Get Out Migration a wild success

What did Alexandra Morton's Get Out Migration accomplish? Why do wild salmon migrate? They go to such huge efforts and for so long a journey. A journey that takes up most of their lives. And then they come back to the stream where they were born in. They come back and make the forests green and feed all the critters.

They have sustained first nations all along the coast. Salmon are sacred. They literally bring this coast alive. We cannot take them for granted.

And yet our governments have looked the other way as salmon farming corporations have despoiled our coast and threatened the wild salmon. The DFO has abandoned it's raison d'etre to protect our wild fisheries just as it betrayed the East coast cod fishery a generation ago.

Humans can migrate too. And that's what we did in the thousands on May 8th , to join with Alexander Morton in Victoria to tell our governments to get the Norwegian Salmon corporations out of our ocean. It was a beautiful day as thousands marched in the streets of Victoria to the Legislature buildings.

It was a joyous occasion as speaker after speaker spoke of the importance of getting the salmon farms out of the ocean and into closed containment.

It's not rocket science. Industrial farming requires the concentration of food product which attracts parasites such as sea lice from the wild. This kind of farming requires heavy doses of chemicals to control the parasites and if this kind of farming is done in the ocean in open net-pens, the sea lice and the chemicals are allowed to spread out and harm the wild fish and other critters.

Putting farmed fish into closed containment protects them from most sea parasites so they require less toxic chemicals. And separating them from the ocean prevents parasites from spreading back into the wild where they are especially dangerous to salmon smolts – the young salmon.

When I listened to the speakers at the legislature I was most impressed by what the first nations elders had to say: Wild salmon are our lifeblood. We can't survive without them. They are a part of us.

The elders have been trying to tell us these things for hundreds of years but it's only now that biology has come to understand these connections. Maybe now we can listen to the wisdom of the elders.

Alexander Morton and the people of the archipelago did not march in vain. We, the people can make a difference. Here's one thing we can do without even leaving the comfort of our homes. Write to the Federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Gail Shea and tell her to get the Norwegian salmon farms out of the ocean: Shea.G@parl.gc.ca . Write to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and tell him we need a BC minister of Fisheries: pm@pm.gc.ca Write to MP Fin Donnelly and tell him what you think of his bill to remove salmon farms from the ocean: http://www.findonnelly.ca

We don't have salmon farms in Prince Rupert now, but if we don't let government know what we think of open net-pen salmon farms, they will stand by as Norwegian fish farm corporations take over the whole coast and drive the wild salmon to extinction. We can make a difference.

"Stepping Stones": The Best Kayaking Book Ever

Make no mistake about it, this is one of the best if not the best sea-kayaking book ever written. Nigel Foster, who builds kayaks, has his own school of kayaking, has written books and produced videos on sea kayaking is one hell of a good writer.

Stepping Stones of Ungava and Labrador has got everything that I would want in a kayaking tale about northern labrador: apt, succinct descriptions of the people met and the land and seascapes traversed by kayak; A brief but eye-opening look at the interaction of Europeans and Inuit of Labrador over the last three hundred years; And to top it all - a sea-kayaking adventure that'll have armchair travelers biting their knuckles in suspense.

That's what makes Stepping Stones such a good kayaking book. He describes each day of the trip as it unfolds, the people, the adventures, the changing weather, encounters with wild life. He says just enough to give you a good idea of each day. And then he weaves in the historical background, and brings it alive when they run into Inuit people who were part of that story.

I've read lots of Farley Mowatt, but I wasn't aware of the forced abandonment of Inuit villages in Labrador that went on in the middle of the last century. This is a chapter of Canadian history that deserves to be better known and Foster does an excellent job of talking about it and describing some of the people he met who were caught up in it.

I consider myself to be a fairly proficient kayaker, but after reading Foster's description of an incredibly dangerous crossing of Hudson Strait, I'm glad he was there and survived to tell the tale and I'm in the armchair reading about it.

