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.