Environment and Good Sense: An Introduction to Environmental Damage and Control in Canada 9780773592667

Table of contents :
Title
Copyright
Preface
Contents
I. Introduction
2. The Air We Breathe
3. River and Lake
4. Forest, Field, and Mountain
5. The North
6. The Sea
7. Conclusion
REFERENCES
INDEX

Citation preview

Canadian Society of Zoologists Environmental Damage and Control in Canada

M. J. Dunpar,

GENERAL EDITOR

1 Environment and Good Sense

M. J. Dunbar

ENVIRONMENT AND GOOD SENSE An Introduction to Environmental Damage and Control in Canada

SPONSORED BY THE CANADIAN SOCIETY OF ZOOLOGISTS

McGILL-QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY PRESS MONTREAL AND LONDON 1971

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1971 ISBN 0 7735 0109 6 cloth; ISBN 0 7735 0126 6 paper Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 72-171563 Designed by Robert R. Reid Printed in Canada

PREFACE

This monograph first appeared in much shorter form under the title The Rape of the Environment as a contribution from the Canadian Society of Zoologists. The reception given to it encouraged the author and the Society to expand it and to publish it in more acceptable format and in a larger edition. This proposal grew in turn into a plan to sponsor a whole series of short monographs on the dismal aspects of the pollution of our Canadian environment, a plan which was accepted with enthusiasm by McGill-Queen's University Press. In preparing the original document, the author solicited and received most valuable contributions from members of the Society in the ten provinces of Canada; these statements—edited, pruned, and rearranged—have been used in the present volume. They are acknowledged, where recognizable, in the text, but the publishers and the author wish to make formal acknowledgement here of the help received from the following: Howard Paish, Lorne Russell, and Geoffrey Warden: British Columbia Wildlife Federation, Vancouver. G. H. Geen and R. M. F. S. Sadleir: Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

vi

Preface

David Boag: University of Alberta at Edmonton. George Mitchell: University of Saskatchewan, Regina. Ralph D. Morris and J. B. Gollop: Canadian Wildlife Service, Saskatoon. Harold Welch: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. Douglas H. Pimlott: University of Toronto. W. D. Seabrook and U. Paim: University of New Brunswick. Fredericton. The Rev. Charles Cheverie: St. Dunstan's University, Charlottetown. Stanley E. Vass: Prince Edward Island Wildlife Division, Charlottetown. Ian McLaren: Dalhousie University, Halifax. William 0. Pruitt, Jr.: then at Memorial University, St. John's. Newfoundland. The author acknowledges with gratitude the permission of F. R. Scott to reprint the poem "North Stream" from his book Selected Poems.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

V

I.

Introduction

1

2.

The Air We Breathe

9

3.

River and Lake

17

4.

Forest, Field, and Mountain

37

5.

The North

51

6.

The Sea

65

7.

Conclusion

77

REFERENCES

85 89

INDEX

chapter one

INTRODUCTION And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination. JEREMIAH, 2:7

Jeremiah had more to say on this theme. The Greeks and the Romans were well aware of the hazards of environmental destruction, and the first men to domesticate the goat in North Africa, and in Italy, may well have had reason to doubt their wisdom even in their own lifetime. It may be comforting to think that man's destructive habits are at least three thousand years old, although they go much further back, but today we have to face the fact that the process is accelerating dangerously, keeping pace with our increased industrial skills and technological ability. "Man," said a distinguished Russian geologist many years ago, "has become a geomorphic force," able to change his environment indefinitely and at will. This can be said either with pride or as a warning, according to the context. We are able to exploit nature as never before, and it is no longer possible to hope that we can leave our environment alone. Margalef, writing in Spain in 1968, said that "genuine conservation forbids any interference"; if this is so then it must be admitted that genuine conservation is impossible. Man is a bold new species, and a disruptive one, and one whose innovations in industry and in transportation are not going to

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stop unless by self-annihilation. The problem is how to order man's activities so that he does not render the earth uninhabitable for himself. Man after all is part of the natural ecological system, no more and no less, and many of his activities are highly beneficial both to the system and to himself. It follows that one level of attack on the problem of pollution is ecological in the widest sense, including the works of man. Another level of attack is through the minds of men and women, a matter of the urgency of public education. Both these approaches will be used here. It is a mistake to think that mankind is all bad in this context. Man may indeed be "the world's worst predator" or "the world's most dangerous animal," but he is also very constructive when he wants to be. Most of the countryside in which we take delight is man-made, the result of agricultural and forestry practices of long standing and of careful husbandry; in fact it is a matter of aesthetic taste whether we prefer "wilderness" to the tamer landscapes of man's occupation. Both are beautiful, provided that in the latter man has behaved himself. Where he has not, where he has destroyed and poisoned and endangered his own survival and that of his fellow creatures, then it is necessary to step in and put things right. That is what this short treatise is all about. When the earlier and much shorter version of this work appeared in September 1969, in mimeographed form and in a very small edition, one of the Canadian newspapers that noticed it expressed surprise that zoologists should be concerned with pollution at all; the implication was that pollution was the business only of the chemical engineer and the local administration. Nothing could better illustrate the gap between the scientist and the public; indeed one wonders how far back towards the most elementary principles one should go in bringing the problems of pollution to public notice. "Begin at the beginning," said the King of Hearts, but it is not always easy to decide where the beginning is. Let us at least affirm that pollution has to do with organic life on this planet, and organic life is the concern of biologists. Zoologists are biologists.

