Foxes, Chickens and Fish

Good Move, Minister Prentice!

Today, federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice did the right thing by appointing an independent science panel to review industrial pollution in the Athabasca River and surrounding waterways. This comes on the heels of new scientific research showing that pollution from the tar sands is contaminating water far downstream from the development.

So far, the Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program (RAMP) has been responsible for monitoring water pollution in the tar sands region. This industry-dominated body has continually reported that there are no problems. As internationally renowned biologist Dr. David Schindler has pointed out, “there's no way industry can be belching out hundreds of kilograms of toxins every year and this not be detectable in the environment unless the monitoring program is totally incompetent".

This fox-guarding-the-henhouse situation has led to growing concern from downstream communities about the safety of the water they’re drinking and the fish they’re eating. When several seriously deformed fish were recently displayed, Minister Prentice said he was “disgusted”.

We’re glad to see that Minister Prentice is now taking a step to get to the bottom of the pollution problem in the Athabasca River. By appointing a panel of independent scientists to provide recommendations on monitoring and best practices, he’s recognized that the federal government has a responsibility to protect people and the environment from tar sands pollution.

Chair

Building a chair in nature, constructed from found elements, is a simple idea about accommodating human-kind in the natural world. Just as a primitive hut provides shelter, so too a chair provides a place to rest the body in a landscape that may not necessarily be relied upon to do so.

As a boy I spent my summers canoe-tripping in Northern Ontario. On many occasions we would stop our journey for a little while to rest and play. During such times I often made chairs. Our part of Ontario is located within the pre-Cambrian shield and is formed largely of granite. The chairs where made by stacking loose shards of rock to construct a seat, back and more often than not arms, as they were useful in stabilizing the back. Because the basic building blocks were both large and crude, the chairs tended to have throne-like qualities. Undoubtedly they were situated prominently, with a long view. The purpose of the chairs, to my young imagination, was to provide a place for the ‘hermit’ – the one who had escaped civilization and lived all around us, yet was never seen.

With this in mind, I determined to make a chair in the high Arctic as part of our Cape Farewell journey. Inspired by the hauntingly beautiful constructions made of snow by Peter Clegg and Anthony Gormley during the 2005 Cape Farewell Project, I went shopping in Toronto, prior to my departure, for the tools that I thought I would need; shovel, snow saw and ice saw.

It was a bit of a surprise therefore to arrive at Spitsbergen and discover that the beautiful snow that Peter and Anthony had worked with was available to them because their trip took place in February, whereas we were conducting our expedition at the end of the polar summer, throughout the last three weeks of September. Nature presented us with only a dusting of snow that rarely covered the enormous landscape of solid rock, loose rock, pebbles, and extremely hard glacial ice. So much for the concept of building a throne of carefully cut and assembled slabs of firm polar snow. How naïve I was.

However, after some time it became apparent that I might be able to carve a chair out of icebergs left on the beaches during low tide, adjacent to the glaciers. So, one morning, equipped with ice saw and a borrowed a hatchet from the ship I walked along the beach searching for suitable specimens, Simon was of course close by, rifle in hand, ever vigilant for polar bear.

Unlike the constructions of my childhood, which were made by adding bits of rock to build up a form resembling a chair, ice presented newer and different challenges. The three chairs constructed required cutting into the ice as found in order to create a place to sit. The resulting forms were not therefore instantly recognizable as chairs in the simple sense of the word, but were rather more sculptural. One of the chairs was like a little speed boat while another became a winged chariot, complete with seat, wings, tail and head.

The hat you see in the photos has another meaning. Also when I was a boy, I had a good friend whose father died accidentally when he fell through the ice while Nordic skiing. He was alone and close to shore, where the ice is thinnest, and with skis firmly fixed was unable to get out. With what may have been his final gesture, he threw his hat onto the dock to let his family know where he was.


The hat has become for me a symbol of loss and thin ice. It communicates both the loving selflessness of my old friend’s father’s gesture and the danger to us all of thinning ice; a sign of both love and death.

By late afternoon high tide had rolled in and the chairs carried out to sea, already beginning to melt beyond recognition. The hat is in my luggage awaiting another day.

