This the full version of the article printed in the second issue of the Canadian Science Policy Magazine. The magazine is available for download here.
I write this from the perspective of an elder and grandfather. My life has been punctuated by a series of LESSONS acquired by experience, observation and thought and I will share some of them.
Soon after the Covid-19 lockdown in March, pundits described the prolonged and profound changes as the “new normal”, thereby implying pre-Covid life had been “normal”. It was not. For decades, ecologists, climatologists and conservation biologists had issued alarms about different impacts of human depredation of the biosphere. This is a very personal take on the timely theme of this issue of SDPM.
My grandparents emigrated from Japan to Canada between 1902 and 1906. My parents were born in Vancouver as were I and my sisters. We were Canadians making a life post Depression when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 and transformed us into a threat to Canada solely on the basis of our genetic origins from the enemy. Of course, there were enormous repercussions of our biological and cultural relationship with Japan, but that was not evidence to justify the actions taken. We were Canadians, but the War Measures Act suspended all basic democratic rights of citizenship – freedom of speech, equality before the law, freedom of movement – and we were displaced and incarcerated in camps or sent to other provinces and ultimately ejected from BC at war’s end.
LESSON: It’s easy to promise rights and freedom when times are good, but they matter most in times of crisis.
I was fortunate in gaining a top post-secondary education in the United States (BA Amherst College, PhD University of Chicago, post doc Oak Ridge National Labs) between 1954 and 1962. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the US began a massive program to catch-up, establishing NASA, supporting science in universities and students. After receiving a PhD, I received numerous job offers in the U.S. without even soliciting them. Nevertheless, I turned down the opportunities and returned to Canada in 1962 because it was different and I preferred a nation in which the CCF could be a respected political party, where a Tommy Douglas could be widely admired, where Medicare, the CBC and NFB were national treasures and Equalization payments enabled the poorer provinces to be helped by the wealthier ones. Canada was far from perfect, but I preferred the difference from the US.
Back in Canada at the University of Alberta, I was shocked at how poorly scientists were supported. I received my first grant from NRC of $4,200 and was told it should have been $3,500 but had been increased because of my postdoctoral experience. Like wine, grants apparently improved with age. At that time, assistant professors in science in the U.S. were receiving grants in the tens of thousands. Canadians needed to know why science matters and how it affects their lives. That’s why I seized the opportunity to do a program for “Your University Speaks”, a weekly television series on the local CBC station in Edmonton. I ended up presenting eight shows on my area of genetics.
LESSON: Television was a powerful medium to reach and inform a broad public audience.
The year I returned to Canada, Rachel Carson published her seminal book, Silent Spring, about the effects of pesticides. I was ambitious to make a mark as a geneticist but as I read her book, I was stunned to realize that in focusing on a part of nature we fail to see the context within which the studied part fits. Thus, one can analyze DDT effects on insects in a flask, growth chamber or even field plot, but in the real world, seasons change, winds blow, rain and snow fall, and a pesticide ends up in all kinds of places and organisms outside the scope of the study.
I was interested in the interaction between genes and chromosomes, not the fruitflies I used for study. Despite billions of dollars of research money and more than a dozen Nobel prizes to researchers studying Drosophila, we still have no idea how they survive an Edmonton winter.
LESSON: Reductionism, the way most scientists examine the world, does not provide enough information to anticipate or control the impact of what we do.
Carson also documented the latest evidence of a hitherto unknown biological phenomenon – biomagnification, the concentration of molecules up the food chain. This important process only became understood when birdwatchers began to note the decline in raptors like eagles and biologists were able to track it down to high concentrations of DDT in the shell glands of birds that resulted in thinner egg shells that cracked prematurely. While most scientists who have ever lived are alive and working today,
LESSON: our ignorance about how the world works is vast.
Paul Mueller earned a Nobel prize for his work on DDT in 1948, when this was hailed as a safe conquest of “pests”. Recognition of a catastrophic extinction crisis of all insects came seven decades later. In a time when science and technology are being hailed as our salvation – vaccines for new diseases, geoengineering to stave off climate change, biotech to shape life forms for human use, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, space travel and colonization, the list is constantly growing – LESSON: we must learn greater humility and patience in the face of our ignorance.
