Conservative government destroys good science

On June 7, 2012, I maile the following letter to Mr. Ashfield with copies to the Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Minister Kent: The Hon. Keith Ashfield, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans House of Commons Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6 Dear Mr. Ashfield: Not being a fisheries or aquatic biologist, you might think my colleagues and I would have scant knowledge of or interest in the Experimental Lakes. Not so. In my career, as a biologist, section head and division manager with Environment Canada, I have had many times to hire biologists with fisheries, aquatic biology, or limnology training. The first thing I looked at on their applications was whether they had Experimental Lakes experience during university. That was the way to know that they had both superior training by Canada’s elite science faculty, and real-world experience. I could depend on these young scientists to recognize a Daphnia when they saw one, to know a hypo- from a hyperlimnion, and to fix an outboard motor when it konked on the way home from a survey. Even if their jobs had nothing to do with aquatic biology, I knew that these were the best people to serve Environment Canada, and the country. The Experimental Lakes sites and program have produced generations of Canada’s top scientists and were the foundation for innumerable masters’ and PhD theses and scientific publications by scholars from all over the world. Students and scientists working there discovered the effects of phosphorus in detergents and acid rain, allowing my former Department to eliminate these scourges of lake ecosystems. It is the best and longest running lake biology experiment in the world—there is nothing else like it. It would be short-sighted indeed to cancel funding for it. Sincerely, Lee Harding, PhD cc: The Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister The Hon. Peter Kent, Minister of the Environment

Canada guts environmental legislation

I mailed this letter to Mr. Harper on June 7 with copies to Ministers Ashfield and Kent. June 7, 2012 The Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister House of Commons Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6 Dear Mr. Harper: RE: BILL C-38 Have you any idea how badly the changes to the Fisheries Act, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and the other changes to environmental legislation, will affect my business? My company and the hundreds of other environmental consulting firms in Canada will have hardly any work if these changes proceed. Developers will have no need to hire biologists to see that their projects are designed to mitigate environmental impacts. Of course, I would gladly suffer lost clients and business if the environment would still be protected, but it will not. You are well aware of the inter-linkages of environmental legislation: • The Fisheries Act is a “trigger” the invokes the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act • When invoked, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act ensures consideration of all components of the environment, including archaeological sites and other cultural heritage values. • Protecting fish also protects water- and riparian-associated wildlife and endangered species. I started working in this business in 1972, before there was even an environmental impact assessment policy, let alone an Act. I spent most of my career with Environment Canada and have two awards from that Department for meritorious service and a letter of congratulations upon my retirement signed by one of your Prime Minister predecessors. No one thinks these Acts can’t use a little tweaking to improve fairness and efficiency; but this is too much. Please stop it. Sincerely, Lee E. Harding, PhD, RPBio President, owner and Chief Scientist cc: The Hon. Keith Ashfield, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans The Hon. Peter Kent, Minister of the Environment

Ottawa to keep records on Canadians' border crossings for the American government

Published in the Globe and Mail, December 2011:
Re: "How Ottawa will track who’s coming, who’s going and where” December 8, 2011, p. A10:

So, Ottawa will keep a record of every time I drive to Oregon to visit my Mom or my plane stops in Texas on the way to a business meeting in South America, but cancelled the long-form census and doesn’t want to know if I own a rifle?


Background: the Conservative government cancelled the mandatory long-form census in 2011, and the long-gun (i.e., rifles and shotguns) registry, a key part of Canada's gun law,in February 2012.

