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The Current Transcript for November 28, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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And then 755 started howling all the rest of the pack started coming out of the willows. And pretty soon there were 10 wolves around 0-Six and they were all howling. It was still to this day one of the saddest things that I have ever heard in my life.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Her name was 0-Six and when she was killed her own pack mourned her. She was not just any wolf. She had a Facebook following, a local fan who kept a diary of her life, a park ranger who wept when he learned she'd been shot. She was a majestic alpha female, descendant of a pack of wolves trapped in Alberta and moved to Yellowstone National Park to replace a species that had disappeared. The wolves of Yellowstone would become a tourist attraction, with manipulative relationships and deadly rivalries right out of Shakespeare and the death of 0-Six would mark a turning point in half an hour Nate Blakeslee brings us the story of the wolf. Later today our project Adaptation gets personal.

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Initial reaction is obviously tremendous grief and sadness. From there, it was [baby moaning] what we can do? There must be something that we can do.

AMT: Cohen was eight weeks old when he was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease and doctors told his parents he would not be able to move, to swallow or breathe. Today he's 14 months old and Cohen and his mom and dad are adapting. Hear their story in an hour, but we're starting in Canada where wolf pack is the loose translation of the title of the Quebec based far right group La Meute. Its protest a few days ago brought out counter-protesters.

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[Sound: Demonstrators chanting and chatter]

AMT: But critics say it also seemed to find a certain legitimacy with the police. We are asking why. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Are actions of police legitimizing far-right groups in Quebec ?

Guests: Jonathan Montpetit, Barbara Perry

AMT: For the second time in three months, far right protesters have made their presence known in Quebec this past weekend. The nationalist group La Meute organized Saturday's heated demonstration in Quebec City. They joined forces with other far right groups such as the groups storm Alliance and they outnumbered the anti-fascist activists who showed up to counter protest. At one point a brief snowball fight broke out but it was by no means a lighthearted clash. Police officers brought out the tear gas and by the end of the day 44 counter-protesters had been arrested. CBC News reporter Jonathan Montpetit has been following the activity of the far right groups in Quebec for some time. He joins us from our Montreal studio. Hi Jonathan.

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: What happened in that protest Saturday?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: Well you had two sides facing off. One collection of fire eight groups led by LA Meute which is the largest for a group in the province Storm Alliance like you mentioned, a number of other smaller but more extreme far right groups also were present and they numbered between we estimate 300 and 500. They were they were met by about 250 counter-protesters. Police kept them as far apart as possible. And in that effort police arrested more than 40 counter-protesters.

AMT: And who are the other groups that joined in, the far right groups?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: So the organizers were La Meute and Storm Alliance. The smaller groups that join one group - or two groups in particular – that stood out to me. One is the The Three Percenters. So this is a so-called militia group that has several chapters in the United States. We've seen them active in Alberta in Ontario and this was the first time that I've noticed their presence, their public presence. They've had an online presence in Quebec for some time. This is the first time they've protested publicly in Quebec. The other group that I think is worthy of our attention is a group called Atalante Quebec which is a explicitly neo fascist, white nationalist, white supremacist group. They're based in Quebec City and they're really at the extreme end of the far right spectrum.

AMT: And so are all of these groups kind of aligned? Do they all want the same thing?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: They want similar things. Not all the far right groups in Quebec are white supremacists. It would be difficult to describe La Meute as a white supremacist group or a white nationalist group but certainly a group like Atalante Quebec, yes. They all kind of share the belief that Quebec culture is under threat from various forces, namely radical Islam. They believe that radical Islam - contrary to all evidence -but they believe that radical Islam is rising in Quebec. It is everywhere that there is Sharia courts in Montreal and all that kind of nonsense. So that's kind of where they align and they differ. You know they differ on things like racial purity of the Quebec. So that's something that they Atalante would advocate for, but La Meute would not.

AMT: And have you seen this kind of cooperation with these groups and a protest before?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: I think this is one of the first times that I've seen that level of cooperation, this kind of intense collaboration. So in the past they've tended to hold separate protests. In August La Meute held a big protest August 20th on a Sunday. The day before Storm Alliance held their protests. So this is I think one of the first time that they have tried to really join forces and try to make their numbers appear as large as possible.

AMT: And that group was larger than the counter-protests group. That's different than past rallies. Is it not?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: So in Quebec - So the August 20th protest in Quebec City, I believe again that the far right outnumbered the counter-demonstrators. There was a protest March 3rd in Montreal and various other cities in the province against the anti Islamophobia motion M-103. There the numbers were roughly equal. But I think one of the alarming things in Quebec is that the fire rate does seem to be able to gather at least as many, and usually more than the counter-demonstrators are able to gather.

AMT: And what about the police reaction to all of this Jonathan? Take us through some of that.

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: So the police reaction was I think troubling for many but I think indicative of the difficult position that police and a lot of you know a lot of people who get kind of wrapped up in the fire right. So the police - So to go back from the beginning the Quebec City has a by law requiring people to register with police seek their authorization before they before they can hold a rally. The far right group that did and they held extensive conversations with police in the days up to the protest. The counter-protesters simply told police that they were going to be there and they didn't go into any kind of detail. So that put the police in a situation where they had information from one group and not the other group. And so it appeared like there was a level of collaboration between La Meute and police. So what happened on the day of the protest is that police provided a security cordon around the Far Right demonstration. The problematic element is that they effectively provide this quarter around Le Meute, but then you had all these other really more radical groups kind of join up at that protective area and the police then pushed back the counter-protesters, to allow the far right to protest in this spot that they kind of signal they wanted to protest. So basically police got wrapped up in this effort by the far right to kind of legitimize themselves.

AMT: And that's the criticism right? That they helped to normalize it by treating them as they - because they followed the by law and the others didn't, their ideology take second place to the fact that they followed a by law.

