This guest episode is hosted and produced by Sarah Friesen, a marine scientist, educator, and explorer based out of Victoria, BC. 

Take a deep breath. Now take another. That second breath is thanks to the ocean – it provides about half of the oxygen you breathe, no matter where you are in the world. It is the lungs of our planet. The ocean regulates weather patterns and global temperatures; without it, Earth would be as inhospitable as the moon or Mars. But it is under siege. Sea temperatures are increasing, the waters are becoming more and more acidic, and areas with extremely low oxygen levels are expanding.

Climate change is happening. Right now. The evidence is all around us: the wildfires that raged last summer in British Columbia and California, the increase in number and strength of hurricanes, such as Hurricane Florence and Michael which both pummeled the east coast of the United States last fall with billions of dollars in damages, and changes in precipitation patterns leading to extreme drought conditions that impacted over 100 million Americans last year. While recognizing that this is a global issue, let’s bring it down to a smaller scale, to a place that is special to me… Newfoundland is an island on the east coast of Canada, where communities are inextricably linked to the ocean. In fact, there’s this saying that I heard multiple times now: “The ocean is life”. I had conversations with Newfoundlanders and visitors about their perceptions and observations of climate change. Within a single lifetime, ocean temperatures have changed, fish species have moved to different areas, and storms have become much stronger, with wind speeds up to 120 km/hour.

Climate change is a symptom of a problem caused primarily by human activity. Like a lid on a pot, the greenhouse gases we emit are trapping heat in our atmosphere, causing global changes at a rate our planet has never seen. On this, scientists also agree – to even begin addressing climate change, we need to reduce our emissions. We have known this for decades… so why are we doing so little about it? 

While many people and organizations are taking steps to be more environmental, there is a lot more that most of us could be doing. There appears to be a big disconnect between the attitude that we should be addressing climate change and the action to actually do something about it. To understand why this is the case, we need to consider psychology.

Dr. Robert Gifford is an environmental psychologist at the University of Victoria who has spent years researching this disconnect. In 2011, he presented the “dragons of inaction”: psychological barriers impeding pro-environmental behaviour choices that would help reduce our individual contributions to climate change. One such dragon of inaction is ideology. Climate change is still considered an extremely controversial topic to many people. When people have beliefs and worldviews that conflict with the concept of human-caused climate change, these naturally present very strong barriers to pro-environmental action. 

Another dragon of inaction is social comparison. One rationalization for inaction is if you feel like you’re already doing more for the environment than others, whether at the individual, community, or national level. Why should I adjust my lifestyle if they aren’t going to? Scientist Dr. Brett Favaro is the author of “The Carbon Code: How You Can Become A Climate Change Hero”. His book addresses many obstacles to pro-climate action, including feeling like what you do doesn’t matter. If you feel like your efforts can’t make a difference in this global problem, you’re unlikely to try to fix it. Perceived lack of control and social comparison are thought to be some of the most common dragons among people. However, we have to recognize that if we don’t take action, no one will. If we follow Dr. Favaro’s recommendations to take the lead and engage in conspicuous pro-climate behaviour ourselves, this encourages others to do the same. Because of this, we can help shift social norms and end up having a much greater impact than just our individual actions. 

Most people are already performing some pro-climate behaviours, like taking a reusable bag to the grocery store or switching out light bulbs to more environmentally friendly versions, which is great. These behaviours are fairly easy to adopt because they do not have that much impact on our lives. However, they do not have nearly the same climate change mitigation effect as more lifestyle-disruptive behaviours like switching to a vegetarian diet or commuting by bike instead of car. As a result, these actions may make you feel like you’re making a greater difference than you actually are, resulting in the tokenism dragon. Still, these positive actions can serve as a gateway to making other more significant environmental choices in the future, as well as increase awareness of those around you. 

