Category Archives: Aquatic sciences

Unmuzzling the Scientists

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Science_Uncensored_Portrait

 

                                                                      Image from scienceuncensored.ca

Do you hear that sound………………………?

What, you don’t hear anything? 

Well, it’s not surprising, because that sound – or lack thereof – is just an Environment Canada (EC) Scientist hard at work.  What; you thought Environment Canada Scientists were extinct – victims of overzealous harvesting by the Federal Government?

Happily, that is not the case.  A few isolated populations of EC and DFO scientists are hanging on to their jobs in fragmented office habitats scattered across the country.  And the silence – well, you can’t hear them cos’ they have Duct tape firmly clamped across their mouths.

It’s for their own protection really – and yours, because if they contradicted some pet government doctrine, well, that might confuse you, or make the government look like they were wrong about something. 

And we couldn’t have that!

OK, so they don’t literally have Duct tape across their mouths, but they do have secrecy-minded gatekeepers between them and the public, and “minders” shadowing them at conferences. And they are increasingly hemmed in by rules about who they can or can’t talk to, whether they can publish their work in a timely manner, and even whether they can apply for grants. Continue reading →

A small victory for the reality-based community

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A lot of people were giddy with delight to hear that Barack Obama had won a second Presidential term.  They were so relieved that Mitt Romney, who came to symbolize hide-bound privilege and every retrograde “ism” and “phobia” in the USA, would not occupy the oval office, that they forgot what a disappointment Obama has been. 

So just what is there in Obama’s victory for the progressives and environmentally aware?  Is Barack Obama waging peace? If anything, somewhat the reverse.  Nor is he much of an environmentalist.  Not one word, not even a syllable was said about the environment in any of the three presidential debates.  The next four years may not be the pipelinapalooza they would have been under Romney, but I would bet money on more pipelines – including the Nebraska stage of the Keystone line – being built with Obama’s approval.

For all that, we can still do a small victory shuffle to honour the fact that a member of the “reality-based community[1]” will lead the most powerful and indebted nation on earth for the next four years.  The alternative would have been a fully signed up member of a party controlled by loony-tunes who proudly declare “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers“.

Here in Canada of course, our slide into political unreality continues.  Since they were first elected, various members of the Federal Conservatives caucus have proudly and repeatedly declared that “we don’t govern on the basis of statistics”.  But as any scientist knows, statistics are how we make sense of observations and data about the world.  So, if not statistics, what is the basis of your policy – guesswork?  Ideology? Reading the tea leaves? Continue reading →

Saving Canada’s Experimental Lakes Area

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You would have to have been living under a rock over the last couple of weeks not to have heard of the federal government’s decision to withdraw funding forCanada’s world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area (ELA).  Research emerging from this network of 58 small lakes in northwest Ontario has helped to clean up Lake Erie (see Figure 1), saved municipalities millions of dollars on the design of sewage plants, and shed light on the ecological pathways by which acid rain harms lakes.  

The imminent closure of the ELA has not gone unnoticed internationally, and threatens to add another twist to the death spiral of Canada’s environmental reputation.  

Water experts from around the world have weighed in to condemn the closure, and a who’s who of leading aquatic experts have written an open letter to Steven Harper requesting that he reverse the closure. Continue reading →