Michael Riordon

the view from where I live

Tag Archives: Bold Scientists


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“They cannot stop me from talking.”

Scientists Biased, Talk Too Much: Confidential government memo.

Details here, in Blacklock’s Reporter: minding Ottawa’s business, August 11, 2014.

Tar sands 2Tar sands, Alberta, Canada.  Photo: The Nation.

The primary target of the confidential memo, John Smol, is a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, a widely acclaimed paleolimnologist (fathoming the life stories of lakes), and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change.

Why does the Harper government want to silence John Smol and his co-researchers?  Because they know too much.  The current regime in Ottawa is an aggressive booster of the enormously destructive tar sands colossus, and is determined to keep Canadians strictly on message: tar sands = good for Canada, with minimal harm.  Period.  Trouble is, their message keeps getting shredded by the findings of honest science.

Why won’t John Smol shut up?  He knows too much:

“The huge problem is that many environmental problems are long scale.  They can take years, decades to show up – or longer, sometimes I work in centuries, even millennia.  But politicians think in terms of four years, at best.  Look at the tar sands – go ahead, pump it out as fast as you can, we’ll be out of here in four years, what do we care?  Industry is even worse, they think in quarters, 90-day intervals.  Costs for the future are horrendous, but they’re not in this fiscal cycle.  When things go extinct, they’re extinct forever.  You destroy a river system, it’s gone. Destroy a fish population, it’s gone.  How do you gauge what that’s worth?”

Delve into John Smol’s research, paleolimnology, and why he speaks out, in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science.  Available September 4, 2014, in print and e-book from Between the Lines.


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Greta Garbo

DSCF2288Photo: MR, August 18, 2014

This morning, a Great Spangled Fritillary visited our garden.  Probably a female, according to The Butterflies of Canada, which says males are bright orange, females subtler.  (I’m open to correction.)

Although I kept a respectful distance, at least ten feet, each time I shifted to a better angle she disappeared.  Then finally she permitted a single photo.  I call her Greta Garbo.

Yesterday a Monarch visited.  Only one, but given their perilous state, one is 100% better than none.  I watched it feed for almost an hour on Brazilian verbena, verbena bonariensis.

A tip: Though it rarely appears on how-to-attract-butterflies plant lists, these tall, dignified plants with tiny purple flowers draw many more visitors than any other plant in our garden.  Brazilian verbena self-seeds lavishly, but doesn’t crowd its neighbours.

Perhaps the monarch will return.  And Greta Garbo.

For more on how gardens illuminate our ambiguous place in nature, science and power, see Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science. Available September 4, 2014, from Between the Lines.


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Whole food for free-range minds

Available September 4, 2014

Bold Scientists, front coverCritical comment:

“A gripping tale of heroic scientists working in the public interest despite powerful
opposition.  At once, both tremendously hopeful and profoundly disturbing.  The world
needs more bold authors like Michael Riordon.”

 Thomas Duck, Associate Professor, Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science,Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

“Silence is consent, my fellow scientists. Riordon’s profiles in courage encourage us to take our data and our voices into the gladiator’s arena and engage in the great moral and political battles of our time.  As Bold Scientists so clearly shows, it’s where we belong.”

Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment; co-founder, Concerned Health Professionals of New York

The menu/chapters:

When the river roared.   First Nations, a long view.
Digging thistles.   An experimental post-oil farm.
A dialogue with the world.   Biology, from the ground up.
Blood on my hands.   Life and death in the garden.
Stolen children.   In El Salvador, war, genes and human rights.
The Cloud.   Watching Big Brother.
ODD.   Psychology and power
Awe.   The wisdom of a spider web.
Pesky data.   Under lakes, dark truths.
The unsolved problem.   Fracking: homeland insecurity.
When the lights go out.   Awakening in an ice storm.
No time for cowardice.   An elemental fight for science and democracy.

Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science

Now:

  • Pre-order it from independent bookstores and Chapters/Indigo stores across Canada.

After September 4th:

    • Purchase or order Bold Scientists from local retailers or libraries across Canada.
    • Purchase it directly from the publisher, Between the Lines, online (within Canada) at http://btlbooks.com/book/bold-scientists, or by phone toll-free at 1-800-718-7201.
    • Purchase online through Amazon.
    • Internationally, the book will also be available via Central Books Ltd:  orders@centralbooks.com / centralbooks.com. (Tel) +44 20 8986 4854.

Unspun science for dangerous times


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Google: a slippery slope

“Who’s to say, now that Google has become an arm of law enforcement, how long that arm will reach?  I mean, can we really trust a giant transnational corporation to have our best interests at heart?”  Thom Hartmann, The Daily Take, via Truthout, August 06 2014.

Good questions.

Google spies

Bloomberg News, a US business paper, August 2013: “The government uses corporations to circumvent its prohibitions against eavesdropping domestically on its citizens. Corporations rely on the government to ensure that they have unfettered use of the data they collect.”

As Thom Hartman notes, “we can all agree that child porn is a bad thing.”  But then who’s next?  Recent exposures of NSA tactics by Edward Snowden and others have made clear that the surveillance state and its corporate partners will grab everything they can, then they decide later who and what is good or bad.

In Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, I asked David Lyon about the comforting mantra that if we’ve done nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear.  Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, Lyon replied:  “The idea that I’m innocent until proven guilty is seriously compromised if I’m placed arbitrarily in a category of suspicion, and the reassuring notion that if I have nothing to hide I have nothing to fear is completely falsified when my name is put on a list about which I know nothing.”

Take this blog, for example.  Its purpose is to share news and questions about how science is done, and what impacts it has on nature and humanity.  But what’s to stop Google from deciding that a blog critical of Google should be shut down?

There are alternatives to the giant trawler called Google.  None of them is 100% secure, but at least some browsers are less inclined to sell us all to the highest bidder.  One example: DuckDuckGo.  And others.

So who cares, some say.

David Lyon again:  “Indifference is appropriate only for those who think that efficiency, convenience and speed qualify as values to be placed over openness, fairness, and the accountability of those whose task it is to process personal data.”

Join David Lyon in tracking the trackers.  Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, coming September 4, 2014 from Between the Lines.