it’s my pleasure to be here today and I
appreciate the invitation to talk to you
the first thing I’d like to do is I’d
like to thank the people and the
communities that I have worked with in
the North for welcoming me welcoming me
to their homes and to their land and I’d
also like to thank the First Nations
peoples whose land we’re meeting on
today I’m an environmental scientist and
I’ve been studying mercury in the
environment for almost 20 years I
studied water quality I study the
impacts that we have on ecosystems and
because of the kindness and generosity
of a colleague of mine I had the
opportunity to visit a part of Canada
that I’d never been to before this year
spent time in the North but not the
North North you know not the Yukon
Territories not Nunavut not the
northwestern all three of which I saw
this year in the process of doing that I
also discovered why I do what I do I’ve
been a professor for 15 years and it’s
never been fully clear to me what my
underlying motivation is this is Luke
Duke in a community of about 1,500
people
that’s the Arctic Ocean right there so
it’s it’s pretty far north a lot farther
north than most people have been and it
certainly was the farthest north I had
ever be my sign it’s a place that you
can imagine is pretty connected to the
land it’s a place that it’s underlined
by frozen ground permafrost atom I don’t
know my timer here can you cue me please
keep me at 15 it’s underlined by frozen
ground you can see the houses are all up
on stilts because the ground is covered
under lying by permafrost you can’t put
things on the ground real sticky that
this is just at the end of the day
difference getting out of school the
place that’s really connected to the
land it’s a place that’s remote most
supplies come in by barge it’s expensive
people hunt fish people rely on the land
for their day-to-day well-being they
rely on land for their subsistence they
feed themselves and they sustain their
they fish a lot this is a picture of
drying our thick char that’s a staple
diet there and the reason why land food
from the land and food from the local
waters is so important because this well
pack of coke is 20 bucks right fresh
food fresh vegetables meats things like
this at the part refrigeration and
shipping are unbelievably expensive and
when your annual income is in the order
of hundreds to thousands of dollars
that’s it this is a luxury item
this isn’t staple food this is what so
think about if this is threatened right
think about if that source of staple
subsistence food that keeps you going is
threatened I’m going to present this to
you as a risk and I’m gonna try and
paint a picture of risk to know there
are communities both in terms of
environment social that hopefully we can
become engaged in and you can give some
thought about how you might participate
we all know what risk is and I’d like us
to think about risk rather than problems
problems require solutions risks
requires management I think it’s risk is
something that we all are familiar with
yeah we have risks that we deal with
every day and we understand risk
management we make decisions about what
we’re gonna eat what we’re gonna buy who
we’re gonna talk to we’re gonna spend
our time those risks can be kind of
non-life-threatening you know maybe I
want to eat this chocolate bar because
it tastes good but then I’m worried
about my caloric intake or maybe I have
to trust this server because they’ve
told me there’s no peanuts in this dish
but I might die right these are risk
trade-off that we’re constantly
these are pretty straightforward risk
these are simple risks these are ones
that we know what the driver is we know
what the consequences are and we can
manage them because we understand those
we can manage them statistically
insurance companies love these kinds of
risks car accidents you know the
likelihood of having heart attack based
on your age and lifestyle these are
relatively simple risks but the reality
in the environment is that risks are not
nearly so straightforward
they are risks that have complexity they
have interdependencies they have a
social context they’re definitely
involve multiple or groups of people if
they’re multi stakeholder and they
involve the social dimension all of
these things together contribute to high
levels of uncertainty about how to
handle these how to manage them in a
meaningful way that we can deem
acceptable or at least tolerable to the
people who are these are often referred
to as systemic risks there’s a really
interesting body of literature about
risk cutoff there that I find
fascinating because what it does it
speaks to all of the things that come
together to help us understand risk
related to complex environment certainly
one of the big issues is that there’s a
huge amount of complexity because of
interrelationships of the economy of
society and social questions and
environmental a huge amount of
uncertainty associated with these
problems that involve the environment
because we don’t understand the
environment very well may as much work
as we do on it and even I can get myself
as an environmental scientist I feel
like I know nothing complexity over
space finally we have ambiguity about
the nature of the risk because those of
us sitting here at Western will view an
environmental risk very differently than
someone that is living on the coast of
the Arctic Ocean and so what I’m going
to paint for you today is a bit of a
discussion about two of those
kind of those major environmental risks
those challenges and have us think a
little bit about what role we can play
so this is what I do
here’s me up here I’m the environmental
scientist I get to go out to amazing
places to do the work that I do not
because I mean it’s an added bonus that