Picture seven knot tidal currents. Seven knot tidal currents! And the kind of steep breaking waves that occur when the wind blows against such a current. When the tops of the waves break the sound is like an explosion.

Now imagine it's so foggy you can hear these "hay makers" all around you but you can't see them until they're breaking over you and your kayak and filling your "drytop" with ice cold water. Imagine that kind of crossing for twelve hours. It's easily the scariest description of a kayak crossing I've ever read.

According to Foster, it took him three years to psychologically recover from that experience. That crossing forms the climactic chapter of the book although what it describes is something that he did almost twenty years before in 1981.

The story that "surrounds" the description of this crossing is his daily log of an ambitious kayak trip that he and his wife Kristen took following the Labrador coast from Ungava Bay to Nain in 2004. There's less suspense, and less adventure in their contemporary trip than in the 1981 crossing but Foster does such a good job of describing each day's journey and weaving in historical references that the whole story becomes that more satisfying a read.

If you're considering kayaking the northern Labrador coast you might think again after reading of these kayakers' hair raising encounters with Polar bears. When it comes to encounters with polar bears I appreciate having that experience passed on to me in one ripping good tale by a true master of the kayak. Thanks for sharing Nigel.

Joining Alexandra Morton's Get-Out Migration

Thank you George Baker for bringing to my attention Alexandra Morton's march down Vancouver Island to protect the wild salmon (prdnews Apr 23). Your article inspired me to buy plane tickets to go to Vancouver Island and join the “Get-out Migration”.
I called friends, my family... I found one other person from Prince Rupert who wants to go. Anybody else out there in Prince Rupert? Give me a call I'm in the phone book.

Up here in the north, it may seem as if that whole salmon farming thing is over. There's a moratorium here. We won. But let me tell you something. It's partly because of Alexandra Morton that we got our moratorium. She did the science, she publicized the issue, she took the salmon farming companies to court, and she has been a relentless voice in defence of the wild salmon.

“We will lose our wild salmon if government continues to carelessly put farm salmon before wild salmon.” Here's a person of great integrity standing up to the Norwegian Fish Farm Corporations, and calling the government repeatedly to account for their failure to protect wild salmon.

There's not many people like Alexandra. She knows that letting the wild salmon die is wrong to the very core of her being. “Salmon embody the essential unity of mountain, forest and stream.” She says.

Meanwhile the government sits on the evidence that open-net fish farms kill salmon smolts and does nothing. The government's view is that salmon are not sacred. They are a stream of income. And if farmed salmon yield a bigger stream of income then wild salmon then so be it.

The character of the north pacific coast, the ecosystem the identity of the people who live here – that doesn't matter to the federal or the provincial governments. It's all about money. But of course no politician has the guts to admit that out loud.

Bill Vander Zalm will be up here in a couple of weeks flogging his American style anti-tax campaign. Who has the integrity? Who is standing up for what's really valuable ?

Look what's happening in the United States. The big banks and the investment firms brought the global economy to the brink of disaster, and then got the government to bail them out and gave themselves million dollar bonuses. And recently the Supreme court took away all limits to corporate contributions for election campaigns. It's official, the U.S. Government is for sale to the highest bidders.

Back in BC we have a government that pretends to be green, but like our American neighbours, really just listens to the sound of money. It's only people with integrity like Alexandra who have made the fish farming moratorium possible. But let's not take the absence of fish farms here for granted.

Money talks and government listens, but government also listens if sufficient numbers of people make their feelings known. When you get down to it it's either we the people or it's the corporations. If we don't join together and make our voices heard they win and the wild salmon go extinct.

What's important to you? Do you fish for salmon? Do you smoke and can salmon? What would it mean to you if there were no more wild salmon?


Before I moved to Prince Rupert salmon didn't mean much to me, but after living here almost twenty years I see things very differently. I'm going down to Vancouver Island to support Alexandra Morton and to tell the BC government to get the Norwegian salmon farms out of our ocean.

