Canada is a nation of wild, legendary rivers. The Mackenzie, the Fraser, the Churchill, and dozens more all empty into our national identity. They flow through our landscape, history, and imagination. They are vital to any history textbook, Group of Seven exhibit, or gift-shop postcard rack.

Canada is also a nation of river-tamers. We revere our waterways—but we also dam them. Trudeau canoed the epic Nahanni and two years later presided over the opening of the mammoth Churchill Falls hydroelectric dam in Labrador. We are, as the Canadian Hydropower Association says, a “hydro superpower.” Almost 60 percent of our electricity supply comes from dams—compared to just 16 percent globally—and only China squeezes more electricity out of its rivers than we do.

The heyday of big dam construction in Canada began around the late 1950s. What followed was an exhibition of progress in the raw. Surveyors and bulldozers headed to the frontier. Mighty men tamed mighty rivers. Engineering prowess replaced natural grandeur.

As rock was blasted and cement poured, legacies were forged, both geographical and political. In Manitoba, the two largest rivers and three of the five largest lakes were dramatically re-engineered. In Quebec, 571 dams and control structures have altered the flow of 74 rivers.

The construction phase lasted through the ’80s, then slowed, even though the country’s hydro potential had only been half tapped. Now, after two decades of limited construction—with the exception of Hydro-Québec, which kept on building—the dam-builders are rumbling to life again.

In the next 10 to 15 years, Canadian utilities will spend $55 to $70 billion on new hydroelectric projects. This would add 14,500 megawatts to Canada’s existing 71,000 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity. Most new projects are in Quebec (4,570 MW), B.C. (3,341 MW), Labrador (3,074 MW), and Manitoba (2,380 MW). The largest of these, Labrador’s 2,250 MW Gull Island project, will produce as much power as 750 train locomotives.

The extent and cost of construction will vary over time, but one thing is certain: the push for more hydro is on.

Most of these projects are driven in large part by the prospect of exporting power to the U.S. American interest in hydropower is linked, in part, to its low cost and its low greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this context, the push for more hydro is also a push by the industry to position its product as an answer to climate change.

Jacob Irving heads the Canadian Hydropower Association, which represents the interests of the hydro industry. He says hydropower is “a very strong climate change solution,” because it can displace the use of coal and natural gas to generate electricity. The argument is simple and compelling: use more hydropower, use less fossil fuel. The industry especially touts exports of hydro to the U.S., where 600 coal-fired plants produce 45 percent of the nation’s electricity, with another 24 percent fuelled by natural gas. The CHA says hydro exports already reduce continental emissions by half a million tons a year. They want that number to grow.

Given the dire climate prognosis—emissions in Canada, the U.S., and everywhere else are well above levels in 1990, the year used as a benchmark in the Kyoto Accord—the urgency of reducing fossil-fuel consumption is great. Perhaps Canada’s wild rivers, if harnessed, can be our gift to a warming world. Maybe a concrete edifice nestled in a river valley is just as quintessentially Canadian as a lone paddler on a pristine river.

This presents a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scenario for Canadian utilities. They can build more dams—obviously still a cornerstone of the corporate culture—cash in on lucrative exports, and enjoy eco-hero status. But is damming more of our rivers an optimal strategy for addressing climate change?

Despite the virtues of hydro power, dams can only reduce emissions indirectly. Their climate value hinges in part on the extent to which they substitute for fossilfuel-fired generation, as opposed to displacing nuclear, wind, or other sources. Though displacement is hard to prove, Irving reasons that “were we not to be sending that electricity down to the United States, the next most logical source of generation to meet their load requirements would generally be natural gas and/or coal.” The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) actually predicts that over the next 25 years, 11 percent of new generation in the U.S. will be coal-fired and 60 percent natural gas (which is roughly half as bad as coal in terms of emissions).

In Canada, most new hydro projects are located in provinces with minimal fossil-fuel-fired generation, so limited displacement will happen here. Exceptions are Ontario, Labrador (where 102 MW will be displaced), Nova Scotia (which will import from Labrador), and possibly Saskatchewan, which could use hydro from Manitoba.

While the fossil-fuel displacement argument has obvious merit, it also has weaknesses. Utilities can argue that hydro exports help save the planet, but critics can say these exports just keep the most wasteful society on earth air-conditioned and recharged. They can say that hydro exports just feed an addiction with more and more cheap power, every kilowatt of which reduces the imperative to curb consumption. The basic argument is that reducing demand must be the obvious and dominant priority in energy policy, rather than endlessly ramping up supply.

Government agencies predict electricity demand in Canada will grow almost 10 percent between now and 2020, and in the U.S. by approximately 30 percent between now and 2035. Ralph Torrie says we can and must go in the opposite direction. “We could double the efficiency with which we use fuel and electricity in Canada,” he says. If you want to see how it’s done, he adds, “just take a vacation to Europe.” Torrie, whose energy expertise is internationally recognized, serves as managing director of the Vancouver-based Trottier Energy Futures Project. In contrast to Irving, who accepts that demand for electricity will grow, Torrie advocates a “new way of thinking about the energy future.”

“There is no demand for electricity,” he says. “Nobody wants a kilowatt hour in their living room.” We want the services that electricity can provide, and we must “focus on how we can best meet the underlying needs for amenity with less rather than more fuel and electricity.” That, he says, is the only hope for “anything we might call a sustainable energy future.”

“We waste half the hydro we produce,” says John Bennett, who heads the Sierra Club of Canada. The solution to climate change is “to use less energy,” he says. “That’s where the major investment should be.”