Of course something that underpins a lot of these barriers is knowledge. Even if you know that climate change is a concern, you still can’t take action if you don’t know what to do about it. We often think about greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, and these are certainly a massive contributor, but there are other important emissions sources. A recent study found that people tend to underestimate the emissions associated with different types of foods, and foods associated with high greenhouse gas emissions (like beef for example) are underestimated to a much greater degree than others. This has implications for pro-climate behaviour choices; people may be unwilling to eat less of these high emissions foods because they don’t know of the climate benefits. However, the same study had some results that were very encouraging. When shoppers were supplied with food labels that included environmental impact, they tended to choose foods with lower associated greenhouse gas emissions. In short, lack of knowledge can present a significant barrier, but when this barrier is removed and people have access to knowledge, they are likely to take positive action. 

Dr. Gifford has identified over 35 of these dragons or psychological rationalizations for inaction. Knowing the individual dragons that are blocking us is crucial in eliminating them. This provides us with a path forward in matching up our attitudes that climate change is a global emergency and our actions to do something about it. Together, we can slay our dragons and take meaningful action on the climate crisis. Our oceans, the lungs of our planet, depend on it. We depend on it.​

​This a table of the other 'dragons of inaction' from Gifford et al. 2011, which you can find here.

Thanks to Newfoundland community members and visitors for their contributions to this story, as well as to researchers Dr. Robert Gifford and Dr. Brett Favaro. Sarah is grateful to Adventure Canada and the Explorers Club who made this trip around Newfoundland possible. The Submerge theme and outro music is made by Peat Bogs; additional music featured on this episode is by Alan Doyle, Gerry Strong, Tony Oxford, and Broke for Free. 

To learn more, please check out the resources below:
Gifford et al. 2011: Dragons of Inaction
Dragons of inaction website 
New Scientist article on the dragons of inaction
PBS article on psychological barriers to thinking about climate change 
Western Star article about Dr. Brett Favaro’s book “The Carbon Code”
The Conversation article about the study on adding carbon labels to grocery store items
Slow Food USA website

​This is the second episode of our series on shifting baselines - exploring how changing perceptions of fish stocks helped to fuel the collapse of the cod fishery in Newfoundland. If you haven’t yet given the first one a listen, I highly recommend it, and you can find it here: https://www.submergeradio.com/shifting-baselines-series.html.
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​In the case of fishing, our human tendency to try and become super-predators manifested in the form of what Newfoundlanders call “draggers”, which are also commonly known as “bottom trawlers”. These draggers are these massive, industrial-scale fishing boats that operated by putting nets at the bottom of the ocean, and used heavy weights to drag them across the bottom, scooping literally everything up that was in its path and destroying habitat in its wake.
 
Overall, the draggers were a huge departure from the more traditional methods used by smaller-scale commercial fishermen like the ones I talked to, who used totally different methods, and had been using the same techniques for the past multiple decades. They used techniques like handlining and cod traps. The method of handling is personal: each fish that you pulled up had a unique feel, a special weight. It was nothing like the fishing mechanism of a dragger. On the dragger, machines do the pulling up, lowering down, and hauling of the fish. They do it much faster, and at a scale much larger. A loss of more traditional ways in favor of efficiency had created a destructive, industrial scale fishing boat.
 
Technology is partly responsible for shrouding how much had changed. Baselines for many of these fishermen had been set before modern technology was a part of their lives. Therefore, now that they have more advanced fishing gear, they may find it easier to catch fish even when there are less.
 
Most of the fishermen I talked to remarked about some sort of novel technological advancement. Technology in moderation has undoubtedly helped to make the lives of smaller scale commercial fishermen easier. However, when fishermen combine traditional fishing methods with more modern technology, such as advanced sounders, it becomes hard to tell if there’s been a change in the fish stocks. It’s difficult to decipher how the natural world has changed, when the way you engage with it changes.
 
Although technology may cloud perceptions of changing fish stocks, fisheries scientists and conservationists realized regardless that there was a huge decline occurring in the cod stocks. They began to think about imposing regulations for proper management and conservation. Of course, a huge issue was that we didn’t know where to put the reference point of what the stock was supposed to look like. The UN decided in 1958, that “scientific evidence of overfishing is necessary before” any regulations on fishing could be implemented. Notice how they said “scientific evidence” of overfishing is needed, because we have evidence of overfishing, but it was in anecdotal forms, which just weren’t ‘scientific’ enough to be taken seriously.  
 
