Richard Zurawski

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.

The price of oil is greater than it has ever been and I am worried that as we approach the summer months we are far too focussed on the cost of travel, tourism and business. I am concerned that we are treating this as an inconvenience and an irritant rather than what it is really is, the first shot across the bow of the western consumptive way of life. What will happen as the summer months wane and we head back into the colder bleaker months of winter, when it is only about travel, but about the basic necessities like food and heat. In Canada we are so dependent on fossil fuels for heat and transport of food stuffs from across the world that we have not planned for what to me is the inevitable. 

We in the middle class wail and complain at the erosion of our wealth as the price of a barrel of crude climbs. we demand governmental assistance to ease the tax burden as our corporate power companies swim is revenues, feeling that it is our due to have a cut of the pie. My concern is this as we hue and cry. What about the people who could not afford a tank of oil last winter, who were on the margins of society, who could not afford the food on the super market shelves?

If you think that last winter was a trial, wait for this coming winter. Food banks and oil banks are already over subscribed and the need far greater than the ability to meet the demand.

So what to do, what is the solution? Certainly the price of oil is not likely to reverse. My approach to this conundrum is to use less. Less imported food, less driving, less consumption and fewer toys and purchases. And when I do need to to consume something I have a number of criteria. How far does it have to be shipped. Where is it manufactured and how much plastic is involved in it manufacture? I ask myself the question whether I really need it. Is there some way I can do the same thing without it. I also consider the likelihood of obsolescence. How long will I be able to use it and what happens to it after I am done with it?

What I have found is that as I consider what to buy and what not buy, I find that the process of considering the purchase actually inhibits impulse buying. Sometimes after all the considerations have been taken into account I find that I really don’t need it. It was a case of want and not need.

So what good it this you ask. How does that help? As I consume less, there is more left for other things, other people and maybe just maybe, if the demand falls, so to will the speculation that is driving a lot of the price increases. The final reason is that it also makes me feel better. I find that I value what I do have and tend not to seek consolation in the acquisition in new items that all too quickly become detritus and cast-off

Will this work for everyone? Probably not. But I feel a little better.

NASA has just this past week landed a spaceship on the planet Mars, the first time that it has been able to do a controlled descent to the planet’s surface in thirty years. What better illustrates the enormous challenge of space travel than the fact that fewer than half of the missions to Mars have ended in success. The others have crashed and malfunctioned.

NASA scientists and technicians were justifiably concerned as they waited to hear from the spacecraft, that it had in fact landed safely and was performing its functions and experiments as planned. This mission to Mars is a precursor to a manned (peopled?) mission in the not too distant future, and its success is a large step to getting people to the surface of the planet.

It is a remarkable step to be sure, but is it one that should lead to an expedition of astronauts? I am as romantic as the next sci-fi dreamer, but I have to wonder whether it will ever be possible to have people travelling to the planets. A trip to the moon to gather rocks is one thing. The moon is a paltry ten times the diameter of the Earth away and we literally and figuratively run circles around the globe constantly. But a trip to the planets is another issue. Mars is more than 100 times as far from the earth at its closest approach and a trip would take months if not years, instead of days and it would expose astronauts to gamma rays, solar radiation and an isolation that even the past Antarctic explorers couldn’t imagine. Then assuming the travellers landed safely after enduring this most arduous of journeys, they would then have to perform their functions and then face the dangers of getting off the planet without the incredible NASA backup and venture back again! This is not Star Trek folks. The chances of astronauts being able to accomplish this successfully borders on the slim and slight.

Whatever successes we have had in space have come at the hands of the incredible technology we have developed. That technology has lead to new materials, computers and robots that are light years ahead of what we thought was possible even a few decades ago. In comparison, our bodies have remained the same, vulnerable, expensive to maintain and easily damaged by even the most benign of what space travel has to offer. In addition space probes and the like have not need to give up lives, breathe, say good-bye to families and endure what I cannot imagine. If they malfunction, its just so much metal and plastic sitting in the red dust. We have plenty more to send. And once there they don’t have to come back. It’s a one-way deal that they are only to happy to make.

So, why I ask, the rush to send people to Mars or to any other planet for that matter? There is no comparison in history to this trek. There is no hope of riches or wealth or other people or anything else that our robots can’t do for us. The vast journeys of the past whether to the New World or to Antarctica pale in comparison to what we intend with the red planet. What’s that expression? Fools rush in……

This is my favourite time of month, because this is when one of my favourite magazines arrives on my doorstep. Scientific American has been a staple of mine for the better part of four decades and my virtually complete library of back issues is a glorious information source. 

I can watch the march of science through its pages and read about the incredible successes from the scientists themselves, who prepare articles for this prestigious periodical’s educated layperson, who may or may not be an expert in a given field. Though I skim every article from the first page onward, I really dig in and settle into my favourites, physics, meteorology and paleontology, like an easy conversation with an old boyhood chum. Always well written, prepared and presented, they summarize the world of science like to other periodical. In addition to the sceince articles, like every other good news organ, Scientific American also has editorials and commentaries, which are always rich and rewarding. I especially like Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic, and regular contributor to Sci Am. 