My first genetics class was for agriculture students and they were curious about animal breeding and the future of genetic engineering of domesticated animals and plants, and that got me reading articles in areas I hadn’t been taught. I learned of the importance of genetic diversity, the hazards of monoculture and the potential for cloning. When I moved to UBC, most of my students were pre-meds and interested in the human implications of cloning, gene manipulation for health and economic benefits, and some asked about social responsibility.
As I read, to my horror, I realized the impact that geneticists had had in the past. Early in the 20th century, eugenics a discipline dedicated to the improvement of the human condition through discouraging individuals with undesirable traits ranging from genuine hereditary conditions to alcoholism, criminality and indolence from having children while encouraging those with desirable qualities to have more offspring. Under the guise of science, eugenics was propelled by a drive to eliminate or spread qualities considered “superior” or “inferior”, “better” or “worse”, “good” or “bad”, but like “desirable” and “undesirable”, those are value judgements, not scientifically definable categories. Now that the entire human genome has been deciphered and powerful manipulative tools like CRISPR technology developed, the drive to intervene, alter and shape genomes is even stronger, especially because of the added incentive of vast earnings.
Eugenics was promoted by leading scientists. I remember witnessing H.J. Mueller, Nobel laureate who found that radiation induces mutations, pinching his skin and exclaiming “mutations are being induced all the time, including in reproductive cells” and advocating eugenics practices because most mutations are deleterious. One of the widely used early eugenics texts was written by Harvard professor, Edward M. East, and stated that “the Negro is inferior to the White” as a scientific fact. I learned that US immigration laws were based on shutting out people from certain countries who were considered inferior while Eugenics Acts in a number of countries allowed sterilization of people in institutions with a genetic rationale. This is not ancient history. Alberta was the last province to rescind the act and has been sued for compensation for wrongful sterilization of Indigenous women. Today, eugenics is a discredited field, considered pseudo-science.
As I learned about this history of genetics, I realized that the incarceration of me and my family was the direct consequence of the claims or boasts of scientists. In Canada, one MP is recorded in hansard claiming that in nine times out of ten (not a Mendelian ration but an attempt at putting a number on it) racial intermarriage led to offspring who were “mongrel wastrels”. General John DeWitt, the man in charge of the Japanese-American evacuation and incarceration, stated that despite being born and raised in the US, Japanese-Americans were still motivated by loyalty to Japan. Most shocking to me was my discovery that Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor of death at Auschwitz, was a geneticist who specialized in studying twins among the victims.
LESSON: Scientists are not immune to confusing their own beliefs and values as scientifically validated fact or truth, and when encouraged by money or politics, this can have enormous repercussions.
When Silent Spring came out, there wasn’t a single department, committee or portfolio on the environment in any country in the world. Carson’s book galvanized a powerful movement as people became aware that the “environment” was important and I, like millions of people, was swept up in it. I thought we needed departments of the environment to enact laws to regulate how much and what we removed from our surroundings and what and how much we put back into it, and to enforce those laws. But I kept referring to Carson’s book and wondered how we could “regulate” chemical pesticides when we didn’t even know about such an important biological phenomenon as biomagnification. There had been numerous justifications for developing atomic bombs, but when they were dropped on Japan, scientists didn’t know about radioactive fallout, electromagnetic pulses of gamma rays or the possibility of nuclear winter or fall. After CFCs had been used in massive quantities as refrigerants or inert additives to spray cans, scientists discovered that high above Earth, ultraviolet rays cleave chlorine free radicals that scavenge ozone.
LESSON: we can’t avoid long-term consequences of powerful innovations because our knowledge is so limited.