Coquitlam endorses pesticide bay bylaw

Published in the Coquitlam Now, February 24, 2012

Councillor O’Neill grossly distorts the precautionary principle and disingenuously ignores the huge body of scientific knowledge of cosmetic pesticides. The precautionary principle guides us to avoid chemicals that are known to be dangerous without waiting for overwhelming proof that they sicken people and pets in our own city, or in our yards. The toxicity of these chemicals is known in minute detail; as a former Environment Canada toxicologist, I have produced some of the literature myself. While modern pesticides are not as toxic or persistent as older, banned ones, they are still toxic or they would not work. Used as directed, they still kill beneficial, non-target organisms, such as earthworms. The Health Canada approvals only apply when used as prescribed, but many people use too much, or too often, or to kill plants or animals not prescribed on the labels. Pesticides can drift into a neighbour’s yard, or be tracked into the house by pets and people. Some people and pets are more sensitive than average, and can become sick even when a pesticide is used as directed. There are cheap and easy alternatives, such as a weed puller for dandelions and non-pesticide treatments for fungus on the roses or weevils on the rhododendrons. We should keep cosmetic chemicals out of our city because we don’t need them for healthy yards and gardens and because however benign they are, they still kill.

Sandhills, Bison, Pronghorns and Pipelines

In expressing angst about attacks on the proposed Keystone pipeline (Pipeline Shutdown, Nathan Vanderlippe and Carrie Tait, Globe and Mail, November 11, 2011, p. B1), could you not at least mention the environmental values that it threatens? Maybe even run a photo of it, instead of protesters in Washington? The Nebraska Sandhills are an iconic landscape “where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play”, and a unique ecozone. In 2010, I had a chance to visit the Sandhills for the first time. My brother and I parked the car many times and just walked out across the prairie. We watched hawks hunt prairie dogs under a sky that went on forever, saw pronghorn antelope gather at a waterhole, and were unnerved by a glowering bison bull moving between his herd and us. There is nowhere else on Earth where one can see this wildlife community in an undisturbed, natural environment. It is worth protecting.

Doing business with undemocratic regimes

Geoffrey York wrote in The high cost of doing business with undemocratic regimes (Folio, Globe and Mail, March 21, 2011) what a great many Canadians have been saying privately for a long time. The Democratic Republic of Congo, where Human Rights Watch estimated in 2009 that 200,000 women and girls had been raped since 1998, as Mr. York stated, is Canada’s top African investment portfolio at $3.34 billion. Putting retirement savings into ethical business funds as my wife and I do is only part of the solution. Canada should introduce regulations to make sure that our companies do not engage in practices abroad that would be illegal here, and compel them to disclose tax and revenue paid to foreign governments , as the USA has done in the recently-passed Dodd-Frank bill.

The spiralling food security crisis

“The spiralling food security crisis” (Celebrities raise awareness of world agricultural crisis” Jessica Leeder, Globe and Mail, March 16, 2011) may be puzzling policy-makers and governments, but not researchers. Sixteen years have passed since Lester Brown, an agricultural economist, published “Who will feed China?” In it, he showed that agricultural production could not rise in the future nearly as much as it had in the previous 50 years because the easy gains from irrigation and mass production of fertilizer had already been realized, there is no more good agricultural land, and no more water. He showed that fish production in the world’s oceans had peaked at about 100 millions tonnes. And he predicted that, with global food production nearly stagnating and population continuing to rise exponentially, the per capita food production would surely decline.

These predictions have come true. The wild seafood supply per person peaked at 17 kg in 1988 and now stands at 14 kg. The amount of cropland per person in 1950 was 0.23 ha, but in 2007 was 0.10 ha. Fish and shellfish farms have partially offset some of the losses in wild ocean fish production, but at tremendous cost to coastal fisheries and agriculture. Corn and soy crops have increased in Brazil, but at tremendous cost to tropical forest ecosystems and biodiversity. Moreover, much of the increased production is going to feed cars (via ethanol) instead of hungry people. Meanwhile, in 2007 people in 22 countries from Bangladesh to Yemen rioted in the streets because of food price increases. Since 2004, governments of five African countries of re-allocated (sold outright or leased in long-term contracts) 2,492,684 ha of land (excluding allocations below 1000 ha) away from smallholders to big business, many of them foreign. They include governments or businesses in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar, India, Britain, South Korea, and China. The rate of farmland reallocation to foreigners increased dramatically after the 2007–2008 food crisis as countries seek to increase their own food security. The government of Madagascar fell in 2009 because of a popular uprising against the government’s 99 year leases of almost 1.8 million ha of farmland to South Korean and Indian companies. The 2011 riots that started “Arab Spring” were but a continuation of this crisis, the roots of which are (a) global population increases, and (b) the failure of developed countries including Canada to focus international policies where it matters: in the stomachs of poor people.