Torrie says large hydro is environmentally preferable to many forms of energy supply, but still, reducing demand can achieve the same thing at a lower cost, and without the decade-long turnaround time for planning and construction. He views conservation as a resource. “There’s almost always a kilowatt of electricity that can be saved for a smaller cost than building the ability to generate a new kilowatt.” Plus, the resource gets bigger with every new innovation in efficiency. As Torrie puts it, “The size of the resource goes up every time somebody has a bright idea.”

Cutting electricity demand by half would include a range of technologies, including LED lighting, sensor-driven smart controls that reduce daytime lighting in buildings, and continued improvements to virtually every device that uses electricity.

But even if we as a continent cut our energy use by half, we still need some energy—and should not a maximum amount of that come from low-emission hydro? Can’t conservation and new hydro be dual priorities?

According to energy consultant Phillipe Dunsky, total spending on efficiency and conservation programs in Canada is only about $1 billion per year. Despite that, Jacob Irving says, “energy conservation has to be forefront of all decisions.” Then he adds a caveat: “There’s a lot of analysis that says energy consumption will grow, and so we need to be ready for that.” Whether demand shrinks or expands, the simple prohydro argument—more hydro equals less fossil fuel— still stands.

But for Tony Maas, who works for the Canadian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, it’s not that simple. He says new hydro projects must be part of an overarching plan for “net reduction in GHG emissions.” He cites Ontario’s Green Energy Act as an example of a plan that commits to overall GHG reduction.

But, as John Bennett points out, “we don’t have a North American plan to reduce emissions,” so new hydro projects “can’t be part of that plan.” The EIA predicts that without policy change, coal use as well as GHG emissions from electricity generation, will continue to increase over the next 25 years. Bennett says building more dams to meet increasing demand is like doubling the fuel efficiency of cars so that people can drive twice as much.

In a release this April, Hydro-Québec, Canada’s largest generator and exporter of hydropower, said, “The major environmental challenge facing North America is to replace coal to generate power and oil used in transportation.” While climate change may be the “major” environmental challenge of the day, it is not the only one. Just because hydro dams do not have highly visible carbon-spewing smoke stacks does not necessarily make them environmentally friendly. Behind the question of whether dams are a climate solution lies a more fundamental question: is hydro actually clean, as utilities and governments regularly assert?

Jacob Irving says, “When people refer to [hydro] as clean, it’s in the context of air emissions.” But rarely is this specified. The categorical use of the term by utilities, without caveat or qualification, is misleading. Tony Maas says he gets “nervous” when hydro is called clean because “it almost implies there are no impacts.” But dams harm the environment. A dam is not an environmental improvement or solution for a watershed.

One of the main impacts is the disruption of the natural “flow regime” in a waterway. Maas says the natural fluctuations in water levels are the “master variable in organizing a river ecosystem,” giving key “cues” to other species. Thus, a WWF report says, “Dams destroy the ecology of river systems by changing the volume, quality, and timing of water flows downstream.” The evidence of this is visible in dammed Canadian rivers, as it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars paid to mitigate and compensate for damages caused by dams. Manitoba Hydro alone has spent over $700 million to address damages from its “clean” hydro projects.

The WWF takes a more nuanced approach. It says some hydro projects can be built without unacceptable harm, but its 2011 global energy plan still “severely restrict[s] future growth of hydro power to reflect the need for an evolution that respects existing ecosystems and human rights.”

Similarly, a 2011 report about Canada’s boreal forests by the Pew Environment Group considers both pros and cons of hydro. In a section about hydro called “How Green Is It?”, the report says:

Although [hydro dams] are comparatively low carbon emitters in comparison to many conventional energy sources, hydropower projects have resulted in significant impacts to wildlife habitat, ecological processes and aboriginal communities.

In a later section, the report states:

While it is clear that allowing our societies to be powered by carbon fuels is not sustainable, this does not mean that alternative or renewable energy sources can simply be viewed as having no cost whatsoever.

The report, entitled “A Forest of Blue,” does not offer a simple verdict. Rather, it says, “We must understand as many of the implications and complexities of the issues as possible.” The candour and openness to complexity demonstrated in the report are exactly what is needed in the assessment of any climate-change strategy.

In keeping with the Pew report’s frank and thorough nature, it also discusses the role Aboriginal peoples play in hydro development. This is an essential part of any discussion of hydropower in Canada since virtually all hydro projects occupy lands to which First Nations have rights. In the past, Aboriginal people vehemently (and mostly unsuccessfully) opposed major dams. That has changed: in some cases Aboriginal opposition has succeeded. The $5 billion, 1,250 MW Slave River project in Alberta has been “deferred” after project proponents were unable to reach a deal with Smith’s Landing First Nation last year.

The proposed Site C Dam, a 1,100 MW, $7.9 billion project planned for the Peace River in B.C., faces resolute opposition from four First Nations in the area. But the outcome of that David-and-Goliath battle will not be know for some time.

Elsewhere, opposition has given way to participation—David and Goliath have become allies. Most recently, members of the Innu Nation in Labrador voted in June to allow the massive Lower Churchill River projects—Muskrat Falls (824 MW) and Gull Island (2,250 MW)—to proceed. In exchange, the 2,800 Innu receive $5 million per year to assist with their process costs during and prior to construction, up to $400 million in contracts during construction, and share of project profits thereafter (5 percent of “After Debt Net Cashflow”).

The broad Tshash Petapen (New Dawn) Agreement, in which these provisions are contained, also includes an agreement in principle on land claims and $2 million a year as compensation for damages related to the existing Upper Churchill Falls dam.

Meanwhile, the Inuit (distinct from the Innu), who are concerned about downstream impacts in their territory, say they have been largely left out of the process.

