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The Current Transcript for October 31, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

All summer, hundreds of volunteers on the west coast of Vancouver Island picking up plastic, styrofoam, car tires, derelict fishing gear and hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Plastic in every form you can think of is floating towards you on the shore, on the water, in the water, transported, washed up, ingested not only as a pollutant you can see but one that absorbs other toxins. They’re still cleaning up beaches on the West Coast and finding tsunami debris from Japan. But it's what they're finding elsewhere that has other scientists concerned. The microscopic particles infused with toxins that show up in zooplankton and enter the food chain. In an hour we go deep from sea floors to lake bottoms on the problem with plastics. Also today, in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, a lot of people confidently pronounced the new peaceful democratic world order. How's that working for us?

SOUNDCLIP

We've seen, over the last five to eight years, a democratic recession—a decline in the number and the quality of democracies. So rather than the march forward, we've seen a regression.

AMT: As a special adviser to the UN secretary general on the protection of civilians, Jennifer Welsh got a reality check on all that intellectual optimism. Hear her in half an hour on the return of what we were supposed to leave behind. But we're looking for your attention on a different story to start today.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Phone message notification, girl giggling, texting, car honking, tires screeching]

AMT: There are moments when something on a smartphone can make you oblivious to your surroundings and imminent risk. It is called distracted walking and the push to outlaw it has begun. Heads up: we're on that right now. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Would a 'distracted walking' ban make streets safer?

Guests: Shelley Carroll, Gil Penalosa

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Cars honking, sirens, street noises]

AMT: The bustling sounds of downtown Toronto and it doesn't just have to be downtown. With sirens, honking, traffic, city life can be distracting enough as it is for pedestrians. But add in a distracting smartphone screen and navigating the bustle can get downright dangerous. The Current’s Karin Marley hit the streets to ask people about their close calls including one man who nearly walked into her looking down at his device.

SOUNDCLIP

KARIN MARLEY: That was pretty close.

MAN 1: [laughs] Yeah, I have two phones too. It’s the worst.

KARIN MARLEY: Have you ever had a close call where you haven't been paying attention?

MAN 1: Yes, with a streetcar. So I was looking at, on my phone. I have like a spidey sense, like Spiderman, right? And I could feel the train car coming and so.

KARIN MARLEY: How close was the streetcar?

MAN 1: I'd say maybe a foot. Oh yeah, it was hardcore. If it was caught on camera it’d be on TV somewhere.

WOMAN: I walked into a pole once. You know, it hurt a little bit, some people looked at me funny but it was okay.

[Sound: Cars passing by]

MAN 2: I was almost hit my car. I was walking up—

KARIN MARLEY: Right. Because you weren’t paying Attention?

MAN 2: Yeah. I just like saw it as I got up. It scared the crap out of me. [laughs] That’s why I don’t—that’s why I’m not using my phone right now. I stopped using my phone while walking because of that. But yeah.

AMT: Well, okay. Clearly many of us are guilty of keeping our eyes glued to our phones, dangerous as it may be. That is why several Canadian municipalities are contemplating distracted walking bans. Vancouver and Calgary are looking at the idea, so is Toronto, where pedestrian fatalities have increased by 34 per cent since 2005. A new poll was released last week suggesting a majority of Canadians would support a distracted walking ban. Shelley Carroll is a city councillor in Toronto Ward 33, Don Valley East. She's with me now. Hello.

SHELLEY CARROLL: Hello, Maria.

AMT: And what do you think of what you just heard? You’ve seen people like that? You’ve done it yourself?

SHELLEY CARROLL: I’ve done it myself. Everyone has that close call and then you question it and you stop doing it. But for those who just have close call after close call, like the ban on using your cell phone behind the wheel of the car, we're starting to see that we may have to impose the same thing on the pedestrian.

AMT: Well, why do you support a ban?

SHELLEY CARROLL: Well, the reason I support a ban is a ban generally isn't enforced every minute of the day but what it does give us is a wide and resourced education program. As soon as you impose a ban, you know you get to do that. And that's what we have to do: educate people that this can be fatal. A driver may well be paying attention to the road, but he has a lot of things to pay attention to. And so he may not intend to miss a pedestrian in his sight line but if he does, it's going to be fatal. You've got to pay attention as well.

AMT: Can you give me some examples of the kind of distracting walking incidents that concern you then?

SHELLEY CARROLL: Well, the big debate that we have is: is it texting or is it talking on the phone? And in fact, research shows that even if you're talking on a phone, if you're in the right of way walking across a crosswalk crossing a road, your gait slows down so it's hard now for the driver who may at the last minute see you to gauge whether or not you've seen him and whether or not you're going to get in front of his car or not. And we know that you really—while you are looking up, your mind is really on what you're hearing—it's picking up the auditory signal and focusing on that, not on your visual. And so there's no question that your ability to deal with the traffic in the right of way is compromised.

AMT: Do we know—you said something about pedestrian deaths but do we know how many of those would be caused—distracted walking would have been an element in pedestrian deaths in Toronto? Do you actually know?

SHELLEY CARROLL: Well, that's the other thing. We don't have a huge amount of data here but we know that the closer you get to the core—and I think that's why you see the ban being discussed in the more dense cities—the closer you get to the core of the city, the pedestrian that seems to be getting hurt tends to be younger. And often there's a phone involved. Whether it's behind the wheel of the car or the pedestrian, often a phone is involved. We haven't got hard data. And that's one of the things that discussing a ban will bring about. The first thing we ask staff to do is study it because if you're going to pay for the enforcement of a ban, you want to make sure. So really just bringing forward motions in the various city halls to say we want to look at one will generate that research.

AMT: How would you enforce a ban like that?

SHELLEY CARROLL: Well, much as we did with getting drivers unaddicted to their cell phones, we would start with a lot of warnings.You do a lot of blitzes where officers don't spend a lot of time with each driver but they stop every single person they see with a phone and tell them the next time, you're going to get a ticket. And often that has a huge impact. That begins to slow down the use of the cell phone behind the wheel. We expect the same thing would be true of pedestrians. We wouldn't necessarily send out a battalion to go looking for them, but a police officer walking the beat now knows that that's one of the things that he's going to stop someone and warn them about.

AMT: And just out of curiosity, can you ticket a minor?

SHELLEY CARROLL: Well, that's one of the things that has to be looked at because that's where a lot of the texting, as you cross the right of ways happen.

AMT: I'm not saying the minors are more guilty than their parents but yeah, can you actually—you don’t know?

SHELLEY CARROLL: It's not that they're more guilty. It's that they have grown up at such an early age that they haven't yet—just as they don't know the dangers of a lot of things and that's why we don't have them driving until a certain age—they don't know the dangers necessarily of walking across the street while sending a text.

AMT: Are pedestrian fatalities and injuries an issue in your ward?

SHELLEY CARROLL: Yes. I'm a suburban councillor. I represent a suburban community. And we recently had a fatality. Now it didn't involve technology, there we have a secondary problem. There is an increasing number of pedestrian fatalities in dense communities of people over 65 and some element of distraction could be there and it’s why we're tackling it at all fronts. In the car, sometimes we have distracted drivers driving transit vehicles. We've got to tackle this on all fronts. And so it only makes sense that that include the pedestrian as well.