In the environmental movement, activists demanded to be part of our management of resources. So there are committees, groups, mandated to manage the Great Lakes, air quality, water resources, forests, endangered animals, etc. But it is done on the basis of simple models. Take an example: almost all caribou populations across Canada are declining precipitously. They are migratory animals that require vast tracts of the planet’s surface, most of it already “developed” or coveted by humans. Our models accept human depredation like deforestation, roads, mines, pipelines and pollution and instead are based on the premise that since wolves eat caribou, killing wolves will improve the numbers of caribou. Thus, by scapegoating a natural predator within a complex web or relationships, we avoid reigning in the primary cause of their decline – humans, the deadliest predator.
In order to “manage” anything sustainably, we need at least two things: an inventory of everything in the management purview and a blueprint of how all the items in the inventory are connected. Now that may be possible with a candy or shoe factory, but what about a forest, a watershed or an ecosystem? How much of the biodiversity do we know? A majority of the terrestrial big things like trees and vertebrates are known by scientists even though there hasn’t been a major push to document as many or all of them, and we keep hearing of the discovery of new species all the time.
And the oceans which cover 70% of the planet are an alien world where we know very little of the diversity within them. The same is true of invertebrates like insects and soil microorganisms like fungi on which which large organisms depend. It was long assumed that phytoplankton, microscopic plants were the foundation of marine food and energy systems. Then it was discovered there are organisms that are ten times smaller, undetected because they pass easily through the mesh of plankton nets. They are called picoplankton and are now considered a fundamental part of the marine web of life. We have no idea how vast life’s diversity is, although I’ve seen estimates ranging between 10 and 100 million. E.O. Wilson has enumerated those that have been classified and the total falls short of 2 million.
In the environmental movement, activists demanded to be part of our management of resources. So there are committees, groups, mandated to manage the Great Lakes, air quality, water resources, forests, endangered animals, etc. But it is done on the basis of simple models. Take an example: almost all caribou populations across Canada are declining precipitously. They are migratory animals that require vast tracts of the planet’s surface, most of it already “developed” or coveted by humans. Our models accept human depredation like deforestation, roads, mines, pipelines and pollution and instead are based on the premise that since wolves eat caribou, killing wolves will improve the numbers of caribou. Thus, by scapegoating a natural predator within a complex web or relationships, we avoid reigning in the primary cause of their decline – humans, the deadliest predator.
In order to “manage” anything sustainably, we need at least two things: an inventory of everything in the management purview and a blueprint of how all the items in the inventory are connected. Now that may be possible with a candy or shoe factory, but what about a forest, a watershed or an ecosystem? How much of the biodiversity do we know? A majority of the terrestrial big things like trees and vertebrates are known by scientists even though there hasn’t been a major push to document as many or all of them, and we keep hearing of the discovery of new species all the time.
And the oceans which cover 70% of the planet are an alien world where we know very little of the diversity within them. The same is true of invertebrates like insects and soil microorganisms like fungi on which which large organisms depend. It was long assumed that phytoplankton, microscopic plants were the foundation of marine food and energy systems. Then it was discovered there are organisms that are ten times smaller, undetected because they pass easily through the mesh of plankton nets. They are called picoplankton and are now considered a fundamental part of the marine web of life. We have no idea how vast life’s diversity is, although I’ve seen estimates ranging between 10 and 100 million. E.O. Wilson has enumerated those that have been classified and the total falls short of 2 million.
LESSON: Our inventory of biodiversity has to be seen as a fraction of what we think exists.
And how much of a blueprint do we have? “Identifying” a newly discovered organism means someone has keyed out the biological lineage of a dead specimen. It doesn’t mean that we know anything about their habitat, what it eats, how it reproduces, what its life cycle is, how many there are, how it interacts with other species or what its range is. We have that kind of information on a very small number of species, usually ones we like or find useful.
LESSON. Life flourishes in a complex web of relationships with other species and air, water and soil about which we know almost nothing.
It is a total myth to believe we can manage anything other than ourselves and when you look at our track record of over-fishing, pollution, poaching, greenhouse gas emissions, it’s clear we can’t even manage ourselves.
