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The Current Transcript for December 8, 2015

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

IN THIS EPISODE

Prologue:

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JERRY FALWELL, JR.: It just blows my mind when I see the President of the United States say that the answer is more gun control. I mean if the people... [crowd applause] If some of those people in that community center had had what I’ve got in my back pocket right now… [roaring crowd applause]

HOST: Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of Virginia's Liberty University, urging his students to arm themselves after last week's California attack. We have heard this b efore, the defense of the gun. From semi-automatic pistols to assault rifles, gun ownership is considered a fundamental right in the United States. An almost sacred belief in the right to bear arms, and not even a string of massacres seems capable of shaking that belief. In a moment, three American gun owners tell us why. And then, smoking gun.

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INTERVIEW: The tide was so huge that the two-metre high seawall that was erected around the hospital to protect it from the high tide simply didn't stand a chance.

HOST: Evidence of the effects of climate change. Not in the future, but right now on the Central Pacific island nation of Kiribati. In an hour, our ongoing project, Ripple Effect, connects the dots between the effects of climate change and the threat to global security. And, rethinking autism.

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STEVE SILBERMAN: And she said, I'm a special education teacher in Silicon Valley. There's an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley. Something terrible is happening to our children.

HOST: Steve Silberman explores that common misunderstanding in his new book, arguing that autistic people have always been among us, and that it's time to see and work with them differently. He says they possess a neurodiversity: a way of thinking and processing thought that needs to be respected and explored, not cured. Hear him in half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

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U.S. gun owners defend their right to bear arms in the wake of mass shootings

Guests: Steve Silberman, Steve Scaffidi, Nicholas Sarwack

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INTERVIEW: I grew up hunting. By the time I was thirteen, my father bought me a gun for my birthday.

INTERVIEW: And I have a son, an adult, 50-year-old son, who is a gun collector. A gun user.

INTERVIEW: My mom used to own a gun. There were some burglaries in the neighborhood that we were living in, and, you know, she had kids to protect.

INTERVIEW: It's my right. And I'm going to own a gun until I die.

HOST: Well, from the streets of Los Angeles, some random sampling of Americans talking about the role guns play in their lives. And America's relationship with the gun is top of mind once again after last week's mass shooting that left fourteen people dead just down the freeway from L.A., in San Bernardino, California. The U.S. president has labeled the shootings an act of terror. He has also called, once again, for tougher gun laws. The numbers in the U.S. speak for themselves.

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WOMAN: The debate over guns in America. What the New York Times this weekend called “an epidemic,” resurfaces each mass shooting. But how many mass shootings are there? That depends who you ask, and how they define a mass shooting. According to the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. averaged about 21 mass shootings a year from 1999 to 2013. It defines a mass shooting as four or more people killed, either in public, or private. Researchers say public mass shootings are on the rise, but mass shootings are only one part of the picture. Statistics show that there's been an overall decline in violent crime in America, including gun violence, yet guns still result in an estimated 90 deaths a day, whether in murder, suicide, or accidental shootings. If you go back and count up all the deaths from gunfire in the U.S. since 1968, you get 1.5 million people. That's more than the number of Americans killed in all wars, from the revolutionary war to Iraq, according to Politifact, an independent fact-checking journalism website. So just how many guns are circulating in the U.S.? There are no official figures, but estimates put the number at 300million. The Small Arms Survey says the U.S. is home to between a third and a half of the world’s civilian-owned guns. And who owns all these guns? A survey by the Pew Research Center found that 61 percent of adults who own guns are white men. By comparison, white men make up just 32 percent of the U.S. adult population.

HOST: To hear why gun ownership is so important to Americans, I'm joined by three people who own guns. Michael Cargill is the owner of Central Texas Gun Works, it's a store in a training facility in Austin, Texas. That's where he is today. Nicolas Sarwark is the chair of the U.S. Libertarian Party, we've reached him in Phoenix, Arizona. And Steve Scaffidi is the mayor of Oak Creek, Wisconsin, where a mass shooting shook his community in 2012, and we have reached him in Oak Creek. Hello Gentlemen, good morning.

ALL: Good morning.

HOST: Steve Scaffidi, let's start with you. What went through your mind when you heard about the San Bernardino shootings?

STEVE SCAFFIDI: Well, anytime you hear about a mass shooting, obviously, it takes me back to what happened here on August 5^th, 2012. But, you know, it's really something that's captured the attention of the media, certainly. It’s a sad day when people lose their lives, innocent people lose their lives, in their workplace, or in the case of Oak Creek, in a place of worship, or in the case of Aurora, Colorado, in a theatre. But my intention of talking about this issue is to talk about what we can do to make those places safer, given the given the rules and what our constitution guarantees each citizen. So that’s the way I look at it.

HOST: Okay, well, just confirm, it was a Sikh temple in your town, six people were killed, four were wounded by a white supremacist, who then killed himself, am I right?

STEVE SCAFFIDI: That's correct, six people lost their lives.

HOST: Okay. And that was what you went through, and that was just, what, three years ago?

STEVE SCAFFIDI: Three years ago, I was just elected shortly before that. A beautiful Sunday morning in Wisconsin, a gentleman walked into—I shouldn’t say gentleman, an individual walked into the Sikh temple , which is probably about a mile from my house, killed two people in the parking lot, killed four others, one of them a woman who was shot in the back while she was praying. Our officers engaged him shortly after the shooting rampage. One of our officers shot him, knocked him down, and then he eventually killed himself with his own gun.

HOST: Okay. Nicholas Sarwack, many Americans, including the president, say tougher gun laws are needed to prevent more deaths such as these. How do you respond to that push for reform?

NICHOLAS SARWACK: The issue with proposing more laws to stop the mass shootings is that none of the laws that have been proposed would have stopped the mass shootings that have occurred. In the case of the Gurdwara shooting in Wisconsin, the shooter legally purchased that handgun after passing a background check in a gun shop in Wisconsin. In the case in San Bernardino, the shooter was a government employee, who would have passed any background check, and actually passed. all of the background checks in California, which has the toughest gun laws in the United States, excepting perhaps Hawaii. So these proposals to add new gun control restrictions don't actually address the problem, and I think it's a failure of leadership to propose a feel-good measure that won't actually address the issue.

HOST: Okay, and let me ask you, because you are chair of the Libertarian Party, what about those background checks? They are required in some cases, not all, should they be beefed up?

NICHOLAS SARWACK: I think that they should be removed. I don't think that we should have background checks, we shouldn't have registration, for what is a essentially a fundamental human right to self-defence. That you can't go taking away the right of people to defend themselves in their communities, in their homes, in their places of worship. I remember worshipping with my mother in Dallas, Texas, during a time when there were some concerns about anti-Semitic violence. And many people during High Holy Days services were armed themselves, because this was not going to be something where they were going to just cross their fingers and hope that something terrible didn't happen.

HOST: So you're saying anyone should be able to buy a gun.