AMT: And it's interesting because the US National Safety Council says 52 per cent of distracted walking injuries happen in the home.

SHELLEY CARROLL: [laughs]

AMT: So not actually on the streets.

SHELLEY CARROLL: That's where we should first learn the lesson is—that's how you end up banging into something, breaking bones, having hematomas is in the home. So you know that you have to pay attention when you're walking. Somehow, we've become acclimatized to seeing people with phones on the street and we just think that while we might pay attention and not walk down the hallway or around the kitchen texting, we seem to think that once we get into the open air we can. And so it's a strange phenomenon that has to be tackled.

AMT: This summer you backed a motion petitioning the Ontario government to make it illegal to use your phone or other mobile devices while crossing the street. The province said no. This is what the Ontario Minister of Transportation Steven Del Duca told us on Friday.

SOUNDCLIP

The municipalities have the ability to make bylaws should they choose to go in that direction. I'm not sure necessarily that in the case of the so-called distracted walking, whether or not new laws are necessarily the best way to go about dealing with the challenge. There was some interest a number of months ago in having the province take a look for example at the default speed limit on our municipal streets. And I think we're going to have an update on that relatively soon. So I don't think it's simply a knee jerk reaction: pass a new law, institute a new fine. It's a combination of what will actually work and how can we best drive home that message? And that's something that we're very excited to participate in.

AMT: Well, how would you like to see the province respond to the issue of pedestrian safety?

SHELLEY CARROLL: So that’s not a surprising response at the provincial level because the phenomenon is causing concern and mostly starting in dense communities. But often in the province of Ontario, the cities have led the province to adopt legislation, certainly in environmental law. The pesticide ban started in Toronto then moved to larger cities and then the province made a provincial piece of legislation. The same thing has happened with police behaviour: carding and street checks became a provincial concern. But it generally does start in the core cities. And so for us to start this with a look at a bylaw, with a look at a locally based education program leading to enforcement, is probably something that while we might be an outlier at the moment, the province may find oh, that did work and maybe we need it in the medium and then the small municipalities as well.

AMT: And what do you say to those who argue that a ban is just unfair to pedestrians?

SHELLEY CARROLL: Well, I think that they're forgetting that we have already tackled this in the car and it only makes sense that everyone in the right of way needs to deal with this. And we're all travellers— some of us are travelling in the car, some on transit, someone on bicycles—and some of us are travellers on foot, and so some rules we have to share.

AMT: What about the argument that you know the car, the truck, whatever is on four wheels is going to be—is still more powerful? That you have a greater responsibility—if you were behind the wheel of something, it is your responsibility not to hit someone who is you know walking.

SHELLEY CARROLL: Absolutely and that's why the law for them came first. But I can't promise you that because I've imposed a law on drivers, you're now perfectly safe and you don't have to pay attention. I can't promise you that. And so whether it was the driver's fault or your fault, if because you were distracted you couldn't react defensively when you were in danger and you died, I can't help you at that point as a legislator.

AMT: In Toronto, in one day this year—it was October 21st actually—18 pedestrians were struck. The average in Toronto is seven a day. Is the problem distracted walking or is there's something else going on in this city that needs to be looked at, for the number of pedestrians being hit?

SHELLEY CARROLL: Well, certainly it's density but increasingly every year as we get that light change, as soon as it becomes darker in the morning and as soon as you get a little bit of precipitation, we generally have this tragic wakeup call day. A smaller number but the same sort of phenomenon happened the year before and the year before that. And so we've got to face the fact that we are a very, very dense community now. And so there's a sort of, there's a removal of personal responsibility. I'll never know the person in the driver. I'll never know anyone in this crosswalk. I'm only responsible for me. And what has happened is as the light changes, we barrel on. We can adopt that attitude in the summer but as it gets darker in the morning, we have this terrible fatal morning year after year after year and then people say oh, I do have a responsibility for my fellow man. That's one of the things—

AMT: And for your own safety, I guess.

SHELLEY CARROLL: Absolutely and that's one of the things these bans will generate, that sense of responsibility in a dense community.

AMT: Okay. Shelley Carroll, thank you for coming in.

SHELLEY CARROLL: You bet.

AMT: Shelley Carroll is a Toronto city councillor in Toronto Ward 33, which is representing Don Valley East. She's in our Toronto studio. Not everyone thinks a ban on distracted walking is the best way to improve pedestrian safety. In fact, some say the topic itself is a distraction. Gil Penalosa is the founder and chair of 8 80 Cities, a Toronto-based non-profit organization that looks at livable cities, sustainable mobility and public space. He happens to be in Bogota, Colombia today. Hello.

GIL PENALOSA: Hello, Anna Maria.

AMT: 8 80. Why is it called that?

GIL PENALOSA: Well, 8 80 Cities is called because what if everything we did in our cities had to be great for an eight year old and for an 80 year old as an indicator? Not eight to 80, eight and 80 as an indicator? Then we would have a nice city for everybody, from zero to over 100. We need to stop building cities as if everybody was a 30-year-old and athletic, and start building great cities for all.

AMT: Okay.

GIL PENALOSA: Actually, that is exactly the issue of the pedestrians being injured and killed all across Canada and all over the world.

AMT: So what do you think of this idea? What do you think of this idea of a ban on distracted walking?

GIL PENALOSA: I think it's a big distraction from what the cities and the province should be doing all across Canada and the world. I have all respect for Councillor Sheryl. I think she's a great councillor but I think on this case, she's totally missing the point. I think there's many other things that the city should be doing and I think this is a big distraction.

AMT: Okay. So why is it a distraction? Why is this not an issue? We heard at the beginning people who actually are looking down. They walk into other people, they walk into telephone poles.

GIL PENALOSA: Because that is not why people are being killed. That’s not why people are being injured. First, I think that it’s absolutely ridiculous to say that 14 people are hit by cars in one day and we blame this in the change of season. That is not the change of season. It’s because our streets are not safe. In Toronto, a person is being hit by a car every three hours, on average 365 days of the year. That is not civilized. And they are not being hit because they are not listening and it is not because they are on the telephone or texting. That is not the reason. So let’s look at the numbers. Anna Maria, there is many ways to make pedestrians safe and it is not by banning the texting. Of course the education is good. We should educate, we should promote but not ban. That is not doing what the city council should be doing. By the way, I love the fact that your program is across Canada because this is something that is not a Toronto-based issue. This is happening in cities of 5,000 people, 50,000 a million, three million. So it is something that is in the urban areas, in the suburban areas. We must make pedestrians a top priority in every single community.

AMT: Okay. Well, Mr. Penalosa, we did say in our introduction that Vancouver and Calgary are looking at this idea of distracted walking bans as well. So if you were going to make a city safer for pedestrians, what would you add that does not exist now in major cities in Canada?