Scientists now point out that humans have taken over the planet with our numbers, consumptive demand and wastes. We are one species among millions of others, yet we claim the right to at least 88% of the land (Bruntland Commission) and few countries are willing to accede 12% to the rest of life. Humans are now the major factor altering the physical, chemical and biological properties of the planet on a geological scale and that’s why some scientists have proposed this geological period be called the Anthropocene.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a gift, an opportunity for humankind to undergo a massive slowdown of activity and movement, and time to reflect on the conjunction of several issues – climate change, species extinction, disease outbreaks, gross economic distribution of wealth, pollution, social justice, poverty, systemic racism, immigration, growth imperative and rampant consumerism, all of which are the consequence of human activity. Nature has been given a break from our incessant demands.
The scale of human depredation is measured by the number of our species, each of whom has an impact on air, water and soil, and our per capita consumption. By the metric of the ecological footprint, which is the amount of renewable resources used by all people, the entire annual productivity of nature that can be considered its interest, is now used up by early summer, so the rest of our consumption in a year is possible by using the biological capital that should be left for all future generations. That is why it is concluded to sustain our current level of use indefinitely would require up to three or four planets.
When I became involved in environmental issues, it always seemed that we were locked into zero-sum debates: the economy or the environment, logging or spotted owls, jobs or forests. Always, the economy was unassailable and central to the arguments. So environmentalists constantly search for economic justification of their proposals by creation of jobs or the costs of not doing anything. But this avoids grappling with the underlying assumptions that drive our activities in the first place. Many of the “victories” in battles I was part of in the 1970s and ‘80s turned out to be pyrrhic: we stopped a dam at site C on the Peace River in BC, we stopped a dam at Altamira on the Xingu River in Brazil, we stopped a proposal by Panarctic to drill for oil in Lancaster Sound in the Arctic; we stopped legislation that would allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd in Alaska. Today all of these projects are being done or will commence soon because in focusing on stopping an immediate threat, environmentalists failed to shift the values underlying the drive to “develop” in the first place. What we call wilderness or natural are undeveloped only to humans; to the animals and plants that have occupied an area for hundreds of millennia, their homes are fully developed and fully occupied.
For most of human existence, we were another ape, hunting and gathering by following plants and animals through the seasons. That was our natural state and required a lot of knowledge and skill to do so successfully for millennia. But over long (by human standards) periods, we moved, motivated perhaps by curiosity or search for food, resources or adventure (we did mate with Neanderthals after all), but as we penetrated new places, we were an invasive species. We had to acquire knowledge through observation, trial-and-error, and experiences, and the memory of the mistakes, successes, failures of ancestors was vital to their survival. The accumulated knowledge was a fundamental blueprint for survival and is the essence of Indigenous knowledge all over the world. Scientists publish the results of their work and reap promotions, raises, reputation and sometimes prizes, but survival is not at stake.
LESSON: For Indigenous people, the knowledge and insights acquired and passed on has enabled them to flourish for thousands of years in diverse surroundings ranging from deserts to plains, tropical forests, Arctic tundra, mountains, wetlands and so on.
No government or corporation or community can claim to the track record of Indigenous people who have survived in place for thousands of years. Despite the horrific history of genocidal policies of invaders who massacred, infected, conquered, colonized and ruled Indigenous people, pockets of resistance continue through the maintenance of culture and language, that are based on the understanding that nature is everything, that Earth is literally our Mother. She has birthed and nurtured us with clean air, clean water, clean soil and food and energy from photosynthesis, all of which is shared with our “relatives”, the plants and animals. DNA analysis confirms this relationship; we share most of the genes found in all eukaryotes, plant and animal, that reflect our common evolutionary history. Surely we treat our kin with love, respect and reverence, a very different way than what we would do if they are merely “resources” or “commodities”.
LESSON: An ecocentric perspective sees us as deeply embedded in and utterly dependent on Nature for our survival and well-being.
I have attended celebrations, funerals and potlatches in different Indigenous communities. Thanks are always given to their Creator for Nature’s generosity and abundance while responsibility is acknowledged by promising to act properly to keep it all going.
LESSON: This reciprocity of thanks and responsibility is missing in modern society.
