The coming and going of visionaries

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We’re staying in a hotel in Saint John tonight. We have a hospital visit tomorrow. To pass the time I went online to check the local news and learned that Dr. John Anderson passed away on Thursday.

John was one of my favourite people at the Huntsman. He and I had worked together on the fundraising campaign for the new Discovery Centre and in just one visit (which he’d personally arranged earlier) with a donor we brought in a $500,000 gift. That was the kind of guy John was. When you were with him good things happened.

Other people could tell you more about John. He was a storied guy. He’d been the director of the St. Andrews Biological Station, head director of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans national research program and shortly afterward, president of the University of New Brunswick. And in that same busy period in the early 1970s he started up the Huntsman Marine Science Centre. Its christening, I’m told, involved outdoor video presentations, bigwigs and a real submarine.

The John I knew was near the very end of his career and struggled to keep up. But keep up he did—with passion. John was the keeper of the Huntsman flame and did not suffer fools gladly. To say he could be temperamental at times would be an understatement.

I remember running into that side of him one beautiful spring morning. I was showing a video in the Huntsman boardroom about the state of today’s oceans. The video, Altered Oceans, was produced by the LA Times and documented ocean acidification, the giant plastic garbage swirl in the mid-Pacific and more. About halfway through I turned to John and asked, “What do you think?” He stood up and muttered, “Junk science,” and walked out.


The incident bothered me. I respected John’s opinion and his dismissiveness hurt. It wasn’t until seeing the news of his passing that I figured it out. I realized that for all his adventure and vision, John was an innately conservative man—in the best sense. John saw himself in the role of conservator, educator and consensus-builder.

People will undoubtedly eulogize John the professional man and John the family man. But the John I knew believed that motivated, cooperative individuals could actually save the world. I have to admit to sharing that view, which makes his loss all the greater.

And I now understand why John couldn’t accept that LA Times documentary. I don’t think John could allow himself to believe human beings would destroy something as vast as the ocean he loved. To the end I think John believed that science and industry—working with the public—could manage “the commons.”

I sincerely hope he’s right, though recent scientific evidence stirs up grave misgivings. But if we follow John’s lead, we won’t just sit here waiting for things to happen, we’ll get up and do something.

That “something” could be a wonderful challenge for John’s beloved Huntsman. The oceans are indeed compromised. The ocean story in this region is compelling.

Under John’s watch the Huntsman crew—led by Fred Whorisky, Bill Robertson, Bill Smith, Mike Henderson, Sandra Clark, Tracey Dean, Muriel Jarvis, Gerhard Pohle, Lou Van Guelpen and many others—has rebuilt the physical operation, forged new partnerships with companies such as Paturel and created new programs such as the New Brunswick grade six outreach program. When the new aquarium opens this July, a new era will begin at the Huntsman, as John Anderson’s passing marks an ending.


By design the new Huntsman mandate will be outreach—and saving the oceans. These two things are leagues way from the bricks and mortar build-out over the past five years at the Huntsman—and the parallel rebuild happening at the neighbouring St. Andrews Biological Station.

Capital improvements are never a guarantee of operational success. Staff cuts will always be a possibility at the Biological Station, and the Huntsman itself will have to attract at least twice the visitors of any other attraction in St. Andrews to remain financially healthy (though its industrial science operations could go a long way to offset any shortfalls in tourism visitations).

But still, it will be a tightrope walk. The Huntsman’s future will depend on corporate contracts and corporate largess. Yet a “save the oceans” educational mission could just put it at odds with its corporate sponsors, such as aquaculture companies.

The Huntsman, like so many not-for-profit environmental organizations, will have to define—and clearly state—its ethical mandate to the public as it moves forward.

Unlike many organizations, the Huntsman is fortunate to have two very good role models to whom they might turn in forming either ethical proposition. Both Dr. A.G. Huntsman and Dr. Anderson were visionaries and innovators. A.G. Huntsman spearheaded the research in the 1920s that led to inventions such as the world’s first fast-frozen fish fillets as well as pioneering research into ocean life. John Anderson pioneered partnerships that led to the twin-campus University of New Brunswick and the multi-university partnership that led to the creation of the Huntsman.