When the UN made this decision, it was in 1958. already over a decade after increased technology made it into the mainstream market after WWII. Therefore, the baseline off of which fisheries management could determine that a ‘significant change’ as they say had been made was a baseline in which significant change had ALREADY been made.
 
They didn’t realize their grave error because they discounted historical anecdotes. Anecdotes that would have told them that there was already overwhelming evidence that a significant reduction in fish stock had been made. No longer could you weigh a basket down with a stone and lift it up to have it overfilling with cod. No longer was the passage of ships impeded by fish.
 
Anecdotes are often cast aside because they’re difficult to incorporate into data, and inconvenient. But just because it is difficult to do so, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
 
Ultimately, social scientists didn’t consider the anecdotes and testaments of inshore fishermen because they weren’t in a quantitative form the scientists could translate. By not taking anecdotes seriously, knowledge of our past is lost. Critical knowledge that can help us better plan for the future.
 
As technology takes us - for better or worse - farther from traditional practices, we shift how we engage with the natural world, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify a proper baseline. By taking historical anecdotes a little more seriously and understanding the role of technology in shaping perception, we can better acknowledge what the world used to look like if we are trying to manage for and really maintain those previous states.
 
Thank you for joining me on this two-part exploration of ‘shifting baselines’ and the Newfoundland cod moratorium. I hope this short series taught you to look differently at what you consider to be ‘normal’. An additional thank you to all the Newfoundlanders who let me interview them – Lee Tremblett, Dawn and Sam Dredge, Chris Brydle, Tony Oxford, Dr. Bavington, and also to Dr. Pauly. Music in this episode is by Gerry Strong, STB, and Blue dot sessions. Our theme music is by Peat Bogs. Additional thank you’s to Adventure Canada and the Explorer’s Club for funding this trip to Newfoundland. Please join me on the next episode of ‘Submerge’. 

See the longer blog post with photos here.

This is the abridged version:

When referencing the recent catastrophic fires on the west coast and flooding on our shores, multiple news broadcasters have referred to them as ‘the new normal’. But, can something ever be normal on our planet that’s constantly changing?

This episode is the first of a series telling the story of “shifting baselines” and describing how our idea of what is “normal” often changes across generations. When it comes to environmental restoration or conservation, this means we’re missing a huge piece of knowledge. I had the unique opportunity to travel with Adventure Canada and the Explorer’s Club to Newfoundland, to interview fishermen about how a changing fish stock has influenced their lives.

When we do something like observe a change in the natural world, in order to notice or realize that some sort of change has happened, we have to have a baseline that we refer to to base this difference off of. The problem with this arises when we start to move around our baseline and change what we consider to be ‘normal’. This happens all the time, especially across different generations. Each new generation has a tendency to think that the world they are born into - and the first environment they witness - is their normal. 

This concept of a changing definition or perception of what we think is ‘normal’ is called shifting baselines, which was coined by scientist Dr. Daniel Pauly in 1995. In short, our baseline of what a normal world looks like is however we first experienced it. The concept of shifting baselines gets a little tricky when you start to think about its role in natural science.

When a pond or public land is being restored, what is it being restored to? What it looked like 50 years ago? 10? 200? When we restore something, we create some sort of baseline of what we think the ecosystem or place is supposed to look like. The problem is that lots of the time, our sense of the supposed “normal” for a place stems from very recent knowledge and creates inaccurate reference points for management.

For Dr. Pauly, the failure to create a baseline representative of what a natural system looked like before major human influence was extremely evident in the fisheries industry, with cod.

The case of cod is one of the most tragic stories of shifting baselines. Dr. Pauly actually coined the term because of historical anecdotes from cod fishermen around the Grand Banks of Canada’s Newfoundland. Dr. Pauly found these historical anecdotes in a book titled “Sea of Slaughter”, written by Farley Mowat. In this book, he chronicled the destruction and depletion of the creatures on the north-eastern shore of north america, beginning with the European settlers.  Some of the first Europeans to the Atlantic coast were blown away by the sheer quantity of fish they encountered, captured in quotes in this book:

“Cod were once so abundant that fishermen would say they could walk across the Atlantic on their backs”

What made these anecdotes so jarring to Dr. Pauly is because of the stark contrast to what we see today from current Newfoundland fishermen, who say they can hardly catch a reasonable amount of stock.