Mammoths live until 3700 years ago

This doesn’t take anything away from “Lost Giants” (Charles Q. Choi, Scientific American, Feburary 2010, p. 21) but megafauna persisted well after 13,700 years ago. In Europe, the dramatic contraction in mammoth range occurred about 12,000 years ago. A mastodon at the Manis Site in Washington was dated to 12,000-11,000 years, and drarf mammoths have been dated to about 3,700 years ago on Wrangel Island, Siberia, and to 7,900 years ago on St. Paul Island, Alaska. The Manis mastodon had a stone point embedded in a rib.

Momentum builds to ban shark fin soup, but is needed for other species, too

News reports show that an increasing number of restaurants are taking shark fin soup off the menu and many cities in Asia and North America are banning the import of shark fins, or from servince soup made from them. In Canada, a Member of Parliament is preparing to table a bill for legislation to make shark fin soup illegal in Canada. This is because of the inhumane nature of the "finning" (in which fins are cut from live sharks, which are then returned to the sea to die agonizingly and slowly); and because the practice, and the culinary tradition that encourages it, is driving many species of shark toward extinction. The soup is mainly for Chinese markets in China and in Chinese communities elsewhere, to whom shark fin soup is considered a delicacy, not only for its flavour, but because anything exotic or rare is highly valued in Chinese cuisine and that of southeast Asian countries, such as Vietnam.

It is not just sharks that are endangered by Chinese and other southeast Asian peoples’ predilection for exotic foods and medicines. A Vietnamese rhinoceros (a subspecies of Javan rhino) is probably extinct because of this, according to a 2011 report; Vietnam, besides having its own flourishing endangered species food/medicine industry, is a major conduit for trafficking endangered species into China. Vietnamese smugglers and Chinese traders are behind the current (since 2008) upswing in African rhinoceros poaching, both black and white rhinoceros species. Since 2008, some 2000 (at least) white rhinos and many of the more endangered black rhinos have been poached from Kruger National Park, South Africa, for example, and one was even killed for its horn in tiny Swaziland. England has seen several dozen museum specimens of mounted rhinoceros heads stolen from their glass display cages this year.

I’ve been studying and writing a series of scientific journal papers on southeast Asian primates, and every one I have written about is either endangered or critically imperilled, i.e., on the verge extinction.

Here is one of many ironies: a species of gibbon (a hominoid ape, like us) on Hainan Island, China, is down to perhaps fewer than 20 individuals left in the world, and until last year was listed as one of the 25 most endangered primates in the world (a report prepared every five years by the IUCN and WWF). But in 2010, a few score of individuals of another species in the same genus were discovered hanging on (ahem! –gibbons are brachiators) in the mountains along the Vietnam-China border. This species had been thought extinct for the last 100 years, so the Hainan Black Gibbon was removed from the 25-most-endangered list to make room for the rediscovered Eastern Black Gibbon. How can a species of primate with fewer than two score left in the world not be on the list of the world’s most endangered primates?

The species that I most recently studied, the White-cheeked Gibbon (see reference below), is extirpated from China, nearly extirpated from Vietnam where only 100 or so remain, and down to a few hundred individuals in Laos. A species of monkey that I published a paper on last year, endemic to Vietnam, is down to fewer than 200 individuals in three heavily-fragmented populations, two of which will surely go extinct in the next year or two. These rare species of primates are illegally trapped in every national park in which they still occur (none occur outside of parks), and most are traded into China. Even endangered primates (orangutans, for example) from as far away as Borneo are poached and traded into China.

It would be interesting to take a forensic look at the exotic “medicines” for sale in Vancouver’s Chinatown, to see what endangered species might turn up there.

