed the ecosystem of a planet and destroyed themselves.

Of late there seems to have been a lot of ink splashed on the pages of our newspapers about how the Arctic ice is disappearing, how the Gulf Stream is slowing, how typhoons, cyclones and hurricanes are spinning destruction at accelerated rates, and the spectacular drought in Australia reaches one in a thousand year frequency. Closer to home, the summer has almost refused to fade away, Ontario’s much vaunted Great Lakes are at the lowest levels since lake levels began to be monitored, while we in the Maritimes record the latest date for a day time high in the thirties, and salmon die in rivers because the waters are too warm. Yet amid all the hoopla regarding climate change, it seems that the majority of people don’t get it or want to get it. It really does seem as though only a handful of people are concerned about it all. Or the media in search of yet another story to grist through the daily mill of news horrors.

I spend a goodly amount of time talking about climate change, to pretty much anyone who will listen. And I have for these past thirty years been trying to get people to listen. I am not a Nostradamus or Oracle In fact my publisher, Lesley Choyce, owner and operator of Pottersfield Press, writer, musician, professor at Dal is going to publish my next offering. Yes, its about climate change

Really not much has changed, except for the fact that the hot air quotient has upped a notch. As I look around me, I see business as usual. Bigger faster cars are still derigeur. Ads talk about speed, creature comforts and SUVs that can rip through any terrain, chase squirrels up trees and churn through fossil fuels.

I then read yet again, buried in the back pages of the newspaper, something that should make all of us sit up and notice. Tim Flannery, a climate change expert from Australia, says that after reading all the reports, all the studies, which by the way, are almost to a scientist telling us that climate change is happening, that we have reached the threshold where we are now at risk of dangerous climate change. Not in two years, not in ten years, not in twenty, but now.

And still we argue and obfuscate and do nothing. How much longer can we do nothing? The tank is empty and we are now running on fumes.

I went for a walk in the Maritime wilderness this past weekend with a friend from out of town, my wife and our two crazy border collies, Patch and Toby. It was in the wonderful Maritime fall sunshine that we found a small lake nestled in the countryside, a rock crest overlooking the lake to sit on and the time to marvel at the beauty of the changing seasons.

As we sat in the comfort of old friendship and sunshine, life was peaceful, gentle and warm. My thoughts drifted to what I saw around me and I could not help but think of a grand old biologist name James Lovelock and his ruminations of life being co-joined, interconnected and woven in such intricacy that it created, nurtured and sustained the Earth’s ability to harbour life for these past, incredible, four billion years. He calls it the Gaia Hypothesis.

Its an elegant, simple, if not whimsical idea, that says that life has the ability to create for itself an environment conducive to the furtherance of life.

If the sun grows too bright and hot, life adjusts by lowering the CO2 content in the earth’s atmosphere and the planet cools. If too much oxygen is made, fires are more likely from lightning strikes and the oxygen is consumed and the levels fall back to lower levels. You get the idea. Its a self regulating system, one that keeps us not too cool and not too hot, a cosmic porridge, just right and toasty. Whether by conscious effort or by complexity and automatic response, its a marvelous entity that he calls Gaia, after the Greek word for mother earth.

On that early fall day day with all that is important to me, my friends and my thoughts, surrounding me, I felt safely tucked into the bosom of mother Earth, of Gaia. How could I not? And for a few moments or maybe longer, as I threw sticks into the still warm waters of that small lake that my dogs swam to retrieve, as we talked and laughed and warmed in the gentle afternoon sun, I believed in Gaia and forgot about climate change, over population and the host of ills we humans have unleashed. For a moment all was good in the Maritime sunshine and we were part of Gaia and she us.