The Dominion - Cameron Fenton

Infographic: Changing the System

Moira Peters — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:05:47 +0000

In the past few years the call for "System Change, Not Climate Change" has echoed across the growing movement for climate justice in Canada and around the world. The response from the political arena has been that changing the systems of production and consumption that fuel our economic and political systems is an impossible task, and a fool's errand. Yet across Canada, major steps are being taken to transform this call into action. The system is changing, and it is the power of communities coming together that is driving this change. On one hand, groups are assembling to transform crucial parts of their lives, from food systems to transportation networks. On the other, communities are standing up to fossil fuel brokers and other destructive enterprises, saying no to the destruction of their homes.

This infographic was published in A People's Forecast: The Climate Justice Issue, our 2011 special issue. To read more articles as they are published, click here.

Wikileaks: The Canadian Connection

Tim McSorley — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:38:19 +0000

wikileakscolour2web2.jpg

[Right-click (PC) or ctrl-click (Mac) and select save as to download]

Science Fixin'?

hillarybain — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 05:14:52 +0000

Moratorium halts real-world geo-engineering experiments, for now

MONTREAL—Covering entire deserts with sun-reflecting plastics. Fertilizing oceans with iron to increase phyto-plankton growth and soak up carbon dioxide. Blasting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere and installing massive mirrors in space to decrease incoming solar radiation to Earth.

What may seem like stories out of a science fiction novel are actually part of a new wave of “geo-engineering” technologies designed for large-scale scientific manipulation of natural systems. The goal: to slow down global temperature increases and mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.

But a growing tide of critics argue that geo-engineering technology is not only unproven, but may pose a grave threat to the planet. Its allure, according to Diana Bronson of the technology and environmental watchdog organization ETC Group, is that "techno-fixes" appear to offer a silver bullet solution to climate change—while allowing business as usual to continue.

“Geo-engineering is both a set of technologies and a drive political strategy,” said Bronson. “It is a way to let rich countries not take responsibility for their climate debt; it is a way to continue living the way we do in an energy intensive and unsustainable way and it is a way to continue pumping fossil fuels from the ground and into the atmosphere.”

In Japan in October, critics won a victory at the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), an intergovernmental convention of 193 nations. All parties to the CBD announced they would be adopting a “precautionary approach” to geo-engineering, and agreed to prohibit real-world geo-engineering experiments.

“The agreement basically is a moratorium," said Bronson. "It was a very hot issue and entered many late nights of negotiations, and the text that came out is a very compromised text. Nevertheless it is a very important step forward. This is the first time that any intergovernmental body has made a decision on geo-engineering.”

While the CBD moratorium prevents the real-world testing of technologies with potential global implications for life and biodiversity, it does not prevent investment or small-scale research in geo-engineering—and the Canadian government has shown interest in becoming an increasingly larger player.

“I don't think the Canadian public, or even Parliament, has any idea that the government of Canada has already invested in geo-engineering research,” said Bronson.

The CBD agreement has created a speed bump on the techno-fix superhighway.

“Essentially what the decision [in Nagoya] says is that until we understand the implications of geo-engineering on biodiversity, or until there is a regulatory framework in place to monitor and control such activities, no geo-engineering should take place,” said Jaime Webbe of the Montreal-based Secretariat of CBD.

Geo-engineering is typically divided into two main categories: technologies designed to limit incoming solar radiation to the earth, and technologies designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it. Both categories include everything from simple ideas—such as changing the colour of roads to better reflect sunlight—to seemingly more outlandish plans to spray sulfur—a byproduct of extractive industries such as the Alberta tar sands—into the upper atmosphere to emulate volcanic eruptions and limit incoming solar radiation.

Billionaires Bill Gates and Richard Branson have established multi-million-dollar funds to develop these technologies. Gates is the major benefactor of the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Resources, a $4.6 million fund managed in part by University of Calgary scientist David Keith, who researches and advocates geo-engineering.

While Keith agrees the CBD agreement is a positive step towards the creation of governance structure for how geo-engineering takes place, he, along with other scientists, also view it as a sign that the technology will eventually be implemented.

A major point of contention at the CBD talks in Japan was whether or not to include Carbon Capture and Storage technology (CCS) in the definition of geo-engineering. The final text excluded CCS from the definition—thereby allowing its real world use—with a footnote from Bolivia expressing disagreement and calling for “full consideration by the Conference of the Parties of [CCS] impacts on biodiversity in general.”

“There is a very complex debate that goes on around carbon capture and its relationship to geo-engineering, and it came to a head in Nagoya,” said Bronson. Excluding CCS from the definition of geo-engineering "was a compromise resulting from a number of countries negotiating together and some of those countries—including Canada and Norway—being very insistent that CCS not be included in the definition."

Henry Lau, spokesperson for Environment Canada, told The Dominion he disagreed.

“Carbon Capture and Storage is not a geo-engineering activity, because CCS provides a way to avoid emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere," he said. "Geo-engineering activities attempt to modify interactions between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere; CCS methods store carbon dioxide underground.”

Much of the debate turns on the scope of the definition of CCS. Carbon capture includes a broad range of technologies, typically divided into two categories: those designed to capture tailpipe and smokestack emissions, and those designed to remove carbon from the atmosphere for storage. The latter include everything from tree plantations to artificially fertilizing the ocean to increase its capacity to sequester carbon. It also includes proposals such as constructing artificial trees that attempt to chemically replicate photosynthesis.

“Those [technologies] which pull carbon out of the atmosphere are definitely covered under the moratorium,” Bronson said. “That includes everything like ocean fertilization, synthetic trees and bio-char...but CCS is categorically excluded when it comes to carbon captured at source.”

Canada has invested heavily in this kind of research, development and implementation.

“The government of Canada is supporting Carbon Capture and Storage with substantial investments in large-scale demonstration projects,” said Micheline Joanisse, a spokesperson for Natural Resources Canada (NRCAN). She points to over $3 billion in funding for projects in Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Colombia, including $466 million for CCS demonstration projects, as well as $151 million for research and development of new technologies.

A large portion of this funding has gone to the University of Calgary’s Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy (ISEEE). The ISEEE is a multi-disciplinary research organization, and one of the largest CCS research centres in the world. It is also where David Keith sits as Director of its Energy and Environmental Systems Group.

