The challenge of the 21st century: setting the real bottom line - part 1

I am a born and bred Canadian (although I did spend eight years in the United States for my university education in the 1950s and early ‘60s) and that shapes my perspective on the world. Although Canada is a sovereign nation, the country’s border allows the influx of American movies, television and products that influence us greatly. We Canadians have struggled to maintain our values and identity in the face of the most powerful nation on earth. So I was proud when Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002 and I’d like to believe that our ratification influenced Mr Putin to sign on as well and make it international law.

Canadians value nature as a part of who we are; they want it protected and they are willing to pay more taxes to do that. They want Canada to meet its Kyoto obligations. They want efficient, affordable public transportation. They want a carbon tax but they also want government and the corporate community to do their share.

When you are cheek to cheek with the US it is hard to maintain independent values. We now have a minority government that has repudiated our Kyoto commitment and gutted programs to reduce emissions.

Human beings are a truly remarkable species. We are able to conceive notions like democracy, science, equality before the law, justice and morality - concepts that have no counterpart in nature itself - but we have our shortcomings too. We demarcate borders that often make no ecological sense: dissecting watersheds, fragmenting forests, disrupting animal migratory routes. These human boundaries mean nothing to the flow of water, the atmosphere or oceans, yet we try to manage these resources within these confines.

When human numbers were small, our technology simple, and our consumption mainly for survival, nature was generally able to absorb our impact. Even so, it is believed that with simple stone spears and axes the migrating Palaeolithic people extinguished slow moving mammals in their path.

As is well documented by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse and Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress cultures have arisen, flourished and disappeared as human demands outstripped the carrying capacity of surrounding areas. In pre-history and even medieval times, humans were essentially tribal animals, confined to their tribal territory, perhaps meeting a couple of hundred people in a lifetime. But humanity has undergone an explosive transformation in the past century.

Consider this: in 1900 there were only a billion and a half human beings in the world. In a mere 100 years, the population of the planet has quadrupled. Almost all the modern technology we take for granted has been developed and expanded since the late 1800s. Our consumptive appetite has grown rapidly since World War II: so today more than 60 per cent of the North American economy is built on our consumption and ever since the end of World War II, economic globalisation has dominated the political and corporate agenda.

These factors have amplified humanity’s ecological footprint, the amount of land and sea that it takes to provide for our needs and demands. Consequently we are now altering the chemical, physical and biological makeup of the planet on a geological scale. In the 4 billion years that life has existed on Earth there was never a single species able to do what we are doing today.

The famous Brundtland Commission report Our Common Future which came out in 1987 coined the phrase “sustainable development” and called for the protection of 12 per cent of the land in all countries, a target which has no scientific basis and which few countries have managed to achieve. We are one species out of 15-30 million species on the planet and setting aside just 12 per cent of our land for all the other species means that we seem to take it for granted that we can use the 88 per cent. And we seem determined to do it destroying habitat and ecosystems while driving tens of thousands of species to the brink of extinction every year.

We protect tiny patches of oceans as marine protected areas, while slaughtering fish and accidentally killing turtles, birds and marine mammals with long lines, drift nets and bottom trawlers. It is predicted that if we continue to overfish, pollute and destroy habitat in the oceans, as we are today, every fish species currently exploited will be commercially extinct by 2048.

We have spread our toxic debris in the air, water and soil so that every one of us now carries dozens of toxic compounds in our bodies. A few months ago in Canada three members of parliament volunteered to be tested for a battery of more than 80 toxic substances. They were shocked to find that they carried dozens of these in their bodies. Our use of the air as a dumping ground for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has altered the chemistry of the atmosphere, which in turn is now acidifying the oceans as carbon dioxide dissolves as carbonic acid.

We have no means of dealing with these global issues with the level of urgency now required. For the first time in history we have to ask what the collective impact of all 6.6 billion human beings on earth will be. We have never had to do this before. It is difficult for us to get our heads around this task. We need the perspective of many of the small island states that are in imminent danger of being submerged by sea level rise from global warming. The metaphor of the canary in the coal mine is very apt. I was there in Kyoto in 1997 when island states pleaded for action to protect their land, but to no avail.