INTRODUCTION 3

It seemed that 1969 might well become known as "Pollution Year," but 1970 and 1971 have easily surpassed it. Scarcely an edition of any daily newspaper leaves the presses without at least one news article or commentary on the urgent problems of our environment. There has been a surge of public and governmental awareness of the problems, radio and television broadcasts have been full of them, student demonstrations on the subject have been increasing in volume, and there has been no shortage of statements of good intentions from politicians and from industry. The Financial Post of 28 June 1969 produced a sixteen-page section on pollution, an excellent contribution if a little optimistically coloured. The 1969 meeting of provincial premiers, in Quebec, laid considerable emphasis on the need for legislation. At its winter meeting in January 1969, the Canadian Society of Zoologists resolved to prepare a statement for general distribution, with federal and provincial governments and the news media especially in mind, in order to put forward some aspects of the matter, and certain viewpoints toward it, which the Society felt were of the utmost importance and which so far had not appeared from any other source in the country. We felt that whereas protests—against the destruction of seabirds in oil-slicks and of peregrine falcons by DDT and other pesticides—were excellent and had to be made, they were often too emotionally presented, with too narrow an interest, and that there was a need for statements from professional bodies, emotionally cold but professionally warm, which would arm the biological side of the dialogue with far more formidable weapons than were in use at that time. And indeed it is true that the ecological arguments against pollution are just as powerful and as ruthless as the pressures for "progress" and the unthinking exploitation of natural resources. If there is to be battle, and it is our hope that battle can be avoided, then it should be understood that the victory will go inevitably to the ecologists because the danger signals are now unmistakable. Unless we pay proper attention to the preservation of the quality of our environment, we will gradually extinguish ourselves. The victory, on these terms, will be a hollow one; better far to use common sense and work this thing out before it is

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too late. This is not an emotional exhortation, it is a scientific assertion. The aspects we wish to emphasize are (I) the ecological approach, and (2) the proper use of scientists, particularly biologists, in planning the rational exploitation of industrial resources. Neither approach has been conspicuous in the past, or is at present.

THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH

Damage to the environment damages man, but not necessarily directly or immediately; and the damage to man may be spiritual as well as physical. Destruction of wolves not only causes overpopulation of deer and deterioration of grasslands, it also forms a gap in our wild environment which is felt psychologically. The loss of peregrine falcons may have a small effect on the populations of small birds, but it has a large effect on the pleasure of life in the out-of-doors. The application of a pesticide may kill its target (for a time at least) and be harmless to the individual human on direct contact, but it usually will have side effects on the ecological system which ultimately, or quite soon, damage man's interests, perhaps in the loss of fish populations or in the subsequent increase in the original target of the pesticide. Some months ago considerable publicity was given to a statement by a physician, in a position to advise governments, that DDT "was not harmful to man," by which he meant that in present concentrations in human beings it was not directly poisonous to the body. This in our view is an extremely dangerous and irresponsible statement because it allays alarm and encourages the use of chlorinated hydrocarbons. In this particular example, the recognition of the ecological damage done by these compounds has resulted in a ban on their use in several parts of the continent, but the lesson stands: in matters of pollution, it is the ecological damage that must be studied. Direct hazards to health are much better controlled than the indirect hazards. One of Francis Bacon's better sayings, among several less accurate shots, was that "nature to be commanded

INTRODUCTION 5

must be obeyed," which puts this ecological matter in a nutshell. Nature can be, and is, exploited crudely and directly and in the short term, but in the longer term there will be disaster unless the natural system itself is thoroughly understood and accepted as law. The domestication of goats was no doubt hailed as a great agricultural advance, until the price paid was realized: the spilling over of goat populations, the feral herds, the destruction of grass and other plant cover, and the erosion of the soil. In the sophisticated and highly political world of today, it should follow, as has been suggested by Frank Fraser Darling (1951), that "the ecologist is as necessary a servant to the statesman as the economist." And indeed ecologists do figure among the advisors of state, though not often at salary scales equivalent to those of economists. Ecologists also become statesmen somewhat less frequently, at present, than do economists. Furthermore, just as ecology is sometimes described as the economics of nature, so economics in the ordinary sense may be looked upon as an extension of ecology.

BIOLOGISTS AND PLANNING

In designing new industrial establishments or new enterprises in environmental engineering, it is normal for the plans to be approved without thought of the biological effects. Rivers are dammed, new lakes formed, pipe lines laid, mines opened up, as though nature either did not matter or would take care of herself. At the last moment biological opinion may be called in, usually with the intention, or at least the hope, of having the scheme whitewashed and blessed by "expert opinion." More often than not the biologists concerned are in government or industrial employ and are made aware of the official hopes and views before they start to work. Our view is that unless mistakes made in the past are to be repeated in the future, independent biological advice must be sought from the very start of the planning stage, so that destruction of the environment can be avoided. If destruction cannot be avoided, then either the project must be abandoned or it must be modified to comply with the necessary safeguards.

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This is a basically important point. The total cost of the project must be taken into the accounting, including the environmental damage and the loss of amenities. The word progress is frequently used to defend the most appalling brutality to lakes, sea-shores, the air we breathe, and our precious wildlife and fishery resources, as though they had no relevance to the life of mankind; but when the result leaves the population worse off than before, the word to be applied to the whole operation is certainly not progress. I believe that this disregard for the living world, in order to exploit the nonliving, lies deep in our human history as a hunting animal. The live world around us is looked upon as legitimate prey, and most of us take no thought for the possible loss of living resources. Nor do we bother when we make a garbage dump of our surroundings; we assume we can move on somewhere else, as a nomadic people would. The sound Scottish advice of "ne'er foul your ain doorstep" dates from a period later than the Paleolithic. There is another, related, point to be made here. Just as man as a whole treats the living world around him with a cavalier hand, so he is apt to look upon biology as a lesser science than physics and chemistry, if indeed it is allowed the title of science at all. The French distinction between les sciences exactes and les sciences naturelles gives the impression of putting biology in second place; and when philosophers speak of "science" or "the special sciences" they mean physics and mathematics. Man is afraid of life, so that life becomes a religious matter, and biology therefore in some way blasphemous. However that may be, the survival of man now depends upon biology and upon mankind's willingness to learn its principles and its laws. If man can land on the moon, one would suppose that he can certainly look after the little matter of reconciling industrial development with high environmental quality. Unfortunately it does not necessarily follow that the technology (usually called "science"), so often reviled by the public as responsible for our troubles, can prevent damage just as well as it can cause it. At all events we need a political decision to