On its website the ISEEE lists its "collaborators," including major tar sands corporations such as Suncor, Total, Shell Canada, and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. It also lists the Pembina Institute—the sole NGO, the governments of Canada and Alberta, and the United States Department of Energy.

According to research by ETC group, over the past three years, Keith has received at least $150,000 in Canadian government funding for CCS technology research, specifically for inventing technologies designed to remove carbon from the atmosphere. According to a 2010 NRCAN report on the University of Calgary's funding for Carbon Capture and Storage, NRCAN, through the ISEEE, provided $50,000 to Keith’s research in 2008-2009.

On December 23, 2009, Keith filed a patent for a device that would involve “carbon dioxide capture systems and methods for the recovery of CO₂ from atmospheric air.” The patent describes how the invention could be implemented for the express purpose of generating environmental offsets, and creating carbon credits.

The same report states that in 2010 the federal government also awarded a $100,000 grant to Keith, along with Arvinder Pal Singh, Chief Technology Officer at Calgary-based Carbon Engineering, which describes itself as “an independent angel-funded company developing technologies to capture CO₂.” The grant is to develop CCS technologies for the direct capture of carbon from the atmosphere, technologies that, under the CBD moratorium, cannot be experimented with outside the laboratory.

Environmental critics like Greenpeace look at Canada’s investments in technologies like CCS as little more than a public relations strategy to cover up or distract from Canada’s international reputation as major polluter. They argue that CCS is not a solution and has no real impact on the root causes of climate change.

Low-tech CCS applications, such as bio-char and tree plantations for example, have critics worried about an upcoming “Earth grab.”

Bio-char is a process by which plant materials are burned in a low oxygen environment and buried to sequester carbon. Both bio-char and tree plantations require massive amounts of land, as well as monoculture crops of trees or bio-char. Used on a large scale, critics warn this could lead to the displacement of communities, the destruction of forests and the transformation of land to to produce biomass rather than food. Additionally, these sorts of solutions create an incentive for the genetic engineering of crops to be used for fuel and carbon storage. Similar trends have happened around biodiesel and tree plantations for biomass power production.

In Canada, a bio-char proposal has been submitted as part of the Alberta Offset Scheme, the government of Alberta’s carbon-trade-based plan for emissions reductions. According to a report from the United Kingdom-based Biofuel Watch, Keith Driver, one of the Alberta Offset System’s chief advisors, has been tapped to draft the International Bio-char Initiative's first set of standards.

In many ways, the debate over geo-engineering boils down to a debate between two models of dealing with climate change: continuing with business as usual, and transforming an unsustainable system of production and consumption.

As tar sands development continues, the Canadian government appears to be betting on business as usual. "I would not be surprised to see millions more dollars in the coming years poured into these 'climate technologies,'" said Bronson. "[These technologies] are more a distraction from emissions reduction than anything else.”

Cameron Fenton is a former intern and Membership Coordinator with The Dominion and a community organizer in Montreal.

Science Fixin?

Greenwashing Hate

hillarybain — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 05:50:18 +0000

Immigrants scapegoated for environmental degradation

MONTREAL—The Centre for Immigration Policy Reform (CIPR), a recently launched immigration reform lobby group based in Ottawa, is using environmental arguments and “green” rhetoric to push for more restrictive immigration policies in Canada.

“High immigration levels make it more difficult to achieve Canada’s environmental objectives and inhibit efforts to reduce the extraordinary size of our ecological footprint,” according to the front page of the CIPR website. Critics say this is painting a green veneer on an old picture.

The “greening of hate” is a phrase coined by Betsy Hartmann, director of the US-based Population and Development Program. In her 2010 essay, "The Greening of Hate: An Environmentalist's Essay," she writes about the anti-immigration lobby's growing tendency toward “the scapegoating of immigrants for environmental degradation.”

Environmental arguments can lend respectability to arguments in favour of restrictive immigration policies, says Ian Angus, editor of the website Climate & Capitalism and the book The Global Fight for Climate Justice. "It is harder today than it was forty years ago for someone to stand up and say, ‘Canada should be a haven for white people who speak English,' but you can say, ‘We want to protect Canada’s environment, so let's keep our population down.’”

Canada is both a major greenhouse gas emitter and and a major recipient nation of immigrants, facts that—until recently—were rarely discussed in the same sentence.

“Most immigrants [to Canada] come from developing countries, and their ecological footprint is somewhere between four and ten times larger in Canada than in their own country," says Martin Collacott, Secretary of the Board of Directors and a spokesperson for the CIPR. He argues that limiting immigration would thus decrease global greenhouse gas emissions and help Canada cap its own emissions.

“[The argument] that, because Canada has such a rotten record on greenhouse gas emissions, we should prevent people from Third World countries from coming here is outrageous” says Angus. In his eyes, Collacott's argument scapegoats immigrants for problems they have little or nothing to do with. Canada's carbon footprint is a result of unsustainable production, consumption and trade driven by corporate-led globalization—and not immigration, according to many climate experts.

Angus adds that the CIPR's argument is deeply hypocritical, "given that so much of [Canada's] affluence is the result of ripping off those countries [where immigrants often come from].” Historically, Canada’s support for and direct involvement in trade programs, military operations and political manoeuvring in the Global South have been of great financial benefit to the North and of great detriment to people in the South.

Collacott's argument is flawed in a number of other ways, continues Angus. He points out that Collacott's claim that immigrants generate huge quantities of greenhouse gas emissions upon arriving in Canada is based on per capita emissions. Per capita calculations, which average 16 tonnes per person per year in Canada, include industrial and transport emissions—the largest emitters in Canad—yet fail to attribute them to their source. In fact, the average person living in Canada emits roughly five tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year; the Alberta tar sands emit 27,000,000 tonnes in the same period.

“This twisted logic would suggest that we should deport all the poor people from around the world to 'developing' nations while allowing the rich to live together with their greenhouse-gas-intensive life styles,” says Harjap Grewal, an organizer with No One Is Illegal Vancouver.

“Forward-thinking climate activists know that now is a critical time to ensure that the precedent for immigration policy protects human rights because immigration is going to get a lot more common,” says Joshua Kahn Russell, a trainer with the Ruckus Society, a network of environmental and social-justice organizers.