Come and join us. Or, even if you aren't planning to go, go to Alexandra's website www.salmonaresacred.org. And check out the progress of the get-out migration. E-mail a comment of support, sign the petition. Show Alexandra and the BC government that Prince Rupert cares about wild salmon.

Book Review: "Beyond Stick Control" by Glenn W. Meyer

Do your rudiments! That phrase couldn't be more of a turnoff to me. As a drummer I want drumming to be fun, not a boring job. Too bad then, that for so long I neglected the rudiments and therefore neglected fluidity and control.

Beyond Stick Control, by Glenn W. Meyer has increased my speed, fluidity, and control demonstrably. The name Beyond Stick Control is significant because Stick Control was Lawrence Stone's classic book of snare drum technique based on the rudiments. How do you go beyond Stone's famous book? Meyer does it by incorporating the bass drum in a marvelous variety of ways.

Yes, do your rudiments but throw in accents, and do variations. First learn them slow, then speed them up to get a sense of fluidity and flexibility. But, you say, what does the bass drum have to do with rudiments? That's what makes the modifier “beyond” so appropriate for this book. Adding the bass drum is what takes your playing beyond stick control.

Glenn Meyer divides his book into four sections. This is important, because each section involves using the bass drum in a different way. Section A ignores the bass drum. It doesn't even ask you to play solid four while you're practicing rudiments. Still I practice section A by tapping out quarter notes just as I learned with Ted Reed's classic book Syncopation.

Section B goes beyond Syncopation by incorporating improvisation in the bass drum. The bass drum becomes part of the beat by following and preceding phrases played by the hands. Meyer calls this technique “Linear Style” and he specializes in it. See especially: his encyclopedic book Funk and Fusion Concepts for a cornucopia of examples.

I love practicing section B. It has given me a powerful sense of control and fluidity with my right kick.

Section C is all about bass drum ostinatos. Don't know Italian? “Ostinato” is a repeated pattern played underneath everything else that supports and holds up the whole rythmic structure. Start with halfnotes, then count time with quarter notes like in Reed's Syncopation, then take your drumming beyond Syncopation by incorporating some latin bass beats, Samba, Baio, Tumbao, and the beautiful Baio/Tumbao. And Meyer knows his latin beats.

Section D “Linear Jazz Style” is worth the price of the whole book many times over. It incorporates what you've learned in the previous three sections into the entire drum set. This section is played with a broken triplets swing feel on the ride cymbal. My suggestion, which if you do take, you'll thank me for, is to practice section D with both R hand ride and with L hand ride. It seems like twice as much work but it isn't because the R hand “teaches” the left. And the added bonus is that you further strengthen your right kick without even thinking about it.

Speed these exercises up and play them as written instead of swinging them and they become more like cut time rock rhythms with the back beat on the three. Try, for instance page 56, #11 to see what I mean. Or they gain a latin like feel from the rudimental patterns. It was when I started practicing the triplet rudiments that I realized how challenging these exercises really are.

I love Syncopation, but doing straight four on the bass drum all the time drives me crazy. Going beyond syncopation I can use the hihat to tell time, and that frees up the bass drum to become a more powerful improviser. Section D takes lessons learned in the rudiments and incorporates them into jazz /rock fusion ride rhythms. For me, that's what makes rudiments so much fun to play instead of being a job. Before this book I had no idea how to play this stuff. Now it just seems natural.

The Real Carbon Economy

We say the economic system works through flows: flows of resources, flows of capital, and flows of produced goods, which are all mostly exchanged through buying and selling, and then invested, saved, or consumed.

These flows can be measured in terms of money value. That's what the GNP and GDP are: dollar measures of the circular flow of a nation's economy over the time period of a year.

Think of life now. Life can't be measured by dollars because life includes a lot more than just humans and life has been around a lot longer than humans.

But life has circular flows too, flows of resources, flows of energy. And like an economy, life should have a balance between consumption and production.

