Land Over Landings: No to New Airport, Yes to Food

Historic Brougham Hall

Yesterday I traveled to Pickering, a suburb just east of Toronto, to learn about a breaking story 45 years in the making. Since the early 1970s people east of Toronto have been fighting plans for a big new airport.  In the late 1960s the federal government bought 20,000 acres of land; only in 1975, after huge protests, were the plans for the airport shelved.

But the plans clung to life, zombie-like. And in the meantime, thousands of acres of good farmland were kept in suspended animation: still owned by Transport Canada, and on one-year leases that discouraged investment, and even basic maintenance, ensuring the slow decline of once-lively farming communities.

Over the last few years half this land has been protected, including in the new Rouge National Urban Park.  But the remaining 9600 acres still remained available for airport development.

Land Over Landings (LOL), a local community group, hosted the event yesterday, to release a report on the potential of the land as a showplace for agriculture and tourism. The economists who wrote this report gave an overview of their results, showing how serious economic benefits could be had if only this land could be given its own future, with long-term leases for farmers and others that would allow them to build a new local economy.

What was especially interesting in all this was that LOL wasn't just opposing an airport, but presenting a vision of what these lands could be.  And it's really exciting: combining the history of the land with all the possibilities inherent in thousands of acres of great soil right next door to six million people.  The benefits include local food security, economic development, and avoiding all the impacts of a major new airport.  One of the lines yesterday that got the most applause was that this place could become "the lungs of Toronto".  That's quite a vision.

Climate Science and Politics: From my Environmental Science and Politics Course

For two weeks this term my Environmental Science and Politics course (ERST-POST 2100H) examined the current state of climate change politics and science.

As always when talking about climate change, I took a pragmatic perspective: working through what needs to happen in order to respond effectively to the challenge.  This means considering how to approach a problem that has scientific content, but also brings in a multitude of political issues.  A "wicked" problem indeed.

My strategy was to begin with an overview of the current state of science and politics: what the latest research tells us, and how humans are (or aren't) responding.  Then I reviewed how climate change is understood as a scientific problem -- in other words, explaining what climate scientists actually do.  From there, we moved onto politics: how uncertainty is constructed, and how climate change can be linked to other issues.  We also spent a little time looking at options for geoengineering -- as a case study of the unpredictable consequences of technological solutions.

And finally, we devoted quite a bit of time to exploring how to communicate effectively about climate change: strategies for encouraging a commitment to acting on what we already know.  This also connected to larger course themes about effective communication of science.  Here too I emphasized pragmatism, especially the need to apply a wide range of strategies, since people think about climate and their place in the world in so many diverse ways.

Artificial Intelligence and the Environment

It often seems these days we've reached peak hype for artificial intelligence (AI), with ever more commentaries about how our world will be transformed by robots that are smarter than we are.  Predictions seem to alternate between worlds in which our AI overlords decide we are expendable, and ones in which humans live ever healthier and more fulfilling lives.

But reading one of the most recent commentaries, just appeared in the Smithsonian, it was interesting to see how disengaged ideas about AI are from the existence of a physical environment.  Apart from mentioning that drones might save us from climate change by reflecting incoming sunshine (which, sadly, wouldn't work), and a mention of Microsoft's "AI for Earth" program (which appears to be as much about business development as saving the Earth), there's no hint that if human life on the planet is transformed, that might mean something for the planet itself, and for all other species and our relations with them.

It makes one wonder: just what will AI mean for environmental studies and environmental history?  And when we think about that question, can we get beyond simple technological determinism?

Salmon Farming on YouTube: Pushing Us to the Edges

An interesting article in Sunday's New York Times examined how YouTube tends to send viewers to ever more extreme content.  In effect, it pushes people towards more radical, more inflammatory takes on any issue, left or right.

This connected with what I've seen when examining how salmon farming is portrayed online.  YouTube is now a key way in which people get information about environmental issues.  So when I talk in my Environmental Science and Politics course about how science is communicated in polarized political environments, I use two YouTube videos about salmon farming to illustrate some points about strategies of framing and argument.

One video, "Salmon Farming in BC" provides a positive view of the industry.  The other, "The Problem with Salmon Farming in BC" is much more critical.  Together, they illustrate the polarized debate that has been for decades a constant in BC environmental politics.  And when you view these videos, YouTube then suggests other videos that provide a similar, or stronger, take on the issue: confirming, rather than challenging, whatever outlook one brought to the issue.

It's not an original point, but I still find it striking: the course of environmental debates today may not be shaped as much by the intrinsic merit of arguments, or even by the relative power of the protagonists, as by the shadowy algorithms that Google uses to keep our eyes on the screen.

The Science and Politics of Risks and Hazards

Last week and this week in my Environmental Science and Politics course (ERST-POST 2100H), we explored the contentious world of risks: how we "know" about contaminants, technologies, and other potential hazards, how scientific and citizen perspectives can often vary, and the many political consequences of knowledge about the risks of industrial hazards.

It's a huge area of environmental politics, in which science and other forms of knowledge are contested every step of the way.  I explained how scientists do risk assessment -- the basic equation of "Risk = Hazard x Exposure," and the four step process of hazard identification, dose-response assessment, exposure assessment, and risk characterization.  The key point here is the notion of "risk" as something that can be quantified and understood objectively -- a formulation which by now my students readily recognize as highly political.

Then we dived into the implications of the common occurrence of scientists and citizens disagreeing over what we should worry about.  So does that mean that when they disagree, scientists are right, and people are wrong?  No, not necessarily... but to explain why, I explored in some detail how people evaluate hazards.  This part of the class brings in psychology, sociology, and history, to show the complexity of peoples' conceptions of the world.  Ultimately, by looking at peoples' understanding of hazards we can produce a richer, more realistic view of how we make collective decisions.

But the moral centre of these risk classes are two case studies of the politics of science.  One is the Flint lead-in-drinking-water case of 2016, in which science was used both to deceive and conceal incompetence, and to affirm peoples' rights to make decisions about their own environment.  The other is the ongoing struggle by workers (and their families) at General Electric here in Peterborough, to get compensation for decades of exposure to a toxic working environment.  In the last two years they've taken the science of workplace contaminants into their own hands.  It's a story I've been following closely.

So it's an ambitious class, but one that gets to the core of the issues of science and politics that are what this course is all about.