NICHOLAS SARWACK: I believe everybody has a fundamental right to self-defence, absent some showing on the part of the government that, with due process, that you have some disqualifying factor. That, if you’ve committed a previous violent crime with a gun, then there is an argument to be made that you oughtn't be able to have a gun after that that, that should create a bar to ownership. But there's also the question of, if you’ve committed that crime and then you've served your time, and been released back to the community, you know, there's a concept of paying your debts to society, and should you be unable to exercise your right to self-defence at that point.

HOST: The president has said it's time to close the loophole that allows people on the no fly list to purchase guns, including semi-automatic weapons, do you agree, Nicholas?

NICHOLAS SARWACK: I couldn't disagree more. The no fly list is essentially a secret government list that you get put on with absolutely no due process protections. There's no appeal procedure to get off the no fly list, and when our government has, in the past, created secret lists they often get abused. When we had a list of Japanese citizens who were known for their ancestry that the census kept, they swore up and down that they would never use that for any nefarious purpose, and then it was used, you know, in the run up to World War II, to basically intern a bunch of U.S. citizens in concentration camps in California. When you make lists like this, especially lists where you can't get off of it, then you’re taking away people's rights with absolutely no due process. You know, at least with background checks, it's required to have a previous conviction, something where you have a court system, you have an appeal process, you have fundamental rights to due process. The terrorists, the no fly list, is a list of people that have just been put on it by the government. You don't know that you're on it, and there's no way to get off of it.

HOST: Okay.

NICHOLAS SARWACK: And so I can't, I can't say that you can take a fundamental right because a bureaucrat decided you should be on this list.

HOST: Michael Cargill, let's let you in this conversation, you own a gun store. What do you think? Do you think everyone should be allowed to buy a weapon as well, or do you agree with background checks?

MICHAEL CARGILL: I think everyone should have that right, to be able to purchase a firearm. You deserve to be able to protect yourself. We were actually founded on firearms, this country, from the beginning, and what people are concerned with right now, they're concerned with the current administration not being able to protect them. You know, we have different situations that are happening in this country, and around the world, and they're losing that public trust. So yes, I do believe that everyone should have that right. What we have in place, it works now, but you're not going to stop that person that's intent on committing a crime. They can use anything to commit a crime, they can use a car if they wanted to. A person that is dead set on doing something, and causing mayhem and destruction, they're going to do it regardless. What we should do is give the tools to the people, you know, in order to protect themselves.

HOST: So but what does that mean? That if someone has, like this last shooting, these guys had AR, what are they called, AR-15s, the semiautomatic rifles.

MICHAEL CARGILL: Right. That’s correct.

HOST: What does that mean to protect yourself, that you would have, would you have been able to protect yourself against them?

MICHAEL CARGILL: I hope so. That we need to get rid of those no-gun zones, those areas that, where citizens actually cannot carry. Because the people that are lawful gun owners, they're not the problem. The people that actually go through the process of getting a license, and I know people, a lot of people don't like that, because you're asking permission of the government to do this, but the people that go through that process are not the ones that are committing the crimes. When you look at our stats that go all the way back, for example, here in Texas, we have stats to go all the way back to 1995,where you look at individuals that actually get a handgun license, they're not the ones that are actually committing the crimes. They're the ones that are actually law abiding citizens. They're the ones that are more law abiding then law enforcement officers. People that actually get a license are less than, they are responsible for less than a quarter of a percent of all crimes in this state.

HOST: Well okay. Steve Scaffidi, Mayor Scaffidi, would you agree that there should be no restrictions? I mean, you've actually lived through, in your community, a mass shooting by a guy who was actually a legal gun owner.

STEVE SCAFFIDI: Sure, and many of the mass shootings are committed by people that are, have gone through the background checks. I believe in the background check process, I think, just for the law enforcement side, we need to know who is purchasing weapons. And really, more importantly, who shouldn't have weapons. And the only way I see, in the reality the world we live in, is that you have to have background checks, just to keep guns out of the hands of people that shouldn't have them. I think it's the, you can always improve the current process. You can speed it up. I do believe that there's issues with lists, where you have to be really, really careful about infringing on people's rights. But we register people for a lot of things in this country, and I'm a firm believer in the second amendment, but I think we really have to think long and hard about trying to keep guns out of the hands of people that shouldn't have them. That doesn't mean we're not going to see mass shootings. There's many, many other ways that we can we can make our public feel safer, and if you'd like, I can talk about those, but—

HOST: [interposing] Well, we, I'm talking to you from Canada, and we know how to do gun safety here, we have laws. What I'm trying to understand is why you guys feel so strongly against them, trying to understand that. So first of all, let me just confirm here. Michael, you own guns.

MICHAEL CARGILL: That is correct.

HOST: Do you carry guns when you go out, when you leave the home?

MICHAEL CARGILL: Absolutely, [crosstalk] I actually carry--

HOST: [interposing] How many?

MICHAEL CARGILL: I carry two handguns on me.

HOST: Why?

MICHAEL CARGILL: Why, because that's my right that's given to me under the Constitution, that's what we've been founded on. I had that right to do that, I enjoy doing it. I've done it for, ever since I was 21 years old, and I'm 46 now. [crosstalk] And I have never had to—

HOST: [interposing] Do you—

MICHAEL CARGILL: I've never had to pull my gun out. I've never had to use it.

HOST: Okay, but do you carry because you like guns, or because you think you might need to defend yourself when you leave your home?

MICHAEL CARGILL: I carry it for my personal protection. I carry it as part of my job. I'm a gun store owner, I’m a firearms instructor, I’m a security instructor. So that's why I do it.

AMT, But like, even when you're on a day off, if you were going grocery shopping, would you have a gun?

MICHAEL CARGILL: Absolutely.

HOST: Okay. Nicholas, do you carry a gun?

NICHOLAS SARWACK: Sometimes.

HOST: Why do you carry it, when do you make that decision?

NICHOLAS SARWACK: It's a self-defence, and defense of others decision. I mean, as the Oak Creek shooting and all these other shootings show, there is no way to predict when a mentally ill person will snap, or in what circumstance, or what situation. So it's the same reason that I keep, I have a car dealership, and we keep fire extinguishers. We don't expect to have fires. We don't want to have fires. We're not inviting a fire by having fire extinguishers. But we keep them around, just in case.

HOST: So just in case someone attacks you, or somebody near you.

NICHOLAS SARWACK: Correct.

HOST: What about governments? Do you also keep guns because of governments?

NICHOLAS SARWACK: I think that's the historical reason behind why we have such a strong second amendment in this country, is that we were a country that was created through the revolution against a tyrannical government. And I think that's the reason that, you know, you have the background here, where there are things that a United States government could not do to its citizens that a Canadian Government could. There's just sort of a fundamental reality of having roughly three hundred million firearms in private ownership in this country that makes certain policy decisions just untenable for the government. And, you know, it's something where I think even Canada has seen that there are limits on what can be done. You know, with the failure of the long gun registry.