Think of the Earth as an economy, a circular flow of resources with an input of high quality energy from the sun and output of low grade energy in the form of infra-red heat.

The Earth is a successful economy because it has life. It is life that is able to capture some of the sun's energy and maintain itself for countless generations in a continuous manner since its origins.

The Earth Economy is a lot bigger than the human economy and a lot lot older. In the Earth Economy carbon is the medium of exchange. In other words, carbon in the Earth Economy plays the same role as money does in the human economy. Carbon, like money gets cycled through the Earth Economy, but unlike money, carbon takes hundreds of millions of years to cycle through.

In the human economy money commands resources, goods and services. And money acts as a store of value. It can be saved and spent later. But money, unlike carbon, is conceptual, it only exists because we believe it has value. It ceases to exist when we cease to believe in it.

Money is really only a virtual reality. Ultimately, what makes all things work, all things go, and what makes living things alive is energy.

Energy flows, and like water, it always flows downstream. In the case of water, it flows downstream to the lowest point on Earth, which is the bottom of the oceans. In the case of energy, when we say it flows downstream we are talking about the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”.

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. That's the first law. The second law has to do with what happens when energy is converted into work.

Living systems capture energy and convert it into chemical energy. The second law says that this must be a downhill process. You cannot reconvert chemical energy to electromagnetic energy (light) unless you add more energy from outside the system.

That's why a perpetual motion machine is impossible. Because whenever work is done, the energy used up, even though it still exists, cannot be used again to do the same amount of work. It gets degraded, or disorganized in doing work. In this sense it always flows downstream.

On Earth, carbon plays the role of life's currency, life's means of capturing, utilizing, and storing the high grade energy, and getting rid of the low grade energy. Because it plays such a central role in life, carbon is a lot like the Greek god Atlas, holding up the sky.

Energy is necessary for life because if there's not enough of it then life's activities stop. But too much energy raises the temperature too high and life can burn up.

Over vast scales of time the carbon cycle has had a huge influence on the flows of energy and the overall temperature of Earth's surface. And during those same spans of time, life has had a large influence on the carbon cycle, and hence on Earth's temperature.

Like goods and services in the smaller human economy, energy flows and circulates amongst living things. First, to the Producers: bacteria, diatoms, algae, and plants. Producers take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Producers utilize photosynthesis and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to capture solar energy and store it in carbon compounds.

. Next, the energy, in the form of carbon compounds, flows to the Consumers: the bacteria, protists, fungi, and animals that feed on plants and on each other. Consumers breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.

When there is a balance between Producers and Consumers Earth Economy is as healthy as it can be. If there is too many Producers and not enough Consumers, then too much of the plants and algae die without decomposing and more carbon gets locked into sedimentary rocks. Then the available supply of carbon decreases and Earth's temperature decreases. This is just one of, but not the only causes of ice ages.

We can call ice ages “Depressions” in the Earth Economy because just as in depressions when there's not enough money to buy everything the economy freezes, during an ice age there's less carbon available to capture the energy needed to drive life. Some of the great extinction events such as the Permian - Triassic extinction 250 million years ago are thought to have been caused by ice ages.

If there is too many Consumers and not enough Producers we get too much carbon available. Remember, Consumers breathe out carbon dioxide, so the more Consumers there are and the more that they consume, the more carbon dioxide there will be in the atmosphere. The amount of available carbon becomes so high that Earth's surface temperature climbs. We can call this “Inflation” .

For thousands of years the human economy was just an insignificant fraction of Earth Economy. But then we discovered fossil fuels – coal, and oil. These are forms of carbon that were saved long ago when for various reasons, plant life was not consumed by other life forms, but eventually was subducted underground. There it was converted by the heat and compression of Earth's techtonic forces into coal and oil.