GIL PENALOSA: Okay. First, I would build sidewalks. In Toronto, more than 25 per cent of the residential streets do not even have a sidewalk. That is shameful. And even recent—right now there is a big discussion in Lawrence Park because some residents don't want sidewalks because they want to feel like they are like in the countryside and even the city itself is proposing to rebuild some streets without sidewalks. So first, have sidewalks. We cannot have a city where one out of four residential streets does not have sidewalks. Second, we need to lower the speed. The maximum speed in all residential areas must be 30 kilometres or less. Across Canada, in front of the schools, we have 30 kilometres an hour. Why? Because it works. But do we want children to be safe only in front of the school or everywhere? So that is very, very important. Third, we need to have small islands in the crosswalks. If we have a crosswalk and there is a small island in the middle so that people cannot cross in one light, then we eliminate 56 per cent of the incidents. I don't say accidents because they could be avoided. So have small islands. Fourth, let's eliminate the turns on red in all urban areas. So there are many concrete—this is not a technical issue. This is more a political issue. For example, in Toronto, one big part of a major step in Toronto was that in the downtown wards a year ago, more than a year ago, the speed was—the minimum speed of 30 k was implemented. But Anna Maria, in more than one year, we have not found the money to repaint the signs from 40 to 30 in a city of more than $10 billion of budget in operating expenses. Ten billion dollars. We don't have money to repaint the signs from 40 to 30? That is ridiculous. That is clearly because this is not a priority for this city. All across the world, we should look: what really matters to politicians is not what they talk, talk, talk.

AMT: Okay.

GIL PENALOSA: It’s where they put money.

[Crosstalk]

AMT: Okay. I’m going to—let me jump in here. Let me jump in. You're talking about cities. What about smaller towns? What about rural areas? What about people walking on highways? What needs to be done in other parts of the country?

GIL PENALOSA: Yeah. This is very important because of this: if you are under 16 years old, anywhere in Canada, in a municipality of 5,000 or in Timmins with 43,000 or Vancouver, your only [unintelligible] mobility is to walk or to bike. So walking and cycling should be safe everywhere. It should be like a human right to be able to walk or bike safely. So that is this. Also across Canada, we are aging. We're getting older and older people want to age in place. And the main concern of older adults is mobility and second, isolation and being able to walk safely has to do with both: with mobility and with isolation.

AMT: Okay. Gil Penalosa, we're almost out of time so just briefly: is there a city somewhere else that’s doing it right that we could look to?

GIL PENALOSA: Well, many. Sweden has Vision Zero and now in North America, there’s a Vision Zero network and in Canada. Vision Zero basically says human beings make mistakes, so let's build the streets and let's build the infrastructure so that it will be safe even if human beings make mistakes. So I think we should adopt Vision Zero all across Canada. By the way in Toronto—one last comment—in Toronto, the city approve a road safety plan that said in 10 years, we're going to reduce the pedestrian deaths by 20 per cent. All of the—certain people said what, in 10 years, only 20 percent? And they put $10 million more in the program and now they say oh, it’s not 20 per cent. Now it’s—we’re going to eliminate 100 per cent. It is playing games when you add two million dollars per year and now you say that you are going to eliminate. Pedestrians have to be our top priority because every single [unintelligible] by walking. We walk to the car, we walk to transit, we walk to places.

AMT: Okay. Gil Penalosa, thank you for your thoughts.

GIL PENALOSA: Thank you.

AMT: That is Gil Penalosa. He's the founder and chair of 8 80 Cities, a Toronto-based non-profit organization looking at livable cities, sustainable mobility and public space. We reached him today in Bogota, Colombia. We want your opinions on this. Is it time to ban distracted walking or do you agree with Mr. Penalosa that that's not the issue, that we need to look at street safety right across this country? Tweet us. We are @thecurrentCBC. Post a comment on this story on our Facebook page. Email us by clicking on contact at www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us because coming up next, the CBC News and then this year's CBC Massey lecturer Jennifer Welsh joins me to talk about the return of history and the historical forces behind our tumultuous present. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Liberal democracy on defensive as history returns with vengeance: Jennifer Welsh

Guests: Jennifer Welsh

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, from water bottles washing up on the beach to tiny microplastic fibres deep beneath the sea, our oceans are choking with plastic and it's not clear what the long term effects will be. In half an hour we'll hear about efforts to haul tonnes of plastic off the west coast of Vancouver Island and efforts to understand what tiny particles the plastic are doing to the creatures of the deep. But first, there's no escaping history.

SOUNDCLIP

You know it used to be that there were many alternative forms of government: monarchies and fascist dictatorships and you know for many years we thought communism was our major rival, an alternative type of civilization. And one by one, in this century, every one of those has collapsed and you know not every country is a liberal democracy. There are many dictatorships of the right and the left remaining. But you know as a systematic idea that has some dynamism and some real vitality, liberal democracy is really all there is now. And we've seen that now in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

AMT: Well, that was 1992. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the Berlin wall was down and liberal democracy appeared triumphant in the world. In the view of American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, we had arrived at the “end of history.” That's Francis Fukuyama you just heard in that clip. Twenty-four years later, history seems to have returned. Maybe it never went away. That's the idea behind a new book and a series of CBC Massey lectures by Jennifer Welsh. Jennifer Welsh is originally from Regina. She is a professor and chair in international relations at the University Institute in Florence, Italy. From 2013 until this year, she was special adviser to the UN secretary general on the responsibility to protect. Jennifer Welsh also co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. Her Massey lectures series begins airing tonight on Ideas on CBC Radio One. The book that she has written is entitled The Return of History: Conflict, Migration and Geopolitics in the 21st Century and that's what the lecture is about. Jennifer Welsh joins us from our Halifax studio. Hello.

JENNIFER WELSH: Hello.

AMT: What goes through your mind when you hear Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement 24 years ago on the end of history?

JENNIFER WELSH: When I hear him speaking, I'm taken back to that period of optimism and how so many were caught up in the belief that history—at least history defined as struggles between rival systems—may have been over. And I have this sense of how that optimism really clouded our judgment about aspects of history that might return, but also made us I think far too complacent about liberal democracy’s trajectory.

AMT: Well, let's go through that. But first of all, he originally wrote an essay about the end of history when the Berlin Wall came down in ‘89 and then he wrote the book. The fall of the wall was such a huge moment in geopolitics. Where were you when it happened?

JENNIFER WELSH: I was a graduate student in Oxford and I remember watching the wall come down on television and a couple of days later, getting a cheap flight and flying to Berlin. So we were there, a few of us, right after that weekend. And it was an incredible time because you know you look back and so much seems to be preordained. You know Germany would be reunified, communism would topple everywhere. But at the time, that's not how it felt. There was euphoria, yes, but uncertainty about what would come next. But certainly that weekend, we all felt that we were watching history real time.

AMT: And your book is called The Return of History. What do you mean by that?

JENNIFER WELSH: What I mean by it is really two things. Firstly, that the Fukuyama prediction and the prediction of others—that liberal democracy would become the most prominent political system worldwide and with it would come a more peaceful world—that that is proving to be either premature or wrong in effect. But secondly, that while history is returning, it's doing so with a modern twist. History never repeats itself. So what we're seeing while we're tempted to say it's just like the medieval period or it's just like the 1930s, of course that's not entirely true. You know we have modern aspects to the return of history today that we need to understand.

AMT: And when did you say to yourself maybe the end of history idea is not quite the way it is?

JENNIFER WELSH: Well, I think to be fair, there were many who believed Fukuyama was far too confident at the time. And I remember very well being in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, I was actually teaching in Prague and there was a great deal of optimism but of course there was carnage unfolding in the Balkans. And many were saying even then you know we've underestimated the force of nationalism. We've underestimated the ability of politicians to peddle on fear. And so even then I think there were cracks in the thesis. But for me, I think really in the last five to six years—particularly through some of the trends I point out in the book, The Return of History—it's become clear not just that we're seeing the return of conflict, barbaric conflict and mass migration, but that we're also seeing cracks in the liberal democratic model itself which are very, very worrying. So for me it's really been in the last five to six years that the thesis has been shown to be so problematic.