Moving into the future—and given the environmental challenges facing us—the new Huntsman leaders might ask themselves, “What would John Anderson do? What would A.G. Huntsman do?”

I’d love to know, wouldn’t you?

Towns, highways, hotels and other attractions

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The recent local editorials about St. Andrews’ storied Algonquin Hotel got some of it right. The Algonquin is losing its management company, the Fairmont. And the hotel is tired.

What the editorials didn’t tell you is that the Fairmont chain is the final version of Canadian Pacific Hotels, which has been operating the Algonquin, on and off, since 1903. So, the town of St. Andrews is losing a long-term—and historic—partner. It’s the end of an era.

That era began with a group of American businessmen from Boston, who built the Algonquin in 1889. By 1903 they’d sold the hotel, lock-stock-and-barrel to CP. Eleven years later the hotel burned down, and was rebuilt and expanded into the Tudor-style hotel we see today. For more on its illustrious history, check out David Sullivan’s book on the hotel (www.pendleburypress.ca).

So why is the hotel’s history important? Well, it has more to do with the history of transportation and technology than the hotel. The Algonquin was only built because of the rail line to St. Andrews.

By the 1950s highways had replaced the railway as the main mode of passenger transportation, and by the 1970s the writing was on the wall. Passenger rail service was a thing of the past, and CP was getting out of the hotel ownership business, though they’d continue managing them. By 1984 the Province of New Brunswick had purchased the Algonquin, ostensibly because there wasn’t any other buyer available. No one but the Province could afford the white elephant on the hill.

It was a losing proposition. Even with a new addition added that year, the hotel was tired. And has stayed tired. Most of the rooms in the main part of the hotel are closed in the winter and have no air conditioning in the summer. To say that these rooms are small and outdated is an understatement, not to mention over-priced.

To blame the government for not keeping up the hotel is a bit disingenuous. There was no way to keep it up—while justifying it as a business. It simply didn’t earn enough to allow for reinvestment. CP knew that. Even so, the Province ponied up the cash to add a signature golf course to the facility, hoping that would draw more visitors. But that has proven to be a money-pit as well, and failed to attract enough visitors.

Meanwhile, the efforts of the residents of St. Andrews have done little over the past two decades to increase traffic to the town. So now all is riding on the future of the hotel, and finding an investor willing to shell out between $15 to $20 million on a money-losing old hotel with low occupancy.

So what is the future? Well, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.” And the original (and long gone) medium for the hotel was the railway. The current media are highways and the Internet.

The new divided highway is going in as we speak, and it will smoothly carry people past the St. Andrews turnoff at 100+ kph, just as it bypasses St. Stephen with a sleek new border crossing. The only local beneficiary seems to be St. George, which has excellent visual optics from the new road and great on and off points—one with an actual gas station and service centre! With a bit of a development plan, St. George could actually do some tourism business.

But it’s the Internet that signals the real change. People now shop globally for tourism experiences. And the word “experiences” says it all. Today’s travellers want something to do, not just something to see. When they arrive at a destination, they come with expectations, and their own personal experience (both online and real world) to shape those expectations.

The prime experience in Charlotte County is the ocean. And whale watching is the easiest and best way to access that experience. Sea kayaking comes next. These are active experiences. But there is no main attraction—such as a national park—to draw hundreds of thousands of new visitors to the area. Instead, the Province invested its money into the Algonquin.

A “Passamaquoddy Bay National Marine Park” would be the kind of thing that would make sense for the entire region. It would give the old Algonquin a reason to live. It would add greatly needed dimension (and international marketing power) to the new Huntsman Discovery Centre. It would give new relevance to the towns of St. George, St. Andrews and St. Stephen as waterfront towns, and bring new and much needed attention to Deer Island Campobello and Grand Manan.


National parks of this type can draw in excess of 2 million people a year. And a national marine park is the kind of thing that lends itself to online marketing.

Why is the marine park a good online fit? Because the Internet is about information. (That’s why it’s the called the “information highway,” duh.) So connect the information dots. The world’s oceans are in crisis. And Passamaquoddy Bay is perhaps the most fertile body of water in the northern latitudes. The life in our bay is beyond world-class. Learning about ocean life is critical to our future. And I don’t mean our local future. I mean the future of all of us on the planet.

