Salmon Wars Documentary - View The Trailer!

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Fri, 04/06/2012 - 23:51

The trailer for our upcoming documentary, Salmon Wars, has just been released! See it here: http://youtu.be/EimPqpMlInY

Background: in recent months, the international salmon-farming industry has been applying for new sites and new leases -- on a truly massive scale. A pair of farms in St. Mary's Bay is licensed to produce 1.4 million salmon, and wll produce as much sewage as the entire human population of Digby County, in which the farms are located. 

Citizens were appalled -- particularly in the communities where the farms would actually be sited.  Yet the government of Nova Scotia seemed -- and seems -- absolutely determined to ignore their concerns, and to rush more salmon farms into production.  Meanwhile one group of concerned citizens approached The Green Interview, wondering whether we could help to inform the public. We suggested that we make a documentary film for free distribution, and the group undertook to raise enough money to cover the costs.

We've been working on the project for months, travelling to Toronto, New Brunswick, BC and Washington to talk to scientists and others, and to visit innovative aquaculture sites. Our Green Interviews with Alexandra Morton, Daniel Pauly, David Montgomery and Alanna Mitchell, all now published, are connected to this project.

We hope to have the documentary completed within the next few weeks -- but in the meantime the issue has been gathering momentum here in Nova Scotia, and we want to give at least a taste of what the finished production will look like. Here it is -- all six minutes of it. Enjoy!

David Korten on the Struggle for the Future of the World

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Wed, 03/28/2012 - 15:25

 

This brief quotation by David Korten -- whose interview we'll post later this week -- provides the most succinct summary I've seen of the giant struggle that we're all now engaged in, whether or not we like it or even know about it. If you want to understand the disconnect between what you want and what your governments are providing to you, if you want to grasp the agenda of the army of lobbyists, idealogues, think-tanks and spin-doctors that infest the capitals of the world, then read this – and memorize the sentence I've underlined. 
 
“The debates, dialogues, and street protests have brought into sharp focus a deepening struggle grounded in two sharply divergent worldviews. On one side are the forces of corporate globalization advanced by an alliance between the world's largest corporations and most powerful governments. This alliance is backed by the power of money, and its defining project is to integrate the world's national economies into a single, borderless global economy in which the world's mega-corporations are free to move goods and money anywhere in the world that affords an opportunity for profit, without governmental interference. In the name of increased efficiency the alliance seeks to privatize public services and assets and strengthen safeguards for investors and private property. In the eyes of its proponents, corporate globalization is the result of inevitable and irreversible historical forces driving a powerful engine of technological innovation and economic growth that is strengthening human freedom, spreading democracy, and creating the wealth needed to end poverty and save the environment. 
 
“On the other side are the forces of a newly emerging global movement advanced by a planetary citizen alliance of civil society organizations. This alliance is bringing together the most important social movements of our time in common cause, is self-organizing, depends largely on voluntary social energy, and is driven by a deep value commitment to democracy, community, equity, and the web of planetary life. It is a movement of a million leaders, each contributing ideas and initiatives toward shaping the whole. In the eyes of its members, corporate globalization is neither inevitable nor beneficial, but rather the product of intentional decisions and policies promoted by the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the IMF, global corporations, and politicians who depend on corporate money. They believe corporate globalization is enriching the few at the expense of the many, replacing democracy with rule by corporations and financial elites, destroying the real wealth of the planet and society to make money for the already wealthy, and eroding the relationships of trust and caring that are the essential foundation of a civilized society.”
 
-- David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, introduction to the second edition. Emphasis mine.  
 
David Korten, our next Green Interview, is a  founder of Yes! Magazine and of BALLE, the Business Association for Local Living Economies. He's also co-chair of the New Economy Working Group, which seeks to create a new sustainable economy to replace what Korten calls “the suicide economy” of today. 
 
 

Daniel Pauly!

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Sat, 03/24/2012 - 14:48

Dr. Daniel Pauly,  our newest Green Interview, is a legendary fisheries scientist, an authority on the overall state of world fisheries and fish stocks, and a bold, incisive thinker.  

Pauly  is the driving force behind FishBase, a database on the web that contains detailed information on all the 35,000 fish species known to science. He and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia are also largely responsible for the full development of Ecopath and Ecosim, a suite of free ecosystem modelling software tools that allow scientists to develop complex scenarios about changes in the ecology of the world's oceans. In 2007, Ecopath was named as one of the ten biggest scientific breakthroughs in the 200-year history of the UN National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which noted that Ecopath “revolutionized scientists’ ability worldwide to understand complex marine ecosystems.”