AMT: Now when the so-called Arab Spring was toppling governments in the Middle East, did you think that that was part of a wave of liberal democracy?

JENNIFER WELSH: I did in many respects. I didn't underestimate the challenge with that. But at the time, like many others, I looked at the germ of the desire that seemed to be expressed by those in the Middle East and thought you know here we're seeing the human craving for civil liberties for freedom on display and that maybe the transition that we've seen in other parts of the world will unfold here. But I have to confess, I didn't underestimate the challenges that we would face, particularly in terms of some of these old dynamics of identity politics, of nationalism and indeed of the very awkward states that are created in that part of the world where this liberal democratic wave is supposed to unfold.

AMT: And especially when we look at you know Egypt has since that time re-embraced authoritarian rule.

JENNIFER WELSH: Absolutely.

AMT: Or had it re-imposed. I don’t know if I should say embraced. Syria has descended into a bloody sectarian war. What went wrong? Are we still looking at the transition?

JENNIFER WELSH: Well, there's one view as you hint at—and Fukuyama argues this himself—that it's far too early to pronounce on whether he's right or wrong, you know, that when you're looking at an idea like liberal democracy, you can't look at the performance in any one year, even any one decade. You need to look at the long term. But I think there are two problems with that. Firstly, it minimizes the degree to which we've actually seen a democratic recession. We've seen not only the reversal of Democratic gains, so for example if we look at Turkey or we look at Thailand, if you just look at the numbers today, we've seen a decline in the number of democracies worldwide. So this seems to be something that we should pay attention to. But I think secondly, it really minimizes the degree to which Western policy and indeed the policies of other states have changed that trajectory for the worse. So we can't just assume that what's happening in the Middle East is an example of the chaos that any society has to go through to ultimately attain democracy. I mean after all, we went through revolutions in European countries and indeed in North America. But the West inserted itself at various points over the last 20 years in ways that have changed the dynamics, in ways that have not just fostered what George Bush called creative destruction, but made it harder in some respects for democracy to take hold.

AMT: It's interesting because the West inserts itself ostensibly to nudge democracy forward or force democracy forward and it doesn't happen.

JENNIFER WELSH: Well, precisely. And you know I would plead absolutely guilty to being one of the cadre of people in the early nineties who believed in the merits of democracy promotion. You know what we should be doing is helping through sharing our models, providing advice, going to parts of the world that are trying to build democracies and trying to assist. And there was a huge wave of democracy promotion. Now I think again, there were limits to the degree to which that could actually take hold, partly because some in the West believe that democracy promotion should happen through the barrel of a gun. We should intervene and change regimes. But secondly as we've seen, I mean in a sense Fukuyama and others oversold their product. It wasn't so easy to transfer wholesale liberal democratic models from one part of the world to the next. And I think in general, outsiders are much more sanguine about what they can provide in terms of advice to other societies than they were 20, 25 years ago.

AMT: It's almost the hubris of Western expectations, huh?

JENNIFER WELSH: For sure. A hubris that liberal democracy would look, the way it looks in our societies, but also that there was nothing indigenous there by way of political traditions that might affect the societies either for the better or for the worse.

AMT: You know at the same time, revolutions are often followed by violence before they settle into a stable form of government. In France, the revolution brought the terror. The fall of the Czar was followed by Russia tearing itself apart before the Bolsheviks through terror brought its own form of order. What about the idea that the bloodshed in the Middle East is the price to be paid on the road to a form of democracy?

JENNIFER WELSH: Yes. Some call it the no pain no gain thesis. You know I can't say that that thesis is wrong. Of course it's impossible for me to predict the future. But as I indicated a moment ago, it also assumes that that violence is all in the service of this one greater goal or long term goal, which is the flourishing of liberal democracy. And I think because I guess of the work that I've done over the last five years, I've been to parts of the world, I've studied parts of the world where you know the sun of history is still shining very brightly in terms of barbaric violence. And I do not feel comfortable with seeing it as having this instrumental value. Violence devastates states and communities. It reverses development gains. It leaves scars for generations. It's why we see today the great problem of recurrence of violence, that even when wars are brought to an end, those societies which experience them are very highly likely to relapse. And so I guess I'm one of those who can't be confident in the idea that war and conflict can serve this instrumental goal quite so easily.

AMT: And you know it's interesting because if you look at the time periods that we're talking about, the fall of the wall, the fall of the Soviet Union and then later now the rise of ISIS. And in between, we also saw brutality: we saw a war in Congo that wiped out millions of people. The equivalent of the population of Toronto wiped out in five years. We saw the genocide in Rwanda. So even when Europe was—and we saw the war in the Balkans—even when Europe was hopeful in some parts, there were still parts of the world that were deep, deep in the bloodletting and the pain of conflict.

JENNIFER WELSH: Yes. And I think you know this brings up a debate about whether we should look at the world through macro or micro lenses. You know in writing this book, I had sitting on my shoulder, you know Steven Pinker saying yes, but you're being far too pessimistic. You know the big story is that violence has declined over all, that 80 per cent of the world is living in peace defined as the absence of armed conflict. And you know you're focusing much too much on the 20 per cent and to which my response would be well, yes. Twenty percent is still a huge part of the world. As I mentioned a moment ago that violence has devastating effects. And I don't believe that we can compartmentalize our globe in quite that way for a number of reasons. You know firstly because as we're seeing very clearly, that 20 per cent is now knocking at our door. We have the greatest episode of mass flight since records began. We have people fleeing war and persecution but also, I think you know the problem with the Pinker thesis is that it doesn't recognize the degree to which that kind of violence that we see spurs a relaxation in our norms about war generally. So in the Congo, in Yemen, in Syria, we are seeing an erosion of respect for international humanitarian law that's deeply worrying and that I would argue could come back to infect other conflicts later on. So we can't believe that what's going on in that 20 per cent is not going to affect us in some sort of profound way.

AMT: Well, let's talk a little bit more about that episode of mass migration that has reached such a critical point now. You write about being on the coast of Sicily as thousands of refugees were trying to escape across the Mediterranean on boats. Talk to us about what you were thinking as you witnessed some of that.

JENNIFER WELSH: Well, part of what I was thinking comes back to you know 25 years ago, that the wall falls, liberal democracy in the West win and barriers come down. And so it's the irony in some respects but a tragic irony of seeing walls come up. And I kept asking myself that summer and through these years you know is this what a coalition of victorious liberal democracies looks like, where people are reduced to trying to cross the Mediterranean on rickety boats and rubber dinghies and where we see the movement of people as ultimately a great security threat? I also felt very strongly that the whole discourse on the migration crisis was massively skewed because if you read the press in the Western world, you would think that this is a European or a Western refugee crisis when the reality is that the top five countries that receive refugees today are all outside of Europe or all outside of the Western world. Those who are bearing the greatest burden are not in Europe, despite what we might read in the press. And I think that's also incredibly important to keep in mind when we try to grapple with this massive challenge.

AMT: Remind us which countries are doing that.