INTRODUCTION 7

attempt preventive action, and for this public education is required, and most urgently. Already there are encouraging signs on the horizon in the form of proposed legislation to stop the fouling of our air and our water. Legislation can be passed, however, become part of the law of the land, and then be disregarded and not enforced. This is well known to conservationists and those interested in combatting pollution. It has been said that when a small boy urinates into a stream in Ontario he is contravening some fourteen federal, provincial, and local laws, none of which has been enforced for years, if ever. It is one. of the purposes of this book, and of this series, to keep up the pressure for action on the part of governments and for cooperation on the part of industry and the public. Cooperation is essential; we should at all costs avoid the "we" and "they" attitude. It is not a question of setting up the battle-lines but of assuring continuing industrial development together with the maintenance of our environment. In the long run we can do without the former, but without the latter we can do nothing; the very survival of mankind is at stake. We are talking here of the Canadian problem, the Canadian scene. Books and articles on pollution in the United States, and in parts of Europe, appear all the time, but not much has appeared about Canada. The extent of the damage in Canada is not yet so great as it is in the United States, and now is the time (indeed it should have been earlier) to repair past damage and to take preventive steps for the future. Moreover, the problem is more than a parochial one. We live concentrated along the U.S. border, but we are reaching farther and farther to the north, so that now the whole of our Subarctic and Arctic has entered the pattern of the Canadian economy, and will be ever more strongly represented in it in the future. This series, therefore, is designed to inform the Canadian public of the Canadian problems, covering all aspects of the subject: from the air to the sea, from the south to the north, from the legal and social to the scientific and technical.

chapter two

THE AIR WE BREATHE If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will. TOM LEHRER

Whenever combustion occurs, air is polluted" (Larsen 1966). The very breath of man is in this sense a pollutant, but the carbon dioxide produced in respiration is recycled through the system as material used by plants in photosynthesis. The products of artificial combustion (fires, chemical plants, automobiles, and so on), on the contrary, contain substances which are not normal to the natural biological cycle, which cause the pollution of the air in our cities and towns, and about which the public and governments are at last becoming uneasy. The exhaust of the gasoline-burning internal combustion engines of automobiles, for example, contains among other things carbon monoxide (a very different substance from the dioxide), sulphur dioxide, various hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen, and fine particles of lead, all of which are toxic and dangerous. These and many other nastinesses such as soot, phosphorus compounds, silica dust, and sulphuric acid have been pouring into the air, particularly into the air of cities, for many decades; the rate of industrial expansion has now reached the point at which everyone, public, government and industrialist alike, is forced to do something about it. The City

10 chapter two

of Montreal, early in 1970, took steps to control the amount of sulphur present in fuels, and none too soon. Dr. Fred Knelman of Sir George Williams University was quoted in one Montreal newspaper as saying "Los Angeles is a carbon monoxide city, London is a sulphur dioxide city. Montreal has the distinction of having large quantities of both." Dr. David Bates of McGill University has pointed out that this is an international problem, as are most of the problems of pollution in the short or the long run, and that the responsibility for its solution rests at present with the Western World, meaning the industrially developed countries, if only to make sure that the industrialization of such enormous countries as India and China, in due course, does not follow the same paths and make the same mistakes. "If the Chinese had as many automobiles in proportion to their population as there are in America we could probably detect their air pollution in Canada" (Bates 1970). A volume on the problems of air pollution in Canada is planned for this present series of monographs, and the subject is too large to deal with fully in this introductory treatise. One example, however, that of carbon monoxide, may be briefly discussed in order to press home the gravity of the dangers involved. Carbon monoxide has a very strong affinity for hemoglobin, the red blood pigment by means of which we trap oxygen in the normal process of respiration. The affinity of carbon monoxide for this pigment is in fact about three hundred times that of oxygen, which means that even at very low air concentrations of monoxide, it is absorbed in preference to oxygen. At high concentrations, as with heavy smokers (tobacco smoking causes far higher monoxide concentrations in the blood than does city air pollution) or polluted air, the body is robbed of a serious proportion of its effective hemoglobin, so that much of it cannot be used for the carrying of oxygen at all. Depending on the extent of this robbing effect, the results can be headaches of varying severity, breathlessness, dizziness, vomiting, collapse, and death. To quote from Dr. Ralph Larsen (1966): "The maximum eight-hour average concentration recommended by New York State's community air quality objectives is 30 parts per

THE AIR WE BREATHE 11

million, corresponding to five percent carboxyhemoglobin" (five percent of the hemoglobin unavailable for breathing). "But is this carbon monoxide level really safe? The results to be expected at this level are about the same as if a person were to lose half a pint of blood. This is no problem to a healthy person, but it might be serious for an anemic, respiratory or cardiac cripple, or for a normally healthy individual who happened to be seriously ill and weak at the time of exposure." Levels of both carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide in Montreal are frequently at or close to the "permissible" concentrations, roughly 30 ppm of CO and 0.10 ppm of S02, and in fact according to Dr. Donald Chant of the University of Toronto, Montreal is one of the top ten dirtiest cities, in terms of air pollution, on the continent. Sometimes the concentrations of these two gases, particularly monoxide, are far higher than the "tolerable." The City of Montreal has recently brought in legislation to deal with this situation. This is a heartening development, and we must hope that the legislation will be made to work. The Province of Quebec, and the City of Montreal, like any other province or city, suffer from political obstacles to the achievement of the ideal in pollution control. The control of the effluents of industrial plants and the control, perhaps the ultimate elimination, of gasoline-burning automobiles are not easily achieved against the enormous interests, including those of the individual citizens themselves, which can put pressure on government to relax or ignore its own regulations, and which would be harmed by proper control. To ask the citizenry to give up their automobiles would seem as preposterous a demand as to ask the automobile industry to close down. Nevertheless it may well come to something of this sort, and the wise among us will begin to reorient their minds toward a day-to-day life different from that to which we have grown accustomed. Canadian cities for the most part are not yet in the serious straits that many of the larger U.S. cities have reached, but they are fast approaching them. Air pollution is becoming serious in Vancouver and very serious in Toronto and Hamilton. The air of Ottawa is frequently badly tainted by