Fifty million people will have been displaced by the end of 2010 due to climate change and related impacts, rising to between 200 million and one billion displaced people by mid-century, according to Mesa 6, the migration working group of the Cochabamba People's Summit on Climate Change.

This has led many people to argue that climate debt—the concept that historically polluting nations bear a financial responsibility to those nations with the least culpability for climate change—needs to extend beyond simple financial reparations to include political and social obligations. The final text from the Cochabamba People's Summit includes a call for a global human rights treaty to ensure the freedom of movement of climate-displaced people. It also proposes structures to hold major polluting nations accountable for the physical, emotional and cultural trauma caused by mass internal and external displacement, both within and from nations in the Global South.

Currently, Citizenship and Immigration Canada “does not recognize persons displaced by environmental change or disaster as refugees.” Immigration policy has strict definitions for people allowed access to Canada—definitions that limit access to Canada to persons facing danger imposed by state, military and other external human forces.

Karen Shadd, a spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Canada, told The Dominion, “There are no plans to amend these definitions.”

“It makes no sense to say that we should fill up Canada with people from poorer countries," says Callicott. "I think we can do more by keeping our country in good shape and helping those countries in other ways, through aid and trade arrangements.”

Syed Hussan, an organizer with No One Is Illegal Toronto, points out that “aid and development projects that follow [climate disasters] result in further dislocation and economic disadvantages.” The scope and distribution of aid projects often leave frontline communities confronting more obstacles. Examples of this include the challenges faced by some residents of New Orleans attempting to return to their homes after Hurricane Katrina, or the current struggles for community reconstruction efforts in Haiti.

Groups working to further limit and control immigration to Canada are nothing new, but the political clout of an organization like the CIPR, along with anti-immigration precedents being set around the world, has Angus worried.

"[The CIPR] are people with a substantial amount of influence in the Conservative party in particular,” says Angus.

The board and advisory council of the CIPR are made up of a number of prominent figures of the Canadian right, including James Bissett, the former director general of the Canadian Immigration Service, and Peter White, former executive of Conrad Black’s Hollinger newspaper group. Derek Burney is a member of the CIPR's advisory board. He played a key role in brokering the 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, and currently sits on the board of media conglomerates CanWest and Quebecor as well as energy giants Shell Canada and TransCanada Inc. He is also a long-standing advisor to the Conservative party, having worked as Chief of Staff to Brian Mulroney and as head of the Conservative Transition Team following the 2006 federal election. He was recently appointed as Chair of the Selection Committee for the current government’s Canada Excellence Research Chairs program.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada has identified the CIPR as “among the range of stakeholder groups that [they] deal with.” Citizenship and Immigration Canada has never considered community organizations and immigrant justice groups as "stakeholders."

Governments around the world have already begun to take steps to limit immigration based on “green” arguments.

This summer, Britain announced it would be implementing an “Immigration Cap,” citing environmental reasons as a major influence behind the decision. Australia renamed the position of Minister of Population to Minister for Sustainable Population, appointing Tony Burke to oversee potential immigration policy reforms to protect the Australian environment. The emergence of a powerful group like the CIPR in Canada has organizers worried that the type of anti-immigration sentiment and legislation appearing in other nations is coming to Canada.

“[Anti-immigrant think tanks] are very dangerous," says Hussan. "They produce ideas of hatred couched in reason which they push into university research programs and into government policy.”

“The fight for free and just movement of people is the fight to end war and occupation, the fight to end ecological destruction,” Hussan explains. “Environmental justice movements need to challenge the racist rhetoric of organizations like the CIPR with facts, with stories, with creative and direct actions—as organizers, it is critical that we anticipate and win the battle of hearts and ideas.”

Cameron Fenton is a former intern and Membership Coordinator with The Dominion and a community organizer in Montreal.

Greenwashing Hate

Climate Call

Martin Lukacs — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:07:05 +0000

Shifting focus from UN to grassroots organizing in lead-up to Cancun meetings

MONTREAL—Battle lines are being drawn as governments, environmental organizations and grassroots organizers are gearing up for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Cancun, Mexico.

On one side, nations from the Global North—including Canada—are setting up to push the agenda of the Copenhagen Accord, an agreement that emerged from last winter’s UN conference in Denmark—one that failed to establish any binding terms for carbon emissions reductions.

On the other side, many nations from the Global South have rallied around the Cochabamba Accord, the end result of April’s World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia. The final text includes calls for a global referendum on climate change, the establishment of an international climate justice tribunal and the recognition of a declaration on the rights of Mother Earth.

Civil society organizations in the North have also begun to lend support to the Cochabamba proposals. A statement from this summer’s United States Social Forum in Detroit issued a call for “all governments engaged in the United Nations (UN) to incorporate proposals from the Cochabamba Protocol and to adopt and implement the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.”

“After significant efforts on the part of the Bolivian government and social movements, text from the Cochabamba Accord, or People's Agreement is included in the negotiating text for Cancun negotiations,” said Andrea Harden, Climate Campaigner for the Council of Canadians. “While some commentators have framed this as a step backwards...it is finally putting goals reflective of social movement demands and the gravity of the crisis we face on the table.”

Indeed, Bolivia and its allies have faced resistance from the governments of many wealthy, highly polluting nations in getting the Cochabamba text recognized for consideration at the Cancun round of talks.

The Canadian Government has been one of those opponents.

“Canada welcomes all input into the UNFCCC process; however, Canada remains committed to the Copenhagen Accord as the basis for a new global climate change regime,” Henry Lau, a representative of Environment Canada, told The Dominion.

Harden points out that governments from the Global North called the Copenhagen text an accord even though it wasn't approved by the consensual process usually required to grant the "accord" label—an indication of their lack of respect for the UNFCCC process.

Lau declined to answer questions about the Athabasca tar sands and its expansion projects—such as the Keystone XL pipeline—which were a focus of protests during the Copenhagen talks. Instead, he focused on draft regulations for personal vehicle tailpipe emissions and reductions in coal-fired power generation to “help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and improve air quality for all Canadians from coast to coast to coast.” According to a 2008 report from the National Energy Board, around 13 per cent of Canada’s total power generation capacity comes from burning coal.