JENNIFER WELSH: Turkey. Lebanon. Countries in Africa which are taking refugees from the Horn of Africa. A country like Lebanon has seen its demographic makeup absolutely revolutionized over the last five years. The Minister of Education called it in 2014, like living through an earthquake except an earthquake that lasts for four years. So we need to put our own struggles in perspective. And when we think about burden sharing, we need to think as much about how we assist those who are on the frontline in terms of receiving those who are fleeing war and persecution.

AMT: There has been some discussion about just what a refugee is. What's the legal definition of a refugee?

JENNIFER WELSH: Well, the legal definition is based on this notion of a person fleeing political persecution on the basis of their identity, whether that be you know religious or ethnic, it has a strong political dimension. And one of the things I say in the book is that of course this is incredibly important to protect. We want to have a regime that provides a haven for those who are fleeing that kind of persecution or indeed war as we saw at the end of the Second World War. But today, the causes of mass flight are much more diverse. Some who write on refugees talk in terms of survival migrants. You know those who are fleeing the effects of climate change, deep poverty, more systematic and long term instability. And so it's harder to fit people into these neat boxes. And I think that's part of the problem for Western countries, is that you have a sense in the debate, that there are those in Europe and elsewhere that want to maintain fidelity to their humanitarian principles. They want to help those who are being persecuted but they worry, they're confused by the masses of people who are coming to their borders because they're not sure whether all are equally deserving. They suspect that some might not be equally deserving and that's all playing into the—certainly to the popular debate that we're seeing in European countries today.

AMT: How do you respond to the argument that while countries are morally bound to take in refugees, they also have the right to select those refugees who can better integrate into the societies that are bringing them in?

JENNIFER WELSH: Yes. I mean it's a very important debate. It's a very important perspective that says democracies—because they function best when supported by cohesive communities—need to have the right to control who comes in and out of their borders. But I think where we need to push is against this notion that there is a marker of your capacity to integrate. I think if we look around the globe today and see societies that are pluralistic, including our own society, we see that the capacity for integration is very deep indeed and may not be able to be measured by what language you speak or what creed you believe in. And certainly if the mass flight we're experiencing is the new normal—which I believe it will be for the next five to 10 years—then we need to look at integration in much more expansive terms. We also need to look at costs in a different way particularly as our own societies in the West—more so in Europe than here—are facing a real age crisis in terms of an aging society where they will actually need a workforce that is younger and more diverse.

AMT: And in terms of fighting extremism, what does denying asylum do?

JENNIFER WELSH: Well, it's been the trope that really defines our current period. You know that what we need to prevent in our societies are attacks by extremists which are—we need to remember—still very rare. I always remember in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in the United States, Canadians were surveyed on what they believed was the greatest threat to their security and actually at the time, the majority said SARS, infectious disease, not the threat of extremist attacks. But yet we know and you and I know that those events, while they're rare, have incredibly high impact and they tend to pollute the discussion and the perception of all refugees as ultimately being linked in some way to terrorism. And it's that which I think our asylum and refugee systems need to work very hard at, providing some level of confidence that there are screening mechanisms in place, but on the other hand not using the securitization of refugees that we have seen and asylum seeking, not letting that completely dominate our humanitarian sensibilities. And I think you know Angela Merkel in Germany fought very hard against that. And I think she tried to lead the German public's understanding of these issues. But as we know, she's paying a very high price. It's very difficult because the trope of fear is used because it works, because it can rally support and that is the dark truth of our age.

AMT: And you say in fact that tightening borders affects the very identity of a liberal democratic society.

JENNIFER WELSH: I believe it does. When I look back at the history of liberal democracy, which I try to do in the book, I look also at the development of humanitarianism in the 19th century and the notion that rights, which became very critical to the very definition of liberal democracy, were also seen as universal. They applied not just to us but to others. And if you look at the French constitution following the revolution that you mentioned a moment ago, the right of asylum is critical. It's a critical passage in that constitution. And how we have responded to those who are fleeing over the last two centuries has partly defined who we are and I believe it's defining who we are today. I think it's no coincidence that ISIS is able to use this image of Europe, pulling up the drawbridge if you will, to paint western societies as being somehow less attractive than the caliphate they're trying to build in the Middle East.

AMT: So much to think about. Jennifer Welsh, thank you.

JENNIFER WELSH: Thanks so much.

AMT: Jennifer Welsh’s book is The Return of History: Conflict, Migration and Geopolitics in the 21st Century. The Return of History is also the title of this year's CBC Massey lectures series delivered by Jennifer Welsh. It begins tonight on Ideas on CBC Radio One, nine o’clock in all time zones, 9:30 in Newfoundland and parts of Labrador. For more details, go to www.cbc.ca/ideas. And stay with us because in our next half hour, our age of plastics is infecting our oceans. We will hear from some of the people hauling the plastic off our coastlines and putting them to interesting uses.

SOUNDCLIP

I’ll paint a picture for you right now. That half of buoy right there, the other half was used for the temporary outhouse that we built. We cut the top off and bolted a toilet seat to it and that's what we used up at Sea Otter Cove for our outhouse. An end use, it would be nice to have multiple uses of some of this material, but that one was an end us. A literal end use, yes.

AMT: Well, how to deal with our ocean plastics on large scales and very small scales coming up. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Oceans 'absolutely choked' by plastic bottles and microplastic fibres

Guests: Rob O’Dea, Max Liboiron

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: Fairy tale]

Here's a scene that has long since ceased causing any surprise: the women folk washing dishes made of plastic. Dishes that bounce when they drop to the floor. Hard to realize it, but it was only 10 years ago that the first pound of polystyrene plastic was sold. It's the attractiveness, usefulness and low cost of the plastic itself that has made this industry one of the fastest growing in the nation's history.

AMT: Well, the music and the language gives that away—it’s part of a promotional film from the early fifties from the US National Association of Manufacturers. Back then, plastics promised to transform our lives and they did. Today, all that plastic is transforming the oceans in ways we are only just beginning to understand. We do know that some of the most serious impacts are happening at the microscopic level. But before we go there, let's zoom up and out for a wider view.

[Sound: Helicopter]

AMT: That is the sound of a helicopter zooming over the west coast of Vancouver Island. Last month it hoisted 40 tonnes of garbage—most of it plastic—and slung it onto a 45-metre-long barge nicknamed The GarBarge. Some of the loads were as large as the helicopter itself. Rob O’Dea managed the project for the Living Oceans Society and we reached him at one of the pickup sites not far from Ucluelet on Vancouver Island. He was on the ground at that point, guiding the helicopter pilot.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Coming in here Rob, with a third load here and it looks like they’ll be able to do her in two more less.

VOICE 2: [In response] Copy that. Thanks, Paul. All summer, there have been hundreds of volunteers on the west coast of Vancouver Island picking up plastics, Styrofoam, car tires, derelict fishing gear, giant trawl nets and hawsers from ships, fish farm debris and hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles. In addition to that debris, we're finding a lot of driftage that was washed out to sea after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan back in March 2011. That material includes tens of thousands of floating buoys from the aquaculture industry, plastic pallets, fish totes the size of a hot tub, and that material from Japan makes up anywhere from 30 to 40 per cent of what we're finding in total.

VOICE 2: [Through helicopter radio] The next time you come in, if you come down and we'll grab a piece of rope out of the back, please.