12

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pulp mills, and the atmosphere of Cornwall, Ontario, is unbelievable. In the particular instance of Cornwall, however, the cause of the smell is probably harmless. Many industrial concerns are taking this problem seriously. The Steel Company of Canada, for instance, at Hamilton, has announced a plan for pollution control in its plant, at considerable expense; so has Dofasco, in the same city. That city was impressed by the events that took place in its air when the Steel Company was forced by a strike to close down for two months in the summer of 1969. The dust descending on the city declined at once by 28 per cent, and there was a drop of 51 per cent in the level of iron oxides. The exhaust of the great air liners leaving and arriving at our airports across the country is also a serious source of air pollution; in fact the exhaust from one jet has been estimated as equivalent to that of a thousand cars. This is a special problem, one that may perhaps be eased to some extent by more airfields further from cities—a solution which cannot be described as perfect; it amounts to the old idea that "the solution of pollution is dilution," which is now thoroughly discredited. But it is not easy to see what else can be done short of reducing the extent of air travel, not a likely event. There is another hazard from jet aircraft that we will discuss in a moment. Diesel engines are not so harmful as gasoline engines, particularly if they are kept in first-class running order. Diesel engines burn more hotly than gas engines, and more of the pollutants are oxidized before they leave the cylinders. The smell of diesel exhaust can be unpleasant because of substances which in fact are comparatively harmless, but if the diesel engine is kept properly in tune the exhaust should be colourless and almost devoid of particulate matter. Electric-driven cars and buses are no doubt the final answer. The City of Montreal may well be sorry that it did away with the old electric street cars and trolley buses, especially the latter. But in the final analysis the trouble comes not from the public transportation systems, but from the private car. There are two very large-scale hazards in the air, so largescale as to be international problems from the start. One con-

THE AIR WE BREATHE 13

cerns air travel and the other has to do with pesticides in the sea. Since Canada is more and more active every year in international travel and in oceanography (we have three oceans, not just two), both these matters should be introduced here, the more so since they are not usually included in discussions of air pollution as such. There is in fact a third such problem, that of climatic change by man, but this we will come to in a later section. One of the constituents of the exhaust of aircraft engines is water. One jet engine on take-off can thrust up to about 80 pounds of pollutants, much of it water, into the air while gaining altitude. At high levels in the air the vapour trails of these engines form clouds of vapour and ice crystals. These cloud layers are very persistent and therefore presumably accumulating over the face of the earth as air travel continues; moreover they lie higher than the general natural cloud cover. On cloudy days these man-made clouds make little difference, but on clear days they cause a significant reflection of sunlight back into the upper atmosphere and reduce the amount of light reaching the earth. In time this must be expected to have a climatic effect which is measurable, and even now it is suspected of having a more subtle and insidious effect in reducing the production of plant growth. Plants are dependent on light for their primary energy and they form the basic food for animal life. Without plants, there would be no animals, including, naturally, man. Man is not separate from nature; this has to be said again and again, because the Book of Genesis says he is separate from nature, and the belief has grown and still persists. Reduction in light supply is a serious matter, and we do not yet know what the effects of these artificial cirrus clouds will be, but there is a suspicion, backed up by some as yet unpublished scientific work, that they may be responsible for a shortening of the growing season and for a decline in the abundance of plants and animals in the marine plankton.* The other large-scale problem concerns our oxygen supply, *Glover. Colebrooke. and Robinson 1970: personal communication and by correspondence.

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and this also involves the sea. Oxygen gas is the combustion medium of life, the means by which animals obtain energy; without it, life as we know it would be impossible. The gas is made by plants, and by plants only, and most of it (about 80 per cent) is formed in the sea by the photosynthetic activity of small planktonic plants floating close to the surface. The sea in fact is the great mediator of those two most important gases, oxygen and carbon dioxide; the plants need carbon dioxide and the animals need oxygen, which is produced by plants. Every year an undetermined but very large quantity of pesticides, among them plant pesticides—all man-produced and mostly man-dispersed—flows into the sea. We do not yet know much about the effect of these substances upon the small floating plant cells, or phytoplankton, which make up by far the largest volume of living stuff in the seas, or in the world, in the spring and summer, but we can be fairly sure it is not good. Recently this problem has been the subject of study and discussion among a comparatively small group of biological oceanographers and others, increasingly alarmed at the probability that this outpouring of waste chemicals, detergents, insecticides, and herbicides into the sea may significantly and dangerously reduce the world's oxygen supply. At present there is perhaps little more to be said on this point, alarming as it is, because the state of our knowledge does not permit the production of useful answers. There is urgent need in this field for research which would include the complete identification of photosynthetic organisms in the sea, a study of the changes that are occurring or have occurred in the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere (not an easy thing to do), and the effects of the chemicals concerned upon the organisms themselves. The prospect of the reduction of our oxygen supply on a global scale is so disturbing that every effort must be made, and immediately, to find out the extent of the danger. I am reliably informed that when this menacing possibility was brought to the attention, in conversation, of an able and highly successful business man, his reply was: "Well, what of it? If we run short of oxygen, we can make it; there should be a buck in that." Ignorance is indeed a dangerous luxury, even

THE AIR WE BREATHE 15

if it gives temporary bliss. The oxygen in the world today, all of it, is the result of countless millennia of activity of plants, and we know of no way as yet of copying the plants' skills. Possibly some day we will be able to do this, but the process is clearly so complex that it will be a long time in the future, if ever, and furthermore the production of oxygen on a scale approaching that of the natural process will be impossible forever, or as near as makes no difference in the time scale involved. A start in the scientific approach to this problem has been made. In March 1970 a paper appeared on the effect of three chlorinated hydrocarbons (DDT, dieldrin, and endrin, all used as pesticides) on marine phytoplankton (Menzel, Anderson, and Randtke 1970). l quote from the abstract of this paper: "Photosynthesis and growth in cultures of four marine phytoplankton species, isolated from different oceanic environments, were affected by three chlorinated hydrocarbons...to varying extents. This ranged from complete insensitivity in Dunaliella to toxicity at concentrations of 0.1 to 1.0 part per billion of the pesticides in Cyclotella. Other forms were intermediate in their response." The problem, therefore, is to be taken seriously.

chapter three

RIVER AND LAKE Ice mothers me My bed is rock Over sand I move silently. I am crystal clear to a sunbeam. No grasses grow in me My banks are clean. Foam runs from the rapid to rest on my dark pools. F. R. SCOTT