Ancient Ground

III

I walk on ancient ground
soft above permafrost
absorbing
what drifts from the south

to the archipelago
cadmium and mercury
bio-diversity

footprints
polar bear, arctic fox, Svalbard reindeer
carbon
remain for years

there are beds of pebbles
on bedrock
- a table top

smoothed by ice
finished
and free under foot

like a filter
exhorbitant
depository of industrial detritus

II

I witness ice absorbed by the sea
feeding her body
of water

warming
current events
on a bed

she curtsies
with the wind
- swoons

by the moon
she rises and falls
over again

she resists -
giving only
on her own terms

no idle tide

Hoefhalveys I

I

Who would have thought that such colour
would grace the cliffs at Hoelfhalveys

not white

but of steel left year ‘round in the yard
leaves left to rust
to mulch in March

I could never have imagined rivules of scree
like the veins of a leaf in autumn
of no particular tree

zinc and iron ochre and copper
tracing contours
of isolation


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Follow the Cape Farewell voyage on the 2010 Expedition blog.

First Watch

David Buckland and I awoke at 3:45 this morning to join first mate, Renske Ritzema, on the morning watch. We hoisted anchor at Sorgfiorden on the island of Friedland to head south through Hinlopenstretet. Our hope was to get through the polar ice that had been drifting northward through the straight, and dogging us for the past several days. The very same ice that nearly trapped us yesterday. To the disappointment of the polar bears, we got away. Full news on other reports.

There was the dimmest light in the sky, as indeed there is all through the night at this time of year. Looking across the horizon, Renske pointed out, one can see where the ice is located, not from seeing the ice itself but by detecting the white reflective band it makes on the skyline.

Within a half an hour I was at the controls of the ship with the entire Cape Farewell team, unawares, slumbering below. It was blissfull; silent and calm. There’s a lot of life on board this boat and it was really wonderful to be in the vastness of the arctic morn with the gang asleep.

She is sweet to control, this vessel. One needs to feel the turnings and compensations of the wheel as she moves about the course, mildly rolling in the morning swell. Finding the way through the broken ice pack adds to the joy, especially when successful.

And successful we were, to a point. The ice pack arrived, first on the horizon, then up close. Soon we were within. Renske took over the controls. Simon, our brilliant and friendly scientist, explains that loose polar ice is moved by a combination of wind and rotation of the earth, the latter causing the pack to drift to the east. The ship’s radar and Renske’s skill guide us through to open water.

But not for long as events turn. Two hours south we encounter the second wave of ice blocking our progress. I learn the patience of polar sailing, as we head back north to the fjord from which we came. Seems we will spend another night at Sorgfiorden with the hope that the disappearing polar ice pack will float past us, thereby allowing our passage tomorrow to future adventures.

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Follow the Cape Farewell voyage on the 2010 Expedition blog.

Something fishy about Alberta's jobs claims

This week, three Alberta Ministers are in Ontario propping up the potential for Ontarians to get jobs helping out the tar sands. Today Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert encouraged workers in Ontario's manufacturing sector to stand up for the tar sands against the environmental campaigns.

But wait a minute...is tar sands development a saviour for Ontario's manufacturing sector?

Because of the tar sands, Ontario is being negatively affected by “Dutch Disease” – a term that describes a hollowing out of the manufacturing sector due to currency inflation driven by resource (oil) exports. A study out of the University of Ottawa that examined the impact of resource exports (oil) on the dollar and manufacturing jobs found that 42 per cent of manufacturing job loss in Canada due to rising currency has been a result of Dutch Disease stemming from rising oil exports.

Ontario is being hit harder by the symptoms of Dutch Disease than the rest of the Canadian economy, losing 183,000 jobs between January 2003 and December 2007.

Yet Ontario is creating new jobs in clean energy - an estimated 20,000 since the Green Energy Act was passed - showing that we can create good jobs by producing our energy here rather than continuing to send billions of dollars elsewhere every year to buy oil.

What's more, leaked cabinet documents reported by the CBC last December show that the federal government is planning on letting tar sands greenhouse gas pollution explode, which would consume an ever growing share of Canada’s carbon budget. This must come at the expense of other sectors – like manufacturers in Ontario – if Canada is to meet its overall carbon targets. This will place a burden on other regions of Canada to do more than their fair share to reduce emissions. The federal government estimates that tar sands emissions will nearly triple by 2020 to 108 million tonnes.

And, this all comes on the heels of Fort Chipewyan fishermen raising concerns about the deformed fish they're pulling out of Lake Athabasca and rising scientific evidence that tar sands pollution is poisoning the water and fish.