VOICE 1: Yeah, I figured you were gonna—I see there's a couple of floats there that need to be tied.

AMT: Well, there you go, Rob O’Dea when we reached him earlier at the GarBarge cleanup operation on Vancouver Island. He's with us now from our Vancouver studio. Hello.

ROB O’DEA: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: I can't even picture what 40 tons of garbage looks like. Help me out.

ROB O’DEA: Considering the number of times that I've handled it, it's etched into my memory. The pile on the barge was probably 25 feet high, 40 feet wide and 120 feet long.

AMT: How many helicopter lifts did it take?

ROB O’DEA: One hundred and fifteen helicopter lifts at about seven, 800 pounds per lift.

AMT: So is that a once in a generation cleanup?

ROB O’DEA: No, it isn't sadly. The particular beaches that I was cleaning, I was wearing two hats this year. One was cleaning around the Cape Scott area, the northwest coast of the island, and my other hat was then coordinating the pickup of all the materials that had been stored by our seven partnering organizations and all the volunteers down the coast. And up in Cape Scott, this was the third year that our organization has cleaned up those beaches. And each year, there is more on the beach than there was the year before.

AMT: So it's not all related to a tsunami.

ROB O’DEA: The devastating Japanese earthquake and tsunami definitely gave a boost to the amount of material that was in the Pacific Ocean. But we're finding about a third, roughly a third, this year was tsunami debris. Another third was post-consumer plastics, mostly water bottles, and the other third was post-industrial fish farm derelict fishing gear. Depending on the beach and which direction it's pointed, some beaches are absolutely choked. There's more debris on the beach than there is sand and logs from a surface area perspective.

AMT: So we heard you mention the hundreds of volunteers who collected the stuff. Where from?

ROB O’DEA: The volunteers—some hiked in beaches that were accessible to vehicles. There were some beaches that people were able to drive in, such as Long Beach or Wickaninnish Beach on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Other beaches, we had to boat in eight hours from the Port Hardy area and then each day we would transport the volunteers to different beaches where they would collect and then bring them back to the boats in the evening.

AMT: The tugboat pulled the barge with its load to the Vancouver area and you invited the public to help sort it and see if anything could be repurposed. Let's listen to some of the people who showed up.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: More plastic bottles. Oh, look, it’s quite light. It’s a shoe. What do you think? It’s very stylish. Would you like it? We only have one of them. But it’s kind of plastic, it’s not good quality leather, I’m sorry to say.

VOICE 2: My name is Ron Simmer. I'm an artist. I'm here because I like to recycle stuff and do art. So we’re allowed to pick and choose and take stuff home that gonna go in the landfill anyway. See? I used to be a commercial fisherman, so I'm familiar with all this netting and fishing floats. I've made giant hammocks out of fish net, which is not a terribly good idea, but it sort of worked, you know.

[Sound: Metal clanking]

VOICE 2: Heavy sucker, isn't it? Well, it looks like a gear-thing probably for raising an anchor. This is probably the anchor line. Maybe there's a human face there. I don't know. Is there a human face there? Think about it. Got the mouth and the eyes and stuff like that. Conceivably could be some sort of small kind of robot or something. Some dead robot from some previous civilization or something like it, right? Who knows. [chuckles]

AMT: Some creative people there. We have pictures of that scene on our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Rob O’Dea, in the end how much of the plastic on the barge could be repurposed or recycled?

ROB O’DEA: We were able to recycle about—repurpose or recycle about—75 per cent. We're still working on the numbers. We've just got the final tear sheets from the material that did have to go to the landfill. But about 75 per cent this year was able to be recycled. The problem or one of the problems with marine debris is that once the plastics have spent any time in the ocean or exposed to the sun, the UV light, it breaks down the resin that's in the plastic and that's the valuable part for the recyclers, so marine debris has a bad name in the recycling industry. So we were even having to sort materials that you would normally say oh, this is recyclable, we were having to make two piles out of that one that was in fact recyclable and the other that was too far photo-degraded and already breaking down and that had to be landfilled.

AMT: What did that operation cost?

ROB O’DEA: The tug and barge operation cost about $130, $140,000. The individual cleanups that different groups did down the west coast of the island, they all had small grants as well to provide food for volunteers and transport to and from. I don't have the numbers of what each of those groups got but the actual pick up of all the materials and then the recycling, repurposing and sorting and disposal, that was about $140,000.

AMT: Who paid for that?

ROB O’DEA: Most of the money came from a very generous gift from the government of Japan. Right after that devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011, they made a million dollar gift to the Canadian government, the BC government, to clean up the estimated 100 million tonnes of plastic that had gone out to sea. Sorry, 100 million pounds [laughs] that had gone out to sea from that earthquake. And this

Year, that money has dried up after three years of clean ups all up and down the coast. So there is no money in the cards right now for future clean ups.

AMT: If you had not had the helicopter and the barge, would there have been any other way to carry that material to a landfill?

ROB O’DEA: It would be extremely difficult to carry the material to any beachhead or trail head or vehicle in most locations. But you know Tofino area, you might be able to get a car close enough but most of the west coast of Vancouver Island and indeed the rest of the coast of BC, there's very few places where you can get a car or a truck even close to the beach. So it was too much material to hike out. The material—we could possibly do it without the barge but then we'd be talking about taking it directly from the beach by helicopter to a landfill. And we'd really like to try to recycle as much of the material as possible.

AMT: How big a problem would it be if that stuff had been left on the coast of Vancouver Island?

ROB O’DEA: Well, a lot of it is still there. Despite the wonderful efforts of all the volunteers this year, based on what I saw flying over the coast and picking up from the beaches that were targeted, we maybe picked up five to 10 per cent of what's on just the beaches of Vancouver Island. There's a lot of small pocket beaches where you couldn't get a boat into them. There's a steep cliff behind them so there is no trail head to hike in. So the only way to get to those little pocket beaches—and there's hundreds of them—is by helicopter. And the budgets just don't allow helicopter people into every single little pocket beach. So I flew over beaches that you know from the air, it was more debris than there was beach.

AMT: And now you say the money's run out.

ROB O’DEA: And the money’s run out.

AMT: What's at stake on the west coast then?

ROB O’DEA: Well, I mean to begin with, the material is just an eyesore. But of course you know out of sight out of mind to a certain extent, particularly on some of the more remote beaches. But as the material starts to break down or well, even before it breaks down, we found all kinds of large blocks of foam that you can see the claw marks from the black bears ripping into this. You know I assume they're getting salt out of the material but just you know shredded lots of foam like that. So the direct evidence that the bears are actually ingesting this stuff—ripping it apart and ingesting it. And then as it starts to break down, the smaller it gets the smaller the creatures that eat it. So once it gets down to the microplastic level—anything under five millimetres and smaller—fish are eating it, birds are reading it. It's becoming a real problem worldwide. The UN Environmental Programme estimates that 100,000 marine mammals die each year due to ingestion of marine plastics or entanglement in nets and a million seabirds. And that doesn't include the fish and the other aquatic creatures. So it's a huge problem and a growing problem.

AMT: So if you don't pick it up, it will end up degrading and then causing more harm.

ROB O’DEA: And even before it degrades, you know we've all seen the tragic pictures of whales and other marine mammals entangled in gear and dying as a result. And as it breaks down, it just continues to—the problem increases the smaller the plastic gets, it seems.