By tapping into this stored form of ancient sunlight, we have been able to extract both biological and mineralogical resources at an accelerating rate. This is a situation akin to hyperinflation in human economy, where the circulation velocity of money (carbon) has increased at the same time as vastly greater quantities of money (carbon) are available.

The result is an overheating of Earth Economy and a new mass extinction event. We call this “Global Warming”.

Spontaneous Organization

The market economy is a self-organizing system because it is made up of countless people who act out of their own self interest to buy and sell to other people. It is not designed and not made by a designer.

A language system such as the english language, is a self-organizing system. Each speaker of english uses english words in conversation with other english speakers. The language itself is shaped and evolves through the sum total of individual conversations and at the same time the language system as a whole shapes the way that each individual speaker uses it in conversation.

Although laws are made by governments and moral codes are often passed on from one generation to the next through formal and informal education, moral systems can also be seen as self-organizing. Our interpretation of values, social norms and rules helps to shape our everyday conduct with others. Each person's conduct in turn, is interpreted by and influences other's value systems and conduct in a vast circle of social networks. Some people's behaviour is exemplary and very influential, other's behaviour is despicable and serves as an example to be shunned.

All these human systems I am describing have emergent properties that are not reducible to a simple description of physical causes. Being an english speaker I can choose to speak eloquently or massacre the language. Either way, I am part of the english language system without being determined by it.

Consciousness is another system, in this case neurological, where the state of consciousness is an emergent property, not reducible to a physical chain of neurons firing.

The parts of consciousness interact together with the other parts: The mid-brain systems that keep us alert and awake and that help us to pay attention, the sensory systems, the motivational system that helps us to focus and prioritize, the memory systems of the cerebral cortex that help in making associations with past experience, and make experiencing into a continuous flow, the parts of the cortex dealing with language, and meaning that help to put ideas into words, the parts that allow us to visualize ideas, and the prefrontal areas of the cortex that assist us in judging and and decision-making.

Our thoughts, sensations, feelings and judgement get organized into coherent ideas and narratives spontaneously without being planned or designed. For any planning, necessarily already involves ideas and narratives, so it can't be primary.

We tend to model reality after ourselves. This is called “anthropomorphism”. At first we attribute human qualities to natural phenomena such as the weather, the sea, volcanoes, the sun and moon, and the stars. We invent mythologies to explain how these things act, as if they were people and acted according to their own purposes.

Determinism can be seen as just another form of anthropomorphism. Just as all humans make things and do things for a reason, determinism sees everything that happens as determined by previous causes. Determinism equates living things with machines as if they were designed for a reason.

According to determinism there is no free will because everything that happens is determined by antecedant causes. But does causation explain everything, and does it really determine behaviour?

Think back to the flock of sandpipers that I talked about in a previous article. The flock flies in unison, quickly manoevering around obstacles as one, and lands on the beach in unison. Where was the cause of that flock's behaviour? Was it the sum total of all the individual sandpipers' behaviour?

But didn't the behaviour of the flock as a whole influence the behaviour of each individual bird? The behaviour of the flock influenced the behaviour of the individual birds, and the individual birds influenced the behaviour of the flock. In which direction was the cause?

We're talking in circles here. If causation happens in both directions or is “circular” in what sense is it determinate?

Everything can influence us at once, and if so what is it that causes us to do what we do? Everything? Then the concept of causation and determinism itself are both meaningless.

It seems to me that self-organization can generate free will because the influence and interaction of a self-organized system can be omni-directional.

Think of the brain. Interactions between many different parts of the brain contribute to each moment of consciousness. At the same time our conscious experience influences those interactions. What causes the experience then?

That's why we say that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and not reducible to the firing of nerve cells. And we can say the same thing about “purpose” and “meaning”. These emerge out of living and self-organizing systems.

Purpose is more basic than meaning because it does not require consciousness. The purpose of maintaining life appears to be already part of every life-form. Meaning emerges from consciousness so it requires consciousness.

