Trust me—I’m a scientist!

February 23, 2010

The Clayoquot Biosphere Trust presents a public talk by biologist and writer Brian Harvey

February 23, 2010
7:30 PM at the Clayoquot Field Station in Tofino, B.C.
FREE!

Victoria-based biologist and writer Brian Harvey spent the first part of his career "practicing science" in fish conservation projects in Asia, South America and Canada, including Clayoquot Sound. Back home, all that work as a so-called “expert” got him thinking what it means to be a scientist. His talk for the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust will be about the use and abuse of science in a polarized world, and will range from disappearing penguins in Antartica to megalomaniac water projects in Brazil to sea lice and the collapse of Pacific salmon.

Public Lecture at the University of Victoria

Review in the Globe and Mail

Some quotes from Charles Wilkins' review of The End of the River in the Globe and Mail, January 24, 2009:

"The End of the River is a brilliant and instructive book, alive with the author's seditious intelligence, his inner compulsions and restlessness, the lot of which are wedded to his literal journey in a way that recalls the travel writing of one of Harvey's heroes, Sir Richard Burton."

"Brian Harvey shows a . . . fascination and deftness with language and its effects, and with the memorable luminescence of a story well told."

"Harvey's book sweeps across continents and oceans, taking us to hand-wringing conservation conferences in Europe, to his home river — the Fraser — in British Columbia, to the fish hatcheries and markets of the Far East — visiting in the process seedy Thai hotels, Amazonian outposts and Brazil's raucous Carnaval."

"A freewheeling and vividly written essay on the mysteries and longings of what it is to be human in a world of cynicism and loss — and more significantly, what it is to be hopeful, to persevere, in the search for redemption and beauty."

Book signing at CINECENTA

On January 21, I'll be signing copies of The End of the River at Cinecenta Theatre on the campus of the University of Victoria. Cinecenta is showing the acclaimed water documentary Flow: For Love of Water that night.

Anybody wondering just how long we can keep the tap running while we brush our teeth might be interested in dropping by Cinecenta on January 21!

Pogo was right

My new report “Nowhere to Hide: Salmon Versus People in the 21st Century” was released today by the B.C. Pacific Salmon Forum. I reviewed all the published science I could find on the threats to wild Pacific salmon and decided there was an elephant in the living room here: human population growth in the Pacific Northwest.

This isn’t a new idea, and I didn’t think of it first, but salmon commentators and hand-wringers have been pretty good about ignoring it in favour of pointing the finger at other culprits. But in the final analysis I think Pogo, the long-running comic strip character created by Walt Kelly, was right when he said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

And this was way back in 1971.







The illustration is a 1971 Earth Day poster written and illustrated by the American cartoonist and commentator Walt Kelly.

Gotcha!

Lots of people worry about farmed salmon escaping from their cages and trying to go native. Genetic pollution? Competition? Disease? All kinds of things can happen (including, of course, nothing at all), and there’s lots of debate about that.

Nevertheless, everybody agrees that, when an Atlantic salmon turns up loose in British Columbia, it’s escaped from a farm. Salmon farmers, of course, hate to have to report every escape, which means the “official” figures are less than perfect.

But now, the long arm of the fisheries law has a new weapon: forensic DNA analysis.

On TV crime shows, suspects always look extra-shifty when they’re asked for a bit of DNA (“Relax, it’s just a routine test. Anyway, you don’t have anything to worry about. Do you?”) After what happened in Norway recently, salmon farmers are going to have to get used to the same thing. Because, when sports and commercial fishers suddenly started catching what looked like escaped salmon in one fjord in 2006, and none of the farms in the region owned up to an escape, officials from the Norwegian Directorate for Fisheries descended on the farms and took DNA samples from the fish in the net cages.

What happened when they compared the farm-fish DNA to the DNA from escapees (whose remains were also tested)? Almost all of the escapees clearly came from one farm. The farm's owners owned up to a “cage incident.”

The recent scientific paper reporting all this is, like all scientific papers, dry as dust. But the authors let down their guard long enough to say this: “It is hoped that knowledge of the existence of this method will increase the likelihood of farmers sending out reports of fish losses to the authorities.”

In other words, “gotcha!”

What good is science?

There appears to be a classic standoff between science and the demands of the market regarding Atlantic bluefin tuna. "Stocks are dwindling", say the scientists; "fish on" say the countries with a big economic stake in the fishery.

For anyone who lived through the collapse of the Atlantic cod, the situation and the rhetoric seem familiar.

And remember, we stopped fishing the cod in 1992. They still haven't come back.