Such streams as F. R. Scott describes are still to be found, but not near our cities any more. The foam, anywhere within fifty miles of a city or town, is likely to be detergent foam, and very persistent. Life on this earth is water-evolved. That is to say, it appeared first in water, probably in the sea, and therefore living things use water as the universal solvent and suspender of colloids and as the prime environment. Water is thus a priori an essential element of life, and to say that living things "need" water is to beg the question. Life exists only in the temperature range in which water is a warm solid (ice) or a cool or temperate liquid, and the terms warm, cool, and temperate mean what they do (to us) because our life is water-evolved. J. B. S. Haldane once suggested that other forms of life were quite possible, elsewhere in the universe, perhaps organisms with molten iron for blood, running in silica blood-vessels. Water has remarkable chemical and physical properties (such

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as large latent heat of fusion, heat carrying capacity, and surface tension) which make it uniquely appropriate for the place it occupies in the economy of life. It is our most precious possession by far, and one which Canada must conserve jealously against the bad habits of Canadians and the rapacity of their neighbours. It is not surprising, therefore, that the literature of water conservation and water pollution is enormous, very much greater in volume and older in time than that of any other branch of the pollution trouble. We must have air just as we must have water, but air moves much more rapidly, expands and contracts in heat and cold, blows about the world in such a way as to mask, for a time, the dangerous effects of air pollution. Not so water. Water lies in lakes and flows gently in rivers, evaporates and returns to us, often within the same day, in rain and fog. Local pollutants are thus almost immediately apparent to the discerning eye and the organs of taste and smell, and we react more quickly to them in terms of alarm, research, and remedial measures. Canada possesses about one-third of the fresh-water resources of the world, which to say the least is a handsome endowment. Our population, moreover, is still small in comparison with the total area available for human settlement, and only two or three of our cities approach the populations of the great cities of the world. Nevertheless, we have had water pollution with us on a fairly serious scale for at least seventy years, and very seriously indeed, in many southern regions, for twenty years. In 1966 the Fisheries Research Board of Canada published a volume entitled Aquatic Pollution Studies 1902-1966, containing reprints of thirty-five research papers, four of which appeared before 1910. The volume was produced on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the National, Research Council, and in the foreword Dr. F. R. Hayes, then Chairman of the Fisheries Research Board, took pleasure in pointing out that the latter organization traced its lineage back to 1898, and was thus considerably older than NRC. This in itself is significant, pointing up as it does the importance of research on aquatic resources in this country. A selection of the titles of some of these papers

RIVER AND LAKE 19

(and date of their publication) gives a feel for the sort of problems encountered: "The effects of polluted waters on fish life" (1902); "Circulation and pollution of water in and near Halifax Harbour" (1924); "The extent of the pollution caused by pilchard reduction plants in British Columbia" (1933); "Oceanography and prediction of pulp mill pollution in Alberni Inlet" (1949); "Avoidance of sublethal mining pollution by Atlantic salmon" (1963). Today the situation across the country is bad, and the amount of research being done on water pollution has increased enormously. The amount of remedial action has not, however, although there are a few encouraging efforts, which, if maintained, will set us slowly on the road to recovery. There is yet no cause for optimism. The damage is done by mining operations, pulp mills, excessive fertilization of the land adjacent to lakes and streams, domestic and industrial sewage of various kinds, and by individual bad habits such as throwing garbage out of boats and motor cars. There is also a growing threat of thermal pollution of our fresh waters by the outpouring of cooling water from power plants, especially nuclear plants. Public and governmental attitudes to water pollution, as to all pollution, vary somewhat from region to region, sometimes for reasons of economic advantage, sometimes out of apathy, often out of ignorance. In British Columbia there is a coal strip-mining operation in the East Kootenay region, to which we will return again in the next chapter. Strip-mining, in which process the vegetation, soil, and rock overlying a coal bed are removed, can be extremely damaging to the environment, particularly if the company involved does not undertake, or is not required, to replace the cover after the operation is over. It is a well-known mining process all over the world, and in Canada we are in a position to learn from the sad examples of other countries whose hills and forests have been ravaged by it. I quote from the Strip Mining Law of the State of Kentucky: The General Assembly finds that the unregulated strip mining of coal causes soil erosion, damage from rolling stones and overburden, landslides, stream pollution, the ac-

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cumulation of stagnant water and the seepage of contaminated water, increases the likelihood of floods, destroys the value of land for agricultural purposes, destroys aesthetic value, counteracts efforts for the conservation of soil, water and other natural resources, destroys or impairs the property rights of citizens, creates fire hazards, and in general creates hazards dangerous to life and property, so as to constitute an imminent and inordinate peril to the welfare of the Commonwealth. Here we have the voice of bitter experience. In discussing the East Kootenay operation in this and the next chapter, I shall be drawing upon two reports: (I) a submission by the British Columbia Wildlife Federation, prepared by Howard Paish, Lorne Russell, and Geoffrey Warden (1968); and (2) a report prepared for the Canadian Society of Zoologists by Glen Geen and Richard Sadleir, both of the Department of Biological Sciences at Simon Fraser University, dated February 1969. Mining developments of this sort are of course not confined to one province or one region, but the East Kootenay events have been given much attention and are used here as an illustration of this type of development in Canada. Geen and Sadleir's report gives the scale of the operation as follows: The area in which major strip mining operations are proposed is the Elk River watershed. There are two main types of land tenure arrangement associated with the coal mining activities in this area. They are: a) land held under the B.C. Lands Act (owned private land). The Kaiser Coal Company Limited has an option on 105,000 acres from Crows Nest Industries. Within the next five to eight years it will decide whether to keep 65,000 acres of the total, and return the other 40,000 acres to Crows Nest Industries. Kaiser has purchased the coal rights to 65,000 acres; b) coal licenses on Crown Land. These are held by the following companies: Scurry Rainbow Oil Limited, Crows