To understand how far we’ve come, we have to go way back to the European colonizers of Newfoundland. When they came to Newfoundland, it was not by accident. They were lured by the anecdotes from the early explorers who had seen the promise of the bounty of the sea of Newfoundland. 

Cod was king. Boats of men came over to Newfoundland and the abundance of fish stocks quickly made it into a bustling port. Newfoundland was founded upon fish, and much of the culture and economy in recent times has still revolved around the fishery.

To see this, I made the trek to Newfoundland, hopped on a big boat, and circumnavigated the island. I interviewed fishermen - both retired and currently in practice. I wanted to see if they had noticed different changes over the course of their fishing careers. I wanted to see if maybe we were more cognizant of the shifting of baselines nowadays than back when it was first coined. Although their answers were laden with complications I had never originally thought off, they did all start off by speaking earnestly of the role that fishing has played in their lives and family legacy.

Cod was the foundation and the lifeblood for generations of families in Newfoundland, so much so that “in cod we trust” became a sort of national slogan. It was one of the world’s most productive fishing grounds for centuries. It was too big, some thought, to ever fail.

Yet on the infamous day of July 2nd, 1992, the Canadian government closed the Newfoundland cod industry. They imposed a moratorium, which prohibited the fishing of any cod, eliminating the jobs of 40,000 thousands of Newfoundlanders and stripping the livelihoods from countless others who relied on a booming cod industry.

They closed the industry that had been the reason for settlement there in the first place.  This birthright of Newfoundlanders was taken away from them; however, the government had no choice. The stocks had been exhausted to a dangerous level, teetering on the edge of what could be a perpetual depletion. Fishermen had been, more or less, scavenging in the sea of slaughter. Because of shifting baselines, most hadn’t realized.

Listen to the next episode of the ‘shifting baselines’ series to hear how the combination of fishing technology and fisheries management added to the shifting perception of fish stock, from the voices of Newfoundland fishermen and natives.


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Many Newfoundlanders have generously contributed to this story. Those featured in this episode are: Tony Oxford, Lee Tremblett, Sam and Dawn Dredge, Ceryl from Little Bay Islands. Dr. Daniel Pauly contributed his voice to explain the idea of shifting baselines.

The intro/outro music is made by Peat bogs. Additional music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions.

& a special thank you to Adventure Canada and the Explorer’s Club, who ultimately made this series possible.

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​When you think of salt and water, the first things that probably pop into mind are either the beach or gargling a heavily salted concoction to stave off a sore throat. Either way, one of the first images that doesn’t pop up - at least for me - is salted winter roads:

When it snows or gets icy, towns will blanket roads and sidewalks with those little chunks of salt to prevent slick spots while walking or driving. But what is put on land doesn’t stay on land. When salt is put on pavement to prevent slick spots, after it’s done it’s job of preventing those slick spots - it has to go somewhere. And that end destination is often our freshwater.

This episode discusses a concept that’s starting to garner some well deserved attention: our inland bodies of water (streams, lakes, ponds, rivers) are getting saltier. This is called salinization, as the water gets saltier. Although this sounds like a distant, foreign topic, it’s actually been suggested as the cause of lead leaching in Flint, Michigan. But what’s causing it, what does it mean for the environment, and why does it matter to you?

Ok, so let’s start at the beginning: streams do naturally have some salt in them, but are receiving way more of it than they’re accustomed to, especially after storms. All because of runoff - water sweeps down asphalt roads or sidewalks, picks up the salt, and dumps it into the body of water it eventually flows into. Like a salty, accumulating snowball.
Stream salinization has the potential to wreak havoc for humans. To see this, all you have to do is look at what happened in Flint, Michigan.