Papers cited:

Harding, LE. 2012. Nomascus leucogenys. Mammalian Species 44(890):1–15

Harding, LE. 2011. Trachypithecus delacouri. Mammalian Species 43(880):118-128

Harding, L.E. 2011. Rare Mammals Recorded in Borneo, Malaysia. Taprobanica 3(2):107–109

Harding, L.E. 2011. Unusual Affiliative Behaviour in Orangutans. Taprobanica 3(2):110–111

Harding, L.E. 2011. Red morph of silvered lutung (Trachypithecus cristatus) rediscovered in Borneo, Malaysia. Taprobanica 3(1): 47-48

Harding, LE. 2010. Trachypithecus cristatus. Mammalian Species. 42(862):149–165

Alien Trout in British Columbia

No one complains about having ring-necked pheasants or California quail around, and few mind seeing introduced Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep in the range of native California Bighorn Sheep, but sometimes the introduction of exotic species has unintended consequences. They can prey on, compete with or parasitize native species; contaminate their genome by hybridizing; and spread diseases to which native species have no immunity. Ecological catastrophes due to invasive aliens are legendary: Indian mongoose (Herpestes auropunctatus), rats (Rattus spp.) and cane toads (Bufo marinus) in Hawaii, European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) in Argentina and Australia, and so on. Of the 18 exotic fish province-wide, 16 (37% of all fish species) occur in the Columbia River basin. This is a higher proportion of introduced species than in any other river system in British Columbia. They include eastern brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis), brown trout (Salmo trutta), lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush), broad whitefish (Coregonus nasus), carp (Cyprinus carpio), goldfish (Carassius auratus), tench (Tinca tinca), brown catfish (bullhead: Ictalurus nebulosus), black catfish (bullhead: Ictalurus melas), pumpkin seed (Lepomis gibbosus), black crappie (Pomoxis nigromaculatus), largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides), smallmouth bass (Micropterus dolomieui), yellow perch (Perca flavescens) and walleye (Stizostedion vitreum). Most introductions in British Columbia have been accidental, but a distressingly high number were purposeful. For example, the introductions of Gerrard rainbow trout into upper Arrow Lake has combined with the exotic mysids and nutrient starvation as well as migration blockage to virtually (possibly completely) exterminate the yellowfin rainbow. Eastern brook trout have invaded and displaced native trout, including the endangered westslope cutthroat trout. Widespread stocking of non-native stocks of rainbow trout has displaced no one knows how many native rainbow trout stocks, and has polluted the westslope cutthroat trout genome by introgressive hybridization. At best, exotic species change biological communities and endangers native species. At worst, they can endanger whole ecosystems.

Infant-carrying and bipedalism in humans

Way back at least to H. erectus times, pair bonding and neoteny meant that both parents were needed to care for infants. And they had to travel with them: at least one infant or toddler (interbirth interval may have been longer, like in bush-living !Kung, 4 years, instead of developed-world humans, less than 2 years) and another one or two dependent juveniles. They travelled widely, all the way to Java and China (well, strictly speaking, the population expanded that far, but individuals must have travelled widely for that to happen). They had to cross rough terrain, like canyons, and wade innumerable creeks and streams (how they got across big rivers like the Indus, Ganges and Irrawaddy is another question). So the mother carries the infant or toddler, and the man does what? Go to any urban park and you’ll see: human males universally carry toddlers on their shoulders, leaving one hand free to lead a pre-adolescent. We need a strong vertebral column for this, and a very upright posture. You must have noticed that when carrying anything heavy, your back could support way more weight than your arms, and the weight forced you to walk very erect. Humans are so programmed to carry heavy weights on our backs that we go backpacking for fun. I think the human vertebral column is way stronger than needed for ordinary and infrequent carrying, like meat back from a hunt. We had to be carrying toddlers. I’ve even been tempted to wonder the sexually dimorphic width and strength of men’s shoulder girdles might have been involved in toddler-carrying. Women can’t carry kids on their shoulders, which are too narrow, for any length of time—the kids slip off.