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IRIS Director Blog

Food blog no. 4 – essential reading on the topic of sustainable food

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I thought that I might have enough opinions about food sustainability for 4 or perhaps 5 blogs. I am aghast to find that I could probably write one blog a week for a whole year. I shouldn't be surprised, since we all eat to live, and this is a universally interesting topic. Plus I have a professional interest in the subject as a plant ecologist, with an applied ecology focus involving animals that we eat - like geese, sheep and deer. This has taken me to many farms. I am also a keen gardener, and a keen cook.

I am not alone in my interest and there are superb writers and bloggers who inform me. My favourite book about diet, cooking and food sustainability is Hungry Planet and the photo essay, What the World Eats, reviewed in the following excellent You Tube video.

Alex Lewin's blog reviews books about food sustainability, including a number that I have mentioned.

Four other lists and sites worth mentioning include:

Change.org's sustainable food section's must-read books. This is a favourite, because the blogger admits to not having read Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food, which I haven't read either, for exaclty the same reason: I get the take-home message - "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
Planet Friendly's website is worth a look, along with Treehugger.com's sustainable food booklist for 2010 and Nibble.com's 2008 reading list.

Dawn R. Bazely

Food Blog no. 3 – why Gordon Ramsay’s F-Word is worth watching

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During the three years before my family emigrated to Canada, I attended one of England's most academically elite schools: Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls.

At the age of 12, along with Latin, French and German, I was taught some very basic life skills in my Cookery and Sewing classes. I built on these skills when doing field work on the shorelines of Hudson Bay. At 19, I took my turn in cooking meals in a field camp for up to 30 hungry field biologists (I was one of them). Today, I'll never compete in a top amateur chef contest, but pulling off a 4-course dinner party, in which every dish served is cooked by me, is no bother.

Sadly, Home Economics has been dropped from school curricula, not only in the UK, but in much of Canada. Jamie Oliver is the most famous TV chef  tackling the issue of food education for children, with his campaign to get British school kids to eat healthier lunches. The institutional history of British school food is fascinating. Jamie's latest T.V. show, the Food Revolution brings the campaign to the USA.

Jamie aside, for me, the most entertaining take on the whole "why can't people cook ?" issue is Gordon Ramsay, in his simultaneously hilarious and shocking F Word season 1 (the F Word is a programme about Food) campaign to get young British women into their kitchen. He got a lot of criticism for picking on women and was accused of being sexist. It certainly was mind-blowing to watch giggling young women admit to never having turned on their stove, but I can also attest to the fact that pretty much everyone I know who is under-35, male and female, with a FEW notable exceptions, lacks basic home economics skills. So, I'd have to side with the "Gordon was sexist" crowd on this one.

When a significant proportion of the younger demographic is not taught the basic ability to cook simple, nutritious food from scratch, and to plan menus and food budgets, why wouldn't we expect to see an obesity epidemic hitting the Global North from the USA to Europe? Lack of exercise is important, too, but for me, diet is as big a factor. Understanding food and where it comes from is also an essential part of educating for sustainability.

My extraordinarily busy family eats food mostly prepared from scratch, and we all pitch in, including my husband, a Julia Child afficianado. Forcing my kids into the kitchen has been a challenge. To do it, I had to run my own Home Economics course at home. Topics included how to clean a sink and toilet. And yes, I learned about basic hygiene back at Haberdashers'.    Dawn R. Bazely

Food blog no. 2 – organic is grey, not black and white

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I thought I'd be blogging about food all summer. But, at summer's end, I find that when I haven't been at conferences, or in the field, I have been kept very busy with gardening and canning or "putting up". This year I grew a large amount of garlic - Northern Quebec and Persian Star, from Boundary Garlic in British Columbia.

Back in the spring, I went to the very enjoyable Toronto-based Green Living Show, which my family has attended every year since it began in 2007. I enjoy chatting with the manufacturers and marketers of green products - some of them much smaller and more artisanal than the  widely recognizable tent-pole names, like Loblaws, Roots and Pistachio. This included a lovely couple who were staffing the booth for an organic delivery company.

"Do people ask you about the dirty dozen and the clean fifteen, and when they do, what do you tell them?", I asked. "Well" they replied, "our position is that we should all eat organic, all the time.".

My come back: "well, you know that the prices make it simply unaffordable for most families, so if you want to be more nuanced in your approach, what's more realistic advice?"