Daniel Pauly is also famous for articulating the concept of “shifting baselines,” showing that as our world is progressively more impoverished biologically, we actually forget what once existed. Just fifty years ago, for example, there were salmon six feet long in the Bay of Fundy. Today we think that a bay without such fish is normal, and we have almost forgotten that such fish ever swam.

In 2002, Pauly made headlines by arguing that commercially fished species like cod, tuna, and flounder will be effectively extinct within a few decades unless we reduce fishing dramatically and set up large fish zones to allow stocks to recover. Overall, he says, the fishing industry is a "global Ponzi scheme," and it's not just one fishery that's failing―it's the whole system.

Lloyd Bourinot's Petit de Grat song

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Mon, 03/12/2012 - 21:46

I had hoped that someone would sing this yesterday at Lloyd's memorial service. Here are the words, from memory. I wonder if anyone has an "official" copy?

LLOYD BOURINOT'S PETIT DE GRAT SONG

The spring of 1961 I thought I'd go to sea,

With Sam Rideout, skipper of the old Red Diamond III,
Down the Strait of Canso till Green Island hove in sight,
We headed 'er in for Petit de Grat one dark and stormy night.

CHO:
We never fished the codfish, no, we never fished at all,
We spent our time in Petit de Grat, having ourselves a ball,
Chasin' after women*  while the ship was overhauled,
Livin' it up on 7-Up and St. Pierre alcohol.

Well, Cap'n Sam from Newfoundland and I was by the drag,
We was skinnin' codfish, we must have skinned a bag,
The skipper says, Now Lloyd, me son, now whatta we got to lose?
Let's throw the fish back in the sea and take a pleasure cruise.

CHO:
We never fished the codfish, no, we never fished at all,
We spent our time in Petit de Grat, having ourselves a ball,
Chasin' after women*  while the ship was overhauled,
Livin' it up on 7-Up and St. Pierre alcohol.

The fall of 1964 was gettin' kind of rough,
I was sick of warps and cod-ends and that sot of stuff
We sailed from Newfie to Bras d'Or and all along the coast,
And now me two feet's on the shore, and this I like the most.

CHO:
We never fished the codfish, no, we never fished at all,
We spent our time in Petit de Grat, having ourselves a ball,
Chasin' after women*  while the ship was overhauled,
Livin' it up on 7-Up and St. Pierre alcohol.

* Lloyd sang “chasin' after Frenchmen,” but I changed it to “women,” which appealed to me more. And I'm not sure of the dates, 1961, 1964 etc. But it's a fine, roistering song. 

 

Alanna Mitchell!

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Sat, 03/10/2012 - 01:45

Alanna Mitchell, our newest Green Interview, has been called “the best environmental journalist in the world” -- and by The World Conservation Union and the Reuters Foundation, no less. Her latest book is Sea Sick: The Hidden Crisis in the Global Ocean, a passionate investigation of the health of the ocean. As she points out, despite the different names, there is only one ocean. It surrounds the world, and it is “the true lungs of the planet,” the source of most of the earth's oxygen supply. If the ocean is in trouble, all of life is in trouble.

Sea Sick is the first book to examine the ecological crisis facing the world's oceans – the way we're altering everything about them from temperature, salinity, and acidity to ice cover, and the very life within them.  Sea Sick is a powerful book, and immensely readable one, a skillful blend of science and storytelling, of personal adventure and intellectual exploration.

Alanna Mitchell began as a newspaper reporter with The National Post and The Globe and Mail,  writing about everything from the real estate market to social trends and statistics. She eventually became an award-winning a feature writer on Earth Sciences, studied ecology at Oxford University, and in 2004 published her first book, Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots.

In 2008 she won the Atkinson Fellowship in Journalism, a $100,000 prize to conduct a new course of study on the intersection of neuroscience and education. In 2010 she won the prestigious Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment for Sea Sick. She is also an Associate with the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), based in Winnipeg.

And she is a wonderfully-articulate and moving conversationalist. We're very proud to welcome Alanna Mitchell to The Green Interview project. 

Lloyd Bourinot: Farewell, and Fair Winds

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Sun, 02/26/2012 - 01:30

While travellin' down to Isle Madame you'll find the sea is mighty ca'm
Cause a dirty oil slick's holdin' down the foam;
But Ottawa don't seem to care 'bout the Bunker C that's lyin' there
In that little oil-ringed island we call home.