This month, Michael’s article pertained to his perspective on the interview he did with Ben Stein, who produced the  documentary marketed to Christian Fundamentalists called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. Ben set up an interview to query Michael on his views on Darwinism for inclusion in the documentary. Apparently, the interview didn’t go as planned from Ben’s viewpoint. 

His viewpoint? Stein draws a ridiculous line that Darwinism leads Atheism, to evil, and can be traced to the Holocaust and other travesties of the 20th and 21st century. Because of this perceived connection, Ben’s central thesis is that the Intelligent Design premise or by any other name, Creationism, is the only viable alternative. Cut in the pseudojournalistic mold of Michael Moore, Ben Stein’s directed approach to enquiry is galling. I urge you to read Shermer’s article and see the machinations that Stein goes through to mislead, obfuscate and distort. Its not about information, understanding or clarification. Its about creating doubt, trying to trip up and hide the hidden agenda that Stein has. Questions are traps, hoping to lead the unwary into saying something that will unwittingly bolster the premise of Creationism.

It’s such a shameful exercise and in a nutshell shows the problems that we now have with vested interests. In this time when we have so many problems to solve, problems that threaten our way of life and the life on the planet, it is so sad to think that so much effort is wasted combating supercilious and spurious arguments whose sole purpose is to give credence to unsupportable and wrongheaded ideas whose only support comes from a conglomeration of ancient myth. 

We need to seriously examine another unspeakable travesty in the making, one that could be even worse than the awful genocides perpetrated by the vile evil regimes of the past. Obfuscation and distortion in the name of fundamentalism is as wrong as the eugenics of our bygone eras and bear the same stamp of pseudoscience and ethical masquerades that led us to the holocaust. Is it time to make this type of distortion a crime when so much hangs in the balance and so little time left to act? 

The past ten years have seen an amazing transformation in the media and entertainment world. The internet has turned everything on its head. Newspapers are losing money, closing down and laying off writers and other production staff, book sales are down worldwide, the music industry still hasn’t adjusted to the new world order and now the great and powerful television and movie industries are beginning to feel the not so nascent and growing power of the wired world.

This shaking up of the world information, communication and entertainment industry has been forecast for a decade and though there are been a few false starts it looks like the shakeup is finally here. Fewer and fewer people are watching the great and powerful networks. The same thing that happened to the music industry, through the free download debacle of Napster and other peer to peer music trading sites is now happening to video, television and the movies. The first inroads were made through Utube, but now the increased bandwidth, the proliferation of movie and TV free download sites is in full swing. And frankly, I have no idea how this latest play will end. When I consider the pap that passes for entertainment that is available to me on the TV dial, or at the latest Hollywood offerings, I see why this is all happening. Why wade through endless commercials, edits in content to fit the production into the TV time slot or just the insipid, low brow shows, I am not surprised that its primarily the blue rinse set and the remote controlling couch bound who make up the dwindling TV audience. And the bad news for the networks is that like big tobacco, the quest for a new younger user is coming up goose eggs.

I tasted for the first time last week what is available out there on demand, sans commercials, watching what I wanted, when I wanted from an offering that boggles the mind. Fifty years of TV production from all genres available at a click of a mouse. The cost zero, the convenience infinity. 

So far I have only logged into one web site, though I have found many others that offer the same service at the same price. Is it legal? I can’t imagine that it is, though the disclaimers claim so.

How long will these sites stay up and running before the authorities step in? Hard to say. Look what happened to the music industry. Napster was the cutting edge, the first wave of peer to peer trading and downloading and it revolutionized how we listen to music and where we get our music. In the end Napster was shut down, but dozens of clones still exist and do pretty much the same thing. The fallout was that many retailers felt the pinch and some even went out of business. Now it is the turn of broadcasters and purveyors of video. We are used to free programming and like the inexorable flow of water down a hill peer to peer free downloads, will erode the networks and broadcasters. Where this will all go and what it means to copyright, programming and how entertain ourselves is the new $64-billion question.

Yet again we hear the bleating people and groups complaining about the cost of fuel for our heating, transportation and agriculture. 

We pontificate, complain and conjecture as to why this is happening, how we have to become active to stop it and how we have the right to continue doing what we want because that is what we want.

We have had warning that for one reason or another the end to cheap fossil fuels was coming, that we were living on borrowed time. Did we look at the facts, listen to the geologists, environmentalists, actuaries and geophysicists who told us that we were playing into the hands big oil and the enriching the Middle East, as well as pushing our planet headlong into thermageddon?

I’m afraid we did just the opposite. We went out and bought the biggest gas-guzzling behemouths we could find, fell in love with urban sprawl and empowered our military to become an arm of big oil and transportation interests. Did we finance alternate energy, look at reduction or put a hold on our runaway consumption and population? Not a chance.

And today as the price of gasoline spirals ever upwards do we slow down, consume less, stretch each litre of fuel? The maddening race continues as we rush ever faster hither and yon and complain that fuel taxes and big oil are gouging us blind. Every highway has almost all driving faster than ever ignoring the simple laws of science that govern consumption.