These commitments are part of the Canadian and US strategy of setting "economy-wide emissions targets," a move that may have influenced the selection of Canada’s new chief climate negotiator, Guy Saint-Jacques. A seasoned diplomat, he is also a vocal promoter of Canada-US economic interdependency. At a speech on free trade to US Chamber of Commerce in 2008 he noted that “as the new US administration defines its energy policy, it is important to keep in mind that America’s largest supplier of energy is your neighbour to the north.”

The Canadian government has pledged “$400 million in new and additional climate change financing,” a promise that many believe has a darker side.

Organizers point to these proposals as false solutions which fail to deal with climate change, and which have the potential to exacerbate existing economic, social and environmental problems. “This amount still pales in comparison to what the Global South is asking for,” Harden said. “There is also a lot of concern as to where this money is coming from...such as the REDD program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), carbon offsets and using other market based mechanisms to meet nation’s climate debt.”

During inter-sessional negotiations in Bonn, Germany, in August, proponents of the Copenhagen Accord announced that access to financing coming from the Global North would be contingent on support for the Accord.

As Cancun draws nearer the United Nations is introducing stricter rules for civil society participation. Bright red text in the UNFCCC Information Note on Cancun warns that they hold “the authority to take any action necessary to maintain [their] security.” Civil society representatives are barred from holding “unauthorized demonstrations." Limits have been placed on the distribution of materials or displaying posters at the discretion of UN officials.

Many civil society delegates were excluded from the Copenhagen conference after participating in the Reclaim Power action—where organizers inside and outside the summit attempted to create a People's Assembly inside the Copenhagen talks—a precedent that has many organizers worried these rules are meant to stifle political dissent.

But Cancun is not the only place where organizers are looking to mobilize. In late July, La Via Campesina, the international peasant network, issued a call for "thousands of Cancuns...[to] unite the force and resistance of peasant peoples of the world, who are already cooling the planet." Their call is for people around the globe to take action in support of grassroots solutions such as those articulated in the Cochabamba Accord.

This call represents shifting values within parts of what is being called the global climate justice movement. Many grassroots climate activists are seeing this summit as an opportunity to shift focus away from UN meetings towards local, grassroots community organizing.

"I don't plan to attend Cancun because it is not my place," said Dave Vasey, a Toronto-based climate justice organizer who was in Copenhagen last winter. "But it is important to respond to the vision and wisdom [of local organizers].”

Vasey, along with many other organizers will be staying home this time. Instead, they plan on bringing the message of "System Change, Not Climate Change" to communities across Canada, and taking action against the root causes of a changing climate.

Cameron Fenton is a former intern and Membership Coordinator with The Dominion and a community organizer in Montreal.

Playing deaf on climate change

Stopping the Flow

Cameron Fenton — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 05:24:19 +0000

Quebec Climate Action Camp takes on the Enbridge Trailbreaker project

DUNHAM, QC—From August 7 to 23, the Quebec Climate Action Camp took root in Dunham, QC—an hour drive southeast of Montreal. The camp aimed to continue to build opposition to the construction of a pumping station in Dunham, a key piece of infrastructure in the Enbridge Trailbreaker project.

The Trailbreaker pipeline project would reverse the flow of existing pipleline infrastructure, moving tar sands oil from Alberta through the United States, Ontario, and eventually crossing through Montreal and Quebec's Eastern Townships region. It would then be piped to Portland, Maine, to be loaded onto tankers destined for Texan refineries.

Community organizers from Dunham joined the Climate Camp to build momentum in a growing local movement against the pumping station. On August 15 over 100 people marched from Parc L'Envol, down Dunham's Rue Principal to Town Hall. Dunham Mayor Jean-Guy Demers ended the march by voicing his support for the camp and for the campaign opposing the pumping station.

Over the two weeks of the Climate Camp, over 300 people visited the camp from across Quebec, eastern Canada, the northeastern United States and coming from as far as California and Austria. The visitors came not only to take action themselves, but also to work towards building a broad, empowering climate justice movement. The camp, powered by solar, wind and kinetic energy, was organized as an exercise in collective self-management.

Climate Camp ended with a march to the site of the proposed pumping station, and the launch of the Trailbreaker Pledge of Resistance. The pledge states that "because of the grave threat the Trailbreaker project poses to the climate, the community and all others in its path, we pledge to engage in non-violent direct action to stop the pumping station should they ever attempt to follow through with its construction without community consent."

systematic changes

March leaving 2

Marching through Dunham

Pledge of Resistance

campsite

Fiyah

Toronto vs. Cochabamba

Martin Lukacs — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 05:11:27 +0000

G20 to consolidate control over climate negotiations

MONTREAL—A small group of the wealthiest and largest carbon-polluting nations will use this summer’s G8 and G20 summits to advance an unjust global climate deal through unrepresentative, anti-democratic channels, say climate campaigners, Indigenous groups and representatives of nations in the global South.

According to documents released in February by the G20 Research Group—associated with the Munk Centre for International Studies—the European Union (EU) wants to “pursue a new deal on global warming through the G20, since the December 2009 Copenhagen conference of nearly 200 countries led to unwieldy negotiations that accomplished little.”

“This speaks to the inability of rich countries to recognize [their] climate debt, and speaks to their rejection of the UNFCCC process and a move to a much more undemocratic process,” said Andrea Harden, Climate and Energy Campaigner for the Council of Canadians.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was established in 1992 and has met regularly since 1995 to create solutions to climate change. With 192 countries now party to the Convention, it is considered by many nations and civil society groups as the most democratic international forum for reaching an effective global climate treaty.

In Copenhagen, the “Circle of Commitment”—a group of wealthy nations, including the US and the UK—secretly circulated a document known as the Danish Text. It recommended consolidating climate negotiating power in wealthy nations, and placing control of climate financing under the purview of the World Bank. The result of the summit was the Copenhagen Accord, a US-backed, non-binding agreement that was similar in scope to the Danish Text. While supporting the UNFCCC as a forum for international negotiations, many nations and climate campaigners are reluctant to support the Accord.

“The Copenhagen Accord is a weak document that is not going to address the issue of climate change in any meaningful way,” said Harden. “The lack of any mandatory emissions targets means that whole countries will be facing dire consequences thanks to our government’s inaction.”

Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s chief envoy to the United Nations, told The Dominion such big power manoeuvring would undermine a just global response to climate change.