There are many reasons why people choose to consume organic food, ranging from health concerns to concern about the impact of industrial farming on the environment. For many people, it is all about managing personal risk and exposure to pesticides and other chemicals. But is it really worth it? In the case of fruit and veggies, it all depends where your  food is farmed. The main reason why I grew so much garlic, is that (1) we can grow good garlic and (2) in the last 2 years, the local Ontario garlic supply has run out by early winter, and (3) I prefer to avoid buying garlic from parts of the world where we hear about issues of food contamination, proven or not.

When it comes to pesticide and chemical exposure, you need to deal with the big stuff first. My husband was a toxicologist in a previous career and we are both biologists, so the whole issue of pesticides has been on our minds for decades. The mainstay organic purchase in our house, ever since my kids stopped breastfeeding, has been organic milk and yoghurt. And, btw, I was one of those working mothers with kids in daycare at 4 months, and an industrial breast pump, busily remobilizing the contaminants in my fat cells into my kids.

When it comes to food preparation, we have never knowingly stuck a plastic container in a microwave - ever since I first encountered a microwave, back in 1984. We also banned our daycares from heating any food up for our kids in any kind of plastic in the 1990s: we were well aware of the early research on phytoestrogens, and chemicals leaching out of plastics. I get frustrated when I see young, environmentally conscious students bringing their packed organic lunches to York in plastic containers, with painted nails and make-up. I don't wear make-up or nail polish - because chemicals can leach into my body through my skin. Nowadays, there is, finally, mainstream awareness of plastics and leachates, but it has taken a very long time.

So, what about organic food? Well, other than our organic dairy products, and garden veggies, we don't bother much with organic fruit and vegetable in my house. We do, however, eat as much locally farmed fruit and veggies as we can: Canadian agriculture has superb regulatory and consumer education systems both federally and provincially.

In a 2003 review of the evidence, in answer  to the question: 'Is organic food better for you?' The UK Food Standards Agency, which, was, at the time, headed by my doctoral supervisor, Lord John Krebs, found that "In our view the current scientific evidence does not show that organic food is any safer or more nutritious than conventionally produced food." Interestingly, over the subsequent 3 years, efforts were made to soften the perceived "anti-organic" tone of the report. But, the science still stands.

Eric Reguly of the Globe and Mail stirred the organic pot with his 2008 article entitled "No organic for me, please" in which he made some of these same points about cost as well as pointing out the lower crop yields of organic. This last argument against organic, is a topic for another post and yet another grey area in the whole complex topic of food security.

Dawn R. Bazely

Hey, get me out of here, I don’t want to go to landfill!

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Recently, there have been several changes at IRIS. Annette Dubreuil is staying on as a part-time project co-ordinator, and is giving up her duties as IRIS co-ordinator. She will be putting her sustainable business model for aboriginal communities into action. She has been working on this project for the past 2-3 years, voluntarily, and is going to pursue her dream of making it happen. I have asked her to keep checking in with us and to let us know how it's going.

We welcome, as part-time summer IRIS co-ordinator, Meagan Heath. Meagan is finishing her MES in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. She is an expert on garbage, was one of the organizers of this year's York U garbage survey, and works part-time for CSBO - Campus Services and Business Operations. She is a woman of many talents including being tri-lingual, and she is passionate about reducing waste. If you read my blogs, you will know, that I, too, am passionate about reducing, reusing and recycling.

Meagan is a very good sport, and I have challenged her, this summer to go head to head with me on coming up with ways of getting rid of the annoying items that we keep putting in our garbage, as opposed to recycling them. This could be, preventing these items from even coming into our homes, or coming up with novel ways of reusing them. Each week, we will post a photo and do a duelling blog. Readers are welcome to weigh in with other suggestions. If we can, we will add a voting button to the blogs.

Here is our first challenge - it's the common milk bag and associated milk bags. What can we do to avoid using them or to redirect them from landfill, in the case where they are not part of a blue box programme (other than having a cow in our back garden?)??

Dawn R. Bazely

(Read Meagan's response: Sack your bags.)