The rise of science indicated through Francis Bacon (knowledge is power), Rene Descartes (I think, therefore I am) and Isaac Newton (the universe is a clockwork mechanism) separated mind from body and moved it from Nature. By focusing on parts of the world around, scientists believed they could eventually understand the parts so they could eventually be fit together to comprehend the whole. With the Industrial Revolution humans seemed to escape the constraints of their biology or even Nature. With telescopes and microscopes, we could probe to the edge of the universe or discover a world in a drop of water. Machines could work tirelessly round the clock, move massive obstacles or objects or travel faster than any animal. Humans were no longer limited by biology, only our imagination. And so we moved from an ecocentric vision of our place in the world to an anthropocentric perspective that put us at the centre and while everything around is about and for us.
Through an anthropocentric lens, we have designed political, legal and economic systems that determine the way we live and act on this planet. But the game in each realm is fixed with us firmly in the centre and no recognition of our utter dependence on Nature, our ignorance or responsibility. Therein lies the essence of our crisis. If we do not acknowledge the gifts of Nature – Earth, Air, Fire, Water – and our kinship with the rest life, choosing instead to celebrate only our achievements while failing to recognize the enormity of our ignorance and our responsibility to honour and protect nature above all else, then we will continue along the destructive path we are on.
Science’s great strength is in description. We constantly discover things because we are so ignorant, we just have to look. The great entomologist, Tom Eisner, once told me he could go any day and discover a new species of insect in Central Park in the middle of New York City. We have far more to discover than we know. Where science is poor is in prescription because we don’t know enough to provide solutions.
LESSON: If we can harness science with its great power of drilling down within the perspective and values of Indigenous people, that would be powerful.
When I was still in graduate school, geneticists began to exploit molecular techniques to analyze and compare products of single genes in different individuals. Applied to fruitflies, I expected this highly specialized species would be relatively homogeneous at each locus. Instead, it was found that each gene in a population had a variety of conditions. It is now called genetic polymorphism and is the very measure of the health of a species. In other words, diversity at the gene level is critical for survival while a small amount of variation as occurs in small populations, from inbreeding or deliberate monoculture of domestic animals or plants becomes vulnerable to genetic malformations or susceptibility to disease or perturbations in the environment.
At the level of ecosystems, those with a great variety of species can tolerate assaults like fire, floods, drought or pest outbreaks while ecosystem diversity has enabled life to flourish in diverse areas like the Arctic, deserts, mountains, tropics, etc. Like Russian dolls, diversity is built into the level of genes, species and ecosystems, thereby conferring greater resilience and adaptability as Earth’s conditions change. The Sun is 30% warmer now than when life first appeared, continents have moved apart or smashed together, magnetic poles have shifted and reshifted, ice ages have punctuated warm periods, oceans have filled and drained, mountains have risen up and worn down, and all the while, life has persisted and flourished. Diversity has been the key.
Human cultures have added another level of diversity that have been critical for survival in diverse places as our distant ancestors moved across the planet. Taken all together cultures create what Wade Davis calls the ethnosphere, the world created by human imagination. And as in the biosphere, diversity of language and culture within the ethnosphere is every bit as critical to human survival as we encounter the multiple crises of this moment. So like the Canadian experiment in multiculturalism, we must celebrate and treasure the diversity within our society as a critical component of sustainability.
Science also reveals a fundamental need built into our very being to be with other species. Ecologist, E.O. Wilson has called this biophilia, an innate love of life that we witness when an infant first sees a butterfly or flower, or for that matter, a snake or a spider. Our chemical war against nature, our fear of or revulsion from spiders, snakes, even ants and flies, results from biophobia which we learn. But it goes against our very need to love and affiliate with them, thereby creating a wall between us and the natural world with real physical and psychological consequences.
Does technology have a role to play in the struggle with climate change and other problems? Of course, but there is no technological magic bullet that will cure all the ills created by technology. As I’ve indicated, our ignorance is so great, we have to apply technology with extreme caution. Let me give you one simple example. It has been found that when carbon dioxide is pumped under pressure into depleted oil wells, more oil can be recovered and the carbon dioxide doesn’t come back out. The climate crisis has resulted from the excess carbon in the atmosphere, so clearly we must stop adding more and ultimately try to remove the excess. Carbon capture and storage or carbon sequestration has been the hope of both the fossil fuel industry and governments as the way to enable the continued use of fossil fuels.