RIVER AND LAKE 21

Nest Industries, Pacific Oil and Gas Company Limited, and Kaiser Coal Company Limited. The coal measures involved are extensive. In the past, mining operations in this region have been underground; the first major surface mining began at the 6,000-foot level, on Harmer Ridge above Sparwood. This is probably the first time that surface mining has been undertaken in an area where the depth of the overburden is as much as 480 feet, over twice the overburden depth in any surface mining operation in the United States. The terrain is precipitous, so that there is real danger of serious erosion problems. In the context of fresh waters, the Elk and Kootenay river systems are threatened by this mining, in terms both of the water quality itself and of the sport fishing amenities. These waters contain rainbow trout, cutthroat trout, Dolly Varden char, and mountain whitefish, providing an excellent and growing sport for local residents and visitors in an area which has few fishing lakes. We do not yet know much in detail about the size of the fish populations or of the fishing pressure, but some measurements have been made, in the form of creel censuses, and it is clear that the resource is not to be sneezed at. Creel census figures collected from the Elk River between 1955 and 1962 showed a catch per unit effort (fish per angler-hour) of 1.83 (1,912 angler-hours, 3,490 fish caught). Most of the fish were cutthroat trout. Scattered data from the Fording River give a catch per unit effort of 1.7 fish per hour. Similar studies on the Kootenay River between Fort Steele and the International Boundary yield a figure of 4.2 fish per hour, which must be regarded as most excellent fishing. There can be no doubt that the strip-mining will cause severe damage to these streams, physically, chemically, and biologically. "Erosion and transport of soil to streams and rivers would lead to an increase in turbidity which would affect angling success. Settling of suspended silt can drastically affect the species composition and abundance of the bottom organisms, a major source of food for fishes. In the face of increasing turbidity in streams, major changes in the size and

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composition of fish populations are inevitable" (Geen and Sadleir 1969). Acid water is also a well-known concomitant of strip-mining. Sulphur-bearing minerals commonly associated with coal oxidize to form sulphuric acid when exposed to water and air. This would lead to extensive mortality of aquatic animals in general. At present we have no methods of controlling this process, nor the effects of sedimentation. The damming of rivers for the establishment of power plants usually, perhaps always, involves habitat destruction, both aquatic and terrestrial, and such engineering projects are normally undertaken without consultation with biologists. Two such instances are reported from the Province of Alberta by David Boag (1969) of the University of Alberta at Edmonton. On the upper reaches of the North Saskatchewan River, there is a proposal to build a dam one of whose prime purposes appears to be to increase the flow in rivers in which the present inflow of pollutants is at or near the maximum legal limits. The Province hopes to alleviate this problem by stabilizing the present stream flow through the construction of a number of dams and by augmenting the volume of water flowing in the rivers through the construction of canals to take water from rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean and divert it into the east-flowing streams. The Bighorn Dam will be constructed in the region of Nordegg and will flood in the neighbourhood of 16 square miles of the flats known as the Abraham Plains and part of the famous Kootenay Plains—a unique grassland in the rain shadow of the main range of mountains on the eastern edge of Banff National Park. These areas, first made famous through the description of David Thompson, are major wintering areas for herds of bighorn sheep and wapiti. Furthermore, the David Thompson Highway will lie adjacent to the lake created and since the proposed draw-down at the dam will be extensive the aesthetic appeal of miles of barren muddy shorelines will be decidedly negative (Boag 1969).

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The Bennett Dam on the Peace River in British Columbia has had considerable impact on the ecological balance in that river and in associated bodies of water downstream from the dam. The flow in the Peace River is reduced to such an extent while the reservoir is filling that the very existence of whole ecological communities is threatened, both in the river itself and in Lake Claire and the Delta at Lake Athabasca. Says Dr. Boag (1969), "the implications for migrating waterfowl, spawning fish and the trapping of muskrats are disastrous." One proposed new dam was abandoned, however, largely because of the strong objections raised by biologists, an example of what may become more frequent in the future: the application of common sense to delay, modify, or abandon engineering schemes conceived without proper thought to their effects on the environment as a whole. This is the story of Southern Indian Lake in Manitoba, reported by Professor Harold Welch (1969), Department of Zoology, University of Manitoba, and retold here largely in his own words; it is a most instructive account of what might have happened had not better counsel prevailed over the first rush of engineering enthusiasm. Southern Indian Lake is in northern Manitoba; out of it flows the Churchill River, eastward to Hudson Bay. Early in 1969 it was virtually unknown, but it quickly came into the public eye when its future role in the economy of Manitoba became a matter of open controversy. The question at issue was whether or not its waters should be raised thirty-five feet and diverted to supplement the flow of the Nelson River, to the south of the lake, to supply water to hydroelectric stations. Would it be better to divert the water at some other point, to have a smaller rise in water level, or would it be best not to undertake the project at all? The latter decision would avoid both the displacement of a prosperous Indian community, and it would keep the lake, one of the most beautiful in the country and by no means a small one, as a recreational asset. The issues were discussed at two public hearings, preparatory to legislative decision. The lake is the largest of a series of lakes along the Churchill River. It lies 50 miles north of Thompson and is ap-

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proximately 90 miles long and 14 miles wide. It has an area of 850 square miles and elevation above sea level of 840 feet. Harold Welch writes (1969): "Until recently this northern part of the province was of little commercial value. So much so that the government did not authorize funds for fire fighting. The development of the Nelson River hydro-electric dams, the nickel belt city of Thompson, and the forest resource industry at The Pas has changed this. The elevation of these northern lakes and rivers and their fall to the Hudson Bay lowlands provides enormous potential for hydroelectricity generation. Manitoba Hydro surveyed the area in the 1950s and the huge Kettle Rapids generating station is now under construction." Diversion of water from the Churchill River would stabilize the flow in the Nelson River, which fluctuates considerably, and thus ensure the maximum and most efficient use of the expensive hydroelectric plants. Manitoba Hydro decided that the place to put a dam across the Churchill was at its outlet from Southern Indian Lake, at Missi Falls; this would raise the water 35 feet, and the flow would be diverted through a man-made channel leading from the southern part of the lake. The water would then flow south through the Rat River to the Burntwood River, and so to Split Lake and the Nelson. The flooding of the land was to be controlled by accessory dams. The flow down the Churchill would be much reduced, but its contribution to the Nelson River flow would realize the full 1.2 million kilowatt potential of the Kettle Rapids station. This would assure a supply of cheap power to meet increasing needs, the development of an electro-chemical industry in the Flin-Flon—The Pas —Thompson triangle, with perhaps a surplus of power for export. The magnitude of the scheme and its enormous economic benefit to the province led the Manitoba government to approve the scheme in 1966. The federal government was involved in financing the construction of the direct current transmission lines over the 565 miles distance from Kettle Rapids to Winnipeg. With all these benefits, writes Dr. Welch (1969), why should anyone raise objectives? But the objections came.