there beautiful places with beautiful
people but it’s just the it’s where some
of these complex problems are vested
right now beautiful Northwest
Territories where I was this summer this
tundra it’s a little bit dark but this
is this big flat expansive landscape
with the Arctic Ocean and the button in
the back this is up here on Kewanee Lake
and Yukon sampling for water quality
these are unbelievable opportunities and
but what drives me there what makes me
think about these problems are this
stomach the industrialization of our
modern world has presents us with some
of the most profound systemic risks that
we can imagine certainly the impacts on
the environment as a result of that’s
those drivers of that industrialization
of our world is global in scale in scope
we know this a climate change is
something that affects every part what
we often don’t think about is how
industrialization has also affected
things like food quality
industrialization has dispersed
contaminants like mercury around the
world in the same way that it’s
dispersed carbon dioxide around so we
have contamination of ecosystems and
foods which is how I’d like to start
reframing a fish to you it’s somebody’s
dinner and not by choice but by
necessity we have contamination of foods
that are really have nothing to do with
the people who need this the most it’s
driven by our global processes of
industrialization the same as climate
a little bit fast so the first example I
want to give to you is climate change in
the north so I’m going to frame these
problems from the northern perspective
for you Coppermine
River it’s not just a pretty picture
slideshow I’m trying to get you to think
about how beautiful these places are and
how important they are to to our world
not just here we are with an interesting
figure from the most recent IPCC the
occupied one glory with too much data
but this diagram is an interesting one
it tells us how much temperature
increase there will be in different
parts of the world relative to how much
warmer the world is going to be overall
so what this means that if the world is
gonna be two degrees warmer overall then
here we are in London we’re gonna be
about two degrees warmer than that so
the whole world is gonna increase by two
we’re going to increase by okay and you
can see that most of the high lap mid
latitudes are kind of about the same you
know everyone’s kind of hovering around
that we’re gonna increase about as much
as the rest of it if we go into the high
latitudes we’re talking anywhere between
four and six degrees warmer than the
rest of the world
so a lot of projections have by 2100 the
northern parts of our continent being
about eight to ten degrees warmer than
they are so the difference between being
one or two degrees warmer versus ten
degrees warmer it’s quite significant
particularly when you think about
people’s connection to the land and the
importance
snow precipitation is gonna do the same
thing right we don’t change that much we
increase a bit so per degree warmer the
earth is we’re gonna go out by about
three percent more rainfall and snow far
north it’s well over twelve percent more
so you might think that that’s good but
actually the North is really dry no more
snow and more rain actually really
changes the ecosystem quite a lot and it
also provides feedbacks into other
aspects of the environment so in the
north and climate change I mean there’s
all kinds of interacting things that are
gonna happen I’m highlighting a few of
them here for you we’re gonna have
warmer oils we have warmer waters
there’s gonna be more rain and snow and
that’s gonna lead to all kinds of
problematic things in the in the
environment permafrost thaw is one of
the big ones that I think we’re hearing
a lot more about these days this is what
it looks like this is a picture by my
colleague Scott Munroe from Queens
University it’s flying over Banks Island
this summer and all of these big bites
out of landscape is the frozen ground
thawing and just running off into the
ocean you know this is what happens when
we start thawing grounds been frozen for
tens of thousands of years this is a
sort of the ground image of what happens
in parts of Northwest Territories when
we saw the ground this is what forest
looks like when it’s frozen underneath
it’s perfectly fine pause in the summer
but it’s still frozen down deeper but
when it starts thawing permanently it
just turns into this sort of marshy wet
it’s totally different in terms of the
chemistry totally different in terms of
the carbon and it affects everything
else that it’s connected
it certainly affects things like mercury
so this is sang West Lake in the
Northwest Territories a very beautiful
small lake a really important Lake to
the gene resource nation that use it for
traditional fishing and they have done
for as long as anybody knows generation
after generation the problem is that the
footprint of industrialization has found
its way of course even to their fish
from sangwich lake above a certain size
that have certain species are no longer
safe for people to eat this is this is
this is a risk this because that’s a
risk cultural and social risk that I
don’t think we can fully imagine what
does that look like why is this well
mercury accumulates in fish humiliates
in fish as they get older and bigger so
when we have fish that are above a
certain size they start you know
increasing in mercury concentration this
is mercury concentration thank for those
of us in other parts of the country if
we want to go to the store and buy some
fish we’re not allowed to buy fish that
has concentrations above 0.5 parts
there’s lots of fish sank ways like that
have concentrations about 0.5 but of