AMT: Okay. Well, Rob O’Dea, lots to think about there. Thank you.

ROB O’DEA: Thank you, Anna Maria.

AMT: Rob O’Dea, project manager with the Living Oceans Society. He's in our Vancouver studio. Well, let's go from the big picture and those tonnes of plastic being pulled out of the ocean down to a teeny tiny view of what's going on in our oceans. Scientists in the UK have been studying a variety of tiny creatures living in the depths of the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Even at depths of 4,000 metres, four kilometres under the sea, they have found plastic microfibers in the sediment.

SOUNDCLIP

And we thought well, if they’re there, I wonder if animals are actually eating them. I wonder if it’s you know they're just habitually eaten. So we did two dissections on animals and sea cucumber and squat lobsters and coral and we did in fact find that these animals were eating microfibres. I mean we found it very shocking to find microplastics in the densities that we found them and in the locations that we found them. We were a few thousand miles from London, a few thousand meters down. It took those many, many days on a boat to get there. There aren’t many more remote places. So I'd be very surprised if you to find areas of this planet where they are not.

AMT: Now that is Michelle Taylor, a senior post-doctoral researcher of zoology at Oxford University. We asked her how the microplastic ends up in the diet of creatures on the sea floor.

SOUNDCLIP

The bottom of our oceans tend to be very cold and very dark. In the deep sea, everything that lives there exists some small particles that float down from higher areas in the water column. We call it marine snow. You quite often see it on deep sea video footage. And that is all of the energy that all the animals in the deep sea exist off, is this marine snow, and microplastics are the same size as marine snow. And the way animals exist there, most of their food comes from marine snow or they’re predators and they eat other things that they find down there.

AMT: Now Michelle Taylor's work at Oxford is helping piece together a picture of the impact of plastics in the oceans. In Canada, Max Liboiron’s research is doing the same thing. She's an assistant professor in the geography department at Memorial University. She studies plastic around the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. She joins us from St. John's. Hello.

MAX LIBOIRON: Hello.

AMT: When we hear about marine snow, I think of a snowflake. How small does microplastic get?

MAX LIBOIRON: Well, so a micro plastic by definition starts at 5 millimetres which is about the size of a grain of rice. But then they can go down to something called a nanoplastic which can circulate in the blood, right? Smaller than you can see, smaller than some of my equipment can even see. So the thing about plastics is they fragment into smaller and smaller pieces. They aren't really degrading or bio degrading. They're just chunking down and those can get as small as nanoparticles.

AMT: So sticking with a very tiny, some of the very latest research on this from the UK looked at zooplankton. What did they learn?

MAX LIBOIRON: So a bunch of people in the UK are feeding special types of plastic to zooplankton to see how and whether they eat them and they do eat them and they make it so that the plastic sort of glow in the dark. They shine a light at the zooplankton. You can see where in their body they are. Some zoo plankton then pass them, poop them out again and sometimes they stick around in the body. And so what my lab and other folks are doing is you're like okay, if it can go in plankton, can we trace it from the plankton to when they get eaten into other animals so we can trace this through the food web?

AMT: And what are you finding?

MAX LIBOIRON: We're still trying to do that. You can see a plastic in a zooplankton because you can shoot light through its body. Harder to do that to a codfish because they're pretty thick. But we are finding plastics in most species that were looking in, birds and fish.

AMT: Okay. Because it's getting in the food chain.

MAX LIBOIRON: It's absolutely. It’s all over the food web, yeah.

AMT: So how big a problem is microplastic in the oceans compared to the big pieces of plastic garbage that Rob O’Dea was talking about that was cleared off Vancouver Island?

MAX LIBOIRON: Right. So the big plastics like what Rob is talking about, the ones you can pick up with your arms, they tend to tangle animals up. To what exact degree we don't know because they tend to get tangled when we're not around. But these small plastics because that five millimetres and smaller is what's called bioavailable, a lot of things can eat them—a lot of lot of things—whales, plankton, everything. So what happens is not that you eat plastic and then you choke and get sick. That does happen sometimes but most animals and actually humans eat plastic all the time. My dog eats plastic way too regularly. What happens is in the ocean, different chemicals that are in the water sort of absorb into the plastic, like have you ever had chili and you're trying to clean out your Tupperware and the orange colour won't come out?

AMT: Yes.

MAX LIBOIRON: That's an example of how plastic absorbs oily chemicals like pesticides and flame retardants and other sort of persistent organic pollutants. And when an animal eats them, the abrasive, hot, acidic conditions of a stomach, those chemicals come back out again and end up in the animal. And that's what we're worried about, worried about all those chemicals. We nicknamed plastics poison pills because they sort of, they’re a vector for these chemicals. And so that's why looking at plankton and things at the bottom of the food web are really important because we know those are being passed up through the food web and into humans.

AMT: So how are you collecting your samples?

MAX LIBOIRON: So what I mostly do is look at different animals that we know people are eating. So I do a lot of collection of cod guts from the food fishery in Newfoundland as well as capelin that are destined for consumption. And increasingly we're moving into ducks and other things that people are hunting so we can sample directly what we know people are eating for plastics. And then also we're doing some shoreline studies for teeny tiny plastic, sort of like what Rob is doing, but ones that are smaller than a grain of rice that we have special techniques for that and trying to compare them and measure them.

AMT: How do you actually get your samples?

MAX LIBOIRON: We get them by donation. We collect them from fishermen. They give us their guts. I want to dress like zombies one year with all my students because we go around from wharf to wharf and request people's guts from them.

AMT: People’s fish guts. [laughs]

MAX LIBOIRON: People’s fish guts specifically. No one has yet donated any of their personal guts. I think I would not pass ethics review if I tried that.

AMT: I don't think you would either. Now what have you found?

MAX LIBOIRON: So in Newfoundland, which is where we concentrate, it's actually very good news. We found some of the lowest ingestion rates in the world and that's because the water, particularly on the east coast of Newfoundland is coming from the Arctic, so that's pretty clean water. And also when glaciers start to melt during the glacier runs, that dilutes a lot of that. On the south coast, there's higher percentages and in other parts of the world there are much, much higher percentages. The average ingestion rate is about 30 per cent which means 30 per cent of a species has eaten plastic. Well, here it's closer to 2.4 per cent in Newfoundland.

AMT: Oh, interesting. So the water’s sweeping down and that's why.

MAX LIBOIRON: Exactly.

AMT: From areas where there just aren't a lot of plastics.

MAX LIBOIRON: Yeah, exactly.

AMT And what has surprised you in your findings then?

MAX LIBOIRON: What surprises me is that even in very remote locations, and this is what Rob mentioned too, even in the middle of nowhere, even in the middle of—I’ve been in the middle of oceans where you can't see anything for days—there are plastics there. There are plastics everywhere. And they can travel for really long times and so they can accumulate a lot of these chemicals and that's pretty frightening.

AMT: And you're using something called the LADI trawl. What is that?

MAX LIBOIRON: The LADI trawl is the low-tech aquatic debris instrument. An undergraduate student named Coco Coyle invented it. One of the places that we—I mean working in Newfoundland and a lot of rural outport communities, working with some indigenous communities, and you know what, if you want to go test your own water, you can't afford a $3,500 trawl. And so I gave her the task of inventing a new one that cost much less money and that you could build entirely in your garage with hand tools. And she invented the LADI trawl.