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The answer lies principally in Southern Indian Lake. It has the beauty and dignity of the North. It is the last large lake in northern Manitoba. At present, it is a maze of sprucecovered islands, open water areas, rock-bound rugged shorelines, beautiful sandy beaches, and is surrounded by wilderness. At the Southern Indian Lake settlement there are 505 Indians and Metis and another settlement of 100 people at neighbouring Granville Lake. These people live on the natural resources of the area, fur, game, and fish, and have annual incomes of $2000 to $4000 per capita. They represent one of the most industrious and prosperous Indian communities in northern Manitoba. The rise of 35 feet in water level would flood its shores and settlements. The lake area and adjoining waters will increase from 850 to 2,000 square miles. It will be the second largest lake in Manitoba and among the largest reservoirs in surface area in North America. It will be larger than the high Aswan Dam reservoir in Egypt. Flooding on this scale would obviously necessitate the resettlement of the people and it would bring about almost immediate destruction of wildlife and long-term changes in the fishery, both vital factors in the economy of the region. The idea of "resettlement," as Dr. Welch puts it, "stirs one's conscience." Does the majority have the right to push the minority around? Is resettlement in any real sense possible? As for the wild animal populations, those of the land would disappear, and the fish resources would be most seriously disturbed. An enlarged lake does not necessarily mean better fishing. Southern Indian Lake is in the area of permafrost (permanently frozen subsoil). Flooding will bring about melting of this permafrost at the rate of a foot or so a year. Soil subsidence will occur. The water will be filled with sediment and trees float free in a quagmire of floating debris. Larger areas of open water will permit the generation of larger waves and further destruction. Fishing will become dangerous and probably economically unfeasible. The recreational potential of the lake and surroundings will

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disappear with rising water levels. Thompson, a city of more than 15,000 people and 50 miles distant, will lose a recreational opportunity. Downstream from the lake the decreased water flow will bring changes important to the economy of Churchill. Freshwater would become scarce. Canada geese, sturgeon, capelin, and beluga populations along the river and at its mouth will change. The role of the Churchill River in keeping tidal sedimentation from the estuary is unknown. The chief concern of the objectors centres on the fact that the alternative diversion schemes were assessed only in terms of one criterion—the economy of electrical generation. This single resource approach is antiquated. The U.S.A. and advanced Scandinavian and other European countries practise multiple use of resources. In multiple resource utilization no single agency or group has exclusive use but all users must share in proportion to their present and future needs. Planning becomes the key to utilization. The concept recognizes the fact that as the human population rises, needs for industrial raw materials will inevitably conflict with Man's needs for identity, space and recreation, unless these are assessed and their utilization planned (Welch 1969). In this instance, the government concerned was sufficiently impressed by the arguments against the motion that it awarded the decision to the defense. And indeed the arguments, when marshalled as above, are enough to make one pause. This is encouraging, and we must congratulate all those involved, Hydro company, engineer, biologist, and government. But it is not quite enough to close the file on that note. Whether this is a happy ending depends upon the point of view. For conservationists, yes; for engineers, perhaps no. The point is that the voices of the biologists and of those able to appreciate the ultimate consequences were heard, although only just in time. The engineering plan may be activated again, in the same form or in modified form, but if it is it will no longer be possible to do so with only the one resource, electric power, in mind. If the plan comes up for discussion a second time, it will be con-

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sidered in the round, and professional biologists, and no doubt also social scientists ("und leider auch ... " as Goethe said), will take part. It is in this that the real advance lies. The United States has the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act to handle this sort of problem, and in Sweden there are the Water Courts; we need the same sort of thing in Canada. The Canada Water Act, which was given first reading in the House of Commons in November 1969, is a start but it does not go far enough. It seeks to halt and to remedy water pollution, which is excellent; it does not demand planned development. There are other dams, and other plans for dams, across the country, but to discuss more of them in detail would be tedious. Each presents special conditions, poses special problems, and probably none of them has been planned with anything else in mind than the single engineering objective. Pollution of our lakes and rivers by industrial plants is widespread, almost a national hobby. Most of the rivers and streams in the populated parts of Canada are carrying manmade pollutants in varying amounts, ranging from elemental phosphorus to inorganic phosphates and nitrates and including mercury and mercury compounds, iron compounds, salts of copper, zinc, lead, and other highly toxic metals, lignins, and a host of organic substances. Some industrial concerns are doing something to render their effluents innocuous, others are doing nothing. One of the choicest examples, not without humour, comes from the Athabasca River in Alberta, where the effluent of a pulp and power mill at the town of Hinton, near Jasper National Park, was so high in noxious concentration that the water was found unfit for use by a second proposed pulp mill at Whitecourt, 180 miles downstream. Only when this became known did the Hinton mill take steps to lower the level of industrial pollutant to a point where the water at Whitecourt could be used by the second mill (Boag 1969). It now remains to be seen what will happen downstream from Whitecourt; perhaps a third plant will be established, only to find the water too polluted even for industrial use. The effluents from industrial plants can be very dangerous. Mercury, used in the manufacture of plastics amongst other

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things, causes paralysis by attacking the central nervous system. Lead is an ancient poison, blamed by some for the fall of the Roman Empire by way of its plumbing system. It is present still in certain paints and in gasoline. Copper causes various types of damage to cells in the bodies of animals, including man; it interferes with the gills and therefore with respiration in fish. Examples of this sort of poisoning can be found all over the country; here is one from New Brunswick: Mining pollution at present is most prominent in the Tomonogops River, a tributary of the Northwest Miramichi River, and in Little River. The major metal pollutants are copper and zinc arising from a base metal mining operation near Tomonogops River. The mine waste concentrations, although fluctuating, have been shown to reach levels lethal to caged salmon; in controlled laboratory experiments, it has been shown that 32 parts per billion of copper and 420 ppb of zinc are lethal to young salmon. Also, it has been shown that sublethal concentrations of copper and zinc are avoided by salmon; that adult salmon have returned to the estuary instead of migrating to the spawning beds in the Northwest Miramichi River watershed. During years of pollution up to 22% of the upstream migrants returned down-river compared to the usual one or two percent. Expansion of mining operations in the Province is likely to compound the problem to the extent of blocking most salmon migration to the spawning grounds unless suitable precautions are taken (Paim and Seabrook 1969). New Brunswick can offer much more of this sort of trouble. One pulp mill spoils a 35-mile stretch of the upper St. John River, and wastes from the same mill will probably prevent the development of sport fishing in a recently constructed hydroelectric reservoir over 100 miles downstream. According to Professors Paim and Seabrook (1969), the concentration of dissolved oxygen in the St. Croix River below a sulphide mill reaches almost zero, and young salmon die within a few minutes of being placed in the water. As new