course we don’t subsist on that fish
people there have to subscribe to this
limit because if you’re eating a lot of
it you can’t eat as much and you can’t
tolerate this basically means that
almost every fish bigger than this is in
some way shape or form a risk like that
signs posted around lakes that are
literally I mean in it for though for us
the middle no one to tell us that
mercury that are above consumption
guidelines and for example a child can
only one serving per month which is
equivalent to a pack of cards that’s not
a lot food that’s not a lot of protein
that means that food has to be derived
from other places which means we’re
starting to rely on other sources of
food that are maybe not certainly
non-traditional and certainly may not be
I’ve already presented these points to
you
warmer soils warmer waters more rain and
snow permafrost thaw as things that are
driving change in the north as a result
of climate change but these things also
affect mercury infection warmer soils
and warmer waters promote processes in
the landscape that make mercury more
available on to those organisms more
rain and snow results in more mercury
running off the landscape and into the
lakes which then further promotes
greater accumulation and permafrost thaw
takes this huge vault of contaminants
that have been stored in the landscape
and translates it into water that then
flows off the land off the land and into
lakes and rivers so all of these things
you know start to start to cause us to
under to question what’s happening here
so we have now an intersection of two
interesting and complex risk spheres
climate and contaminants both of them
being driven by an industrialization of
our globe but now interdigitating both
of them individually presenting risks to
northern residents and northern
ecosystems and then together presenting
a compounded risk that the complexity of
which and the interplay between all of
these factors becomes a little bit my
number and we start thinking about all
of the things that are going so let’s
return you know to our diagram that
speaks to the complexity and the
uncertainty of this process these are
our three spheres
we have our economy our environment we
have our social sphere we’re in the
social sphere I’m giving you the example
of food security and food sovereignty
for northern communities the
interdigitating the intersection of
these three Sisk spheres right here and
that’s the north those are the
communities that we’re talking about
that we’re not in that risk we’re not in
this nexus between all of these
somewhere here where we don’t have all
of these things laying on top of one
that you know cause us to have concern
so let’s give some thought to risk
governance instead of problem-solving
we’re gonna govern this risk we’re gonna
figure out what we need to do in order
to determine whether a risk that we
present somebody with is acceptable and
I posed the question well who is it that
determines whether the risk of climate
change is driven by globalization
industrialization who determines whether
that risk is acceptable or whether the
risk of mercury contamination to fish
that are staple service of our diamond
part of our diet who determines whether
that risk is acceptable I’m gonna I’m
gonna make the case that it’s everyone
it’s all of us it’s all of the
legitimate voices that need to take part
in this conversation it’s not us here
it’s not exclusively people in northern
communities it’s all of us that have
legitimate voices to participate most
oftentimes our wrists are not acceptable
okay tolerable maybe in which case we
get into a sphere of risk management we
start thinking about what we need to do
in order to keep that risk tolerable so
that it doesn’t get into the realm of
something or into intolerable risk is
the one that we can’t possibly continue
on this path we can’t continue on a path
whereby we are going to continue to
threaten our well-being as a society as
a society so I’m gonna make the case
that when we start thinking about risk
governance we all can contribute to the
governance of complex global risks we
all can play a role in this because we
all have something to contribute my
contributions are small they’re in one
area of environmental science where I’m
trying to address questions of
uncertainty in some specific things
related to mercury
but I’ve come to realize that what I’m
doing is contributing to a management or
governance of a set of complex systemic
risks that face communities and my
motivation is trying to understand that
on behalf of communities that don’t have
we can all equitably contribute and
include legitimate voices in this
conversation right those legitimate
voices include us they include people
who are living in other countries that
we’re pollution is is rising but it’s
also voices and legitimate concerns
raised by communities that are impacted
by these processes I who have had
nothing to do with
I think we can also all work together
especially in Canada to build trust and
consensus amongst all of the
stakeholders and all of the people who
are contributing their voices to this as
part of that trust and consensus is in
fact accepting and acknowledging so
here’s me I’m in the environment this is
what I do this is my little part myself
my students my colleagues go out and do
our best to inform what’s happening in
the environment through our science so I
ask you to consider where you are we all
have a role to play in understanding
these problems we don’t have to solve
them individually we don’t have to be in
charge of this whole process but we can
all be a player in understanding these
risks and that may simply be by having
an open mind and an open heart to the
legitimate voices that contribute to
you [Applause]