by David Suzuki
Canada attempts to manage its Pacific and Atlantic fisheries from faraway Ottawa in Ontario and relies on government experts who are not free to state the scientific evidence in public or to make recommendations based on it; government scientists are under intense political pressure to provide information and advice that support the government of the day. The observations and advice of those who make a living on the ocean and in rivers and lakes are rendered marginal or ignored. Such an approach on the east coast of Canada has been catastrophic—the cod fishery, for example, has long since collapsed—yet DFO has been unresponsive to the knowledge of local fishers.
“Fisheries That Work” was a good-news report, giving lots of examples of what works elsewhere and answers to outstanding questions. It was well received by local fishing communities, but the study received almost no play in the media. Crisis and confrontation make stories, but good news is deemed to be boring.
Undaunted, we funded a group of First Nations, commercial fishers, tourism operators, and environmentalists in the village of Ucluelet on Vancouver Island to apply community management of the local fish. The jury is still out on whether local management of species of salmon that migrate long distances can work when they are intercepted in the ocean. As a model for other projects, our fisheries studies provided a good one—do the analysis, look for solutions, then apply what was learned.
Since then, the foundation has funded numerous fisheries projects, including University of Victoria biologist Tom Reimchen's seminal work on the biological marriage between salmon and the rain forest; a province-wide DSF-sponsored inquiry on salmon led by the eminent B.C. judge Stuart Leggatt; a report on the DFO's policy of licensing the killing of spawning herring just for the roe; and a challenge to salmon farming.
THE GROWTH OF SALMON farms on the west coast of British Columbia has been cancerous. Today, production of salmon from open netpens dwarfs the number of wild fish captured. But these developments have been accompanied by numerous problems, and our foundation has played a major role in publicizing the dangers.
To many people, salmon aquaculture seems the marine equivalent of farming on land—use the ocean currents to slosh through nets that confine large numbers of animals whose growth is sped by regular feeding. The premise is that we can improve on nature with greater survival, faster growth, and year-round availability of the fish. But as we are learning from experience with cattle, poultry, and hogs, feedlots create enormous problems of disease, inhumane conditions, and waste.
But salmon aquaculture is wrongheaded from the very start. For one thing, unlike cows, sheep, and pigs, the fish are carnivores. They must eat fish. If we don't raise lions or wolves for food, why do we grow salmon? Food fish like anchovies, herring, and sardines, which people in South America eat, are being depleted to make pellets to feed salmon. As well, vast quantities of feces accumulate beneath netpens; diseases and parasites like sea lice explode and spread to wild fish, and large numbers of alien Atlantic salmon—also being raised in west coast salmon farms—escape periodically into the Pacific. Sea lions, otters, eagles, seals, and other predators attracted to the concentrated fish in nets have been legally killed by feedlot operators to protect their “crop.” And the flesh of the farmed fish is contaminated with chemicals biomagnified from the feed fish, antibiotics, and dyes to color the flesh.
Aquaculture, like agriculture, must be a part of the food future for humanity, but it will be sustainable only when practiced according to principles that will ensure continued ecological, social, and personal health. Global health, environmental, and equity issues are poorly handled by advocates of salmon aquaculture, and chefs and the public in B.C. are catching on and showing signs of discriminating in their buying.
Ecological health also can be restored on a small, local scale. Salmon are at the center of one of our most gratifying projects, revitalizing the run to Musqueam Creek in Vancouver. In 1900, the area that now encompasses the city boasted more than fifty rivers, streams, and creeks, each with its own genetically distinctive races of salmon. Some waterways might have had fewer than a hundred spawners returning, others had hundreds of thousands, but together they supported millions of fish. The past century of human encroachment has meant creeks were filled in, streams diverted, and riverbanks cleared of vegetation and polluted as our needs trumped those of the fish. At the end of the twentieth century, only one stream in Vancouver still had wild salmon runs—Musqueam Creek.
The creek runs through the Musqueam Reserve on the west side of Vancouver, home of the Musqueam First Nation, but only a dozen or so salmon were making it back to spawn. In an area that is now heavily populated and includes many properties with riding stables, Musqueam Creek was under pressure from horses ridden through it, children playing in it, and the runoff from storm sewers and homes illegally hooked up to dump sewage into it.
In 1996, the David Suzuki Foundation was approached by the Musqueam people to help rehabilitate the creek. Willard Sparrow, grandson of the famous chief Edward Sparrow Jr., had become very concerned; in a way, the survival of that tiny salmon run seemed symbolic of the fate of his people. Could the old ways and the salmon they depend on be retained in an increasingly urban setting?
Nicholas Scapiletti was working for the foundation at the time and hit it off with Willard as the two of them began a campaign to raise money to clean up and protect “Vancouver's last salmon creek” and to educate people in the neighborhood. The Musqueam Watershed Restoration Project was begun to train Musqueam youth to care for the waterway, shore up its banks, create baffles to slow the water, plant trees along the edge, put up signs, and distribute informational flyers. Willard educated his people about the symbolic importance of the creek and got them to support a small group of stream keepers. Once, Willard was wading in the creek to check it when to his delight a woman on horseback spotted him and yelled, “Hey, the Musqueam are trying to bring the salmon back in that creek, so get out of there!” The neighbors had now taken ownership and pride in this small stream and were watching over it.