The Alberta's government's economic claims are just about as credible as their claims that tar sands development is 'responsible'.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager, Climate and Energy

Blogging is a Relative Thing

We’ve been at sea for five days now and the trend has been to have an adventure at shore in the morning and return to the Noorderlicht for lunch by 1:30. The afternoons are spent sailing and ‘blogging.’
It’s a curious sight to see twenty people sitting at their laptop computers while pitching and rolling in the cabin of a 100-year-old schooner at 80N. To a fault, the writers and artists on Mac, the scientists, PC. I suspect there are more words thus generated in the afternoon than are photographs the entire rest of the day, and that’s saying something. To be fair, I should mention that there are also many serious writers on our journey, who I know to be up to a lot more than this writer could ever pretend to be, but that’s still a lot of words.
Many of the blogs are destined for the web sites; primarily Cape Farewell and then on to Huffington Post, Treehugger and Environmental Defence. There’s a flurry of activity after dinner as files are transferred and photos selected to accompany the chosen texts for the day. And that’s no mean feat, for the sheer number of photos submitted for consideration, combined with our exacting editorial standards, makes for a highly competitive and ‘oft political selection process that leaves many images and even more egos left weakened and fallen on the cabin floor.
Words and images are then transferred to Cape Farewell’s Project Co-ordinator, Nina Horstmann who transmits them via Iridium satelitte feed to Marialaura Ghidini at the Cape Farewell headquarters in London. Nina and Marialaura are our Post Master General and work very hard (and often very late) into the night, to make it all happen.
But it wasn’t always this way.
The following excerpt is from a book purchased at the museum at Longyearbyen entitled:
Greetings from Spitsbergen, Tourists at the Eternal Ice 1827 – 1914.
John T. Reilly, published by Tapir Academic Press, Trondheim.

The early visitors were inveterate writers who never passed an opportuntity of informing family and friends of their daily experiences. Indeed postcards were one of the few souvenirs that passengers could obtain during their polar cruise and, as a result, many more than one might expect have survived the ravages of time. Cards could be bought on board ship and in various ports en route. Haffter, a passenger on the “Auguste Victoria” noted that the number of cards posted during the 1899 cruise came to around 20,000 – an average of fifty cards for each passenger. Indeed one tourist on the “Kong Herald” posted a record one hundred and two cards in a single day in 1898. It was not uncommon to run out of postage stamps, as did the small post office in northern Norway when six thousand cards were delivered from the “Blucher” in 1904.
So it begs the question: why all this writing? For one thing, the distance between points in this part of the world is really vast and sail boats, in our case, and steam ships, in the case above, move relatively slowly, so there’s a lot of time to spend between the moments of activity. It’s true there are lively conversations that occur, especially during mealtimes and into the evening, but there are also lengthy periods of silent contemplation, perfect time to write.
I also suspect that, unlike our Victorian ancestors, we are adjusting to the fact that we are no longer permanently connected to familiar and established networks of colleaugues, families and friends. Old habits die hard and home is a long way away.
But most important, we are very serious about the purpose of our journey and are passionate about sharing our thoughts and observations about the impact of climate change, recorded as we sway along the very edge of the polar ice cap, live and in real time - bumping into ice.

Skip the BPA: Food Packaging Update

For all those devoted bisphenol A (BPA) followers out there, here’s some food packaging news for you to chew on. Early in July, Heinz Australia announced that they were in the process of phasing out BPA in its baby food packaging that used BPA - not all baby food packaging did. This suggests that Heinz’s removal of BPA from their baby food packaging continues to move forward. Seeking Safer Packaging, a report Environmental Defence co-released in 2009, identified Heinz as the only surveyed company currently using an alternative to BPA in some of its can linings, and as phasing out BPA in its baby food can lacquers. A total of 20 companies were surveyed for this report.

Since the time of report release, it has also been announced that Muir Glen, a subsidiary of General Mills, will be switching to metal can packaging that does not contain BPA. To expand, a GreenBiz article suggests that Muir Glen tomato products harvested this summer will be packaged in BPA-free cans. And should you be interested, here are some more companies that BPA-free packaging for some or all of their products: Eden Foods, Edward & Sons, Wild Planet, Eco Fish, and Oregon's Choice.

