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Posts Tagged ‘Dalhousie University’
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
May 9, 2010
In the frosty pre-dawn darkness, Bridget Stutchbury is slipping stealthily through the Pennsylvania woodlands, occasionally flashing a light to illuminate a landmark. She is trailing a philanderer, hoping to catch the hussy in the act. For two hours she tracks her target by sound and by radio — and she fails. The floozy demonstrates perfect chastity.
The philanderer is not a woman, but a bird, a female Acadian flycatcher, and Dr. Stutchbury is not a private eye, but an ornithologist who studies the social life of songbirds, including their sex lives. This is not leering voyeurism. Songbird populations are falling steeply, and to reverse the decline we need to understand not only the reasons for their decline, but also their requirements for successful reproduction.
Professor Stutchbury, who teaches at York University in Toronto, actually calls herself a “behavioural ecologist” or, more colloquially, a “bird detective.” That’s also the title of her newest book, and of the talk she’ll deliver at Dalhousie University Wednesday evening. She has spent her life studying songbirds in the wild, and her first book, Silence of the Songbirds, described what she had learned about them.
Silence of the Songbirds is an intensely readable book, a finalist for the Governor General’s literary award. But the story it tells is a sad one.
Songbirds are astonishing little creatures. Many of them winter in tropical forests from Central America to mid-South America, and breed in the Canadian north. They cross the Gulf of Mexico in a sustained 15 to 20-hour overnight flight that can cost them nearly half of their body weight. At the height of the migration season in April and May, US coastal radar stations pick up huge clouds of north-bound birds soon after sunset — as many as 50 million in a single night. In the early days of radar, before operators realized what was happening, they referred to these mysterious waves of aerial movement as “storms of angels.”
The destination of billions of these “neotropical migrants” is what Stutchbury calls “the biggest migratory bird nursery in the world,” the vast northern boreal forest that stretches across Canada from Newfoundland to the Yukon and Alaska. Here, in a few intense summer weeks, the birds find mates and build nests, conceive, hatch and nurture their young — and then fatten themselves again for the long trip south.
The birds are at risk in every part of this demanding life cycle. Fully half of them die in the course of every year’s migration, and the explosion of human populations has multiplied the hazards they confront. Their breeding grounds in the boreal forest are being chipped away by industry. The temperate forests of eastern North America once provided a vast leafy flyway from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, but they have been reduced to fragments and the tropical forests are falling at a terrifying rate.
Lighted skyscrapers and transmission towers represent lethal obstacles to night-flying birds. Latin American farmers use staggering quantities of pesticide, with lethal effects on wintering birds. A Wisconsin study in the 1990s estimated that, in that state alone, domestic cats annually killed somewhere between 8 million and 217 million birds.
And all of this is in addition to natural predators like squirrels, raccoons, snakes and other birds.
Stutchbury notes that we can all help by behaving thoughtfully — keeping our cats indoors, drinking shade-grown organic coffee, eschewing pesticide-soaked produce, buying FSC-certified lumber and paper products, dousing office lights during migration season. Most of these are better choices anyway.
Meanwhile, the annual Breeding Birds Survey shows at least 18 species of migrant songbirds in serious decline. And if you think this has nothing to do with you, think again. The songbirds are an integral part of the web of life that sustains us all. The quality of our air, for instance, relies on healthy forests — and the trees rely on the songbirds to control their insects, pollinate their flowers and distribute their seeds and fruits.
But to value songbirds for their usefulness to humans is morally bankrupt. Songbirds are among nature’s most exquisite creations. If they don’t lift our hearts, if we can’t value them for themselves, then we have no right to share a planet with them.
– 30 —
I interviewed Bridget Stutchbury for The Green Interview during her visit to Halifax. We’ll run the interview on the site later this year.
Tags: Bridget Stutchbury, Dalhousie University, Silence of the Songbirds, songbirds, The Bird Detective, The Green Interview, York University
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
February 14, 2010
“It sounds silly when you say it out loud,” said Ram Myers, “but they seemed to have a notion that you could sit in Ottawa and make up reality. If you could enforce a scientific consensus, that would be reality.”
That’s Dr. Ransom A. Myers, Dalhousie University’s late, great, and sorely-missed marine biologist, talking about the federal bureaucrats who “gruesomely mangled and corrupted” the research of their own scientists, to quote an internal DFO report, and thus allowed three imperilled groundfish stocks to be fished almost to extinction.
Ram Myers’ comment has echoed in my mind since the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change began imploding in the blizzard of compromising emails that escaped from the University of East Anglia in December. That episode was followed by the disclosure that several findings in the IPCC’s report of 2007 were based on faulty evidence.
These were not trivial findings. One was the widely-reported prediction that, based on current trends, the glaciers of the Himalayas would melt away by 2035. Since Asia’s nine largest rivers arise in those glaciers, the result would have been a nightmare sequence of catastrophic flooding and lethal droughts for the one billion people who live downstream.
But the prediction was based on anecdotes, not on peer-reviewed science — and it was “so wrong that it’s not worth discussing,” says Georg Kaser, a leading Austrian glaciologist who flagged the error before the report was issued, and was dumbfounded to find it in the text. Maybe part of the reason is that the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, also heads a New Delhi research group that has scooped up millions of dollars in grants to study the melting of the Himalayan glaciers.
The IPCC’s scientists now stand accused of shabby science, selective reporting, naked self-interest and the intimidation of skeptics. And of course the climate change skeptics are all over the issue: See? These guys are liars and cheaters and thieves — and therefore, climate change is all humbug.
Not so fast, bub. To begin with, the IPCC report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries, and only a few have been impugned. Georg Kaser himself was a lead author of the section of the report dealing with the physical science of climate change. Despite the furor, Kaser says the report’s central contention that climate change is an established reality and a major threat is absolutely sound.