In Quebec, the James Bay Cree receive over $100 million a year in hydro, forestry, and mining royalties as a result of the 2002 Peace of the Braves agreement. In it they consented to the Eastmain-1-A/Sarcelle/Rupert Project (918 MW) while securing the permanent abandonment of the Nottaway-Broadback-Rupert project, which would have flooded 6,000 square kilometres.

First Nations near proposed dam sites in Manitoba have been offered lump-sum compensation packages, along with the opportunity to invest in projects. For instance, the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, with its 4,500 members, will be entitled to a third of the profits of the nearly completed Wuskwatim Dam if they can come up with a third of the $1.3 billion cost of the dam. They also benefit from $60 million of employment training.

In June, four other First Nations joined Manitoba Hydro in announcing the start of construction on the 695 MW, $5.6 billion Keeyask dam. Like Nisichawayasihk, they will be offered the chance to invest in the dam, as well as employment opportunities.

What’s clear in all these cases is that Canadian utilities cannot ignore Aboriginal demands. “We can stop development,” says Ovide Mercredi, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations and the recently retired Chief of the Misipawistik Cree Nation in northern Manitoba. His community sits right next to the 479 MW Grand Rapids Dam, which floods 115,700 hectares. In reference to the water flowing through that dam, Mercredi’s message to the province is simple: “That’s not your water, it belongs to our people and we want a share of that money.” The dam’s 50-year provincial licence expires in 2015 and Mercredi wants licence renewal to be contingent on public acknowledgement of the harm, increased mitigation of damages, and a revenue-sharing agreement. In part, the message is that if utilities do not deal with Aboriginal concerns now, they will have to later.

Whether First Nations are defiant or eager for new dams to power their economic future, the broader environmental questions remain. While Aboriginal influence has led to a reduction in the size of dams and increased environmental mitigation, and First Nations consent improves the general ethical perception of a project, there is still no tidy way to pour thousands of tons of cement into a river.

No matter who is involved, the merit of the case for hydro as a climate solution can be tested by the assumptions it rests on. These assumptions are that hydro is clean; that demand for electricity will grow; and that the primary alternative to more hydro is fossil-fuel generation. Are these solutions part of the solution or the problem?

Ultimately, the solution to climate change, as well as to watershed health, may never be found unless we move past these assumptions and replace them with better, more accurate premises.

First, dams are not green or clean in themselves. To disrupt the flow of a river and blaze a transmission corridor through kilometres of forest is, in itself, bad for the biosphere. To solve one environmental problem (global warming) with another (pouring hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cement in a free-flowing river) is counterintuitive. That said, desperate circumstances may require desperate measures.

Second, energy demand can and must be substantially reduced. The logical outcome of letting demand increase indefinitely and meeting that demand with ever more hydro and other renewables is to have every river dammed, the landscape saturated with wind and solar farms, and consumption still increasing. The ultimate, unavoidable solution is to use less energy. This must be the dominant priority.

Finally, dams do not reduce GHG emissions per se. They increase energy supply. Apart from a demonstrated continental commitment to dramatically reduce emissions (and energy demand), the case for hydro as a climate solution is, for the industry, a rather convenient truth. Hydropower can’t be part of the climate-change solution if there is no solution.

Climate change is one of humanity’s greatest challenges, and to address it we may need to conjure greater creativity than just reviving electricity generation megaprojects conceived of decades ago. Dan McDermott of the Sierra Club’s Ontario Chapters says, “The age of big dams is over.” According to him, hydro proponents “have their heads turned backwards attempting to mortgage the future to maintain the past.”

The large hydro projects currently in the works were envisioned before global warming concerned anyone, in an era summed up by former Manitoba premier Duff Roblin when he rose in the legislature in 1966 and prophesied a grandiose future for hydropower, saying, “We can have our cake, we can eat it and we can make a bigger cake, and sell part of that.”

Though hydro prospects are framed differently now, dam proponents still appear to share Roblin’s belief in limitless, consequence-free development. Now the question of whether taming more of our iconic rivers will help the climate becomes a question of whether Roblin was right.

TerraCycle products made from garbage (from left): backpack made from Capri Sun packets; messenger bag made from Oreo wrappers; tote made from potato chip bags.

The Claim

Supporters of “upcycling”— turning garbage into funky purses, photo frames, jewelry, and more—say it’s a great way to minimize what’s going into our mountainous landfills. But just how truly green is this practice?

The Investigation

One company that’s been making waves in the world of upcycling is TerraCycle. Partenered with such big businesses as Kraft, TerraCycle proudly embraces the “eco-capitalism” label.

Currently, it mostly turns unrecyclable drink pouches into backpacks, tote bags, and pencil cases. Since there’s nothing else that can be done with this silver heavy-duty packaging, TerraCycle’s brightly coloured upcycled products are “turning a negative into a positive,” says company spokesperson Brian Young. TerraCycle also donates two cents for every pouch it collects to the charity or school of your choice.

It’s all very warm and fuzzy, so it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger problem: why are we creating so much garbage in the first place?

Then there’s upcycling’s carbon footprint when it’s scaled up. TerraCycle, based in New Jersey, collects juice pouches from across North America and ships them to a variety of manufacturing centres in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and across Asia. The finished products are then shipped back across the continent to big-box retailers.

While TerraCycle does ship by train when possible as part of its plan to minimize its environmental impact, all this continent-crossing leaves the same type of hefty carbon footprint typically associated with any large-scale manufacturer.

To deal with this downside, upcycling should be the purview of local projects, says Jesse Lemieux, a sustainability expert and founder of Pacific Permaculture. He believes that people need to be taught how to deal with the waste in their immediate surroundings, rather than having large companies take care of it for them.