Food blog no. 1 – waste not, want not

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My friend and colleague, Prof. Ellie Perkins recently forwarded an article to a number of us about the "cost of eggs". I assumed that it was all about the nutritional value of hens' eggs and expected to read that I could soon keep chickens in my back garden in Toronto - and why not? Vancouverites can. With the advent of the growing season, I am currently in an "urban agriculture" headspace, as well as engaged in the ongoing battle to increase the number of vegetarian meals that my family eats (for both cost and carbon footprint reasons) to over 50%. It turned out that Ellie's article was a very curious piece about the high value placed on the eggs of students with high SAT scores by couples hoping to conceive via fertility treatments and egg donations! Eggs are parts of life cycles, and all organisms need food as they go through their life cycles. Food security and sustainability of supply are huge issues. When I began teaching ecology at York in 1991, global per capita food production had been steadily rising. In recent years, per capita food production has been declining for various reasons, but there is still enough food to feed the world, if we could get it distributed.

Tristram Stuart's book Waste, highlights the issue of how much food is wasted as a result of our industrial-scale approach to agriculture and best-by dates which result in enormous quantities of food being thrown out. Many families throw out much of the food from their fridges and GOOD magazine tells us that the average American wastes 0.5 lbs of food per day. In London, England, 176,000 bananas are thrown out everyday. Both GOOD and Stuart point out that, if diverted appropriately, this wasted food, could address issues of hunger quite seriously and it could also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Another way of putting into perspective the information about just how much food never makes it into people's stomachs, is to take a look at the excellent series, What the World Eats. It is based on the book, Hungry Planet, and shows photos of families from around the world with their weekly groceries spread out before them, as well as the cost. A picture really is worth a thousand words, and this is the book that I would want to see in everyone's house, on the kitchen table.

The 2001 AAAS Atlas of Population and Environment, is also an excellent resource.

So, take-home message number 1 - eat ALL of the food that you buy for you and your family. Do this before thinking about eating locally or organically or turning vegan - which I'll cover later. Reducing food waste at the local kitchen level takes a lot of planning and is hard work. I DO THIS, and so can you. Follow GOOD's and Martha's advice and plan weekly family menus. Freeze leftovers and use up food that's on the edge of going off. As Gordon Ramsay  points out, time and again, in his books and tv shows - good restaurants waste very little food - they would not make money if they did.

Dawn R. Bazely

LCBO probably makes more progress in one flyer than Toronto’s cycling advocates make in two years…

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My latest set of blogs are a bit delayed, because following on from teaching BIOLOGY 2010, York's Plant Biology course, and the arrival of a very early spring, I am writing a lot about food - security and sustainability. These blogs take a lot of fact-checking and research and are time-consuming to write.

So, here's a quick shout out to the LCBO - the Liquor Control Board of Ontario - who this past weekend, likely did more to promote cycling as a form of sustainable transportation among non-enthusiasts, than all of the cyclists, cycle clubs and cycling advocates that I know, put together, including the City of Toronto cycling office!

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They put a very handsome young man, dressed in an impeccably tailored suit on a bike, and made it the cover of last weekend's flyer promoting French wine. This arrived as an insert in our Saturday paper.

Marketing-wise, we'd normally expect to see this chap in an ad for an expensive sports car, but here he is, on a bike, looking cool and trendy. Ahem, note to male members of my fellow middle-aged cohort "you are more likely to keep fitting into your expensive suits, if you cycle, rather than buy a sports car".

I have cycled hundreds and hundreds of kilometers in Oxford and Cambridge, as well as in the Netherlands, and Sweden. Everyone and their dog cycles around. BUT here in North America, despite the best intentions of  advocates, cycling's just not as widely perceived as something that everyone should do, for all of their life. I hope that this flyer cover has some unintended consequences that are good for the environment and people's health.

Just one beef about the adverts: as the parent of a teen, who thinks that bike helmets are totally dorky, despite the stats and the wide availability of cool helmets (widely reviewed, including at the website, Outdoor Urbanite) - I do wish that the inside shot with the baguette and flowers showed the model wearing a bike helmet.

[photopress:LCBO_french_lessons2.jpg,thumb,pp_image] DrumTom

Dawn R. Bazely

NIMBYism and windfarms in Toronto

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The City of Toronto was well ahead of the Canadian curve when it came to adopting basic principles of sustainability around public transport, intensification of building density and the need to increase sources of renewable energy. The Ontario Green Energy Act has provided marvelous opportunities for increasing provincial sources of renewable energy. I have been amazed at how wind farms built in recent years in southwestern Ontario and on the way to Grey Bruce have livened up the landscape.