Starting in April of 2014, the residents of the city of Flint were exposed to lead levels dangerous to human health, through their water supply. But what spurred this dangerous lead leaching? In sum, what started it all was a combination of economics and negligence. You see, Flint was broke - and under Michigan law, an emergency manager was appointed to help balance the books and bring the city back ‘out of the red’. One potential solution to their financial woes: adjusting their water supply.

They decided to switch from Detroit water - some of the best drinking water - to the Flint River, and use a treatment facility that hadn’t been in operation in decades. So the problems begin to accumulate fast - switching to a new water source, with new water chemistry, on a tighter budget, and switching back to an old, outdated treatment facility.

But what made the river water so corrosive that it led to massive amounts of lead leaching wasn’t just the fact that industry was dumping some of the byproducts of production into the stream. Instead, it was that much less sinister sounding suspect: salt.

High chloride levels in Flint River meant the water was very corrosive - leading to the corrosion of the pipes that transported drinking water to people’s homes. Because Flint was broke, they hadn’t implemented corrosion control. Corrosion control works by creating the natural buildup of mineral deposits lining the insides of pipes, which prevents the exposure of the pipes to corrosive contaminants found in surface water (and found in especially high concentrations in the Flint River).

I asked some scientists looking at the issue about the solution to freshwater salinization. One thing, they all suggested, was simply: dump less salt.

Remedying this problem isn’t just a function of putting less salt, however; it goes deeper than that. It’s about spreading the awareness that our actions on land influence what happens in our waterways. We don’t act in a vacuum; the things we put out in the environment - whether it be salt, fertilizers, oil spills, or medicine - often end up in our local streams and rivers after rains wash them away. They can end up in the same rivers and streams that we frequently look to for drinking water.

The saying is that you shouldn’t, well, poop where you eat ... what about where you drink?

​If you’d like to read more about freshwater salinization, here is an open access (read: free) research article to check out by Kaushal et al. 2018.

Special thanks to Anurag Mantha for describing the science behind the Flint water crisis.

Human civilizations have frequently found themselves congregated around water sources. Proximity to bodies of water means easier access to drinking water, irrigation, hygiene, etc. Because of all the services that freshwater bodies provide, you’d typically regard these bodies as likely a ‘good’, sort of benevolent aspect of the natural world. But in one area of the world - in the Cameroon Grassfields - lakes have historically had a pretty bad rap...and for good reason.

Indigenously classified as ‘bad’ lakes, the folklore of some lakes in this region told ominous tales of fatal, exploding lakes. Bodies of water here are where the death dwelt. Lake Nyos, in the northwest region of Cameroon, is one of the lakes that bears the title of a ‘maleficent’ water body, capable of producing harm (Shanklin 1989).

The legend went that every couple of years, evil spirits would emerge from the lake to take the lives of those around it. As it is for many myths and legends, there’s some truth to this tale. In 1986, Lake Nyos erupted - not ash, or lava, but a suffocating concentration of invisible gas in an event called a limnic eruption.
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In this episode we’re recounting the historical limnic eruption at Lake Nyos, explaining what it is and the steps being taken to make sure that history doesn’t repeat itself.

The original legend of Lake Nyos and the evil spirits that haunted the valley was grounded in geomythology - when cultures craft a myth to explain geologic events, especially catastrophes (volcanic eruptions, meteor impact, etc.).

Scientific awareness of geologic events can keep such folklore as merely a legend, preventing the cyclical disasters from wreaking havoc again.

If you'd like to read more about limnic eruptions, here is an open access (read: free) journal article to check out by Halbwachs et al. 2004.

Special thanks to Dmitri Rouwet for answering questions in regards to all things volcanic lakes.

References for this episode:
Le Guern, F., E. Shanklin, and S. Tebor. "Witness accounts of the catastrophic event of August 1986 at Lake Nyos (Cameroon)." Journal of volcanology and geothermal research 51.1-2 (1992): 171-184.

​Shanklin, Eugenia. "Exploding lakes and maleficent water in Grassfields legends and myth." Journal of volcanology and geothermal research 39.2-3 (1989): 233-24


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