Now, if that isn’t a marketing opportunity, I don’t know what is.

Loading the ocean economy to collapse

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As far as I could tell, I was the only one on the block who got through the winter without a snow blower or a contract with a plow-truck owner.

Sure, my shoveling saved some fossil fuel but I couldn’t resist checking out the online classifieds for plow-trucks. And I found one that looked pretty good. It was on Campobello. So I set up a time to see it. The truck was less than I’d expected, but the owner was a nice guy, a fisherman.

He talked about fishing. He was shrimping now, he said, but wasn’t much money in it. He’d only made 500 bucks this year—though last year’s lobster season had been good. Without unemployment insurance he didn’t know how he would have made it.

Good for him, I thought, that our provincial political rep is also a fisherman from nearby Campobello Island. But then again, politicians don’t grow fish. Or do they?

On the way back I tuned the radio to David Suzuki and the young Canadian movie star Ellen Page, who played the lead in the hit movie Juno. One of her comments caught my attention. She said, “The oceans today have more acidity than in the last 20 million years.” Could that be true, I wondered.

So I did a quick search on the Net to see if she got her fact straight. Turns out she did. A 2009 National Geographic report quoted Thomas Lovejoy (the former chief biodiversity advisor to the World Bank), who said, “the acidity of the oceans will more than double in the next 40 years. This rate is 100 times faster than any changes in ocean acidity in the last 20 million years, making it unlikely that marine life can somehow adapt to the changes.”

Oh-oh. Sounds a bit ominous. And it is. Because it turns out we’re causing it. As we cough out more carbon dioxide through our collective smokestacks and tailpipes, the world’s oceans absorb more than 25 percent of all the CO2 we generate. It does this through the magic of biological and solubility pumps.

But thanks to fossil fuel we’re pushing out more CO2 than the ocean can absorb.

And our total output of CO2 is somewhere north of 30 billion tonnes a year. All that CO2 upsets the natural chemical balance of the ocean, creating—acidity.

Here’s what good old Wikipedia has to say about the effects: “research from the University of Bristol, published in the journal Nature Geoscience in February 2010, compared current rates of ocean acidification with the greenhouse event at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, about 55 million years ago when surface ocean temperatures rose by 5-6 degrees Celsius, during which time no catastrophe is seen in surface ecosystems, yet bottom-dwelling organisms in the deep ocean experienced a major extinction.”

That isn’t all. The Wiki page went on to say, “the current acidification is on path to reach levels higher than any seen in the last 65 million years. The study also found that the current rate of acidification is “ten times the rate that preceded the mass extinction 55 million years ago,” and Ridgwell [prof., U of B] commented that the present rate "is an almost unprecedented geological event.” A National Research Council study released in April 2010 likewise concluded that “the level of acid in the oceans is increasing at an unprecedented rate.”

This projection seems to jibe with an earlier report from Dalhousie’s Dr. Boris Worm, who was pilloried for his prediction a few years ago that the world’s fishery would collapse by 2048.

This isn’t the first time human technology will have wiped out a fishery (though it would certainly be the most catastrophic).

From 1960 to 1990 the world’s high-tech factory trawler fleet wiped out the Atlantic cod fishery. Instead of heeding the advice of local in-shore fisherman who foresaw the collapse in their declining catches in the early 1980s, the Canadian government and its Department of Fisheries and Oceans kept the industry going until 1992 before declaring a total moratorium. By that time, as we all know, it was too late. And the cod stocks have yet to recover.

Turns out that a quicker response by Canadian politicians may have resulted in a lot more fish today.

Instead, some 12,000 to 20,000 people lost their livelihoods and the federal government spent an estimated $2 billion in social welfare to offset the economic carnage.

Well, here we are, 20 years into the future, and it’s déjà vu all over again. And it’s not just the fishery we’re going to lose this time. CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change will disrupt just about everything we do on the planet. If ever there was a time for politicians to take action, it’s now. But it’s clear they won’t, at least not in time.

The collective environmental problem seems just too big for politicians to wrap their tiny heads around. How could our local politician, the fisherman, possibly convince his esteemed colleagues that New Brunswick has to completely reinvent itself to build a new post-climate change, post-fossil fuel economy?