But what is the sequestered carbon doing? Much of it is trapped in pockets under layers of limestone. Carbon dioxide dissolves in water as carbonic acid which is what is causing ocean acidification. Acid dissolves limestone so could all the sequestered carbon be released again when it punctures the limestone cap? It was once thought that all life ends at bedrock so below that Earth is sterile. Now we know that bacteria can be found kilometers below Earth’s surface and they are like nothing we know above ground. Entirely new phyla have to be created to give them an evolutionary place among the various branches of life. Stephen Gould pointed out that life above ground is a very thin layer while life underground is kilometers deep. He calculated therefore that the weight of protoplasm beneath Earth’s surface could be greater than the weight of all the trees, fish, whales and all other life forms on the surface. What are these strange beings doing, what role do they play in the movement of energy, water or atoms? Fascinating questions but we have no idea. When I asked Princeton’s Tullis Onstott, one of the world experts on microorganisms found deep under Earth what carbon sequestration might do to them, he replied “I have no idea but the methanogens will love it.” What are methanogens? Bacteria that consume carbon dioxide and release methane which is a greenhouse gas that is up to 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide!
Janine Benyus has suggested a way to reduce the potential risk of new technology is biomimicry, that is imitating living organisms. She reasons that over billions of years, organisms have confronted the challenges of finding nutrition and energy, reproducing, evading predators, recovering from illness (even bacteria are invaded by viruses), eliminating waste, protecting offspring and so on. In the myriad ways that organisms have evolved solutions to these problems, people may find ones that work for us. A simple example is when an elephant defecates on the plains, it is not a pollution problem because insects, fungi and bacteria see it as food. We, on the other hand, take human feces which could be a rich fertilizer and combine it with potable water, and create a problem. Chinese people knew better until persuaded to use “modern” fossil fuel intensive techniques of industrial agriculture.
Let me close with a story. I was beginning my last year as an undergraduate at Amherst College when on October 4, 1957, the world was electrified by the announcement that the Soviet Union had launched a satellite, Sputnik, into space. Few in the world even knew there was a space program and every hour and a half as it passed overhead, Sputnik blared out Soviet technological supremacy. The three branches of the US armed forces each had their own rockets and launched them (not all at once) only to have every one explode. Meanwhile, the Soviets scored a succession of impressive firsts – the first animal (a dog Laika), the first man (Yuri Gagarin), the first team of cosmonauts, the first space walk, the first woman (Valentina Tereshkova).
The American response was impressive and instructive. This was a time when the U.S. and Soviet Union were locked in a Cold War and Soviet technology was impressive but there was no whimpering or whining (at least publicly) that the Soviets were too far ahead or that it was too expensive to try to catch up. Americans created NASA and began to inject funds into universities and students. I was a foreigner, yet when I mentioned my interest in biology, there was money to support me. And then in 1962, President John F. Kennedy announced “we choose to go to the moon”, an audacious proposal to win the “space race” by getting Americans to the moon and back with a decade. There was no clear way to do it, only the resolve.
And the results were impressive. Not only did they succeed within a decade, America is the only nation to put humans on the moon. To me what is most impressive is that fifty years later, when Nobel awards are announced in science, American scientists or scientists working in America continue to garner most of them because of the enormous success of the program to make America a major force in science on the way to the moon. And every year, NASA publishes Spinoff, a magazine that documents hundreds of innovations from laptop computers to satellite communications, space blankets, GPS and ear thermometers that resulted from the American determination to get to the moon first.
And this is my most important LESSON: What enabled Americans to win the space race was the commitment to do it.
It is unAmerican to respond to issues like climate change as too costly or impossible. Once committed, consider all of the collateral, unexpected and unpredictable spinoffs that resulted and continue to be generated. And that is precisely what will happen once we make the commitment to shift all avenues of society to the goal of a cleaner, greener, more just society.