But, as the province moves on from terrestrial wind farms to offshore projects, one Toronto community is mobilizing against them. Some Guildwood residents have asked their city councilors, Paul Ainslie and Brian Ashton, to bring forward a motion to the city’s executive committee asking the province for a blanket-moratorium on wind-power development. The Globe and Mail article, Bluff residents fight wind turbines, explains that this motion, if passed, will be purely symbolic. But, while it will have little impact, it illustrates the nature of local opposition to such projects. The article quotes my colleague, Mark Winfield: "it would be “tragic" if fear of angering residents prevented the city’s politicians from pursuing much-needed renewable energy initiatives."

I am grading final exams right now. Since my head is in this space, my response on hearing about this motion in the last week was to imagine a take-home exam that I would like to set all of the voting residents of this local community. Here are the essay questions:

1. Explain what the acronym NIMBY stands for and discuss how this may or may not be applicable to Guildwood.

2. Define the term “ecological footprint” and explain how you would calculate your personal footprint.

3. In the documentary, The Age of Stupid, the filmmaker, Franny Armstrong illustrates the case of local residents opposing a wind farm project on the basis of landscape aesthetics. Compare and contrast this case with that of Guildwood in terms of how you are still “do[ing] your bit for the environment” (quote from wind-farm opponent in The Age of Stupid).

4. Discuss the evidence in the peer-reviewed literature for the harmful impacts of wind farms on human health and the environment. In your answer, define the term, peer-reviewed literature. (hint - you may want to use Google Scholar for this).

The purpose of these questions? Well, none of them have definitive right or wrong answers, so they are aimed at improving the level of informed opinions on the issue, because, obviously, there is homework that would need to be done to answer these questions. In the Globe article, Mr. Ainslie comments “there’s a lot of things that are unanswered”. These questions would help in addressing his concerns.

And, I am NOT advocating for only peer-reviewed science to drive action and policy. My close colleague,  environmental ethicist, Dr. Nicole Klenk proposes that “scientific narratives should be denied a priori privilege over non-scientific interpretations of nature for policy purposes”. I completely agree – local knowledge is very important and should be taken into account. BUT just how much local knowledge is there about wind farms in Guildwood?

I have lost patience with the dominant notion in our society, that an uninformed opinion should count for as much as an informed opinion. Too many people, including my teenager,  are getting away without doing their homework. The question of exactly whom I see as being responsible for this lamentable state of affairs is a topic for another blog.

Dawn R. Bazely

PS the quote is from the 2008 article, “Listening to the birds: a pragmatic proposal for forestry” in the peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Values, volume 17, pages 331-351

The quest for a sustainable writing tool

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Last Friday, I was one of the volunteer parent drivers for an excited group of school children that included my daughter. We went to the opening day of  the "Harry Potter" Exhibition at the Ontario Science Centre. Like all trendy exhibitions, the cost of entry was pretty steep, and naturally, since this is a commercial enterprise which is all about making money, the exit of the exhibition led directly into the gift shop. All kinds of pricey Potter paraphernalia was on sale:  a Wizard Chess set for over $400 and a replica of the marauder's map for $45 (prompting me to keep asking myself, "Do J K Rowling and Warner Bros REALLY need another few million?"). Luckily, my daughter kept her selection on the less expensive side and settled on a $20 Parchment Paper Writing Set. "Heck, I thought" as I handed over the plastic, "I could put the kit together from stuff I have on hand at home, and make a quill from a gull or Canada goose feather..." [photopress:Harry_Potter_1.jpg,full,alignright]

Now, when it comes to consuming sustainably, we all KNOW that we should strive to avoid creating garbage that goes into landfill. The Parchment kit purchase got me brooding about my ongoing irritation at the mountain of used up ballpoint and felt-tip pens that I and all the students that I teach have been creating. I am extremely annoyed at how few pens are  recyclable or biodegradable (there are some that are) and at their limited use for  crafts. I have actually given this very serious thought and I maintain a huge collection of pen lids salvaged from pens that have run out, just in case some artist needs them for an installation project involving making a mosaic or collage out of old pens.

My irritation was recently exacerbated, because I was given a beautiful York University metal, rollerball pen. When it ran out, I tried to buy a refill for it, and found that this needed a "special order" from the bookstore. Only one other person had placed such an order, which led me to wonder what all the other recipients had done with their rather expensive metal pens once they ran out?

This seemingly small question of writing instruments had become, for me, yet another irritating example of our sustained unsustainable practices. And, I thought of a solution: I grew up using a fountain pen, and I would go back to it.  Through most of the 1980s, and early 1990s, I used a SINGLE pen - a Sheaffer, with a 14K gold nib that I simply refilled from a bottle of ink. Unfortunately, I am as hard on fountain pens as I am on everything else. On dusting the pen off, I found out that I had stopped using it  because it was very leaky and the nib was bent out of shape. After watching my forefinger and middle finger turn blue, I remembered...

