Churchill, Manitoba

I spent Canada day on a small plane, flying North. I’ll be here in Churchill for the next week filming a story on biting flies, which is a good, because this town seems to have lots of them.

Initial impressions; Big Sky, smells of summer. The sun never sets, the bugs never sleep, and the men are rugged (which is just how I like them.) I could get used to this place.

Along with the Pine Tree Line and the Distant Early Warning Line, the Defense Research Board is established, with the sole purpose of assessing chemical and biological agents with defense capabilities. The greatest biological threat a northern solider will face – the biting fly.

The Northern Insect Survey, conducted between 1947 and 1962, remains the most extensive insect survey in North American History. By the time it was completed, over 72 sights were sampled, all with the sole intent of assessing how troops would withstand northern climates in the event of a Soviet invasion. In the end little was done with the data, and for years it lay mostly dormant in the Canadian National Collections on Insects in Ottawa. Until Now.

The Biological Survey of Canada, a joint initiative by the Royal Ontario Museum, McGill University and the University of PEI, will recreate the Northern Insect Survey at 12 key locations over a two-year period. The timing of this project is imperative; Today the Arctic is among the most fragile ecosystems on earth. The immense environmental pressures increase annually as the effects of global warming are felt most acutely at northern latitudes. With their diversity and potential for rapid population growth, arthropods can serve as barometers of environmental change. In recent years yellow jacket wasps have been observed on Baffin Island, an unprecedented site, and believed to be only the tip of the iceberg for northern arthropod populations.

In the coming weeks I will travel to Churchill, Manitoba, to document this project. There will be biting flies and midnight sun, and if I’m lucky, the odd polar bear. No word on whether the Russians are planning an appearance yet.

Music by Aaron Leaf. Images by Artbeats. Remix by ME!

The explosion is said to have been cause by a sudden bubble of methane gas. Impossible to predict. But certainly a probable outcome of drilling. Reason should dictate that such an explosion would cause the oil tanker to sink. And that sealing a hole in the ocean floor would be challenging at best, and impossible at worst. Reality is dictating the worst.

Here’s what I don’t get; We’re all born with common sense. We know that error happens. We know what the fall out of possible error is. And yet our governments continue to invest in unsustainable energy sources. What if this had been a nuclear tailing pond, which must stand undisturbed for 100,000 years to neutralize the effects?

Errors happen. Maybe it’s time we start accounting for that in initial plans.

Cary Fowler is the brain behind the vault,  and in a new TED talk he explains the importance of saving seeds in order to feed the world’s poor, who will be disproportionately affected by a changing climate.

From the talk:

“The most interesting thing about South Africa is that we don’t have to wait until 2070 for there to be trouble (with the food crops.)

If by 2030, the maize or corn varieties — which is the dominate crop, accounting for 50 per cent of the nutrition in southern Africa  — are still in the field in 2030, we’ll have a 30 per cent decrease in production of maize, because of the amount of climate change already.  Thirty per cent decrease in production, in the context of increasing population is a food crisis.  It’s global in nature.  We will watch children starve to death on TV.

Now, you may say that 20 years is a long way off — it’s two breeding cycles for maize.  We have two rolls of the dice to get this right.  We have to get climate ready crops in the field, and we have to do that rather quickly.

Watch the talk and leave your comments bellow

Helveta is a privately owned company specializing in supply chain management in the timber and agriculture markets.  The company has hammered plastic barcodes into over a million trees in Africa, Asia and South America.  Though these barcodes do not make it impossible for illegal loggers to continue, they will make processing and exporting the wood a challenge.  According to Reuters:

“We bring transparency and visibility where historically that has probably been limited at best,” Patrick Newton, Helveta’s chief executive officer, told Reuters.

The company, which has just secured another 3 million pounds ($4.88 million) in funding from investors, has put barcodes on trees across the world, including in Bolivia, Ghana, Indonesia, Liberia, Malaysia and Peru.

Technological innovation? Certainly. Environmental protection? I’m still not sold. The corporation is barcoding trees in plantations, not forests. The practice seems more in favor of protecting business owners bottom lines than biodiversity.  At the crux of it is a cap and trade philosophy, where carbon offsets are used as an incentive for developing economies to increase their forest cover to soak up the fruits of our hyper-consumption lifestyles.

During my youth I worked in the forest sector as a tree planter. Tree plantations are not forests. They are industrialized monocultures, designed to turn a profit, not complex living ecosystems. While I’m all for increasing tree cover and technological innovation, this project looks more like a brilliant business idea than a environmental breakthrough.

This is why I’m going.  I’ll be joining Dr. Allan Baker and a team of researches to document the recovery of the Red Knot, a migratory shore bird which journeys each summer from Tierra del Fuego in Argentina to the Arctic, a distance measuring over 15,000 km.  In the late 1990’s, the North American subspecies experienced a population crash, plummeting from 90,000 individuals to a mere 13,000.  The population now hovers around 30,000.  A few good breeding seasons could take the birds off the endangered species list and onto the road to recovery.  But it won’t be easy – the United States has yet to classify the bird as endangered (due to both political and financial reasons,) and fisherman off the coast of Delaware Bay continue to over fish horseshoe crabs, whose eggs are a critical food source for the Red Knot during the annual migration.

The trip is still a few weeks off, but I’ll be documenting the adventure here.  Stay tuned…

But when we went around the table to debate whether or not individuals would change their habits after reading the book, the answer was a resounding no. I suppose not entirely surprising, but perhaps a tad soul crushing? I spend my entire day trying to give people the tools and information they need to make the behavioral modifications necessary to alter the crash-course direction our planet is heading in. I’ve always believed that with knowledge comes the ability to change, or at least the ability to make a choice. Perhaps there-in lies the problem – people are lazy, and don’t want to make the more difficult choice. Ah evolution, you fail me again.

Speaking of evolution (and the coming apocalypse) the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is in the news again. For those of you who haven’t heard of the project, it’s essentially a bomb-proof concrete bunker, encased in permafrost and stored way up in the Norwegian Arctic. It’s the Noah’s Ark of seed banks, designed to save us from our untimely Doomsday demise.

Apparently, our Doomsday is closer than we think. Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and intellectual father of the Svalbard Seed Vault, recently had this to say:

“By the end of the century, average temperatures during growing seasons in many regions will probably be higher than the very hottest temperatures now. By 2030, we could see a 30 percent drop in maize production in Southern Africa; 2030 is only two crop generations away. We’re not talking about some time in the distant future when we all expect to be dead. We certainly can’t wake up in 2029 and decide to do something.”

Of course, saving seeds these days is easier said than done. Intellectual property rights have crept into all facets of post-industrial life, including mother nature’s own designs. The 2001 UN treaty of Plant Genetic Resources (ITPGR) officially resolved that farmers, breeder and scientists should have open access to the plant genetic resources of 64 species of the world’s major food crops, so long as they agree to return an equitable share of profit from any marketed product they derive.

Equitable share? Marketable products? I thought we were talking about food. Already Pollan’s treaty seems to be shot out the window. Saving our food sources, and global genetic biodiversity, will be a challenging task indeed.