“I appreciate that people are coming up with creative solutions to garbage,” he adds. “There’s more and more of a need for this. But the whole system has to change. Unless we address that, all of this is just a Band-Aid.”

The Verdict

We agree with Lemieux. Upcycling is a symptom, not a cure. While there’s no doubt TerraCycle and other upcyclers are diverting trash from landfills, our real focus—as individuals and as voters— should be less on how to prettify our garbage and more on how to stop creating it. Of the three Rs, “reduce” remains the most important.

The billions of dollars and years of research that NASA has spent studying Mars may have finally yielded some results here on Earth.

Earlier this year, NASA scientists told the UN water conference in Egypt that they could use radar technology originally developed to search for water beneath Mars’ surface to find H2O buried up to a kilometre beneath the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. Such equipment could help ease global water shortages and avoid future conflicts over water supply, Dr. Essam Heggy, a planetary scientist and a member of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told gathered delegates. Scans of Darfur, he added, show that the entire region sits atop a series of dried lakes and valleys that are 6,000 years old, suggesting there may be underground aquifers that could be tapped for water.

Don’t grab the straws yet, though.

“Certainly having a larger water supply could—if used wisely—reduce the level of conflict,” says Professor Dan Shrubsole, chair of the geography department at the University of Western Ontario and a specialist in water management. “But in terms of ensuring that the water is wisely and efficiently used? That’s another question.”

And it’s an important one to ask. Just digging up more water—instead of tackling the root cause of our global water shortages—is hardly the most responsible route. And as a concept, drilling miles into the earth to extract its valuable fluids—ahem, see the BP Gulf oil disaster—seems less credible by the day.

Fact is, we waste a lot of water. UNESCO estimates that up to 90 percent of water used globally is consumed by agriculture and industry, and much of it is wasted. According to the Stockholm International Water Institute, up to half of all water used to produce food worldwide is wasted through inefficient irrigation techniques, or leaking pipes and crumbling infrastructure. We’re literally pouring billions of litres of water down the drain.

Shrubsole also warns that NASA’s plan to connect surface water systems over national borders could elevate tensions between water-starved nations, leading to conflicts over who owns the rights to the water, and where. Governments need to take the initiative to establish ground water management regimes that are transprovincial, trans-state, and transnational, he stresses. Unless that happens, Shrubsole is doubtful that just drilling for more water could avert resource conflicts. “There are lots of conflicts over water now,” he says, “And there will be lots of conflict over water in the future.”

Tony Maas

Tony Maas is WWF-Canada’s national advisor on freshwater policy and planning. He will be speaking about how organization can expose, assess, and mitigate their “water risk” at the Canadian Water Summit in Toronto on June 17.

Alixandra Gould: What is the biggest threat facing the health of fresh water in Canada today?

Tony Maas: Just one? A lot of the impact on water resources is very local in nature. But writ large, one factor or challenge that we face, that cuts across anywhere in Canada and the world, is the implications of climate change. Climate change will, in some cases, lead to changes in availability and demand for water. It’s changing the context of water management.

Alixandra Gould: WWF-Canada seeks to reduce demand for fresh water while maintaining strong economies. How exactly do you accomplish that?

Tony Maas: One of the most important ways is by recognizing that money can be made by reducing our use of fresh water — if we’re smart about it. There are a lot of technologies that are based on being more efficient with water resources. Those technologies range from smarter irrigation systems for agriculture to municipal systems where we’re capturing rain water, and systems for treating water quality as well.

Alixandra Gould: You co-authored Changing the Flow: A Blueprint for Federal Action on Freshwater. Can you tell us a bit about that blueprint?

Tony Maas: That blueprint is a very comprehensive look at the many things the federal government can and ought to be doing to complement things at the provincial level where water management is more prominent. But the federal government has some very clear authorities and opportunities to provide for a much more robust water management system across the country. A good example of what the federal government could and should be doing, and seems to me more and more backing away from, is collecting data on water availability and water use. They’re getting a bit better on water use, doing industrial surveys and things like that, but much of the science and monitoring that the fed government used to do is falling by the wayside.

Alixandra Gould: What do you think of charging people more for water? Do you think that would change behavior on a mass scale and create an incentive for people to conserve more?

Tony Maas: Yes, but I don’t think it’s a silver bullet. It’s not qualified. It doesn’t mean that if we raise the price of water everything will be okay. The devil in the details — and it’s not really that devilish at all — is that it’s not about the price necessarily. It’s about how to create the pricing structure to better reflect the value of fresh water. One of the key things is a “life line.” You provide a municipality with a certain amount of water, of good quality, for a very low cost or no cost at all. The first 50-100 litres that come out of your tap each day are free, or very low cost. Then you increase the cost to the user as their water usage rates go up. That’s referred to as an increasing block rate.

Alixandra Gould: Irrigated agriculture accounts for 70 per cent of all water used by humans. How do you reduce the amount of water used on Canadian farms?

Tony Maas: This is one of the things we’re really going to have to bump up against in short order, especially in the breadbasket of this country in the prairies where scarcity this year is a very good example of challenging times. It’s a tiered response. The first is looking to technology — smarter irrigation systems, timed irrigation when it’s required most for the crops to be able to provide a product that’s suitable and desirable for market. The next level of consideration needs to be a bit more forward and must start asking the difficult questions about what are the most productive ways of using the limited water we have available. Of what crops are of higher value that provide a stable, reliable, and reasonable income for farmers that may take less water to grow? Pulse crops in Saskatchewan are being looked at as very valued crops because there’s a growing export market for pulses. That’s lentils and other legumes. They’re being looked at in places like China and India, because their populations are growing beyond their capacity to grow their own. So you may be talking about shifting from irrigating a field of alphalpha to feed to beef as your end product, to shifting more of that to pulse foods that are less water intensive and also provide for good economic opportunities for the economic sector.