It may seem rather abstract, what I'm talking about but these are all things that science has a problem dealing with but are in the province of religion. Consciousness emerges from physical phenomena but cannot be reduced to them because it influences those phenomena. Purpose emerges from life and influences life, meaning emerges from consciousness and influences consciousness.

The key to all these phenomena is that they appear to emerge spontaneously from the bottom up in self-organizing systems, without being designed or planned. This has obvious implications for religion. But that's not my department.

Earth-House-System

I'm reading a book by Phillip Ball, called: Water, Matrix of Life. If you want to know more about water, it's fascinating and well written. I particularly like this quote of his: “Water is the agent of geological, environmental and global change. It confers fecundity on parched regions, while it's passing turns grasslands into deserts.”

Water does all this and more. But water is incredibly effective at what it does because water is a team player. Apparently there's water on the moon in the form of patches of ice, but it's inert, it doesn't do anything because it lacks the other team players. Let's introduce these other team members.

Water is a compound not an element although the Greeks and the Chinese thought it was one of the “four elements” - Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Let's run with this idea but let's assume that fire can mean all types of energy, especially the Sun. Let's use a bigger name for Air. We'll call it the Atmosphere. Let's say that “Earth” means the planet and not just a hunk of rock. Now let's add a fifth element, and call it “Life”.

Put these five elements together and they will interact spontaneously. And these interactions form the great geophysical systems of the Earth.

The Earth's surface has mountains and basins. It's lowest points are where most of the water is – in the oceans. The Earth's gravitational field is strong enough to hold all the gases: the oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapour that make up the atmosphere.

Think of Earth as a house without a switch because it runs itself. It's roof is the atmosphere. It lets vital energy from the Sun in and gives us a bit of insulation at night. Too much insulation is not good, as we see with the planet Venus, with its surface temperature of 460 *Celsius.

The Earth's got plumbing, heating, ventilation and power, mostly run by one system: the weather. But it's also got backup power from internal heat which causes plate tectonics to reconfigure the seas and continents every hundred million years or so.

It's not like a house that was designed and built, because it repairs itself. Tell me, what house that we have built repairs itself, or has lasted as long as Earth has?

As a plumbing and heating system and power system the weather is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. Sometimes we get too much water sometimes not enough. Sometimes it gets too hot, sometimes it's just right.

The weather operates under the usual physical laws. The Earth's spin causes winds to curve in the direction of rotation making cyclonic wind patterns counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Sun's radiation heats water on Earth's surface and causes water molecules to change from liquid to gas. The water vapour can rise into the atmosphere because it contains heat from the sun.

Weather is partly predictable, we recognize the seasons, but also unpredictable, we don't know what the weather will be like a month from this day. The weather is a self-organizing system. Weather systems can last up to a week and travel thousands of kilometres.

Let's call a system: a group of parts that interact together to form a whole that is separated from the external world by a boundary.

Let's divide the world of systems into three: machines, institutions, and self-organizing systems.

Self organizing systems are systems of parts that interact via simple physical laws. The parts of the Solar system - the sun and the planets, interact by the laws of motion and gravity to form a balanced system that has maintained itself over time.

All machines are mechanical systems designed and built by humans for various goals. A house is a mechanical system that transfers heat and energy from outside and holds it inside. Houses and other machines have switches on them. When the switch is turned on, the machines start to work and when it's turned off they stop working.

What is a self-organizing system? Think of a flock of sandpipers flying low over the water – the precision and coherence of their flight. The flock swoops and glides as a unified whole as if it acts with one mind.

But each bird is acting on its own and the subtle alterations in flight that each bird makes in response to its neighbours creates an emergent unity.

Unlike machines, self-organizing systems are not deterministic. These systems have properties that emerge from the interaction of all the parts that cannot be predicted from the nature of the parts alone.


You cannot predict the weather beyond a week; Human behaviour is both predictable and unpredictable. Weather systems and large-scale human societies exhibit complex behaviour that is the hallmark of self-organizing systems.