As Willard and Nick staged celebrations of the watershed, invited biologists to talk about biodiversity and nutrient flow, organized tree-planting days, and held salmon barbecues to mark the role of fish in our lives, the city and funding agencies found the restoration of Musqueam Creek irresistible. Not only did the duo get funding for the project, the city supported construction of a different kind of roadway in the surrounding area so that water could percolate back into the soil of the watershed instead of being sent down storm sewers to run into the ocean. The team even brought dead salmon from other runs and distributed them along the banks of the creek to return nutrients to the soil, as had happened naturally before “progress” intervened.
Musqueam Creek is on its way back to health; the number of returning fish rose to over fifty in 2004. Nature is incredibly generous when we give her a hand.
TARA WAS NAMED PRESIDENT of the foundation but was not paid for the long, often arduous hours she had put in to get it going. As projects were developed and staff began to pour out material, I was given credit for much of it because the organization carries my name, but in reality—as with the television shows I do—the foundation produces material through the hard work of a devoted team. Volunteers like Tara and me have been a crucial part of the organization's work and effectiveness; I have been amazed at the devotion and hours volunteers give, not just to us, but to so many important causes. They are part of the glue that holds society together.
As the foundation has taken on issues and projects, we also have become increasingly efficient in getting our message across. Our goal was to invest half of every foundation dollar in communication, since public education and awareness are crucial to our mandate of offering solutions. David Hocking, with long experience at Petrocan, came to us to head the communications team.
Having staff behind us also meant Tara and I were no longer feeling isolated or harried. If I was to talk to some special interest group or meet a politic
al leader, the staff would often update background notes that made me so much more effective.
It is clear that the old ways of confrontation, protests, and demonstrations so vital from the 1960s through the '80s, have become less compelling to a public jaded by sensational stories of violence, terror, and sex. We need new alliances and partnerships and ways of informing people.
Tara delivering a speech as president of the David Suzuki Foundation
When the foundation was started, we were imbued with the sense of urgency implicit in the Worldwatch Institute's designation of the 1990s as “the Turnaround Decade.” The decade came and went. The world didn't change direction, but now the foundation has matured. We have earned a presence in the media, influence within the political and industrial community, and credibility with the public.
chapter TWELVE
UP AND RUNNING
IN ITS EARLY YEARS, the David Suzuki Foundation (DSF) had to acquire a membership base that would support the projects we had planned. That meant we had to become adept at getting our message out.
We picked up experience in organizing press conferences and writing press releases, articles, op-ed pieces, and other documents, and the day came when the communications group, headed by David Hocking, established a Web site. I was slow to recognize the role the Internet would play in raising our profile, and I was nervous about committing the funds. Now I appreciate the importance of that investment.
Jim Hoggan, president of the largest communications and public relations company in western Canada, found our work interesting and worthwhile. He offered his expertise on a voluntary basis. He brought great integrity—he advises his clients that they should never deliberately lie, deceive, or cover up. Jim helped us develop the most effective ways to get our message out, and ever since he joined the board, he has devoted countless hours to our communication effort.
AS THE FOUNDATION BECAME more sophisticated and better equipped to tackle issues, we felt ready to take on some big ones. And of all environmental crises confronting us today, climate change looms as the largest.
Cited by the Canadian parliamentary all-party Standing Committee on the Environment as a threat second only to all-out nuclear war, global warming nonetheless can seem a slow-motion catastrophe that will not kick in for generations, and so it has been difficult to raise public concern about it.
Jim Fulton's political connections paid off when he persuaded Gerry Scott, a longtime strategist in the provincial New Democratic Party, to join us in taking on the foundation's climate change campaign. The challenge was to educate the public about what climate change is, what the scientific evidence is for its cause, and what the solutions are. Most environmental funding agencies were established to finance work on more immediate challenges such as toxic pollution, deforestation, or destructive developments. Global warming has implications on a much more immense scale, and it was extremely difficult to fund the project. I despaired over whether we could find the kind of money we would need to make a difference.
Stephen Bronfman of Montreal had joined our board in the early years. He became convinced that climate change was a serious issue and made a multiyear financial commitment to Gerry's group, becoming the largest individual contributor to the issue in Canada. Assured of this solid base of support, Gerry pulled together a small band of experienced and dedicated people and began to get the matter onto the Canadian public agenda. For such a small team, they carried out a remarkable series of studies and activities.
Gerry invited Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, the largest flooring company in the world, to join our campaign to get industry leaders to start working to cut emissions and make money doing it. Ray stepped up to the plate and is now on the DSF board.
The group commissioned papers including “A Glimpse of Canada's Future,” “The Role of Government,” “Taking Charge: Personal Initiatives,” “Keeping Canada Competitive,” and “Canadian Solutions.” But by far the most remarkable was “Power Shift,” a study by energy expert Ralph Torrie, showing that with technology already commercially available, Canada could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent in thirty years.