Alixandra Gould: It’s your job to advocate WWF-Canada’s positions and perspectives on freshwater in government relations. What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced?

Tony Maas: At the federal level, there’s largely a hands-off approach. There’s an attitude that it’s not a priority for them. For decades now, the federal government has been deferring to the provinces. What that means is some stuff doesn’t get done because the provinces only have a certain capacity.

Alixandra Gould: Which province has been the most difficult?

Tony Maas: I certainly haven’t advocated governments across the country, but I think there are interesting opportunities right now in B.C. as they go through their water act modernization process. In Ontario, they’re looking at this water opportunities and water conservation act, but the details are still coming. Alberta is certainly a challenging place to work, and it’s been challenging for us. I try to maintain some optimism, but a I do believe that with continuing pressure, particularly when citizens voice their perspectives on this, then we can make moves in ways that reform Alberta water policy that protects water for nature but also provides water for economy.

Alixandra Gould: Beijing aims to reuse 100 percent of its waste water by 2013. Is an effort like this possible in some of Canada’s major cities?

Tony Maas: Well, you’re not talking to an engineer, so I’ll qualify that. So I guess my answer becomes very simple. If a city the scale of Beijing can make that happen, then certainly major cities in Canada could make that happen.

Alixandra Gould: Where should the limited financial resources we have be directed to make the biggest impact possible?

Tony Maas: It depends where you are. In the prairies, the limited resources have to go to looking into how to reform agricultural production in that part of the world, and the water allocation system, in ways that ensure we maintain economic activity but put water back into the South Saskatchewan basin, because it’s dangerously close to drying up. In the great lakes basin, endangered species is one of the greatest concerns.

Alixandra Gould: Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute in Seattle told National Geographic that we will inevitably solve our water problems. Do you agree?

Tony Maas: You’re making me say I’m an optimist twice in one interview! Yes, I think we will solve it. It’s on us to be pushing our governments to be stepping up. It’s one of the biggest questions of the 21st century.

Sugar palms are one of the crops that make up the plantation. Photo by Shawn Thompson.

Halfway around the world, on the eastern side of the island of Borneo, near the oil city of Balikpapan, a new tropical rainforest is being created out of what was once a poisonous wasteland. It is a story of radical loss and recovery for an entire ecosystem in a relatively short time. Only a century ago the rainforest was disparaged as “jungle,” wild and ripe for exploitation by the willing and the unscrupulous, its vitality apparently endless and unassailable. As part of that, in Borneo, near a town called Samboja, the land was ravaged by a lethal succession of mining, logging, slash-andburn farming, drought, and fires. Trees were cut down or burned. Alang-alang grass took root and secreted cyanide into the earth. The birds and animals disappeared. The sky was empty, dry. People could no longer make a living from the land. There was malnutrition. The life expectancy plummeted. Crime spread.

It was a heartbreaking downward spiral. As in Africa, South America, and Asia, Borneo’s once lush tropical rainforest was shrinking rapidly, pulling an entire ecosystem down with it, including one of the planet’s four species of great apes, the orangutan, now threatened with extinction. The process of devastation at Samboja started with the discovery of crude oil a century earlier but accelerated as the logging industry moved in, chewing its way through the forest to plunder its bounty. Nothing was left but barren fields of grass—the perfect fuel for the wildfires that snuffed out what remained of the land in the 1980s, when an El Niño–induced drought swept across the island. Blackened stumps still stand as symbols of the conflagration.

It seemed hopeless at Samboja—but, today, a controversial initiative is attempting to reverse the ecological collapse that has destroyed the forest. The project is the brainchild of a Dutch scientist named Willie Smits, a forester, microbiologist, and founder of the world’s largest agency for the protection of orangutans, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation. Smits has a deep reverence for orangutans and so he launched this US$10-million project at Samboja designed to save the orangutans by saving Samboja’s rainforest. Smits, in his typically grand and ambitious way, is creating a model for a new kind of rainforest, one where people and wildlife can live harmoniously in an almost utopian symbiosis. Here, human beings, plants, and wildlife will exist together in a forest that sustains them both but preserves the fragile peace between humans and apes with a thorny barrier of salak palm trees. The orangutans get a home and food; the people regenerate the land that earns them a living.

The key to Smits’ vision is that human beings will have reason to protect the rainforest instead of just exploiting it. The new forest at Samboja could be an example to the world of a bulwark against the destruction of a species and, even more, the prototype for creating an entire ecosystem. Smits has such high hopes the project will endure that he named it Samboja Lestari—or “Samboja Forever.”

Dutch scientist Willie Smits with one of the Samboja orangutans. Photo by Cees Bosveld.

Eternity aside, there are more immediate concerns. Smits wants to preserve the diversity of a part of the natural world under severe stress—according to a 2007 Greenpeace report, Indonesia, which encompasses most of Borneo, has the highest rate of deforestation in the world. Smits believes his ambitious scheme can do a better job of sustaining both the local population and the local wildlife than traditional conservation methods. And yet Smits’ scheme is contentious and the science uncertain. His defiance of official and conventional thinking has created opposition—even within his own foundation. “The model I have developed is truly a model that can be modified for worldwide application,” Smits insists. “We can implement the techniques of Samboja in any place in the world. It is a recipe that is replicable.” If Smits’ project succeeds, it will be a miraculous accomplishment and a new symbol in a world where hope seems to be rapidly fading to reverse largescale environmental crises. But the big question still to be answered is whether Smits’ new ecological model is the best solution to deforestation—or just an expensive mirage.