HOST: But so, I mean, you actually-- I just want to understand, you actually think there might be a time when you might have to take up arms against your own legislators? Like, that’s not out of the realm of possibility?

NICHOLAS SARWACK: You know, when, much like the fire analogy again, that's always a possibility. It's always a possibility that someone will either invade the country, or that something could happen where you would be forced to make that kind of choice. But you can't get ready to make that kind of choice at the time it happens. If your family's being rounded up to be put in an internment camp, and you’re of Japanese ancestry, you don't get to decide, oh, now I should go arm myself, so that they can't round up my family and lock them in a concentration camp.

HOST: So…

NICHOLAS SARWACK: Because as at that point, you can't buy a gun.

HOST: [pause] Okay. I'm trying to get my head around that, I mean, like, -[crosstalk] don’t you believe--

NICHOLAS SARWACK: [interposing] Which, part, the historical part?

HOST: Well, no. No, I understand that more than 200 years ago, that's how the U.S. was [crosstalk] created.

NICHOLAS SARWACK: [interposing] No, I was talking about 50 years ago.

HOST: No, I know, and in Canada, we had we had internment camps, and there have been apologies. But my other question is, you live in a democracy. You don't think that your democracy will protect you from bad legislators?

NICHOLAS SARWACK: Did it protect the Japanese, did it protect African-Americans in this country? Has that worked?

HOST: You tell me.

NICHOLAS SARWACK: I don't think so.

HOST: Okay, well, let me just go to Steve Scaffidi, do you carry a gun?

STEVE SCAFFIDI: I don't carry a gun, I own two guns.

HOST: Do you ever leave the house with a gun because you feel you need it for your protection?

STEVE SCAFFIDI: No.

HOST: Did you before the mass shooting in your community?

STEVE SCAFFIDI: No. No, my guns are used for hunting. I'm an avid hunter, that's how I express my second amendment rights. But I understand people, some people want to carry a gun for their self-protection. Constitution says they can do that. I do have trepidations that if we all completely arm ourselves, we're essentially going back to what I call the wild west era of the country, which I didn't think was a particularly positive result for a lot of people, especially the weaker members of our society. I understand that people have the right to protect themselves, and I have to live in the reality of the country that I live in, and that says that people have the right to bear arms, and I would look at solutions that are not focused on trying to take guns away, but how to use guns more responsibly.

HOST: I'm still trying to understand. Michael, help me understand why, why you need to have two guns, because…

MICHAEL CARGILL: It's not about a need. It's not called the bill of needs, it’s actually called the Bill of Rights. And we have to go back and, even, let’s look at today. Even today, you say this is a democracy. Well, I agree with you, but even today, we actually need a bill for certain people in this country, in the United States, to actually be able to vote. It's called a voting acts right, that has to be passed every so often, and if that's not passed, then there are certain people in this country that will not have a right to vote. So, you know, that's where we look to our government saying, hey, there's a problem there. And there's also a problem with America. America is the greatest country on this planet, I truly believe that.

HOST: But you have a lot of people killing a lot of other people, a lot of innocent people are dying.

MICHAEL CARGILL: If America was so bad, if we’re just so terrible, then why are so many people wanting to come here? We're great country, because they love what we have, they love who we are. [crosstalk]And this is something—

HOST: But still, a lot of people die. Is that okay?

MICHAEL CARGILL: A lot of people die from a lot of different things.

HOST: [pause] So what do you want us to understand in Canada, where we have tougher gun laws?

MICHAEL CARGILL: If it works for you, then that's great. This is part of our way of life, this is what we believe in, this is part of America. You know, like it, or, you know, if you don't like it, then that's fine, but this is America.

HOST: Gentlemen, we have to leave it there, thank you for talking to me today.

NICHOLAS SARWACK: Thank you.

MICHAEL CARGILL: Thank you.

HOST: I've been speaking with Michael Cargill, he's the owner of Central Texas Gun Works in Austin, Texas, Nicholas Sarwark is the Libertarian Party Chair in Phoenix, Arizona, and Steve Scaffidi is the mayor of Oak Creek, Wisconsin, where a mass shooting shook that community in 2012. Now, we did put in an interview request with the gun rights group the National Rifle Association, no one was available to speak to us today. We want to know what you think about what you've just heard. Does the prevailing gun control discussion in the U.S. affect the way you feel about that country? What about what my guests have just said about the need to protect themselves, not only from other people, but from their government, governments? Go to our website, http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the ‘Contact Us’ link. You can find us on Facebook, you can tweet us, we are @thecurrentcbc. And stay with us, the news is next. And when we come back, author Steve Silberman on the surprising history and future of autism. Plus, details about a special autism live web chat that we will be hosting later today. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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Rethinking autism through the prism of neurodiversity

Guests: Steve Silberman

HOST: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current.

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HOST: Still to come, it's a ripple effect of climate change that is starting to be felt in some low-lying areas of the globe, and could be a full-on crisis soon, climate refugees fleeing their homes as water levels rise. That's in half an hour. But first, thinking differently about those who think differently.

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HOST: As a long time journalist with Wired magazine, Steve Silberman was used to spotting trends in California's Silicon Valley, but perhaps none as important as this one twelve years ago. He kept noticing that there were clusters of children with autism in Silicon Valley communities where software engineers and I.T. employees lived, and that began a decade-long quest to understand the nature and origin of autism. Now, he's published a book of his findings, it's entitled, ‘NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity,’ and in it, he argues that autism should be viewed not as an epidemic, but as a different way of thinking. And just a note, we’ll be hosting a web chat on this topic online today starting at 1:00 PM Eastern Time. We'll give you details a little later, but right now, Steve Silberman is in San Francisco, hello.

STEVE SILBERMAN: Hello, it's great to be here.

HOST: Well, I'm really interested in what you have to say. What were you seeing in Silicon Valley that piqued your interest back then?

STEVE SILBERMAN: Well what it was, was that I was doing stories for Wired, I was one of the senior science writers there, and I did a story that actually took me to a boat in Alaska with more than one hundred computer programmers, including a guy named Larry Wall, who invented one of the first open source programming languages. And as I was coming back into port from this cruise up to the Arctic Circle with all these programmers, I asked Larry if I could come interview him at his home in Silicon Valley. And he said, yeah, sure, by the way, we have an autistic daughter. And at that point, remember that was the year 2000, almost everything that I knew about autism I had learned from the movie Rain Man. I thought that autism was a very, very rare condition. I thought the chances of me ever meeting an autistic person in real life are very slim. So I went to interview Larry, and then about six months later, I was writing about a different technologically very adept family in Silicon Valley, and I asked the sister-in-law of the woman who I was profiling if I could come interview her at home, and she said, yeah, sure, by the way, we have an autistic daughter. And I thought, god. That's an odd coincidence. So I was just talking about that odd synchronicity to a friend of mine in a café, and a woman at the next table said, oh, my god. Do you realize what's going on? And I said, what's going on? And she said, I'm a special education teacher in Silicon Valley. There's an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley. Something terrible is happening to our children. So I got a chill, and I got, you know, because I was a science writer, I got the desire to find out if that was really true. So I wrote this article called The Geek Syndrome, and it came out in 2001, a lot of people read it. But what I noticed was that unlike most magazine articles that are forgotten overnight, I got e-mail about The Geek Syndrome for, like, ten years. I got e-mail from autistic people, from their relatives, from their families…

HOST: Saying what?