Cape Farewell: First Night and Second Day

Comfortably cruising aboard the Noorderlicht through the blue of an Arctic high pressure system. Cold and clear we go between Western Spitsbergen Island and Prins Karls Forland Island due north through the Forland Sundet. We have had our early day adventure followed by a delicious lunch and are now at computers recording our observations. Artists as scientists as artists, searching for meaning, or some such thing.

The morning broke early and bright anchored in Trygghamna Bay (though I doubt the Norse call a bay a bay). Here words fail for the first time but certainly not the last. So make a picture in your mind’s eye, however you will, of a bright sun, a soft mist, clear blue water and two land banks facing one another at a kilometer distance. One rises to a height of 300 metres and the other to 1,000 metres. The bay, really a mini fiord, is 5 km long and ends in a glacier which Simon says has shrunk considerably since he was last here three years ago.

This is an arid landscape and the unusually hot summer of 2010 has left the land drier than usual. To the eye is an infinite nuance of brown. We head to shore aboard a zodiac and beach at the ruin of a 17th c. English whaling settlement, named Alkhornet. Andre, the Russia, and Simon, the Englishman, carry rifles to protect us against the threat of polar bear.

Andre insists, as he guides us to graves with 300 year old human bones, exposed thanks to permafrost, that the settlement was not of the English but rather of Russian ‘Pomors’, a people from the White Sea, and proves it by showing us some old bricks which he claims were made by them alone. Simon makes no retort to the contrary, so with no national affront taken, the guns remain with their latches on safety, at least for the time being.

Follow the Cape Farewell voyage on the 2010 Expedition blog http://www.capefarewell.com/2010expedition/

Cape Farewell: Expectation and Reality

Left Canada a few days ago to come to this remarkably remote place at 78 degrees north to join Cape Farewell’s global Climate/Culture Expedition. A group of 20 scientists, writers, visual artists and musicians; a delightfully odd collection of souls from around the world, will be boarding a 135 foot sailing schooner, the Noorderlicht, for a 22 day sail around the Svalbard archipeligo, a kind of roiling, boiling think tank on climate change.

Leaving Canada I was feeling excited to be going to a place that I thought would be beyond the reach, or at least just ahead of the curve, of the global eco-tourist trade. Having spent the summer hearing news of the sheer number of tourist boats cruising the Canadian Arctic, including the embarrisingly staged photo-op of Prime Minister Harper balancing on a little piece of polar ice (having personally banished the Russian Air Force) I was feeling pleased to be going to the far reaches of the polar planet, halfway around the world, away from the madding crowd.

Fifteen of us gathered at London and flew north to Oslo where we met our five Russian compatriots and continued further north to Tormo. Changing planes, we left Tormo in the darkness of night and flew ever further north to Longyeaybyen – and into the midnight sun. To bed with light in the sky at 3 am we awoke at 8 am, had breakfast and walked to the wharf, the boat and, as it turns out, a new awakening! Contrary to my expectation, eco-tourism has arrived and is alive and well in Longyearbyen too!

In the past three years, 200 tourist beds have been built in a variety of hotels; mostly to accommodate the cruise-ship trade from the south, but also to provide for climbers, hikers, kayakers and the odd scientific cultural polar expedition to sea. In addition, Longyearbyen hosts a small university, complete with students on bicycles and a very fine local museum to illustrate the history of a once-thriving but small coal mining town and northern outpost.

But never mind, it is still a spectacularly beautiful and very remote place and I have been assured that as we sail further north to the edge of the polar ice cap, we will see no signs of other humans and are guaranteed to see lots of whale, walrus, seal, manitou and of course polar bear. And this I do believe to be true as we will be packing rifles as protection whenever we go ashore. Will keep you posted.

Our Message to Madam Speaker

Our Message to Madam Speaker

It’s not every day that the third most powerful U.S. politician comes to visit Ottawa. It’s even more rare when a big part of her visit focuses on a key environmental issue – the mismanagement of the tar sands. Her visit coincides with growing U.S. opposition to a massive tar sands pipeline called the Keystone XL, something she is being pressured to investigate by many in her party.

We are encouraged that Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Markey, Chairman of the influential Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, have chosen to reach out to environmental and First Nations actors in addition to politicians and industry representatives.

Our organizations will have an opportunity to meet with her tomorrow to put forward our perspective on how regulators in Ottawa and Edmonton are failing to do their job with regards to the environmental impacts of the tar sands industry, and what U.S. political leaders can do about it.