The 53-year-old Smits is no idle dreamer, judging by the remarkable results so far at Samboja. I was there in 2004 while interviewing him for a book I was writing about orangutans and spent a week with him. It seemed that he was beyond ordinary things like food and sleep. Last summer, I went back to see the progress at Samboja Lestari.

Nature had returned. The hills that were once bare were flooded with trees. Where before there was nothing but grass and dirt across the project’s 1,850 hectares, frilly sugar palms had shot up alongside a diverse array of other tree species. Orangutans roamed on small islands and the distance between human and ape seemed to vanish for an instant. A mother orangutan was feeding a small child. A male gave me a bold look—and then quickly lost interest. A young orangutan was hauling himself through the leafy canopy on a rope. Officials from the project took me in a battered jeep to bounce along rutted and muddy roads to see the forest’s outer edge, where there are five villages with a total population of more than 10,000 people, some of them working to supply fruit and vegetables for the orphaned orangutans at Smit’s rehabilitation centre. Nanang Qasim, one of the project managers, told me the project tries to hire local people, rather than those from Balikpapan. It is the beginning of re-integrating a damaged natural community.

I talked to Muhammad Trafakhur Rochim, the Indonesian co-ordinator of human development for the project, who trains farmers from the villages. “They have a commitment to protect the land,” he said. “They really understand that this project is really important.” He said the contract to supply food for the orangutans is worth 125 million Indonesian rupiah a month (about $14,000) for a total of 150 people, and estimated the average monthly income for a worker in the villages is between one and two million rupiah.

I saw one truck come in loaded with melons for the orangutans and, in true Indonesian fashion, it stopped at a house just outside the preserve for a boy to pick a melon for his family, a gift from the red apes. The food was bound for orangutans confiscated by officials after they had been held captive illegally in homes, sometimes as though they were members of the family, at other times chained or held in cramped cages. The orangutans are quarantined and those who are not too sick to be released are rehabilitated for the forests. Those forests, however, have been reduced by logging. One of the three vets at the project, Dr. Siswiyani—with the single name that many Indonesians have—told me: “It’s difficult to find a release site for them because there is so much deforestation.” As we talked, a male orangutan named Sipur wandered nearby. “I love them all,” she said, echoing the kind of comment I heard so often from people who work with orangutans. “They are like humans, so I feel close to them.”

It is a critical time for a project like this, considering the endangered status of orangutans. Orangutans are only found in the wild in Borneo and Sumatra and most of that land is under the control of Indonesia. There are an estimated 60,000 orangutans left in the world, a number that is dangerously low and shrinking: close to 90 percent of the wild population was lost in the 20th century alone. The rainforests of Indonesia are decimated for palm oil plantations, which support consumer products such as cooking oil, biofuel, chocolate, ice cream, margarine, toothpaste, soap, cereal, and cosmetics. “There is not a single protected area in Indonesia that is not under threat,” says Smits. He believes his project can eventually support 2,000 people and 1,000 orangutans, the number of orangutans that many scientists think can create a self-sustaining population without inbreeding.

Melons are grown by local farmers to feed the orangutans. Photo by Shawn Thompson.

It is a task of incredible complexity (some would say scientific hubris) to recreate the diverse ecology of a tropical rain forest. And yet Smits seems to be accomplishing just that. The reconstruction of the ecosystem, as he explains it, needs nutrients and microorganisms that live in symbiosis with the roots, and it needs the right combination of the right trees, everything staged in the right sequence. The compost for the transformation—an elixir of life —comes from a recipe that Smits concocted to combat the hard, infertile soil. He mixed alang-alang grass, rotten wood, sawdust, rice husk, leaves, peels, and remains of fruits and manure from cattle and chickens with a microbiological agent he made from sugar and cow urine. Chalk and nitrogen were added to speed up the process, which takes less than three weeks to complete. Smits says the trees that were planted have created a microclimate that has lowered the average temperature in the forest by between 3 and 5C, increased cloud cover by approximately 12 percent, and improved rainfall by 20 percent. The project has small lakes and reservoirs, an eco-lodge, a sun-bear sanctuary, and a research centre where individual trees are monitored by satellite imaging. There are now over 1,200 species of trees, 137 species of birds, and nine species of primates at Samboja Lestari.

With all the changes, according to Smits, the health, contentment, and economy of the community have improved dramatically. A community of 2,000 Indonesians is being established through the local farmers, who are offered free land for agreeing to live harmoniously with the wildlife and to support the ecology of the forest. The farmers plant crops of pineapples, papayas, beans, and corn, and that list will be expanded to include bananas, cacao, and chilies. The farmers can harvest the sugar palms, which may someday be sold to the sugar refinery that the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation wants to build, and can also produce the material for ethanol to run a generating station. Smits wants to build schools for the farm community that will teach humanitarian principles and ecological practices.

He says that unless they build a forest that supports the local economy, the onslaught of logging will continue. So this new forest is designed to be protected by the people who make a living from it. “If you want to help orangutans, make sure the local people benefit,” he insists. “This forest can do so many small things that make the total sum much more.”

Not everybody is convinced by what Smits says. They have questions. They want details. They want to know why so many resources should be put into creating new forests, when efforts could go toward saving the existing ones. Erik Meijaard is one of those asking pointed questions. A conservation scientist with a background in biological anthropology, Meijaard has been working in

Indonesia for the past 18 years, including a stint in the 1990s under Smits. Meijaard says it remains unclear whether Samboja Lestari is a good idea that achieves results, and that the success will ultimately depend on the extent to which it can improve community livelihoods and achieve long-term financial stability. “That question remains unanswered,” he notes, “and will remain so for a few years, because that is the kind of time such projects need to be evaluated.” Meijaard raises other questions about the enormous cost of projects like Samboja, and their financial sustainability, too. He, like others, says that it is better to concentrate on projects that attempt to protect the remaining forests instead of trying to create new ones from scratch.