STEVE SILBERMAN: Well, they were talking about really day to day problems, like, I can't get access to health care, or when I was young I was considered a genius, but now I can't find a job, because I can't make it through an interview. Many of the e-mails I was getting were about problems in very basic human needs like education, housing, health care, employment. Meanwhile, the whole world was having a conversation about autism, but it was about something else. It was about whether or not vaccines cause autism. And so, in a sense, the world thought that it was dealing with this, you know, pervasive problem of autism, but it was talking about something other than what autistic people and their families were actually facing every day.

HOST: And, in fact, you got a hint there in some of those e-mails, that there were adults, it wasn't solely something happening to the children of this era.

STEVE SILBERMAN: Yeah, exactly.

HOST: So let's talk about some of the history you looked into, as you delved further into this. Tell me about the eighteenth century English chemist, Henry Cavendish, who was he?

STEVE SILBERMAN: Yeah. Well he was, he was a scientist before the word scientist even existed. A name for what he was didn't really come along until the late twentieth century, and Oliver Sacks, the great neurologist and writer, retro-diagnosed Henry Cavendish as having sort of a classic case of Asperger's syndrome. And the reason why start with him, is because I wanted to look at an autistic person before all the sort of clinical clichés about autistic people had sort of crystallized.

HOST: So, and how did looking back in time, and at a figure like Henry Cavendish then, reframe your thinking around what autism is?

STEVE SILBERMAN: Well, autism, in this day and age, is often considered a kind of historical aberration. Like, as if it didn't exist before, as if it's a modern problem. All this money is being spent to look for modern causes of the surge in autism diagnoses that began in the early 1990s. And so what I tried to do in my book, was to go back to the very earliest history of autism to the, in fact, the moment when autism was discovered, by two different clinicians in two different countries, and then trace the history up to the present day, to find out if something other than, you know, vaccines, pesticides, Wi-Fi, antidepressants in the water supply, etcetera, was causing the surge in diagnoses.

HOST: Well, then let's go into the twentieth century and the 1930s. What kind of work was the Austrian physician Hans Asperger doing with children at his clinic in Vienna?

STEVE SILBERMAN: Yeah, here's the thing. Hans Asperger was working at the University of Vienna. Clinic is almost an inadequate word to describe what he and his colleagues created, which was a very progressive, sort of a combination clinic and school for kids who would really end up there as last resort. Like, these were kids who had been kicked out of multiple schools, they were considered unteachable, but Hans Asperger and his colleagues developed ways of teaching these children that involved everything from music and dance, to poetry, to history lessons. And they were able to work with children who everyone else had sort of turned their backs on, and so it was a very, very humane and progressive place. And what Hans Asperger discovered was what we would now call the autism spectrum. A lifelong condition that was a, could be a serious disability, particularly if the society around the people did not make accommodations for the different ways that they learned. And one of the ways that Hans Asperger came up with, methods of pedagogy that were great for autistic kids, was he listened to them. He took them on as his advisors, in a sense, and so really, what Hans Asperger discovered in the mid-1930s, was the autism spectrum. But there was a problem, as students of history know, about being in Vienna in the 1930s. And that is in 1938, the Nazis marched in and annexed Austria for the German Fatherland. And at that point, they started passing eugenics laws that specifically targeted kids with hereditary disabilities, and so the children in Asperger's clinic became targets of these horrible extermination programs that were used by the Nazis as a sort of practice run for the Holocaust against the Jews. And Hans Aspergers’ Jewish assistants had to leave Austria. And, in fact, one of them at least, if not two of them, were rescued from the Holocaust by a clinician in America named Leo Kanner. He was working at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was Jewish. He was helping many clinicians find placements in America. And so, a guy named George Frankel, who was Asperger's chief diagnostician, started working for Kanner, and in 1938, a patient came to Johns Hopkins with a condition that Leo Kanner didn't really know what to make of. He sent this patient, whose name was Donald Triplett, to George Frankel. Well, George Franco, by that point, had seen more than a hundred kids with autism, at least, and he knew exactly what was going on with Donald T., as Donald Triplett would become in Leo Kanner's writing. And then in 1943, Leo Kanner wrote his landmark paper, announcing his discovery of autism. And Asperger's paper, primarily because of the war, didn't come out for another year. The problem was that Asperger and Kanner had very, very different visions of autism.

HOST: And, in fact, Kanner saw it as a rare thing, and Asperger's saw it as something on a continuum that affected more people than people realized.

STEVE SILBERMAN: That's exactly right. In fact, Asperger's said that once you learn to recognize the characteristic traits of autism, you see them everywhere. Kanner, however, saw autism as an extremely rare form of childhood psychosis, akin to schizophrenia. And about three years after his paper came out, he was quoted in Time Magazine as saying, “These children were raised in a refrigerator that didn't defrost.” And by that, what Kanner meant was that he was, in a sense, blaming parents for triggering autism in their children.

HOST: And so this is where you identify this moment in time, you call it a tragic error, because it's his view of this condition that then sets, sort of, the view of it throughout North America and wider medicine, right?

STEVE SILBERMAN: Yeah, exactly. I mean basically, Kanner’s belief that parents played a role in triggering their children's autism had at least two truly tragic effects for autistic people in their families. One is that his recommended course of treatment for autism was to remove the child from the allegedly toxic psychic environment, and put them in an institution. The problem is, it's not as if there were specialized autism wards, like a lot like Asperger's clinic, in the state hospitals. The kids were put on psych wards and, you know, basically subjected to incredibly barbaric experimental treatment. For instance, in New York City, at Bellevue Hospital, the head of psychiatry there did an experiment where she gave a bunch of autistic kids. L.S.D. every day for three months. And, you know, it didn't do anything for their autism. She finally realized that it was making them very anxious, as, in fact, taking L.S.D. every day for three months would do to anyone. And that was, you know, that wasn't even the worst of it. I mean, kids were subjected to electric shock, kids were given lobotomies, it was a terrible time. But in addition to all that horror, parents of autistic children were made to feel ashamed, and they were told by their own psychotherapists that this was their fault, and that they secretly hated their children. And it was, Kanner's theory about refrigerator parenting cast a terrible shadow over autistic people in their families for decades.

HOST: It's so sad. So what has changed since then in how autism is understood?