In 1970, the tanker Arrow impaled itself on Cerberus Rock, just off the coast of Isle Madame, Cape Breton, and the Bunker C oil that poured out of it created the worst oil spill in the history of Canada, even to this day. The Talkin' Arrow Blues was written by a local musician, printer, sailor, naval reserve officer, bon vivant and businessman named Lloyd Bourinot. The Bunker C belonged to Imperial Oil, who at that time had the slogan "Always look to Imperial for the best."  So Lloyd's chorus went:

The Living Beach re-visited

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Sat, 02/18/2012 - 21:19

In 1998, I published The Living Beach, my most extensive piece of environmental writing -- an account of the fascinating dance of wind, sand and water that makes beaches, live, grow, shrink, die and adapt. The book won a bunch of awards, but when the publishing house was sold to a multinational corporation it instantly went out of print.  (The hardcover is still available from my author website, www.silverdonaldcameron.ca.)

The Most Glorious Beach in the World (1998)

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Sat, 02/18/2012 - 20:58

"My favourite beach?" asks Dr. Miles O. Hayes of Columbia, South Carolina. "There's no doubt that the most beautiful beaches in the world are the beaches in South Carolina. You should go to Kiawah Island. Beautiful clean white sandy beaches." 

 
Amused by his own boosterism, Hayes laughs heartily. He is an internationally recognized coastal geologist who advises governments and corporations about beach clean-ups all over the world. But he is a patriot too. His office is in the capital of South Carolina, he has taught at the University of South Carolina, and in a sense he *designed* the beaches of Kiawah Island, near Charleston. When the Kuwait Development Corporation was planning to subdivide the island, they commissioned Miles Hayes to create regulations which would preserve those sweeping beaches in all their natural glory.
 
So Hayes can hardly be expected to praise beaches elsewhere — but then, to my surprise, he does.
 
“Actually my favourite beaches are in Alaska,” he says. “ The beaches in Cook Inlet and the beaches down off the Copper River delta are absolutely the best. Also I really like the beautiful white beaches in Oman -- the exposed beaches on the Indian Ocean, where the beaches are composed of little shells called forminifera tests. Those are my favourites." 
 
When I met Miles Hayes, I was researching a book called *The Living Beach* (Macmillan, 1998). I spoke to scientists, surfers, engineers, cottagers, conservationists, politicians. In passing, I asked them about their favourite beaches. To my surprise, I found that many people have three favourite beaches. 
 

The Orcas Win in Court!

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Tue, 02/14/2012 - 01:43

http://www.ecojustice.ca/blog/ecojustice-delivers-a-big-win-for-the-canadian-orca-population

This ruling fills me with jubilation. In my 1998 book The Living Beach, I took a look at the idea that natural phenomena should have legal rights. Bolivia has passed a landmark law on this topic -- and here's a Canadian court asserting the duty of Canada to protect the habitat of a wild animal.

Here's the passage from The Living Beach. I'm very proud to have written it. 
 
 
    If stewardship became a major objective for us, what would we do differently?

    Geologist Stanley Riggs suggests that we might begin by giving legal rights to beaches and other natural objects. He proposes that beaches themselves should have legal standing in the courts; they should become "jural persons," with rights which the courts would be obliged to consider. The idea is disorienting at first, but then so is the present situation. If I sue my neighbour over ownership of some dune land, is there not something absurd about the fact that the law considers my interests and my neighbour's, but not those of the dunes? Surely Gaia is also a party to this dispute.

   Of course, the courts already consider the legitimate interests of persons who are unable to speak for themselves -- infants and the mentally incompetent, for instance. Other entities which are,literally, legal fictions are "persons" in the courts, including corporations, trusts, estates and nations. In many jurisdictions, animals have at least minimal rights, such as the right not to be
treated cruelly. Even ships are sometimes treated as jural persons.

   If a ship or an estate, why not a beach, a mountain, a stream?

David Montgomery!

Submitted by Silver Donald C... on Sun, 01/29/2012 - 20:16

Our newest interview, David Montgomery, is a geologist, a professor, a rock musician – and the author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, a startling book that details how human beings have been mining the soil since the dawn of agriculture, turning the Fertile Crescent, for instance, into the desert that is modern Iraq. It takes from 500 to 1000 years for nature to create an inch of topsoil, but with careless agriculture – the kind of agriculture we practice today – that inch of soil can be lost in just 25 or 30 years.

David is also the author of King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon, a fine book on the decline of salmon all around the northern hemisphere,  from the fjords of Norway to the rivers of British Columbia. Once again, the cause is human carelessness. We never decided we didn't want salmon. We just decided that we wanted other things more – like logging, power generation, a place to dump pesticides and so forth.

We asked David what connects these two books. He told us that he's a student of the forces that shape the landscape over time – and among the most powerful forces shaping the landscape in recent millennia is us.

Oh yes – you can get his band's album via iTunes. The band is called...  Big Dirt.