Not that I’d discourage him trying. In fact I’d gladly roll up my sleeves and help. And I’d bet there are a few unemployed fishermen who might, too. Before it’s too late.

You and Andy Warhol fighting for bandwidth

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You can get more money or more stuff. But you can’t get more time. Or so the old adage goes. And it’s true; despite modern health care, we’re only here for a short time.

So it comes down to making choices about what we value. But how do we make those choices? And what influences those choices?

There’s a cool website I’ve mentioned before: www.worldometers.info. It will show you that the world’s population is growing by one person every split second. By the time I finished writing this sentence and checking the site again the world’s population had grown by 325 people. There are a lot of new customers out there.

Worldometers tells us that there have already been 180,263 new book titles published so far this year—that in just a little over two months. It seems that since the advent of the personal computer everyone is a writer. Given that maybe only one in 10,000 manuscripts gets published, how can the poor editor choose the best manuscripts, and worse yet, how can the hapless reader choose a single good book from this tidal wave of publishing?

In 2004 the New York Times reported: “Everyone is reading the same 20 books,” Paul Slovak, the associate publisher of Viking, complains—a problem most attribute to the shrinking press coverage for new books. “It's become a winner-take-all situation.”

This year alone the world audience will have a choice of over 1 million new titles, and yet only 20 books will hit it big. Those are pretty poor odds for a writer. No wonder an endorsement from Oprah is so important. Her choice makes the difference between the remaindered bin and a best seller.

But why is Oprah’s selection any more valuable than, say, yours? No surprise. Oprah has access to bandwidth. By bandwidth, I mean a very large pipeline to the public.

As most of us know, bandwidth is a technical electronics term for the carrying capacity of a communications system. Thin telephone wires of have a bandwidth limit, or a limit to the amount of data that can be pushed through that narrow pipe. Engineers work hard to design work-around solutions to increase the carrying capacity of existing wires—so we can get more information into hour homes.

Today’s telephone system runs on basically the same wires it did 50 years ago. Yet today’s high speed service will deliver high speed internet service to two computers as well as an online movie to my Blu-Ray device and a long distance telephone call—all at the same time. Somehow that ‘twisted pair’ of phone lines got a big dose of steroids. That’s bandwidth increase.

Your brain has bandwidth, too. You can only absorb so much before your brain overloads. It’s like drinking from a fire-hose. So in today’s high-information world, we’re all forced to edit.

And there’s a tremendous amount of competition for the bandwidth that actually gets inside our heads. But that’s increasingly difficult to do in an ever-diffusing and atomized media universe in which we can choose between print, radio and TV, telephones and the galaxy of tools on the Internet—e-mail, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, websites and so on.

Not only that, we’ve become our own content generators. While just 20 years ago we sat passively in front of a TV, we now create our own things to narrowcast to the entire world. Our Facebook pages transmit our impulses, interests and idiosyncrasies, minute-by-minute to anyone who’s watching.

All our history, all our present and much of our future plans are available online. There is so much weird and wonderful personal creativity on the Net that it makes Andy Warhol look like a rank amateur. But for the fact that he’s famous, he’d barely be noticed today.

That said, we’re now awash in information no one actually wants—or knows how to process. What happens to a global society in which the communications bandwidth is completely stuffed to the max?

Well, most of it becomes irrelevant. Like Warhol—or the 20 best selling novels this year—only a handful of mega-brands will sell. Last year’s best seller was Stieg Larsson. Next year, who knows?

Ironically, even though we’ve never before had so much choice—from communication to travel destinations to consumer products—we’re more susceptible than ever to group behaviour. Our massively interlinked communications networks may actually amplify the effects of mass behaviour, rather than increase personal choice.

What we are losing over time are qualified, independent arbiters of choice, that is, the people we can trust to help us make informed choices. Sure, these reviewers still exist. But there’s no way they can keep up with the tidal wave. They’re drowning and disappearing. Only big corporate interests have the complex systems necessary to keep up with trends and exploit them. And this includes big governments.

Their well-funded special interest agencies—aimed at reshaping the messages—are now filling up our bandwidth. We’ve successfully moved from Andy Warhol’s experimental world to Glenn Beck’s one-dimensional universe. Unfortunately, that adds up to a few big influences and a whole lot of noise.