STEVE SILBERMAN: Well, here's the thing. There was a cognitive psychiatrist in London named Lorna Wing. And she was not only a very prominent psychiatrist, but she had an autistic daughter herself named Suzy, and she and a research assistant named Judith Gould in the seventies went to do one of the very first studies of the prevalence of autism in the general population. And what they discovered was that, yes, autism as Kanner had defined it, very narrowly, was rare. But there were all these kids who seemed to have pieces of Kanner’s syndrome. They were clearly autistic, but not in the ways that Kanner described. Like, Kanner described kids who were very, very antisocial, and seemed to have no interest in making friends. These kids might be very social, might really want friends, but they didn't know how to do it. And so, Lorna was confused at first. It was like, why had no one noticed these children before? And then, by chance, she came across a reference to this guy named Hans Asperger, who had written a paper in 1944 that had never even been translated into English, it was still in German, and it was probably the Nazi associations that, in part, discouraged the translation of that paper. The other thing that discouraged it was that Kanner had never mentioned Asperger's work in his career until the 1970s—

HOST: [interposing] Aha.

STEVE SILBERMAN: And then he dismissed him. He said, oh, yes, that Asperger person. What he discovered was, at best, a forty-second cousin of my syndrome. And so Kanner really suppressed knowledge of Asperger's work. But when Lorna asked her husband John, who spoke German, to translate Asperger's paper, the gates of diagnosis were made much wider, just as Lorna intended, because she knew how difficult it was for children to get a diagnosis under the old definition.

HOST: So what is the NeuroTribe, and what is neurodiversity?

STEVE SILBERMAN: Neurodiversity is a word that was invented in the late nineties by woman named Judy Singer, a sociology student in Australia. She had a mom who had survived Auschwitz, and whose behavior was very disturbing to her family, but no one ever talked about it because she was a Holocaust survivor, so no one wanted to say, you know, something's weird about mom. But it became clear to Judy that her mom had been undiagnosed case of Asperger's syndrome. Judy then had a daughter, her daughter was clearly not developing the typical way. But unlike the children that Kanner described, her daughter was very loving, but she was also clearly autistic. So Judy not only figured out that she herself was somewhere on the spectrum, and that her mother and daughter certainly were, but that it was another form of disability.

HOST: Jim Sinclair is an autistic person, and he wrote an essay in the early nineties that has been widely circulated since then. You quote it, it's called Don't Mourn For Us. We have a reading an excerpt of that, let's listen.

Reading: MAN: This is important, so take a moment to consider it. Autism is a way of being. It's not possible to separate the person from the autism. Therefore, when parents say, I wish my child did not have autism, what they're really saying is, I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different, non-autistic child instead. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us, that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.

HOST: It's a pretty powerful quote.

STEVE SILBERMAN: Oh, it's unbelievable, yeah. I mean, I cried when I first read it, I have to say.

HOST: So when he says that, what he's what he's doing in that clip, he’s embodying the whole essence of neurodiversity, right? That behind that label of autism, or even Asperger's, there is a real person there that has to be understood at a different level that we have not yet really understood as a society. Am I right?

STEVE SILBERMAN: That's true, yes. One quick way to understand neurodiversity is to just think, great minds don't always think alike. Basically, our society has benefited from the contribution of people on the autism spectrum, like Henry Cavendish, from people with dyslexia, from people with ADHD. All of these conditions convey not only significant challenges, and they are significant. And in autism, you know, there's there does no making light of the challenges that autistic people in their families face. Some autistic people never learn to speak. And so these are very serious conditions. But what Jim was saying was that they were human conditions and that if a person has one of these conditions, they're not a failed version of normal, they’re a different way of being. And, in fact, society has always benefited from the contribution of people who think differently from every, most people around them. And so that's what neurodiversity does, it flips the pathological model towards appreciating the strengths and special gifts of people with these conditions.

HOST: So give me a concrete example. Jim Sinclair has some observations about how autistic people experience empathy. What can you tell me about that.?

STEVE SILBERMAN: Well, reading other people's feelings is a challenge for autistic people. But let's look at someone who many of your listeners may be familiar with, Temple Grandin. She is a middle aged woman. She's very autistic. When she was a child, her mother was told to put her in an institution, which she did not do. And Temple Grandin became one of the leading industrial designers in the world. She designs livestock facilities that are kinder to the animals, basically, than the livestock facilities that existed before. Temple attributes her ability to design these facilities to her ability to in a sense, empathize and think like the animals in those facilities, and she would not have been able to do that if she had not been autistic. She says that we need different kinds of minds to work together as a society.

HOST: What do you say to a parent who is struggling with a non-verbal, lower functioning child who is very dependent, who is also on that scale?

STEVE SILBERMAN: What I say is that the problem with the way society treats autism now is that we've invested millions and millions of dollars in the last 15 years or so into searching for the causes of autism. So all this money that is made by organizations like Autism Speaks, by doing walks with people who have very good intentions, this money then gets funneled primarily into genetic research. So is that bad? No, but there's a problem. We have ignored the very, very desperate needs of autistic people and their families, particularly the families of children who are profoundly disabled. Many parents said to me that they were afraid to die because they didn't know what was going to happen to their child once there are no longer around to really advocate for them. And so, what we need to do is invest in research that directly improves the lives of autistic people and their families who are already here, and we've been ignoring that.

HOST: And also, because what you're saying is we have to understand how individual autistic people think.

STEVE SILBERMAN: Right.

HOST: We have to understand more about them in order to help them [crosstalk] and their families.

STEVE SILBERMAN: [interposing] That’s true. Exactly, and, you know, a recent study was done a couple years ago, where 50 million dollars was sent to the Beijing Genomics Institute to look for risk factors for autism. Imagine if 50 million dollars was invested in developing better communication technologies for kids. That's the kind of investment I'm talking about.

HOST: It's extraordinary when you think about how children were treated decades ago, versus what we understand today, and that just, what you're arguing for is the potential for what we still don't understand.

STEVE SILBERMAN: Yeah, exactly. And one of the reasons why I tend to avoid using terms like high functioning and low functioning is because they both obscure more than they reveal. For instance, so-called low functioning children often have special abilities that we don't know about, because they haven't given them the appropriate methods of communication. At the same time, people who appear to be very high functioning, like Temple Grandin, often face serious struggles in day to day life, in trying to sort of pass as non-autistic, like in the workplace, or whatever. So, we have to start looking at the individuals and what they need, and what their families need.

HOST: Because those words are so loaded.

STEVE SILBERMAN: Yeah, basically people have all this potential that is locked up behind the inability to communicate, the lack of adequate support. We understand disability. You know, for instance, closed captioning was invented for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Well, what do you know, it turns out that closed captioning, turns out to be great for people on treadmills in gyms who want to find out about the news. When you make accommodations for disability, you generally end up improving everyone's lives in ways that you could not have foreseen. So what I am suggesting is that we should look at autism as a disability that deserves reasonable accommodations, just like any other form of disability. Instead of treating it as like the sort of bizarre thing that came up in the in the 1990s because of vaccines or, you know, with Monsanto, or whatever. We have to start treating it as a disability that has been part of the human condition for a very long time.

HOST: Steve Silberman. Thank you for your work.

STEVE SILBERMAN: Thank you.

