Latest posts in Science Matters
Report shows Canada must do more for its oceans
You'd think the decline of the Northern cod fishery, largely caused by mismanagement, would have taught us something. (Credit: Hawkins Multimedia via Flickr)
It's been 20 years since Canada's East Coast cod fishery collapsed, and we still have no recovery target or timeline for rebuilding populations. That's just one finding in a damning report from a panel of eminent Royal Society of Canada marine scientists.
Sustaining Canada's Marine Biodiversity notes that Canada has "failed to meet most of our national and international commitments to protect marine biodiversity" and "lags behind other modernized nations in almost every aspect of fisheries management."
For a country surrounded on three sides by oceans, with the longest coastline in the world, that's shameful. Beyond the jobs, recreational opportunities, food, medicines, and habitat that our oceans provide, they also give us life. Half the world's oxygen is produced in the oceans by phytoplankton, which are threatened by rising ocean temperatures and acidification because of global warming.
Science literacy is good for society
Some moms and dads fear questions such as "Why is the sky blue?" and "Why is the moon out during the day?" (Credit: Kristin Brenemen via Flickr)
Kids ask questions. Sometimes adults feel inadequate if they don't have ready answers. But when I became a teacher, I learned quickly that there's nothing wrong with saying, "I don't know." Teaching children how to learn is more useful than feeding them facts.
Many parents, though, believe they must appear infallible in the eyes of their children. A U.K. survey found that some moms and dads fear questions such as "Why is the sky blue?" and "Why is the moon out during the day?" Math and science queries were the biggest stumpers.
Researchers questioned more than 2,000 parents before The Big Bang U.K. Young Scientists and Engineers Fair. Many respondents admitted to "furtive researching to save face before answering their child."
Oil sands and pipeline debates hindered by lack of energy plan
We need to slow down development, get our share of the wealth, and save some of the riches and resource for the future. (Credit: NASA Earth Observatory via Flickr)
The ongoing pipeline debates have become mired in conspiracy theories, distractions, and misinformation. Is there nothing we can all agree on?
To begin, who would deny that our most basic human needs are clean air and water, productive soils, and a diversity of species? It isn't controversial to argue that we must protect these necessities of life.
We also need energy — from a mix of sources. Oil will be in that mix for the foreseeable future. But surely we can all agree that burning fossil fuels at the current or greater rate is not healthy for humans and the environment. Rational people also agree that doing so is driving dangerous climate change that threatens human existence.
Where does that leave us? Canada has tremendous natural wealth, especially energy resources. But we have no plan to guide us in the way we extract and use them or in how we get energy to Canadians. Indeed, one rarely reads of a national energy plan without seeing a reference to the "hated" National Energy Program brought in by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government in 1980 and killed after Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government won the 1984 election.
Continue reading »What's so radical about caring for the Earth?
We are condemned by our own government because we question the safety of two pipelines crossing more than 1,000 streams and rivers through priceless wilderness (Credit: Clickr Bee via Flickr)
Caring about the air, water, and land that give us life. Exploring ways to ensure Canada's natural resources serve the national interest. Knowing that sacrificing our environment to a corporate-controlled economy is suicide. If those qualities make us radicals, as federal Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver recently claimed in an open letter, then I and many others will wear the label proudly.
But is it radical to care for our country, our world, our children and grandchildren, our future? It seems more radical for a government to come out swinging in favour of an industrial project in advance of public hearings into that project. It seems especially radical when the government paints everyone who opposes the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project as American-funded traitors with a radical ideological agenda "to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth."
Northern Gateway is about profits versus environment
When we build infrastructure such as pipelines to support the fossil fuel industry, we increase the incentive to use fossil fuels for a longer time and decrease the incentives to invest in cleaner energy. (Credit: rblood via Flickr)
The battle lines are drawn, and Northern B.C.'s pristine wilderness is the latest front. With hearings underway into the proposed $5.5-billion, dual 1,172-kilometre Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline project to transport bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to Kitimat and imported condensate to dilute it from the coast back to Alberta, the fossil fuel industry and its supporters have stepped up the rhetoric. Environmentalists and people in towns, rural areas, and First Nations communities in B.C. have lined up in opposition.
It's not just about potential damage from an oil spill along the pipeline route or from a supertanker plying the precarious fiords and waterways along our northern coast — as critical as those concerns are. The larger issues are about our continued reliance on polluting fossil fuels and the economic impact of rapidly exploiting and selling our resources and resource industries.