AMT: What does it look like?

MAX LIBOIRON: It looks like a manta ray. It has these two big wings that come out the side to stabilize it. It's got a big square mouth and a big mesh that comes off the end. So it looks like a manta ray with a big sock on its back. And you can skim that. We've tried it on a bunch of fishing vessels including very small ones that fishermen have lent to us and chartered for us. And it can handle all sorts of really small boats. You drag it behind you in the water, it collects plastic and we can sample that to see sort of the state of pollution in different areas.

AMT: Okay. So it's really working for you. It's a good tool.

MAX LIBOIRON: It's a very good tool.

AMT: How concerned should we be that plankton and fish are being found to have plastic inside of them?

MAX LIBOIRON: Very concerned. The thing about the chemicals that accumulate on these plastics is most of them are called endocrine disrupting compounds. The most famous of these compounds is DDT or BPA, bisphenol-A, or the pesticide. And they act in really insidious ways. So instead of poisoning you and killing you, which is a very obvious effect, they work in your hormone system and your hormone system is already up to a lot of stuff and so it can you know manifest in decreased fertility and cancers and obesity and poor fetal development, brain development. And there are lots of other things that affect that as well. And so it's really hard to trace the concrete A to B sort of effects of things and so they tend to get overlooked or they tend not to fly in policy as well because sometimes policy is like tell me exactly what causes this. Well, it's more like correlated, it's more like associated because that's how your hormone system works. So it's especially concerning because it's very hard to point to in terms of the effects but because they're in all aquatic food chains, you know they're very widespread.

AMT: You also have a civic lab, a project you call CLEAR that's looking into marine plastics?

MAX LIBOIRON: That's the name of my laboratory, the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research.

AMT: And tell me what you're doing.

MAX LIBOIRON: There are 16 students in the lab as well as myself and we are running a bunch of bio monitoring projects, mostly in Newfoundland. We tend to focus on citizen science which means we do work with people who aren't scientists, like gathering these fish guts and building these trawls that anyone can use, but also working with school kids and other groups that aren't usually considered knowledge producers to get information for us about beach conditions and looking in their fish for plastics. And we're finding that most of our plastics in Newfoundland come from Newfoundland. Somewhere like Rob and Vancouver Island, most of that is come from away plastic, what we would say here. It's from other places, and that’s because their currents are different than ours. So that's important. It means that if we want to clean up our mess, we have to do it in Newfoundland. While in Vancouver, if they want to clean up their mess they have to look globally.

AMT: So in other words, you could maybe get people to be more careful with their plastics so that they don't end up in the ocean.

MAX LIBOIRON: Well, that's actually pretty impossible. The vast majority of plastics don't come from people being careless. Rob is even saying a full third of the plastics that they found come straight from industry. That's also true here. That's true everywhere in fact. So consumers don't even touch it and then here, a lot of the plastics I find I can tell blew out of the landfill because you can trace them from the landfill down the hill and into the ocean. So those are things that people have taken care of and have tried to recycle and have thrown out with. The problem with plastics is that they're very light, they endure a long time and the ocean is downhill from everything. So people like Rob and he's doing all these cleanups and that's important but it's like bailing out a boat before you’ve plug the hole. I'm trying to plug the hole by keeping down the production of plastics, right? Talking to industry, talking to government, being like okay, no more disposables, no more needless disposables. Let's try and keep plastics from being invented and created in the first place because once they're in the world, they're going to stay in the world. Like plastic packaging, you don't need to package an apple in plastic. You don't need to—right, just ceasing the production at the rate that it's going. Eighty per cent of all plastics come from land. They usually escape infrastructure and that's just because they blow out. There's very little infrastructurally you can do about that. The landfill in St. John's, lots and lots blows out of it and they're trying everything they possibly can to keep that from happening but it’s just a windy place.

AMT: So what are the worst sources of ocean plastic and microplastic?

MAX LIBOIRON: Sewage outfalls is a big one. Fishing industry. Losing nets. And again, they're not doing it on purpose, right? This is just what happens to plastics. It escapes. It's called leakage in the literature. It leaks into the ocean. And then about a third of it come straight from industry, preproduction pellets or nurdles, they're called.

AMT: And what's a nurdle?

MAX LIBOIRON: They look like little beads without a hole in them. You find them in the Great Lakes a lot. Like if you wanted to make something out of plastics, I would ship you a bunch of nurdles which are the raw production pellets. They’d all be little round things, they'd all be white and you would melt them down into your whatever umbrella—

AMT: Little form or something.

MAX LIBOIRON: Yeah. So we find a lot of those.

AMT: And how do they end up in a lake?

MAX LIBOIRON: In the Great Lakes, that comes mostly from shipping. So coming out of containers, shipping containers, coming out of barges, flowing out, right? Flowing out, again, the oceans downhill from everything. They're impossible to contain. They're so light. They're so flimsy. They fly so easily. They flow so easily that there's no containment system that works on them.

AMT: What about microbeads in cosmetics?

MAX LIBOIRON: Yep. That's another one especially in the Great Lakes and those are coming out of sewage treatment plants even. Not all sewage treatment plants have enough of a mesh to keep them out which is why banning them—which is what's happening by 2020 in both Canada and the states—is the best bet. It's like plugging the hole instead of just trying to bail out a boat that keeps sinking.

AMT: And you can actually read on cosmetic labels now if you know you're looking for to see if they’re in there.

MAX LIBOIRON: Yeah. It’s anything that says poly as the first part of it. That means there's a plastic bead of some sort in there.

AMT: And municipalities, some anyway, are moving toward eliminating single use plastic bags. But you're making the point that this is a bigger problem than individuals.

MAX LIBOIRON: Absolutely. Individuals can make changes on an ethical and personal level. But if everyone I know brang a reusable bag to the grocery store, my data wouldn't notice as the scale is much too big. It's much more of a stopping it coming down the pipeline problem. Once the plastic exists in the world, that's it, it's here to stay. It's going to outlast the human species.

AMT: So what needs to be done in your mind? If you could change something, what would it be?

MAX LIBOIRON: I would radically reduce the amount of disposable packaging that's out there and make it not plastic. Right? I mean plastic only really existed in exponential numbers since the Second World War. Before that, we still managed to package food, we still managed to eat, we still managed to go grocery shopping with different materials and in different ways. And that's in living memory. There are people around who remember what that was like. There are things we can get back to and there are things that we can do instead.

AMT: Well, Max Liboiron, thanks for your perspective on all of this. Thanks for your work.

MAX LIBOIRON: Thank you.

AMT: Max Liboiron is an assistant professor of geography at Memorial University. She directs the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, known as CLEAR, and she was in our St. John's studio. If you're joining us partway through, you can download the podcast or you can listen right online: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Let us know what you're thinking as you listen to the different scientists talk about the ubiquity of the plastic in our water. You can tweet us we are @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our site www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for q. If you're a fan of Orange Is The New Black, as I am, you'll be interested to know that Tom Powers is talking to Natasha Lyonne today, who plays Nicky on Orange Is The New Black. Tom Power and Natasha Lyonne speaking today on q. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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October 31, 2016 full episode transcript

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