“Bolivia believes that on an issue that affects the whole of humanity, we cannot make decisions in small unrepresentative forums, whether it is a group of 20 nations or in secret dinners behind the UN facade as we saw in Copenhagen,” said Solon. “That is why we are calling for climate change to be brought back into the full UNFCCC process, and are supporting just, effective proposals put on the table by civil society organizations.”

While Canada and US politicians have refused to publicly acknowledge their policy shift, critics argue their statements about the UNFCCC processes indicate as much.

In the weeks after Copenhagen, head US climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing stated “it is...impossible to imagine a negotiation of enormous complexity where you have a table of 192 countries involved in all the detail.”

Critics’ speculation that the Copenhagen Accord would be used to undermine the UNFCCC was confirmed in early April 2010 at the Bonn intersessional meeting. The United States announced that nations refusing to sign the Accord would be ineligible for financial aid to developing nations to mitigate climate change.

“The US is acting like a bully, strong-arming the most vulnerable countries to get them to sign onto an ineffective and unfair deal that will not move the world closer to a just climate agreement,” said Kate Horner of Friends of the Earth in a statement to the media.

“This is in their rights, but unfair and clearly an attempt to punish Bolivia,” said Solon. “What kind of negotiation is it where you lose money if you disagree?” He said Bolivia’s negotiating positions would not change because of such threats. “We are a country with dignity and sovereignty and will maintain our position.”

Canada’s Environment Minister Jim Prentice denied rich countries would prefer to work outside the UNFCCC. When asked by The Dominion, he also pledged support for the Copenhagen Accord.

“Close to 90 per cent of the world’s emissions are now governed under the Copenhagen Accord,” Prentice said. “The [government’s] intent is to proceed through a multilateral process to turn that accord into a treaty. It may be discussed but the focus will be the multilateral process to turn this into a binding treaty, and that is not the role of the G8 or G20.”

For representatives of Indigenous communities, drowning island nations and nations of the global South, the Copenhagen Accord represents a step in the wrong direction.

“The Copenhagen Accord has no legal standing—it is a declaration of defeat by nations determined to avoid their responsibilities for climate change,” said Solon.

Canada has come under fire as a major destabilizing force in international climate politics, and recently lowered its emissions targets to meet those of the United States.

“Our economies are integrated to the point where it makes absolutely no sense to proceed without harmonizing and aligning a range of principles, policies, regulations and standards with respect to combating climate change,” said Tracy Lacroix-Wilson of Environment Canada.

Under the self-regulation measures of the Copenhagen Accord, the Conservative government has decided to harmonize its emissions targets with the United States at 17 per cent below 2006 levels by 2020.

When measured against the Kyoto Protocol’s 1990 base year, the Copenhagen Accord will only reduce emissions by three per cent. This is half of Canada’s legally binding targets under the Kyoto Implementation Act, and far below what climate scientists are calling for.

Critics point out that the Accord leaves 75 countries involved in the UNFCCC negotiations out of future climate plans, adding weight to speculations that Canada and other major polluting economies aim to undermine the UNFCCC.

“It is essentially the G20 that is holding back the international process to achieve a fair, ambitious and legally binding climate treaty,” said Kimia Ghomeshi, G8/20 Campaign Co-ordinator for the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition. “It is these industrialized, wealthy countries that are historically responsible for causing climate change and therefore have the greatest responsibility to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.”

Gomeshi argues that without comprehensive, science-based targets enshrined in a global treaty, 76 nations “representing approximately 80 per cent of global emissions” will need to make cuts internally. Without enforcement measures, there are no forums for the most adversely affected nations to hold polluters accountable.

To address the Copenhagen Accord’s inadequacies, Bolivian Prime Minister Evo Morales convened the first World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in late April.

“The People’s Summit on Climate Change aimed to bring democracy and people back into decisions on climate change and our future,” said Solon.

The Council of Canadians was one of the organizations which sent civil society representatives to the Cochabamba conference. “We are excited to hear about and discuss some of the projects on the table, including the creation of a climate justice tribunal and an international referendum on a global climate treaty,” Harden told The Dominion. in the lead up to the summit.

Meanwhile, critics accuse wealthy nations of delaying innovative responses to climate change. At the G8 Foreign Minister’s meeting in Gatineau, Quebec in March, Japan’s was the only delegate to address the media on the subject of climate change.

“As we all know, the global community must address the issue of rising sea levels and rising temperatures. In order to address [climate change] there seems to be a consensus today,” said Kazuo Kodama, Japan’s Foreign Affairs press secretary. “We have to transform our society from a carbon intensive one to a low carbon society.”

According to documents obtained from the International Energy Agency (IEA), G8 and G20 leaders will likely table Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies as their main effort towards this transformation. The IEA’s 2009 CCS report to the G8 notes that “most of the major economies have announced ambitious plans (and associated funding) for large-scale CCS demonstration projects,” including a $3.5 billion investment from the Canadian government.

But a 2008 report released by Greenpeace called CCS technology a “false hope” solution that has yet to be effectively implemented by any large-scale coal-fired power plant or in the Canadian tar sands.

“Carbon Capture and Storage amounts to an expensive distraction from more meaningful actions addressing the climate crisis, like keeping fossil fuels in the ground, significant improvements in conservation and energy efficiency,” said Harden. “Even worse, emphasizing the proposed ‘potential’ of CCS masks the immediate impacts of ongoing expansion of destructive fossil fuel-based energy production, which the climate crisis demands we transition away from.”

The Toronto Community Mobilization’s G20 call-to-action included an invitation to Copenhagen to bring “climate justice” to the streets of Toronto.

“Following the collapse of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, [the G8/G20] will be discussing the global economy, development and climate change,” read the invitation. “These gatherings are about trying to fix capitalism, a system that cannot be fixed; about creating unsustainable market responses to ecological catastrophe that reinforce systems of oppression... The so-called leaders at these gatherings do not represent us.”

Organizers are looking to examples and proposals from the global South, such as those coming out of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.

“We imagine the beginnings of a people’s accord, a summary of proposals led by groups who have worked many years on these issues, which can be implemented at local, regional, national and international levels,” said Bolivia’s Solon. “And it could provide a road map for saving people and our planet.”