HOST: Steve Silberman's book is called NeuroTribes: the Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. He joined us from San Francisco. Now, we're going to be hosting a web chat today at 1:00 Eastern, 10:00 AM Pacific time, with Margaret Spoelstra, who is the executive director of Autism Ontario. She's a special education teacher by training, she spent the past 35 years working with individuals with a variety of special needs, especially autism. We're asking based on your experiences, should we approach autism differently? Again, based on your experiences, should we be approaching autism differently? Join our Web chat today with Margaret Spoelstra, the executive director of Autism Ontario. 10:00 AM Pacific Time, 1:00 PM Eastern Time. Go to our website, http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent to get the details of all of that. And let us know what you think of what Steve Silberman just said, you can tweet us we are @thecurrentcbc, or find us on Facebook. Now, in our next half hour, our project Ripple Effect looks at the human face of climate change, from Fiji to Bangladesh. Perhaps someday soon, a little closer to Canadian shores. The rise of the climate refugee. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, and online on http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent.

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Climate refugees flee their homes as water levels rise

Guests: Michael Nash, Walter Kaelin, Simon Dalby

[Music: Sting]

HOST: Hello, I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti, and this is The Current.

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[Eerie Music]

[Waves Crashing]

WOMAN: [Echoing Voice] Ripple effect.

WOMAN: It's estimated with sea level rise, that in the coming 20 to 30 years, 42, maybe go up to 50 small island developing states could fully disappear.

MAN: If, ultimately, you lose your nation, your nation goes underwater or becomes unlivable, you're not a temporary refugee, you’re permanently relocated.

MAN: We’re already seeing a number of these nations trying to negotiate, if you want, alternative places for their populations to move. It's an extraordinary prospect, in a sense, that in the 21^st century, we are at the point where whole nations will have to, essentially, cease to exist.

HOST: Those are voices from the documentary film Climate Refugees, and as climate talks grind on through their final week in Paris, the fate of many more potential climate refugees may hang in the balance. It is a ripple effect of climate change that in low lying countries such as Bangladesh, the island nations such as Fiji, rising sea levels from global warming threaten to wipe out not just homes, but entire homelands. Today, as part of our season long project, Ripple Effect, we're learning more about the environmental forces displacing so many people, and the ripple effect their movement will have for the rest of the globe. So, to start, let's begin with the director of the documentary Climate Refugees. Michael Nash is in Los Angeles, hello.

MICHAEL NASH: Hi, Anna Maria.

HOST: Where are people's lives most affected by climate change today?

MICHAEL NASH: You know, we really started this search back in 2008, and we traveled to 48 countries in search of the human face of climate change. And what we found was that really, the main driver that seems to be forcing environmental migration is water. There's a lot of places that have too much water, and there's a lot of places that are lacking water. And I think what's really interesting in the day and the time that we live, is people of always migrated. You know, you ran out of fish, you moved farther down the bay. The weather kind of changed a little bit, you moved up the coast. But now, when people are migrating, the numbers that they're migrating at and the fact that they're crossing borders, seems to be creating conflicts around the world.

HOST: And so, in migration because of climate change, what did you see in some of these places?

MICHAEL NASH: We saw a variant of many things. Take, for example, you mentioned Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a country of 155 million people, and we were there when Cyclone Sidr hit. And literally within a weekend, thousands, I think the number was ten thousand people died, and over a million people were displaced. So in a weekend when a storm like that hit, it went farther inland than any other storm had before that. And these people unfortunately don't have an insurance company that's going to send them a check three weeks later to rebuild their life. They were forced, and we followed them, into major cities like Dhaka, where they literally started living on the streets.

HOST: Hm. You know, I have a clip from your documentary, another clip from Climate Refugees, a Bangladeshi woman speaking about the effects of climate change on her country.

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WOMAN: Nature is now at war with us. Cyclone Sidr killed many. Millions and millions are now hungry and homeless. Is this a message from God? I don’t know. I pray for the generations to come. The children that must leave Bangladesh to survive.

HOST: Michael Nash, what do you remember about her?

MICHAEL NASH: She was this beautiful, elderly woman that we just ran across traveling through one of the many villages that we ran across. And, you know, a lot of people that we met believed that they had done something wrong, and God was challenging them. That this was a direct link to them living the wrong way, and we really learned that climate change seems to have a target on the poor. These poor countries are just really being challenged on a daily basis.

HOST: Because they have to flee, they don't really have any way to mitigate. Right?

MICHAEL NASH: They don't, and you know, and what we learned, which I never even thought would be an issue when we started on this search, was not only do they have to flee, but they’re leaving their culture behind. These people do not want to leave where they're from. When we're in Shishmaref, Alaska, we interviewed someone who wasn't going to leave, and the same thing we found in parts of Tuvalu, elderly people whose spouses were buried there, and uncles and aunts and grandparents were buried there, they weren’t going to let those graves go underwater without a fight. So it's not only them picking up in search of food and water for survival, but it's them literally walking away from everything that they've ever known.

HOST: And I guess sometimes, that it's not really a conscious decision, they're literally fleeing, they’re trying to get away from something.

MICHAEL NASH: They are fleeing, they're leaving from a bad situation. And I'll share something with you that is, there's some of the media has as covered this, but I put it but don't think they've done a really great job on really covering this specific issue. And that is, so take for example, Bangladesh. Bangladesh, again, as a country of 155 million people, they are on the run right now. Many of the people in the surrounding areas are now living in shelters, and they are right at the break even of their food supply. Now, that is a country of Muslims. Wonderful people, but when they start to move outside of Bangladesh, they're either going to move into China, which is to the north of them, which is communist, or India, which is to the east of them, which is primarily Hindu. And so, what caused them to move was climatic shifts, droughts, environmental disasters. But when they get to those borders, the media is going to make this out to be a religious battle. And the same thing could be said for Syria. What really created that was a four-year drought, where the people from surrounding areas were forced to go into the cities, which put stress on the larger cities that were already at a breaking point, and it created a civil war. I don't think you can call them climate refugees, but certainly, one of the threat multipliers that created that situation was a shifting climate that caused a pretty extreme drought.

HOST: Do you think the human cost of climate change gets enough attention from world leaders?

MICHAEL NASH: I don't, and I think there's two conversations, I believe there's two platforms to this conversation. And I think the global leaders have really only spoken about one of those platforms, which is, is it carbon based, if it is, how do we fix it? The other platform is the humanitarian aspects of it, and the national security implications of it, which on that platform, it doesn't really make any difference whether it's carbon based or whether it's natural. The fact is if people are running out of water and food, and having to relocate, that becomes a big national security risk.

HOST: So what do you want to see coming out of the Paris Conference that actually addresses this?

MICHAEL NASH: Well, it's interesting, because while I was in Copenhagen in 2009, at some of the discussion tables, and at that point, people that were moving because of climate change, they hadn't even created a term for that yet. And the United Nations really never wanted me to put the term climate in front of refugees, because it creates all sorts of issues. And they have officially, about four years ago, they officially came out with the term environmentally induced migrant. So I hope that in Paris, they can expand on the issue of environmentally induced migrants. And I hope all these countries just come together and understand that there is no planet B. If we get this wrong, we're going to live in a very, very different world.