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So, off I went on a rather desultory search for a new fountain pen that  has taken me  6-months, give or take. Staples did not really sell quality everyday-use fountain pens, but rather, caligraphy kits with specialist nibs. I then began a random check of stationery stores but failed to find inexpensive, good quality fountain pens. I did, however, discover that the only fountain pen for sale in the York Bookstore was DISPOSABLE. I did end up buying it, out of sheer fascinated horror at the concept, it and I have used it up - it gave a pretty smooth, if guilt-inducing write.

I was starting to become quite obsessed with the whole issue of  being forced to use single-use pens but did not have the time to do a really thorough investigation. But, today, while hanging around, waiting for my daughter , who was on a birthday celebration scavenger hunt at the Eaton Centre, I went on a hunt of my own. At Birks, and European Jewellers, I found Mont Blanc pens for $500-$1000. Gulp! I would lose it/break it/ drop it. Too expensive for me.

But, luckily, I found a shop called La Swiss, with a very patient young man, named Marc who was having a slow day. I drove him crazy, because here, at last was a shop full of not just Swiss watches but a ton of German, French and US-manufactured fountain pens. I left the store with 4 of them:

1. A Waterman, Charleston, Ebony Black model - nice weight, and heft

2. A Diplomat Excellence B Black Lacquer model - a little heavier and with a fine nib

Since they were both well under my target price point of $200 each, and I was so happy to have found a store with a whole range of fountain pens, I went crazy and bought a couple of inexpensive (around $35 to $60) pens from companies that I had never heard of:

1. An ONLINE Piccolo tri-colour fountain pen with a pink and purple lid. This German company, founded in 1991 by Alexander and Thomas Batsch, manufactures a line of eco-friendly, writing products for kids - and, has one of the most chic retail websites I have ever seen - WAY TO GO!

2. A Monteverde Jewelria resin fountain pen in brown. Monteverde is a US company.

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I expect to be just fine with these pens for the rest of my life. Like HP Reverse Polish notation calculators, I expect that most people will be unlikely to pick up a pen and use it if I leave it around. Do consider switching back to a fountain pen, and rejoin the fan club. If you did not grow up using one, give it a whirl with a disposable starter pen - you are sure to love it. Fountain pens write faster and smoother than any other pen that I have ever used, and I write a lot. The only thing to remember is to put the pen in a ziploc bag when you fly - the ink leaks - or, just don't fly.

Dawn R. Bazely

Spring is here… too early

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This morning, the novelist, Rui Umezawa, who is a neighbour and who kindly reads my blogs, asked me why I have been so inactive on the blogging front. "Too busy", I yelled across the garden fences. This term I have been teaching BIOLOGY 2010, the Plants course, which I taught from 1991-97, before powerpoint and course websites. So, while all of those life cycles are forever burned into my brain, chalk and talk, as we call that style of lecturing, is, in science, pretty much gone the way of the dodo. I have had to create Keynote and Powerpoint lectures and to learn "moodle" which is the most comprehensive electronic classroom software that I have ever seen. This open source software has replaced the way that I previously accessed my course websites - namely through the very nice, and now retired Biology Department Lecturer who functioned as our webmaster.

Moodle has allowed me to teach this course as I always wanted to: skipping from chapter 1 directly to chapter 32, and then to 21, to chapters 2-8, to 11-12 and then 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13 in Raven et al's Plant Biology 7th Ed.  CRAZY, right? But in fact, moving through the material in this sequence always made more sense to me than the linear way that I was forced to teach in earlier versions of the course text book: i.e. start at chapter number one and proceed forward in a one-way sequence. The internet and moodle has provided me with the tools to lay out a completely different roadmap than that provided by the book's author's and index, and, in 2010, the students can follow my map and route through the text book. If I had tried to do this in the 1990s, supported by paper course handouts and chalk and talk lectures, there would, most likely, have been a revolution in the lecturehall. Students who missed classes would have been griping about the jumping around, and any deviations from the lecture schedule, when I found that I was not delivering planned lectures on the expected date. With moodle, I  constantly update the students about where we got to, and with podcasted lectures, they have more flexibility than ever before, to miss a class and still catch up.