Cameron Fenton is an intern at The Dominion and an anthropology student at Concordia University in Montreal.

This story was published in The Dominion's special issue on the G8 and G20 summits in Ontario. We will continue to publish independent, investigative news about the G8 and G20 throughout the month of June.

For up-to-the-minute G8/G20 news from the streets of Toronto, visit the Toronto Media Co-op.

Under water

Picking up the Copenhagen pieces

Building Heroes

Tim McSorley — Mon, 31 May 2010 05:41:55 +0000

Professors protest Project Hero as military PR ploy

Montreal—Project Hero, a military-supported, private sector scholarship program with the mission to “provide undergraduate scholarships to children of fallen soldiers,” has become the target of growing criticism across Canadian campuses. Since professors at the University of Regina spoke out against the program in March, 661 people have signed a growing petition which calls on people to “stand against Project Hero.”

Over the past year, former Canadian Forces chief of staff, Retired General Rick Hillier, and Kevin Reed, the head of the Grey Horse Corporation, have spread Project Hero to 26 campuses across Canada. The program’s tag-line is “Gifting education to the children of our fallen soldiers,” but many critics see the program as both a dangerous encroachment of the military into universities and a tool to drum up support for an increasing military presence in Canadian politics and culture.

“So let's be clear about this: Project Hero is not about these children's education,” explained Martin Hebert, associate professor in the department of anthropology at the Universite Laval and member of Anthropologists for Justice and Peace (AJP), who have been active in opposing Project Hero. “The real beneficiary of all the hype that this project has created for itself are the Canadian Forces, not the soldiers' families.”

Public resistance to the program began last March, when 16 professors at the University of Regina sent an open letter to the president of their university to express dissatisfaction and opposition to the university joining Project Hero.

“A few of us didn’t want our university to participate in [Project Hero], so we put together a letter outlining our objections and asking what we would like to see happen in place of it,” Garson Hunter, associate professor of social work at the University of Regina and signatory of the letter, explained. “It has to do with the encroachment of the military into the university structure...what we objected to here was the idea of signing onto what is basically a propaganda campaign.”

The open letter called on the University of Regina to take three actions: withdraw from Project Hero, push for government funding for universal access to post-secondary education and hold a public forum on the war in Afghanistan and Canadian imperialism.

“We’re absolutely fine with our faculty and staff disagreeing with some of the things that happen at the university,” said Barb Pollock, spokesperson for the University of Regina. “A university is absolutely the place where diverse opinions and debate happen all the time, the fact that 15 or 16 of our faculty, out of about 400 disagree with something is fine.”

Despite this belief, the university is moving ahead with Project Hero, with no plans to hold the public forum called for in the letter.

While university administration has made neutrality the party line, media and local Conservative politicians—including Regina MPs Tom Lukiwski and Andrew Scheer—attempted to turn the 16 into pariahs. Scheer called for the professors to withdraw their letter and write a public apology, calling their actions “disgusting.” The signatories received messages such as, "If you can't get behind our troops, get in front," and, "You deserve to be taken to Afghanistan and strapped to a roadside IED."

Hunter considers the belligerent Conservative reaction to have been an attempt to deflect oncoming criticisms from the Afghan detainee commission, which he points out could implicate General Hillier. The retired army chief of staff also sits as the chancellor of Memorial University in Newfoundland, the first school to sign onto Project Hero.

Interview requests to both Hillier and Memorial University were not returned.

Project Hero is what Hunter calls an “unfunded scholarship,” in that it exists without any external financial backing and asks universities to waive the fees for these students. This is augmented at a number of schools by a bursary to offset the cost of books and living expenses for the children of fallen soldiers.

The University of Regina is one of the schools that offers extra funding for living expenses of these students. Barb Pollock explained that the money for this extra bursary would come from the university’s scholarship and awards fund, which funds around 3,000 awards each year. Critics are asking whether this funding could be better spent, pointing out that tuition fees are climbing across the country, making university education increasingly difficult to afford and raising the potential debt load of prospective graduates.

“With Project Hero, they are asking universities to cover [tuition and fees],” Hunter explained. “Project Hero doesn’t actually contribute ten cents...students here are facing rising tuition, for example our students are facing a five per cent tuition increase this September.”

Beyond questioning the origin of funding for the program, only a handful of students have actually been funded through Project Hero raising questions about the motivations behind the program,

“In fact, the University of Regina may never see one [such] student,” Hunter said. “It’s silly, you would have to be 15 years old right now to benefit from Project Hero...and I don’t know why you would, you would actually receive more from Veterans Affairs.”

Another major critique which has been levelled against Project Hero is the effective redundancy of the program to reach its stated goal of “gifting education.”

Act C-28, the Children of Deceased Veterans Education Assistance Act, has existed since 1985 as “a program to help children carry on with their education past high school if they have a CF parent who dies as a result of military service.” The program, funded through Veterans Affairs Canada, provides up to $6,700 per year to pay for post secondary education and the associated living expenses of the children of deceased veterans. Project Hero thus exists to fulfill a role that the Canadian government has been filling for over 20 years.

“If the only preoccupation of the Canadian Forces in this matter were to see that deceased soldiers' children get a university education, the matter could easily have been addressed by simple, private, and dignified measures, such as an increase of the soldiers' insurance policy,” said Hebert.

Politicians and the mainstream press took the 16 professors' opposition to the program as symbolizing their complete opposition to any aid going to the children of deceased soldiers. Dr. Maximillian Forte, associate professor of anthropology at Concordia University, described his colleagues' treatment as a “shocking degree of bullying” by the mainstream media, politicians, and extreme right-wing bloggers.

“Like the 16 University of Regina professors...AJP does not argue that students who have suffered the financial impact of a parent lost in war should be banned from getting scholarships,” explained Forte, who also works on the steering committee of AJP. “Instead, we argue that all students in dire financial straits should receive similar opportunities, including those who have lost a parent for whatever reason; universities should not be in the business of sanctifying one death as more heroic than another.”

Concordia was the first university in Quebec to sign onto Project Hero in 2009, followed shortly by McGill. In a press release, Judith Woodward, president of Concordia University, called the program “a fitting way to honour the memory of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice through military service.”