Australians elected four consecutive Conservative governments that denied the reality of human-induced climate change and refused to ratify Kyoto even though the country suffered severe drought for years. Australia is an island continent with most of its population living along the edges where sea level rise will have its greatest impact.

My own country, Canada, is extremely vulnerable. We are a northern country and warming, we know, is going on more than twice as rapidly in the north as it is in temperate and equatorial areas. For decades Inuit people of the Arctic have begged for action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because they can see the changes, but they have been ignored.

I was very proud when Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol, but our current government has turned its back on our Kyoto obligations and cancelled all the previous government’s programmes to reduce emissions. Indeed, until very recently, it denied the reality of human-induced climate change and continues to support the rapid expansion of Alberta’s tar sands, which is the most polluting activity in the country.

North America along with Europe, Japan, Australia and other industrialised countries created the problem of climate change. Our industrial and economic growth now serves as a model for the developing world to follow. If a rich country like Canada or the United States cannot cap its emissions and bring them down, why should countries like India or China or any of the other developing nations pay the slightest attention to the demands to reduce theirs?

I deliberately chose the title "The Challenge of the 21st Century: Setting the Real Bottom Line" because the media, politicians and corporate executives repeat over and over again the mantra that the economy is the bottom line. I believe that this is totally misdirected attention.

What is the environmental crisis that we are talking about? What does it mean? In 1962, I was galvanised to join what became the environmental movement when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book about the unexpected effects of pesticides. It is hard to imagine what the world was like in 1962, but when her book came out there was not a single Department or Ministry of Environment in any government on the planet. Rachel Carson put the environment on the agenda around the world.

As I was swept up in the movement, along with millions of others around the world, I felt that human beings were removing too much from the environment, and returning too much waste and toxic material back into it. At that time the solution was to create an infrastructure of government departments of the environment, to enforce laws to protect endangered species and regulate the quality of air and water. But by the early 1970s I realised it would not work this way because we do not know enough to be able to regulate new technologies as they develop.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

DDT had been synthesised in the 1800s but it wasn’t until the 1930s that Paul Müller showed that DDT kills insects and could solve a lot of problems. This seemed a way to control pests that had plagued humankind while offering corporations an opportunity to make money. Müller won a Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1948. Then in the 1950s birdwatchers observed that predatory birds in particular were in decline and biologists discovered a phenomenon which we did not even know existed - bio-magnification. They found that DDT sprayed in concentrations of parts per millions is absorbed by micro-organisms that are not killed by it. Instead, it is concentrated so that at each trophic level up the food chain, DDT concentration is amplified. Eventually, in the fatty tissue in shell glands of birds and the mammary glands of mammals the DDT can become concentrated tens of thousands of times.

Looking back, when DDT began to be used, the phenomenon of bio-magnification was not even known to exist. We only discovered it when eagles began to disappear and scientists tracked it down.

The same happened with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). CFCs seemed to be a wonderful invention - large ring molecules with chlorine atoms attached that are chemically inert. CFCs seemed to be a perfect additive to spray cans. If you are going to put, say, deodorant in spray cans you do not fill the whole can with deodorant, you do not need that much. You just put a little bit at the bottom and add a propellant. But if you put air in, the oxygen is highly reactive and breaks down the deodorant. We began to use CFCs by the millions and millions of pounds.

Years later scientists discovered that CFCs persist in the environment and in the upper atmosphere, ultraviolet radiation from the sun breaks chlorine atoms off the CFCs and the chlorine free radicals react with ozone and break it down. I had not even realised that there was an ozone layer up there to break down. How could we have managed CFCs when we did not have any idea what their effect would be in the environment?

I am a geneticist by training, and history indicates we are in for similar surprises with genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. We are now manipulating the very blueprint of life, creating organisms that have never existed before. Any scientist who tells you they know that GMOs are safe and not to worry about it is either ignorant of the history of science or is deliberately lying. Nobody knows what the long term effect will be. Europeans have been much more conservative about allowing GMOs into their countries. They are watching Canadians, who have been doing a huge experiment by eating it for over five years!

So for me as a scientist it was a real dilemma. We often see unpredictable environmental impacts arising from our use of science and technology. How can we manage the impact of these new powers when we are so ignorant about the world around us?