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pulp mills are built, the situation will get worse, and at present almost nothing is being done to remedy it. Pollution by solids, such as sawdust and silt (the latter from soil erosion), exists in many streams, spoiling spawning grounds and endangering populations of organisms upon which fish feed. In the Miramichi River estuary, recent tests have shown the presence of organic pollutants such as creosote and pentachlorophenol. The latter is known to be highly toxic to fish and other aquatic animals. The New Brunswick record in pollution is not all bad, however, although it is one of the worst areas for uncontrolled pollution. The spraying of forests to control the spruce budworm began in New Brunswick in 1952, using the chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticide known as DDT. It was used consistently up to 1969, but finally after more than adequate demonstration that great damage was being done to the stream fauna, including young salmon, the use of DDT has been abandoned. Other less harmful and less persistent chemicals, such as those known to the trade as Malathion and Sumithion, are now being used instead. The threat to the salmon parr is now less, but it has still to be demonstrated that the spraying accomplishes its object of destroying the budworm in the long run, of which more below. A new pollutant in some of our fresh waters is heat, the heat contained in the cooling water from thermal and nuclear generating stations, which are beginning to appear; they will be abundant in the future, and they will affect sea water as well as lakes and rivers. As our population rises (and Canada is one rare country which would benefit rather than suffer from more people), so will the demand for electric power, and as our oil reserves fall, the use of atomic energy will increase. I am not going to try to put this into quantitative terms, because I think they would carry little meaning at present; and in any case quantities mean one thing to one man and another to the next, just as ordinary language does. But it can be said with assurance that heat carried in the cooling water of nuclear power plants is going to be a problem of increasing complexity in the fairly near future. It will be complex simply because it involves temperature, an environmental factor perhaps as im-

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portant as water, air, and time, but one which we are a long way from mastering intellectually. Animals and plants can adjust fairly rapidly to temperature changes, except in the shortest of the time-scales of references, such as the day or the month. Furthermore, when the heat under study is carried in water, a number of dynamic environmental factors enter into the problem, such as the effect of the heat on the stability or instability of the water into which it flows. The stability of the water column, by which is meant the density difference between the bottom and the surface, has much to do with the fertility, or productivity, of the water body involved, so that the inflow of heat at one depth level, or in one region, can have very different effects from the heat inflow at other depths or in other geographic regions. But it is too early yet to present these problems in a book of this sort, whose purpose is general, public, and preliminary. Next on the list of fresh-water troubles comes eutrophication, a word unknown to the public two years ago, now in every newspaper almost every week. As a description of a process of pollution it is an unfortunate term, at least to those who recognize the first syllable as Greek for well, or something good. The word means simply the increase in production of living matter, or in nutrition, which on the face of it ought to be something to be wished. The trouble comes when the increase in production overshoots the mark. When fertilizer, normally in the form of phosphates and nitrates, is added in carefully calculated amounts to a lake or a stream, the growth of plants, both planktonic and benthonic (plants on the bottom) is enhanced, just as it is on land when fertilizer is spread. When it is added in very large amounts, too large for the system to absorb, the growth of plants overshoots the point at which it can be balanced by the feeding of herbivorous animals in the water, or the animal population itself may rise to densities greater than the system can manage. When this happens, the dead organic matter that accumulates (particularly in the winter) decays, and in doing so uses up a great deal of oxygen. By degrees this process produces an anoxic lake, one in which most of the deeper water is anoxic all the time. The destruction of fish and much of the inver-

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tebrate life becomes extreme, causing the disappearance of all life, or of all except a few species which can tolerate the low, oxygen concentrations. At the same time the ability of the lake to oxidize potentially harmful substances from other sources is greatly decreased, so that for purposes of fishing, swimming, or even boating the lake is ruined. To this dreadful process we give the pleasant Greek name of eutrophication. Thoreau once wrote that "a lake... is the earth's eye, on looking into which the beholder measures the depths of his own nature." Thoreau guessed better than he knew. This account of the effects of fertilizing, and of the causes of eutrophication, has been accepted for decades and as part of the scientific orthodoxy. This does not mean that it is true; Thomas Henry Huxley, in the last century, once said that a scientific truth began as a heresy and ended up as a myth. But I do not think that the presently accepted facts of the effects of the overfertilization of lakes have reached the stage of myth. In view of this it is interesting to find that a magazine called Canadian Research and Development, clearly supported by industrial interests, has devoted a special issue (March/April 1970) to denying this relation. The magazine attempts to show that the factor which determines the excessive growth of life in the process of eutrophication is not nutrient (fertilizer), but "carbonaceous material," by which apparently is meant, ultimately, carbon dioxide.* Carbon dioxide is indeed necessary for the photosynthetic activity of plants. This process involves the interaction of carbon dioxide and water, with energy from the sun in the presence of enzymes associated with the green pigment, chlorophyll, to form sugar (glucose) and oxygen. So far so good. But to build their own tissues plants need inorganic nutrients, such as phosphates, nitrates, and silicates. Whereas there is usually no critical shortage of carbon dioxide in the environment, the growth of plants in the spring of the year normally depletes the environment of these inorganic nutrients, so that these fertilizers become what are known as The article in Canadian Research and Development has been very adequately answered and countered by Dr. J. R. Vallentyne in the May-June 1970 issue of the same journal.

SUNLIGHT air

CO2

1 02

water Photosynthesis — I CO2 111 t

Plant growth and 4 respiration

+

+ energy in presence —+ glucose

+ 021

of chlorophyll I