Project Hero is also an example of how, off-campus, the links between corporations and the military are increasing as well, says Hunter. Kevin Reed, executive director of the program, was made an honorary lieutenant colonel of the 31 Service Brigade of the Canadian Forces in December of 2008, part of an expanding program which ascribes honorary military titles to corporate leaders in exchange for their support of the military.

“We’re getting this really close connection between the military and the corporate interest who benefit from these budgets,” Hunter said. “You don’t get the Canadian public sympathetic by showing them the body parts of children killed in Afghanistan, you get support by having a Highway of Heroes and with programs like Project Hero.”

Reed is also a member of Canada Company, a registered charity founded in 2006 with the self-professed aim of providing “outreach between Canada’s Armed Forces and the corporate world.” Members of Canada Company are required to donate a minimum of $1,250 to join the ranks, receiving a pin with the group’s motto “Many Ways to Serve.” Canada Company also provides a scholarship for the children of deceased soldiers, which it has given out since 2007.

Calls to Reed were not returned.

The roll-out of Project Hero comes as Canada’s annual military budget, according to a 2008 study by the Centre for Canadian Policy Alternatives, is at its highest point since World War II—and rising. Canada has pledged to pull combat troops out of Afghanistan by next year, but as military spending increases, it poses questions about the increasing cultural presence of the Canadian Forces.

“These programs are actually embarrassing the Canadian Forces, making it look to the public that they don’t support the dependent children,” Hunter said. “We don’t call it Hero Day on November 11, we call it Remembrance Day, the name itself is jingoistic...this is a not-too-well-hidden propaganda campaign.”

Cameron Fenton is Membership Co-ordinator at The Dominion and an anthropology student at Concordia University in Montreal.

Project Hero

The Ethnography of an Air-Strike

Tim McSorley — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 05:54:49 +0000

Canada’s military academics in the Afghan war and at home

MONTREAL—In the age of counterinsurgency and the battle for “hearts and minds,” cultural knowledge is valuable currency for the military intelligence business. The desire for cultural intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq has led Canada and the United States to implement hybrid military-academic programs meant to mimic anthropological research, mapping the “human terrain” of a battlefield.

These programs have led to serious concerns among social scientists in general, and anthropologists in particular, about the possible militarization of their practice, and the erosion of the creditability of their work.

According to Robert Albro of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), there is a fear among academics that the military wants to “plug into” anthropological knowledge without engaging in a dialogue that respects the work, ethics and history of the discipline. Anthropologists in Canada and the United States worry that their discipline could go the way of physics after the creation of the atomic bomb in World War II, weaponizing knowledge at a cost to anthropology as well as the cultures and people it studies.

In late 2008 the Canadian Forces launched a new counterinsurgency initiative in Afghanistan. Entitled the White Situational Awareness Team (WSAT) program—named for military colour codes of red for enemy, blue for friendly and white for civilian. It is similar to the controversial Human Terrain Teams (HTT) deployed by the United States military in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2007. HTTs are the on-the-ground research arm of the United States’ Human Terrain System (HTS) which, according to military sources, is “designed to meet the military’s requirements for socio-cultural knowledge across a spectrum of operations that the US may encounter in today’s world.” Each HTT is made up of five members, three military personnel and two civilians, while each WSAT includes two military intelligence officers and three civilian Department of Foreign Affairs employees.

Critiques of HTS range from calls for its immediate and complete halt, to recognizing an inherent value while denouncing program management. Plagued by scandal, HTS has been caught in a firestorm of internal and external discontent. According to a former employee who spoke confidentially to The Dominion, HTS, in its current form, cannot function as a war-fighting system, and those who should be concerned with its ineffectiveness are more concerned with selling the perception that it works.

Anthropologists in the United States have pushed back. The AAA, founded in 1902 and the largest professional association of anthropologists in North America, published a public statement on HTS in October 2007 calling HTS an “unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.”

The Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA) was founded by eleven academics in 2007 to resist the militarization of anthropology. In 2009, the NCA published The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: Or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society in response to the publication of US Army US Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, a document the NCA calls “faking scholarship.” They directly counter the military’s declaration of success, writing, “[T]here is no evidence, as some supporters have claimed, that the program saves lives.”

In fact, even as these programs are developed, casualty rates have continued to increase year over year. According to a report from the Integrated Regional Information Networks, a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 6,584 civilians were killed in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2009. In the first ten months of 2009, they estimated that over 2,000 civilians had been added to that total.

“We modelled our approach upon that taken by physicists critical of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative,” said Roberto Gonzalez, founding member of the NCA. “After much discussion, we decided to take collective action and produce a statement of our objections to developing trends in the militarization of anthropology.”

The statement has since garnered 1,000 signatures from anthropologists and other like-minded scholars, including a number of Canadian anthropologists, declaring non-participation in all counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. Although not opposed to “all work with military and civilian policy makers,” the NCA is “staunchly opposed to HTS.”

One of these Canadian signatories is Dr. Maximilian Forte, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, and member of the steering committee for Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.

“I am totally opposed to the use of anthropologists and other social scientists in any situation where combat, counterinsurgency, or even the psychological and cultural manipulation of other societies is concerned,” said Forte. “If academics align themselves with the national security state, they diminish the relevance and credibility of their work, and potentially endanger the reputations and lives of all other academics.”

Anthropologists for Justice and Peace was founded in 2009 with a mandate to work in solidarity with civil society, anti-war activist groups, and Indigenous communities, and “call[s] on anthropologists to radically rethink the nature of their position in local communities, to decolonize ethnography, and to re-conceive the nature of the research process so that ethics are not a minor, procedural consideration.”

The NCA and AAA both identify ethics as a major issue within HTS, citing an absence of any code of ethics for both researchers and the use of knowledge collected. The Human Terrain program attempts to approximate anthropological fieldwork methods where we develop intimate and constructive relationships with research subjects, Robert Albro told The Dominion, but does so operating in a state of ethical exception.

“Leadership [of HTS] has at different times and ways stated it doesn’t need to follow United States ethics,” said Albro.

The NCA has a similar position, writing that “the HTS program violates scientific and federal research standards mandating informed consent by research subjects.” Both are referring to the Common Rule, an ethical regulation which enshrines the protection of human subjects in scientific and medical research.