HOST: Okay, well, Michael Nash, thank you for your thoughts on this one.

MICHAEL NASH: Thank you, thank you for having me.

HOST: Michel Nash, a filmmaker, and the director of the documentary Climate Refugees. He joined us from Los Angeles. Well, Fiji is a nation made up of more than 300 islands in the Pacific Ocean, many of which rise only a few metres above sea level, meaning they’re especially vulnerable. Fenton Lutunatabua is in Fiji, he is the Pacific Communications Coordinator for the environmental agency group, 350.org.

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Fenton Lutunatabua: Last year, I got to visit the low lying atoll island of Tuvalu. My friend is [unintelligible] is from there, and the highest point on her island home is no higher than five metres. So, you know, sea level rise is problematic, salt water intrusion means her fresh water supply is affected, and flooded pig pens mean her food security is threatened. Earlier this year, king tides hit the low lying atoll island of Kiribati, and one of my colleagues and close friends Varsity is from there. And Varsity was actually at the Betio Maternity Hospital when the king tide hit, and she said that the tide was so huge that the two-metre high seawall that was erected around the hospital to protect it from the high tides simply didn't stand a chance. The entire hospital was destroyed. She was explaining the whole thing to me, and she said that there were all of these mothers with their young children, that were so afraid and with discord in this utter chaos.

HOST: He says that kind of damage and utter chaos is forcing Fijians to plan for the worst.

SOUNDCLIP

Fenton Lutunatabua: I know that there are a couple of villages that have been in Fiji that have been earmarked for relocation from the coastal areas to somewhere inland, but for a place like Fiji, that is very different from a low lying atoll like Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tokelau, and the Marshall Islands. President Tong in Kiribati, he has this program called Migration with Dignity, where in anticipation of this, he is preparing his people. So right now, they're looking at developing young people, educating them better, so when they, if they had to move, they'd be able to move over to another country, and not as second class citizens, but as people that would be able to contribute to that country's economy and all of those things.

HOST: that is Fenton Lutunatabua of 350.org in Fiji. Well, no matter the outcome of the Paris climate talks happening now, the forces driving climate change won't be stopped dead in their tracks, and the world will inevitably be facing more climate migrants in the years to come. Walter Kaelin is working to rally international attention to their plight. He is the envoy of what is called the Chairmanship of the Nansen Initiative, an organization which works to protect people displaced by disasters and the effects of climate change. He was in Paris earlier to speak at that climate conference. Now, he's in Baeren, Switzerland, hello.

WALTER KAELIN: Hello, Anna Maria.

HOST: What's the main message you had for the conference?

WALTER KAELIN: The main message was that the Paris outcome really has to address the issue of displacement, intermigration, planed relocation. It's one of the biggest effects and impacts of climate change, and it's not to go away, but rather to increase as a problem.

HOST: What kind of numbers are we talking about? How many people displaced every year?

WALTER KAELIN: On average, during the past seven years, about twenty, twenty five million people annually on average who are displaced by sudden onset disasters such as flooding windstorms. But you don't even know what the number of those is who have to go away because of drought, desertification, and slow onset sea level rise.

HOST: What kind of strategies would you use, then, or what are you working on to prevent those incidents from turning into humanitarian disasters?

WALTER KAELIN: What we need to do, is in situations like Kiribati or the coastal areas of Bangladesh, to help people to move out of harm's way before the disaster strikes. This is about planned relocation. But then what is also needed is to facilitate intermigration, so that people can move to other countries in regular ways, that they don't have to wait until, really, there is nothing else to flee. And that's very much a message coming from the Pacific island. What they want is regular legal possibilities.to immigrate to neighboring counties. They don't like to go, they really very much are tied to their lands, to their ancestors who are buried there. But they say it's still better to move in the regular way, where they can decide when and where to go, than to wait till we really have to flee. And then end up marginalized as a kind of refugees.

HOST: Is anybody doing that now, opening their doors to that kind of a migrant?

WALTER KAELIN: There are some examples. There are several countries who have admitted climate and disaster displaced persons. For instance, in 2011-2012, when ten years of drought in Somalia turned into famine, the neighboring counties, Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, admitted almost 300,000 victims of famine, granted them refugee status. In the Pacific region, there are some small programs. The idea of the Australian Seasonal Workers Program is that because living conditions are becoming more and more difficult, for instance, all the king tides that affect the soil, the salination, so it's more and more difficult to grow crops. So, by allowing people to work temporarily in Australia, and then bring the money back, families can adapt to those challenges. They can invest also, for instance, in reinforcing the houses so they are less vulnerable in the event of a storm. The New Zealand Pacific Access Quota, that's about permanent migration. That's about doing that gradually, and not waiting until flows of refugees arrive. And that's the approach used by New Zealand.

HOST: And is that working? Is that a solution in the long term?

WALTER KAELIN: I think, overall, facilitating migration as a way to adapt to the impacts of climate change is not a miracle solution, but it certainly will help. The big problem is that such migration can be positive, but it also can be negative, particularly when people are exploited. So the protection of the rights of these migrants is extremely important.

HOST: I want to pick up on that, because the term climate refugee is not actually legally recognized, is it?

WALTER KAELIN: It’s not legally recognized. At the core of all the definitions of refugees lies the notion of [unintelligible], of persecution, something you have to run away from, as far as possible, because your government or non-governmental groups in power really go after you. That's a bit different in the context of disasters and effects of climate change, because their governments are not really turning against their own people. Governments of Bangladesh, of Kiribati, [unintelligible] to the international community, including the Western countries, cooperate with them to solve some of these problems. We can invest into Disaster Risk Reduction, [unintelligible], such as in drought affected areas, bring new crops that are drought resistant, building dams, all these kind of things can be done to not stop all the displacement, but at least or to reduce it. And then, [unintelligible] cooperation in terms of admitting people, of facilitating at their migration.

HOST: Mhm.

WALTER KAELIN: That’s a better way to approach it than to force people, really, to wait until it's too late, and then end up in marginalization and refugee camps.

HOST: How do people who are displaced by climate change want to be considered?

WALTER KAELIN: In a consultation we conducted in the Pacific, a community leader from Kiribati very forcefully said, we don't want to become refugees, please help us not to become refugees. We don't want to have to wait till we really have to flee. We want to have some measure of decision-making power, to anticipate. That’s why we want that regular migration channels, immigration channels, are opened up for us. What the people want is also investment into their education, into their preparation for immigrating, so that they really can compete on the labor market of countries of destination. That they are welcomed, can integrate, and do not end up dependent on handouts, instead of having some measure of continued control over their lives.

HOST: Okay, well, Walter Kaelin, thanks for speaking with me today.

WALTER KAELIN: Thank you.

