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

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?