“Overall this is a good project with some real potential benefits for people, nature, and climate,” he says.

“But the question is how cost-effective and sustainable is it compared to other approaches.” Meijaard says that during his time with The Nature Conservancy, Indonesia had agreed to protect two limited forests, of 38,000 and 11,000 hectares respectively, holding between 500 and 750 wild orangutans. That is as safe as it gets in Indonesia, says Meijaard. He adds: “This is not a competition between two projects, but it does raise the question whether the far higher costs of Samboja Lestari justify its relatively limited benefits.”

According to Meijaard, the Samboja Lestari project is a reaction to the intensive illegal logging on the release sites where Smits’ organization had sent rehabilitated orphan orangutans—but without a clear indication of how many orangutans survived those circumstances. “So, the idea was to rebuild a forest from scratch, get local tenure issues sorted out from the start, deal with community conflict before it arises, and eventually have a safe haven for orangutans. But how many orangutans could the area harbour?” Despite Smits’ infectious optimism, Meijaard points out that the normal population of wild orangutans that a forest can support is much lower than the number planned for Samboja Lestari. “Can the forest provide enough resources for such high densities, or will it be more of a semi-wild population that relies on additional feeding and cannot be allowed to breed? And where would the population expand to?”

Smits thinks the obstacles can be overcome, that Samboja Lestari could hold 50 times more fruit trees than a natural forest, and support a near-miraculous 1,000 orangutans in a space where a conventional forest could normally support only 60. And yet even Smits is worried about how precarious the project is. “So far,” he says, “it is an experiment and I fear it can still go wrong.”

A mother and child at the Samboja Lestari orangutan preserve. Photo by Shawn Thompson.

There is a deeper meaning to the venture at Samboja Lestari. It is a critical time for rainforests and the life that depends on them, including ours, and Smits’ rainforest could encourage a pivotal shift in our thinking. If the idea of Samboja overcomes all the political and economic obstacles and proves to be workable, it could be part of a momentous change in our relationship with the natural world. The broad history of our interaction with the rainforest has been defined by our denigration of its strength and beauty. We have misunderstood it, reviled it, misused it. Now Smits wants to take a big leap forward with a radical recreation of a forest designed for human beings and wildlife alike.

Smits has seen what happens if we don’t dare to think big and act boldly. He told me about the dramatic effect the huge fires that swept across Kalimantan had on his thinking. They were the catalyst for Samboja Lestari. “We were busy trying to save as much forest as possible. One night we went to save my research plot from fire and drilled a water hole. When the first muddy water came out we were overrun by at least 10 wild boars that bumped us over and started to drink the muddy stream. There was a deer standing still and I could touch it and noticed its legs had burned. Then she fell.” The deer died soon after. “An owl sitting on a branch fell dead. Those pictures of what happens in those forests that are drying out—a process that is worsening with climate change—are some of the most dramatic images I still carry with me.” Smits says it is images like these that make him attempt the near-impossible. “In Samboja Lestari, when I stood on that barren hill in the afternoon, I was watching the most extreme consequences of those fires and forest destruction—the vastness of yellow grass, just grass eerily silent. Not even insects! I wanted to see a damp forest again and hear the voices of birds.”

MIT Professor Sheila Kennedy's solar-energy-producing textiles. Courtesy Sheila Kennedy.

Rick Mercer’s quip during the Copenhagen climate conference last December summed it up best: “So [Stephen] Harper flew to Copenhagen to have a club sandwich and hide in his room?”

The post-Copenhagen doldrums were still bringing us down when Thomas Auer, managing director of Transsolar, the German climate-engineering firm assigned to the Manitoba Hydro Place, stepped onto a stage at Toronto’s Interior Design Show in January to explain his vision on designing a world without oil. The future in sustainable architecture is about harnessing daylight and fresh air, he declared.

The theme that came up again and again in presentations from renowned engineers, architects, designers and futurists at IDS was if we are to kick our oil addiction, guilt-tripping us won’t work. But seduction through innovative design just might. As design guru Bruce Mau said, “I don’t believe we can succeed in sustainability without making it more sexy and beautiful.”

So imagine, for example, a beach house with billowing curtains that harvest sunlight and convert it to energy— enough to juice up your laptop or illuminate your bedroom at night. Sheila Kennedy, architect, inventor and MIT prof, has done just that. Her sensuous textiles (including lace) are implanted with ultra-thin photovoltaic strips that produce electricity when exposed to light.

For Fritz Haeg, desirable objects took a backseat to the human condition. A geodesic-dome-dwelling architect based in California, Haeg says the story of oil is one of disconnection. There was a time when we used the resources immediately within our reach and dealt with our waste locally as well, Haeg says, but oil took this away and unintentionally led to our present ignorance about the environment.

One of Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates. Courtesy Fritz Haeg.

Edible Estates, Haeg’s ongoing gardening project, is trying to change that. By turning eight suburban front lawns from spaces you cut and “keep off” into productive gardens, Haeg wants to bring back a reality rendered invisible by oil. He’s not a Slow Food idealist; instead, Haeg says that questioning the front lawn is just the easiest first wedge into unraveling the old structure of our cities. But he acknowledges the idea will face resistance in suburbia. “How far have we come from the core of our humanity that the act of growing our own food might be considered impolite, unseemly, threatening, radical or even hostile?” he asks.

Yello Strom energy metre in use. Courtesy Yello Strom.