We brought Dr. Joseph J. Romm to Toronto and Ottawa to talk about his 1999 book Cool Companies, which cited dozens of North American companies that had already reduced their emissions by more than 50 percent and remained highly profitable. Since then, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation has begun to track “reducers”—companies, cities, regions, provinces and states that are making serious reductions in harmful gas emissions while saving tens of millions of dollars.
When The Nature of Things with David Suzuki broadcast a film by Jim Hamm showing many examples of opportunities to make money by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the DSF put together a series of events in Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver, with speeches, previews of the film, and exhibitions of energy-saving technologies such as windmills and then-unknown gas-electric hybrid cars. We knew we had to get on with demonstrating that there are alternatives to the polluting ways that are creating climate change, since neither governments nor businesspeople were leading the way.
It was hard work to get media attention until DSF employee Catherine Fitzpatrick had the brilliant idea of looking at the medical implications of burning fossil fuels. She concentrated on the direct effects of air pollution—not the spread of new diseases in a warmer world or starvation from drought and failing crops, but the direct, day-to-day, physical effects of air pollution on people. If we couldn't get attention for climate change as a monumental threat, we could bring attention to the more personal costs of burning fossil fuels.
Sharing a joke with Gerry Scott when he was director of climate change work with the David Suzuki Foundation
This strategy worked. Using government data, the doctors and scientists Catherine commissioned produced a report entitled “Taking Our Breath Away.” It found that air pollution, much of it from burning fossil fuels, was prematurely killing sixteen thousand Canadians a year. A plane crash killing all occupants is a great tragedy, but imagine a full jumbo jet crashing in Canada every week: you get an idea of the magnitude of these preventable fossil fuel–induced deaths from pollution.
And every fatality is just the tip of an immense iceberg. For every death, there are many more serious lung problems requiring hospitalization, including surgery. For each hospitalization, there are many more days lost from school or work, then many more with reduced productivity because of low-grade problems of bronchitis and asthma.
“Taking Our Breath Away” was the first DSF report to be translated into Canada's other official language, French, as “À couper le souffle.” Doctors recognized the significance of the report, and English- and French-speaking physicians supported our call to reduce air pollution. Federal and provincial medical societies also signed on to our initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for health reasons.
One of the first people to buy in was Dr. David Swann, chief health officer for the province of Alberta. I was stunned when he was fired for taking this position. This is Canada, yet here was Alberta behaving like some tin-pot government vindictively punishing a public servant for deviating from the government line. Dr. Swann fought back and eventually won reinstatement, but he soon left public service in the province. Taking a stand on climate change in Alberta took courage.
In concert with other organizations, Gerry commissioned papers that looked at the impact of climate change on Canada's national parks. Jay Malcolm, a forestry professor at the University of Toronto, concluded that global warming would dismantle the species balance of our most prized parks: some species could adapt to higher temperatures, but others would have to move to remain within a viable range.
A 2004 DSF study, “Confronting Climate Change in the Great Lakes Region,” looked at the hydrological implications of climate change on lakes Superior, Michigan, Erie, Huron, and Ontario, which constitute the largest area of fresh water on Earth. The report concluded that the effects would be catastrophic.
The Nature of Things with David Suzuki did a series of programs on global warming, including a two-hour special. Polls showed that Canadians were becoming increasingly concerned about climate change, and I like to think that both the David Suzuki Foundation and The Nature of Things played an important part in increasing that awareness and concern.
The evidence of climate change is now overwhelming, and to me nothing is more compelling than the cover story in the conservative National Geographic magazine in September 2004. Presented on a foldout page, the 400,000-year record of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, teased from the Antarctic ice by researchers, reveals a curve that in about 1990 suddenly soars above the highest level found in all that time. That curve then leaps straight up.
But personal observations, even if anecdotal and not statistically significant, are compelling too. When Tara and I camped above the Arctic Circle in June 2005, we saw and heard firsthand evidence of shrinking glaciers, melting permafrost, and newly arrived plant and animal species. Arctic peoples speak of global warming as a well-established fact that has changed their habitat and already threatens their way of life.
Yet, despite the overwhelming consensus of climatologists and the most painstaking assessment of scientific literature in history, in 2005 the media continued to treat climate change as if it is a controversy, as if there is still doubt. They give far more space than is warranted to the small number of “skeptics” who deny global warming is occurring. This is tragic.
Accepting that the danger is real, society can look for solutions. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions means buying time to switch to alternative, nonpolluting energy sources and enjoying the direct benefits of a cleaner environment, better health, and the conservation of valuable, nonrenewable fossil fuels. If by some miracle the crisis passes, those nonrenewable fossil fuels will still be there, our homes and businesses will be more efficient, and our environment will be cleaner. Acting on climate change is a win-win situation, whereas doing nothing will make the corrective measures much more difficult, much more expensive, and perhaps too late.