What reminds me of Ram Myers is the touching faith of some climate-change critics that if they can just convince enough people that the whole thing is a hoax, then that will be reality, and we can get back to business as usual. I’d love to believe it, but it’s nonsense. Somewhere out there, beyond all the noise and clamour, the real world is evolving according to its own nature, no matter what we may hope, wish or believe.
I listen to Gwynne Dyer, who travels the world investigating the military implications of climate change. “When you talk to the people at the sharp end of the climate business, scientists and policy-makers alike,” Dyer writes, “there is an air of suppressed panic in many of the conversations. We are not going to get through this without taking a lot of casualties.”
I listen to Jim Lovelock, a towering figure in earth science, who concedes the possibility that the skeptics are right and that global warming is an illusion — but whose observations suggest that global heating is happening much faster than expected. For example, he says, the great global heat sink is the sea. When the sea gets warm, it expands, and sea level rises. Well, sea level is rising faster than predicted, so the sea is absorbing a lot of heat. That’s an observation, not an opinion.
How do we deal with all these uncertainties? In 2007, a young Oregon science teacher named Greg Craven reviewed the options in a little YouTube presentation called “The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See.” His conclusion? Acting to counter the risks of climate change will certainly cost a lot of money, perhaps needlessly. But failing to act could very well cost a lot of lives. How hard a decision is that?
– 30 —
Tags: Add new tag, climate change, Dalhousie University, Georg Kaser, Greg Craven, Gwynne Dyer, Interngovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, James Lovelock, Ram Myers, Ransom Myers
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Sunday, April 6th, 2008
“All of what we produce is going to be waste,” says Claude Ouimet. He waves his hand around the brand-new seminar room, studded with audio-visual devices. “This beautiful room, all this equipment, it’s all going to be waste. It’s just a matter of time.”
Claude Ouimet is head of InterfaceFLOR Canada and Latin America, a subsidiary of Interface Carpets of Atlanta, Georgia, a company already familiar to readers of this column. Inspired by its visionary founder, Ray Anderson, Interface aims to be not only the world’s first zero-impact corporation, but also the world’s first restorative corporation – an organization which actively improves the environment.
Claude Ouimet has thought a great deal about the future and the environment. He fears that his legacy to his children – our legacy to our children – is “a first class ticket…. on the Titanic.” And what he has just said is a stunning, transformative thought.
“All of what we produce is going to be waste.”
It is, too. I never thought of it this way, but viewed from the perspective of Gaia, the “economy” that we treasure so much is just a vast apparatus for the production of garbage.
Nor does the transformation from goods to garbage take very long. Claude Ouimet was speaking at EcoPrise 2008, a conference on business and the environment organized by Dalhousie University’s Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship and its Eco-Efficiency Centre. The Eco-Efficiency Centre’s director, Ray Côté, handed me a graph produced by The Natural Step showing that of the raw materials and energy that go into US manufacturing, only 7% is transformed into products. The other 93% becomes waste – slag heaps, emissions, heat, by-products. And of the 7% that reaches the market, 80% is discarded after a single use. Think of packaging, motor oil, tissue paper, garbage bags.
The result: 99% of the raw materials and energy that we took from the earth to make industrial products has become waste within six weeks of sale. Ninety-nine percent!
Nature, by contrast, wastes nothing. Nature is cyclical, fluid and creative. One organism’s wastes are another’s nutrients. The fallen tree shelters the mouse and feeds the fungus. Substances and energies interweave, separate and re-join, looping together like the circles that represent the Olympic Games. Life forms are created, abandoned and re-created in the most intricate of dances, powered always by the sun.
Industrial societies, by contrast, are linear and reductive – and we’re only beginning to understand the implications of those qualities. For instance, Nova Scotians are rightly proud of the fact that we’ve reduced the amount of solid waste going to our landfills by more than 50% — but in truth that’s only a baby step. We need to choke the waste stream at its source, resisting lavish packaging and planned obsolescence, refusing to buy what we don’t need, re-learning to value quality and durability, ridding ourselves of “disposable” products that actually linger for centuries.
In short, we have to green our minds, change the way we view the world, and accept responsibility for our life decisions. More and more, our lives need to mimic natural cycles. If everything we produce is going to be waste, we have to ensure that it’s useful waste, waste that nourishes life.
These are great challenges – with great opportunities. We’re lucky to live at a time when all human activity is up for re-examination and re-invention – and not just by vanguard corporations like Interface, but by ordinary people and small local businesses. The dangers are great, but the opportunities are glorious.
One participant at Ecoprise 2008 was Robert Taylor, the whiskered, plain-spoken president of Taylor Lumber Company of Middle Musquodoboit. Taylor Lumber began in 1945 as a small local sawmill and horse logging operation, and now includes a major sawmill, a planer mill, a chipper, and a building supply store in Musquodoboit Harbour.
Taylor’s problem was the mountains of chips and sawdust created by its mills. The solution was to use those wastes to fuel an electrical generator. The generator powers the mills and provides electricity to the local community. Its heat dries wood in the kilns, and its ashes replace lime on the fields of nearby farmers.
Taylor is now looking for a good use for the hot water from the generating plant. He contemplates using it to heat greenhouses, or possibly to warm up ponds for aquaculture, growing species like Arctic char.
The company also practices sustainable forestry, planting enough trees to replace what it cuts. Since the trees provide the mill’s energy as well as its raw materials, the operation begins to take the elegant shape of a sustainable natural cycle.
“All of what we produce is going to be waste.” A sobering thought – but it’s also a splendid opportunity to free our minds, liberate our imaginations, and discover a new, green world.
– 30 –
Tags: Dalhousie University, Eco-Efficiency, green economy, Interface, recycle, restorative corporation, waste
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