Imagine what the world might look like today, if we didn’t burn fossil fuels, if we had developed renewable energies, perfected the hydrogen economy when the first oil crisis hit in 1973.
Imagine if we didn’t flow trillions of dollars a year to people half a world away bent on financing our destruction with our own dollars, impoverishing our middle and lower classes while at the same time enriching the greedy elite. 

Or go even further back and look at the antics of General Motors, Mac Truck, Standard Oil, Firestone, along with the duplicitous governments in Ottawa and Washington and the like, who illegally destroyed our rail network so that we would become addicted to the automobile.

So here we sit stewing in a pot of hubris of our own making, having traded the future for plush, wheeled parking lots called SUVs. 

Bring on the higher fossil fuel costs, bring on the shortages, bring on the taxes. The sooner we get past the idea that we can do what we want because we can, the sooner we can get back to our senses and stop unlimited growth.

We take so much for granted. When we look at the seas and the oceans we limitless expanses and forget that even something as seemingly endless are not immune to our effects. Even they have begun to change because of our numbers and industry. The latest studies seem to to be telling us that climate change, a warming of the atmosphere is also going to interfere with the oceans’ ability hold oxygen.

The more scientists study the oceans, the more there is for them to find. And one of the more disturbing finds is that parts of the oceans are becoming anoxic zones, that is, areas devoid of oxygen. Not good news at all if you live in the ocean and breathe oxygen. That includes, fish, corals, sponges, lobsters, squids; just about anything that crawls or swims in the ocean waters. So what happens to oxygen breathing creatures in these anoxic zones? Pretty simple. Whatever relies on oxygen and happens to live there dies. And some of the regions are huge. There is a zone just off the west coast of Africa, almost as big as Belgium that has been studied for years as it gets bigger and more consistent.

In the anoxic zones, anaerobes, creatures that do not require or even like oxygen, thrive. The famous “red tides” caused by red algae, are an example of these types of creatures and what happens when the move into a region. Red algae, a phytoplanktonic organism, require very little oxygen and also release toxic chemicals that kill pretty much any organisms that come in contact with them, fish, birds, mammals and even people. The red algae then consume their kill, which in some cases can number millions of individuals, rivaling humans in their ability to destroy vast regions of the ecosystem. 

Today, more and more of these dead zones are cropping up in the oceans. Most are along coastal areas where effluent and agricultural runoff deplete the oxygen and devastate coastal shelf life, opening a new niche for anaerobes and other anoxic creatures. The eastern coast of North America has in recent years been the scene of shellfish poisoning, because the shellfish are filter feeders that ingest the phytoplankton toxins and then pass the toxins on to us when we consumed the shellfish. That led to the deaths of many people and even many of those who survived were left with permanent disabilities.

As long as we continue to pump effluent into the oceans, as long as we treat them like open sewers we will have a harmful effect on not only the creatures in the ocean, but ultimately ourselves. When we close an environmental niche to one group of species, life somehow finds a way to sooner or later populate that empty spot with another group, which very often may not be the friendliest or compatible to us or the creatures we rely on.

It’s no secret that as human rights to travel, live and work around the world have become strangled for one reason or another, the rights of capital have enjoyed an unprecedented and virtually unfettered right to travel, invest and exploit.

Under the banner of globalization, our corporatocracy has been able to close borders to people wishing to emigrate and immigrate and yet at the same time opened the floodgates to investment money to take advantage of third world countries with poverty issues, no environmental standards or worker rights. And in the name of cheaper consumer products we in the west have sold our industry, environment and standard of living down the proverbial river.

You can a get a cheaper coffee maker or toaster or BBQ, but chances are it is made and manufactured in China where workers have virtually no rights, the environment is an afterthought and profits for the companies investing abroad are enormous. Meanwhile smaller regional and locally based companies that have unions, pensions, adhere to stricter environmental codes and make products at higher costs, suffer the bottom line consequences. Yet it is these companies that are invested in their regions, they pay their taxes at home, they employ locals, contribute to the social infrastructure like charities, institutions and events.

It used to be that manufacturers produced most of their products for regional and local markets and by and large took their resources from the region as well. It was pretty much a closed loop and the environmental footprint was smaller, though the product more expensive.

Now with multinationals having conquered all with their ability to invade any market and flood it with cheap goods, subsidized by the exploitation of the environment and poverty stricken workers we find ourselves awash in cheap consumer items, but no environment to speak of, an economy that continues to insist that globalization and consuming is a way of life synonymous with Democracy.

We are now at a cusp, living in a world where the chickens are going to come home to roost. We have traded our limited fossil fuels for SUVs and toasters and when the dust settles we will have to find a way to do more with less. We will need to learn to manufacture what we need again at home and not just what planned obsolescence tells us we think we want. We will have to rebuild our rail lines, pay higher food prices, repair, recycle and reuse, give up the ubiquitous air travel to sunny climes, and above all, reinvent our antiquated economic model.

No more BBQs made in China. No more Walmart superstores and the like that cruise into a region and gut businesses and cities like a T-rex on steroids, riding a wave of fossil fueled consumer goods.