The AAA code of ethics promotes responsibility by anthropologists in the field, specifically toward the subjects of their research. At the heart of this code, Albro cites a “do no harm” ideology. This creates a problem if research is feeding military intelligence and facilitating the kill chain. Additionally, anthropological ethics state that research should be shared openly, especially with the fieldwork subjects. In the HTS, research immediately becomes classified, creating what Albro calls an issue with “social scientists working in secrecy.”

HTS adopts the language of anthropology and trains recruits in the basics of fieldwork,
yet only six PhD anthropologists, of over four hundred employees, are serving in the program. According to Zenia Helbidg—a former HTS recruit, who was fired for pointing out some of the program’s shortfalls to superior officers—HTS is “hiring anyone with a degree which they can sell as social sciences.”

There is concern that deploying the army approximation of anthropologists, clad in fatigues with a gun in hand, gives the image of bringing the full force of the military to bear in a fieldwork situation and fundamentally skews power dynamics between researchers and the communities they study.

“One [blowback] is to recast anthropologists as servants of empire, and as the eyes and ears of the national security state,” Canadian anthropologist Maximilian Forte told The Dominion. “Many anthropologists already, in the best of times, have been suspected of being intelligence agents. These developments will only solidify that perception, and could potentially put the lives of anthropologists abroad at risk.”

The most public example of this was on November 5, 2008, when Paula Loyd, a member of HTT AF4, was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire while interviewing residents of the village of Chehel Gazi, 80 kilometers west of Kandahar city. She later died in a United States medical facility.

A United States military statement described the incident noting that one of Loyd's HTT co-workers shot and killed her assailant, sparking questions about why a United States civilian is carrying a weapon while deployed as part of an active military counterinsurgency operation. Lloyd’s team was embedded with Task Force 2-2, a United States unit deployed under the command and purview of the Canadian Forces Task Force Kandahar. The Canadian Forces made no public comment on the incident.

The situation in Canada is exasperated by the fact that any social scientist deployed with the Canadian military is a federal employee first, and an academic second.

“Their [WSATs'] job seems to be no different from that of HTS, except that for now the civilians they use are government employees, not academics,” Forte told The Dominion. “They have breached a barrier however: the idea that social and cultural knowledge can be useful for counterinsurgency, at least that door has now been opened in Canada”

Inquiries to the Canadian Forces were not returned by press time.

Academics, and their research, become part of the military intelligence machine in a system where, according the Canadian Forces COIN manual, “[R]egardless of what agencies are used to undertake activities, much of the assessment in support of operations will come from military intelligence staff.”

This places academia in a position which, according to Dr. Forte, mistakes “service to the state as service to the people—a mistake that is a hallmark of classic fascism.”

To date, the debate about military influence in anthropology and other social sciences remain chiefly in Unites States, but that could be changing. A well attended panel entitled “The Use of Culture and Anthropology in Counter-insurgency and Peacekeeping Operations” at the Canadian Anthropological Society’s 2009 conference, along with the foundation of groups like Anthropologists for Justice and Peace, are evidence of growing momentum against the military’s attempts to drape a green beret on the ivory tower.

Human intelligence programs represent a dangerous step towards “cultivating a dependency on the national security state, and on military funding, to build prestige, prominence and power,” according to Dr. Forte. “This will diminish the space of independent, critical intellectual endeavours, and ultimately create momentum against academia as a safe space in which to produce knowledge that challenges dominant assumptions.”

Cameron Fenton is an intern at The Dominion and an anthropology student at Concordia University in Montreal.

Embedded Anthropologists

Red Panda

Cameron Fenton — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 04:09:11 +0000

The real life firefox

Living among the trees of temperate Himalayan forests from Nepal to western China, Red Pandas (Ailurus fulgens) spend most of their adult lives alone but live their first year under the protection of their watchful mothers.

These small mammals are primarily nocturnal, but have also been described as crepuscular—most active at dawn and dusk. Daytime hours are spent sleeping, lazing among high branches in the heat and covering themselves with their bushy tails in cooler weather. Their tails, with six yellowish rings, also serve as effective camouflage in the trees.

Like their distant relative the Great Panda, Red Pandas lack the enzymes necessary to digest cellulose and primarily subsist on a diet of bamboo, although they have also been known to consume small animals, eggs, fruit and other plant materials.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List—considered one of the most reliable systems for determining the extinction risk of wildlife populations—the Red Panda is categorized as a vulnerable species.

Not a major prey animal, population threats are primarily man-made. Deforestation due to industrial and agricultural expansion is one of the largest, fragmenting habitats and destroying food sources. Red Pandas are also hunted for their fur—especially their ringed tails, thought to be a good luck charm—used for making hats, and in local ceremonies across their endemic habitat.

More of a curse than a blessing, Red Pandas adapt extremely well to captivity and can be found in zoos around the globe, with over 150 in North America alone. This created a strong live animal trade for both public and private zoological collection. Today, thanks to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), live trade is now illegal. Unfortunately, with little enforcement locally or internationally and a sizable private market still in existence, poaching remains a widespread problem.

Red Panda

Common Snapping Turtle

Cameron Fenton — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 05:22:01 +0000

Ograbme!

One of the largest freshwater turtles in North America, the common snapping turtle—a member of the Chelydridae family—can trace its roots to the Late Cretaceous period, over 70 million years ago.

Chelydra serpentina, named for its powerful jaws and the snake-like appearance of its neck and head, can be found all across central Canada, the United States and as far south as Ecuador. Typically living in shallow water, the common snapping turtle can be a prickly customer on land, with a reputation of being unfriendly to wayward fingers.

Snapping turtles’ snorkel-like nostrils lie on the very tip of their snouts, allowing them to remain in shallow water and mud for long periods of time.

Efficient aquatic scavengers, the omnivorous snapping turtle has a varied diet of plant and animal matter. Snappers are also known to hunt on occasion, eating small fish, rodents, reptiles and even unsuspecting birds.

Human interest in the snapping turtle has typically been for making soup, with hunting still practiced in most of North America. In Ontario, they have been labeled a species of special concern—a species with characteristics that make it sensitive to human activities and natural events.

Known in North American folklore as the “Ograbme” (embargo spelled backwards) the snapping turtle earned a place in the history of our southern neighbours, becoming a feature in political cartoons commenting on the 1807 Jeffersonian embargo act which banned trade between the United States and other nations.

Snapping Turtle