HOST: Walter Kaelin, envoy of the Chairmanship of the Nansen Initiative, he was in Baeren, Switzerland. Well, as we talk about one of the most profound ripple effects of climate change, people forced to leave their homes, any mass migration has ripple effects of its own, including global security. Simon Dalby is the C.G. chair in political economy, the political economy of climate change at Wilfred Laurier University. He's the author of Security and Environmental Change. Simon Dalby is in Waterloo, Ontario, hello.

SIMON DALBY: Good morning, Anna, how are you?

HOST: You heard Michael Nash at the beginning, there, mention the link between climate change and the Syrian Civil War. How is one connected to the other?

SIMON DALBY: The Syrian situation involved a large drought starting about a decade ago, in the eastern part of the country. Without the necessary rain, and with so much antiquated irrigation systems, quite a lot of farmers were basically put out of business. Lots of workers could no longer work. Many of them joined the large migration into serious cities. They were there, mixed up with large numbers of refugees from the Iraq wars, as well ,and various other disruptions in the region. When the regime decided that their protests, particularly highlighted in 2011 with the Arab Spring, of course, those protests were seen as a threat to the security of the state. And the state turned violent repression loose on those people. Well. surprisingly enough, they fought back. This is a key ingredient in the in the civil war that started. It's not the whole story by any stretch of the imagination, but it is one ingredient in it.

HOST: Well, because Syria was always an oppressive, very brutal dictatorship.

SIMON DALBY: And, you know, the Assad regime, and particularly, you know, his father's regime before him had a reputation for being very nasty to their own population. But in terms of there being a security crisis, it depends crucially on how the regime actually sees people, sees migrants, sees people that are protesting precisely because the regime isn't helping. If the regime sees this is a violent threat to their power and reacts with violence, as was the case of the Assad regime, then, well, we do have a security crisis for all sorts of people. If, however, the regime follows the advice of your previous couple of speakers on the show this morning and says, we've got to help, these are people that clearly, through no fault of their own, are vulnerable. We have the ability to treat them decently, to ensure that they are educated, they can be accepted into our society, and get jobs, and so on. That kind of response means you don't get a security crisis.

HOST: Okay, so of all the factors that can lead to conflict and political instability, how important is the factor of climate change?

SIMON DALBY: Not a major one, because migration is being caused by all sorts of other economic and social factors across the planet, in addition to climate change. We are, as they say these days, becoming an urban species. We are moving from country sides into cities, and climate change probably aggravates this in particular places. It becomes a security problem when we’re not prepared, when we're not thinking ahead, when governments misinterpret these migrations as some kind of threat. And indeed, the response determines whether we get a security crisis or not.

HOST: So what do governments need to do to prepare for such challenges?

SIMON DALBY: Well, that depends on which government, where. I mean, obviously, if you're the government of Fiji, looking at your coastal vulnerabilities to tides, thinking about taking, perhaps, some of the population from Tuvalu and the other atoll states is the kind of thing you need to think ahead about. Any country that has a major low lying coastline needs to start thinking start thinking about its own vulnerabilities as well as the migrants, more distantly. Your previous callers talked about Bangladesh in particular, Vietnam is also very vulnerable because a huge rice-producing area in the Mekong Delta, and that's very low-lying, too. They need to think seriously about growing mangroves on the coast more enthusiastically, that’s what the Bangladeshis are also doing, precisely because this actually protects them somewhat from storm surges. So that kind of ecological anticipation is crucial. There are going to be a lot more migrants in in coming years, and as the weather becomes more and more unreliable, droughts and storms are going to cause increasing vulnerabilities for rural populations in particular, and we've got to think ahead in terms of how we plan for that. Because the crucial thing is not to be caught flatfooted and having to have cobble together emergency responses, when these things can be anticipated much better, further in advance.

HOST: And you're saying that if you do have, if you do anticipate, you can actually deescalate the potential for conflict.

SIMON DALBY: Exactly. But we do need to think ahead.

HOST: So what do you want to see come out of the Paris talks in terms of this?

SIMON DALBY: I think that the folks have been calling the response to this under the label of loss and damage. The debate there is, folks in the low-lying states saying, look we're facing this imminent problem, and we didn't cause it. You caused it, looking at us in the north, who burn up lots of fossil fuels, and have been doing so for very long time. And we need compensation, we need some money to help us prepare, and adapt, and move. And you have to pay up, because you caused us this problem, it's not our fault, and yet, we’re the victims of it. As Michael Nash said, given the way that this is playing out, the poor seem to be the target for climate change, and they didn't cause the problem that's making them vulnerable. So there's been some attempts to get the northern political leaders to think seriously about this, and there’s been considerable reluctance, because the debate is about, well, what do we do about carbon, not about, well, who's actually being victimized by this. There's all sorts of complicated issues here. We may well end up with lots of people launching lawsuits against big fossil fuel companies, for instance, because they're obviously responsible for at least some of the carbon. [crosstalk] And getting –

HOST: [interposing] And Simon Dalby, we have to, no, we actually have to leave it there, we’re out of time. Thank you for your thoughts, though. [crosstalk] Bye bye.

SIMON DALBY: [interposing] All right Anna Maria, good to talk to you, bye bye.

HOST: Simon Dalby, C.G. Chair in political economy of climate change at Wilfred Laurier University, and the author of Security and Environmental Change, he joined us from Waterloo, Ontario. Well, that is our program for today. Stay with Radio One for q, Shad speaks with writer Kevin Powell about his new book, The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy's Journey into Manhood. And a reminder, following today's conversation with Steve Silberman about autism, and his book NeuroTribes, we’re hosting a live web chat later today starting at 1:00 PM Eastern, 10:00 AM Pacific. You can join us on line to chat with Margaret Spoelstra, the executive director of Autism Ontario. She's a special ed teacher by training, spent the past 35 years working with individuals with a variety of special needs, especially autism. And we're asking based on your experiences, should we approach autism differently? So join that chat, http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, go to that website to get the details. The chat’s at 1:00 Eastern, 10:00 Pacific. Now, last season here on The Current, our producer Liz Hoath brought us the story about a Canadian company that some bracing neurodiversity, and hiring autistic people for jobs that suit their skills. One of those employees was Matthew Wang, and we're going to leave you today with some of his thoughts about autism in the workplace, and what this job has meant for him. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, thank you for listening to The Current.

MATTHEW WANG: It's encouraged me to go out of my shell a lot more. I've tried to take up dancing, for example, as a recreational activity. Dancing is actually really, really challenging for me. Reading social cues, trying the choreography, trying to choreograph a dance on the fly, like how to lead someone, is very, very challenging for me, and I'm quite awkward at it, but it's great that people teach me because these are the kind of social skills that are extremely difficult for me. And before I had a job like this, I rarely, rarely would go out to do any social events. I mean, even now, it's very difficult to feel comfortable in my own skin, partially because of, say, sensory issues. Like, this is about as bright as a room can be without being painful for me. It could be loud noises or, I don't know, it's very difficult to comfortable in your own skin.

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