I LOVE IT - but it's been a heck of a lot of work at the back end. Still, there's nothing like jumping into a new technology with two feet, and sinking or swimming. The York University support staff have been amazing and I have taken several mini-courses. And, the time involved, has meant no time for blogging here. But, I have sought to imbue the course with a large measure of sustainability thinking. This is easy to do in a course that is essentially about biodiversity, why plants are important to humans, and about evolution. Our lectures on the Carboniferous and the tree ferns and progymnosperms (ancestors of seed plants) that fixed enormous amounts of carbon, and which subsequently turned into fossil fuels, relate directly to human-produced greenhouse gas emissions arising from the burning of these fossil fuels. I found an amazing old You Tube video about fossils, from the 1950s or 1960s by Royal Dutch Shell (that's Shell Oil to you and me), that the students have watched.

Everything is connected. Teaching about flowering plants and pointing out to my students that trees are already flowering , has reminded me, every day since early March, that climate change is happening NOW. I told my husband yesterday that one is supposed to prune roses when the forsythia blooms, and today, I have seen forsythia flowers. My gardening journals from the 1990s tells me that in 1994, the forsythia was only just flowering on April 27. In the early 2000s, I was noting that the forsythia blooming in mid-April was just "too early" - and in 2010, it's been flowering since the 2nd or 3rd of April. Climate warming is here, and in fact, in the USA, the Gardening Zones were  adjusted in 2006 by the Arbor Day Foundation to reflect this.

Dawn R. Bazely

Winkling out those climate change skeptics – yes, they are everywhere

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Hmmm - I arrived home after a hard week of BIOL 2010 (PLANTS) lectures and more missed deadlines, to pick up the Globe and Mail Friday edition for a nice, relaxing read, when I suddenly sat up straight at Neil Reynolds' Business section column - The mythical assertion of fossil fuel scarcity. It's all about a recent article by Professor Emeritus Peter Odell, in the European Energy Review (I haven't downloaded and read it yet, but I will).

"Wow!" I thought, "it kind of goes against everything that I have been reading about Peak Oil, for much of the last decade", so it must be important. And then, I ask myself, who is this Odell? Quickly checking him on Google Scholar, I found that my academic work is cited more than his, and he's 30 years older than I am. Then, I check him out further, and find some interesting comments in response to an article, in the same vein, that he wrote in The Guardian in 2008. Some of the quite long, coherent, as opposed to the short, incoherent,  responses say things like "Mr. Odell, I request that you get up to speed on what's happening with the world oil situation. Your misinformation is doing everyone a great disservice" and "Unfortunately, Mr. Odell is woefully unaware of the current oil situation" and "Anybody who knows anything about oil is aware that the R/P ratio is a pointless statistic. If Peter Odell is using it, he either ignorant or disingenuous" and, my favourite, "I seriously don't see how you could be a professor emeritus of international energy studies and believe the stuff you have written".

But, it gets better - Prof. Emeritus Odell is on Republican Senator J. Inhofe's notorious and hilariously debunked list of supposed expert climate change skeptics. For the debunking by Prof. A. Dessler, just go to: http://www.grist.org/article/the-inhofe-400-skeptic-of-the-day1/ and keep changing the number at the end of  the url to 3. And, while you're at it, check out the very detailed debunking of Dr. Seitz as a climate denier, which is one of Peter Sinclair's "crock of the week" videos.

A few blogs ago, I outlined what I perceived to be a failure of the Canadian media to carry out proper investigative reporting vis-a-vis Bjorn Lomborg, and, well, it just carries on, unfortunately with a columnist in my favourite Canadian newspaper. This is not the first time that Neil Reynolds has published anti-climate change columns that sort of have an an aura of balanced reporting. In the same way that academics carrying out medical research must reveal all of their sources of research funding when publishing articles, it would be helpful for members of the Canadian Press to reveal their political affiliations. Then it'd be obvious to those readers who are not prepared to dig a little deeper as to exactly where they are coming from.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Michael Enright give an after-dinner speech, and was surprised to hear him decry the appalling state of investigative journalism in Canada. (He named the New York Times as the best newspaper in the world. I started paying a lot more attention to it, and have been forced to come to the conclusion that he probably was right. For TV journalism, I would have to say, that Al-Jazeera English, is also right up there in terms of quality of in-depth reporting, with respect to covering generally ignored issues). I have now come to the sad conclusion that his assessment of the general state of Canadian journalism was also pretty much bang on.

Dawn R. Bazely

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