Like Haeg, Ted Howes of global consultancy IDEO believes that we have to turn energy from an invisible commodity into a tangible experience. And social media can help. The Yello Strom energy meter, which Howes helped develop for the German market, is a small wall-mounted box with a curvy bright yellow shell and a simple-to-read meter that could easily have been plucked from an Apple store window. It sends out tweets about your energy consumption and gives consumers direct access to Google’s energy management tool, PowerMeter. A phone app is sure to follow.

The attitude that we can wean ourselves off oil by finding more attractive alternatives may have ironically been best summed up by the man who was Saudi Arabia’s oil minister during the 1973 oil embargo. “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone,” sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani said recently, “and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

“We know that the greatest obstacles to technological progress are organizational, cultural, sociological,” says Anita McGahan, a professor who teaches “The End of Oil” [PDF] at the University of Toronto. “They’re not technical. We have the technology.”

Now we need the political leadership.

The people of Sydney, Nova Scotia waited decades for their governments to come to an agreement to clean up this disgusting mess left behind by nearly one hundred years of steel production. If the Environmental Bill of Rights is passed, other Canadians won't have to wait so long for action.

The tide may finally be turning on environmental action from the Canadian government. The Canadian Environmental Bill of Rights had its first reading in the house yesterday afternoon, and our fingers are crossed.

Ecojustice, formerly the Sierra Legal Defense Fund, drafted similar legislation last year, in hopes of giving Canadians a legal means of protecting their health and their environment. The bill draws upon similar legislation from the Northwest Territories, Ontario, Quebec and the Yukon. Worldwide, 130 other countries have similar legislation in their constitutions.

The adoption of this bill would be a real step toward cleaning up Canada’s disappointing record on the environment. It would give Canadians the right to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment, the ability to call for an investigation against the government in cases of environmental abuse, and protection for whistleblowers.

Let’s hope our politicians can stop acting like children long enough to read it.

[Creative Commons photo credit to Richard001]

On the menu: B.C. Farmed Salmon

Problem: Fish Farms

Forty percent of our seafood comes from aquaculture. However, it’s hardly the sustainable solution that many believe it is. Farmed fish are fed wild fish, with four to five kilograms of wild stock being used to produce one kilogram of farmed. Coastal farming also infects wild fish with diseases and parasites. In British Columbia, wild pink salmon are on the brink of extinction from aquaculture sea lice. The disappearance of these fish will impact everything from the grizzly bears and orcas that rely on them for food to local communities such as Echo Bay, which rely on them for jobs.

On the menu: Sharkfin Soup

Problem: Sharkfinning

High demand for shark fin soup in China has led to an explosion in sharkfinning. Thirty-eight million sharks are now being killed annually for their fins, reducing some species by 80 percent over the last 50 years. Losing these top-level predators disrupts the underpinning of the food chain, creating an imbalance that has been linked to the collapse of certain fisheries, such as the Tasmanian rock lobster fishery, where the lack of sharks has resulted in an increase in octopuses, a main predator of the lobsters.

On the menu: Seaweed

Problem:Marine Habitat Loss

The world’s fishing fleets are also negatively impacting such key habitats as coral reefs, wetlands and mangroves. Destroying these environments, and the vegetation within them, sabotages marine reproduction, the ocean’s ability to filter toxins, and, perhaps most importantly, its ability to create oxygen. Seventy percent of the world’s oxygen is produced by a healthy ocean, so we are taking our very breath away with marine habitat loss.

On the menu: Tuna Sushi

Problem: Overfishing

Eighty percent of the world’s fish stocks are fully or over-exploited, including the highly endangered bluefin tuna, a fish prized in the sushi market. If demands are not hampered, the world’s fish stocks will collapse by 2048, causing catastrophic effects on the 170 million people employed in the fishing industry and the 2.9 billion who depend on it for food.

On the menu: Shrimp in Cocktail Sauce

Problem: By-catch

Each year, millions of non-targeted species, such as sea turtles and dolphins, are accidentally caught as by-catch. This “by-kill” is then either thrown back into the sea or illegally traded, further decimating fish stocks and encouraging the trade of endangered species. While by-catch is a problem for almost every fishery, it’s at its worst with shrimp trawling. Of the 5.3 million tons of shrimp caught annually, 35 percent are discarded, usually because the animals are too small or the wrong sub-species.

Illustrations by Sylvia Nickerson

Untapped oilfield or conservational goldmine?

Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park is home to one of the planet’s most richly diverse ecosystems. Beneath it lies enough oil to generate some billions of dollars in revenue.

What’s a poor Andean nation to do? Hold off drilling in exchange for cash, it turns out.

In 2007, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa proposed a novel solution: the Yasuni oil fields would remain untouched in exchange for economic compensation from wealthier countries around the world. Enter: the carbon market.

Carbon credits are typically granted in response to emissions-reducing initiatives. Ecuador’s unorthodox approach to the program, which would earn the country carbon credits for not bringing forth future emissions in the first place, is a first.

Despite being South America’s fifth-largest oil producer, most Ecuadorians live in poverty. Three decades of oil exportation have resulted in mass deforestation, pollution, and extensive watershed degradation. The proposal to reap economic benefits from conservation, rather than exploitation of resources, is a novel one, yet sure to draw controversy from opponents who see the plan as an ill fit to the requirements of the carbon credit program or, at worst, cash for what might ultimately prove a short-term agreement.

It is also unclear how exactly the money would be spent, or how the certificates would be sold on carbon markets.

Regardless of the potential downfalls, environmentalists view the initiative as an ecologically benevolent sacrifice on the part of the Ecuadorian government.

Let’s hope they’re right.