Our message in a nutshell will be this: the environmental problems with tar sands development will not improve without a signal from its largest customer – the U.S. Indeed, the Canadian government has repeatedly said that it will not lead, but merely follow the U.S. in matters of climate and energy.

Virtually every environmental indicator in the tar sands – greenhouse gas pollution, toxic waste generation, acid rain, habitat destruction and fresh water use – is getting worse because Canada and Alberta are failing to establish or enforce absolute limits on the industry.

What’s worse, both levels of government engage in active denial of the impacts – such as claiming that pollution is “natural,” a claim recently turned on its head by Dr. David Schindler’s independent study on the Athabasca River.

Bigger picture, tar sands development holds hostage Canadian climate policy and diverts resources and attention away from the transition to the clean energy economy.

Canada could be a leader in a clean energy transition. With huge potential in renewable energy, it could also assist the U.S. with more exports of clean electricity. Instead, Canadian taxpayers are footing the bill for politicians to lobby against low carbon legislation in the U.S., in order to protect the tar sands industry.

The U.S. commitment to clean energy will necessarily force them to confront the problems with tar sands oil, which has a significant environmental impact. Right now, the U.S. can take one step by denying the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Otherwise, the U.S. is tacitly saying that it condones the ongoing mismanagement of the tar sands, and of Canada’s role as America’s dirty gas tank.

Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Markey were instrumental in getting a climate and energy bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. While the U.S. has not yet adopted comprehensive climate legislation, her focus on the tar sands could serve in the interim as a step forwards in tackling many of the same issues her legislation sought to address.

Someday our own policy makers will once again show leadership on the climate and energy files. For now, though, we look to others like Speaker Pelosi to help guide us to a better future.


Rick Smith, Executive Director, Environmental Defence Canada
Marlo Raynolds, Executive Director, Pembina Institute

Some Good News about Toxic Flame Retardants: Canada’s Proposing an Expanded Ban

For all those concerned about the presence of toxic flame retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (or PBDEs for short) in all kinds of products (e.g., furniture, textiles, electronics), know that Canada is committing to banning all of them in everything. Currently only some are.

While not all PBDEs are banned in all products yet and won’t be for a few more years, the commitment of the federal government to do so is certainly noteworthy. Ecojustice, the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Environmental Law Association, and Environmental Defence welcomed this news since we collectively filed a formal Notice of Objection to the original regulations. This was because the original regulations only banned some PBDEs in all products – they did not ban the import and use of the PBDEs that makeup the most widely used mixture. The expanded regulations the government is committing to introducing, however, will.

For more information, check out the recent media release and backgrounder (pdf). Also be sure to visit Health Canada’s webpage about PBDEs.

If you belch out toxins, they must end up somewhere

New research released this week shows that heavy metal pollution from tar sands development is contaminating rivers in the Athabasca region, despite the claims by government and industry that the pollution is from natural sources.

Dr. David Schindler, one of the authors of the paper, put it this way:

"There's no way industry can be belching out hundreds of kilograms of toxins every year and this not be detectable in the environment unless the monitoring program is totally incompetent,"

The study found 13 metals and metalloids, deemed priority pollutants by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in snow and water. Seven of those were above levels considered safe by the Canadian government, and higher concentrations were found downstream from tar sands development than upstream.

At first, an Alberta government scientist responded with the usual refrain that the pollution comes from natural sources. This is the second peer-reviewed study published by Dr. Schindler that refutes that, yet the government wants us to keep on believing their side without providing any data to back it up. Next Energy Minister Ron Liepert tried to shoot the messenger by questioning Dr. Schindler's credibility. And then yesterday, Premier Ed Stelmach responded to say that his scientists would sit down with the researchers to figure out the discrepancy. The study has, rightfully, struck a nerve.

Meanwhile, federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice stuck to his line that the lead and mercury found in the water is natural.

The Liberal Environment Critic, however, had a different take. David McGuinty said that "the federal government has to exercise its exclusive constitutional responsibility and enforce its existing environmental standards...That means Fisheries Act prosecutions if required, that means exercising the powers they have at their fingertips. Minister Prentice has got to stop bobbing and weaving now and he's got to do his job."

Hopefully, more federal politicians will start to take the type of action Mr. McGuinty is talking about.

Gillian McEachern
Program Manager