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: Exactly and I think, having spoken to a lot of the leaders in La Meute you know they're very conscious of that. I think they're very conscious that they can use police, they can use their own willingness to collaborate with police to show that they're law abiding peaceful citizens and that that helps their cause. Right. So that that helps them combat the notion that they are radical violent racists. And so the police kind of get co-opted into this effort to normalize their discourse. So that's raising a lot of questions in Quebec.

AMT: And what about then the left protesters, the anti-racism anti-fascism protesters? How do they see that? Did they see that they need to change their tactics for PR purposes as well or do they like- Do we know?

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: Well so because the counter-protesters- Really it's a rainbow coalition of groups, a lot of different groups. Among them are the so-called Antifa who really are you know is kind of an outlook that is you know, it's very anarchist in mindset. So there's already an unwillingness to collaborate with law and order. So in a way from a purely PR perspective they're disadvantaged from that. But they insist on the necessity of confronting and physically confronting Far Right groups wherever they manifest themselves. And that goes along with a kind of unwillingness to be seen as overly complicit with police. So you know that puts the police in a situation where they tell us their first responsibility is to keep the groups separate to avoid physical confrontations, because we've seen you know fistfights break out in the streets before when police don't get in between them. But so their unwillingness to cooperate with police kind of makes them vulnerable to police reaction. It makes them so makes it so that they're the ones who end up getting arrested.

AMT: It's fascinating. Jonathan thanks for bringing us up to speed. I'm going to pick this up with our next guest. Thank you.

JONATHAN MONTPETIT: My pleasure.

AMT: Jonathan Montpetit. He's a reporter with CBC News in Montreal that's where we reached him. According to my next guest this latest turn out of far right protesters represents a departure from the past. Barbara Perry is a professor in the faculty of social science and humanity at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. She's been researching hate crimes in Canada for 20 years. She happens to be in Surrey, England today. Hello Barbara Parry.

BARBARA PERRY: Good morning Anna Maria.

AMT: So can we pick up on just what we just heard Jonathan talking about that view that the actions of the police actually normalize or legitimize some of these alt-right groups in there, taking to the streets, how do you see that?

BARBARA PERRY: Yes I think you know sort of for a casual observer that's what it appeared to do in this case. In fact they were quoted as saying you know they were quite happy with the collaboration that they had with the far-right in this particular incident. And I think that that was you know a very smart move as much as I hate to say it on the part of La Meute to engage in that kind of those kinds of conversations with law enforcement, because it does lend them a sense of legitimacy if you will in terms of playing by the rules, regardless of how hateful or exclusionary their language and their sentiments might be.

AMT: You know it's interesting I used to cover protests between the far-right and the left in Berlin in the 90s and when neo-Nazis marched the Berlin police would always protect them and they would always get into riots with the left. And they would get quite violent on that side. But they would always protect the neo-Nazis from because they knew there was tension there. So we've seen this elsewhere, that legetimizing.

BARBARA PERRY: Isn’t that a disturbing anomaly or analogy to draw? [Chuckles]

AMT: It's just an observation I don't know [chuckles]. So when you see protests like that take place in Quebec City as opposed to somewhere else in the country what does that tell you?

BARBARA PERRY: Yes well I think there are so many factors that have coalesced in Quebec. I mean we can put it in the international context in terms of the connection between the far right in Quebec and their counterparts in France in particular. We can put it in the context of the Trump effect. But there are also you know, there's also a lengthy history and back of you know challenges around cultural identity and religious identity in particular previously anti-Semitism and more recently in addition to that Islamophobia. So I think you know such things as we've seen in recent years as you know the charter of values and more recently the banning of the niqab in Quebec, all of those I think serve to further marginalize Muslim communities and leave them vulnerable to the narratives of the far right. And I think you add to that also what we're seeing over the past year or so in terms of the irregular immigration and asylum seekers which have been just disingenuously I think constructed as illegal immigration from the perspective of the far right. So these are you know easy targets, ready targets for the right in Quebec in particular.

AAMT: How much support do you think far right groups think about how at the moment then?

BARBARA PERRY: Well it's hard to say. I mean if you believe La Meute that they've got how many now for over four years must be over fifty thousand followers now online. But I think the other difficulty is just looking at public opinion data from the last decade or so, is that in general across the country there's As always you know a fairly substantial proportion 20 percent 25 percent in public opinion polls who would express you know negative perceptions of Islam, of immigration, of you cultural norms and even larger numbers in Quebec pretty typically. So I think that that suggests that there is a great deal of sympathy at least in the in the province for this sort of movement.

AMT: Some journalists covering these groups said the media needs to be careful not to buy into claims regarding membership numbers. I've got a clip here of Martin Patriquin Montreal-based freelance journalist who has written about La Meute for Buzzfeed. Listen to what he told us.

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MARTIN PATRIQUIN: La Meute you know says that it has 44,000 members and that, you know, that it's been going gangbusters for a number of years. I got a hold of their membership list and I just started calling people. And everybody that I called, said they had no idea - save for one person - they had no idea that they were members of La Meute. They were added without their consent. When you look into it it's almost like a Fun House mirror situation whereby the number of people that are on that list doesn't correspond to their actual influence. When you look at the actual people that are active in a group like La Meute, it's pretty much a handful of people that make a heck of a lot of noise but is a much smaller group than what they sort of purport in the media.

AMT: Barbara Perry, what do you think?

BARBARA PERRY: I think that was a great project that he sort of embarked on there. I think there's a lot of literature that I think that there is a tendency to over inflate the numbers and the activity. But I also think that this particular - not just this one not just the protests over the weekend but the one in August and I think there was another one in September as well - also indicates that you know the numbers are not insubstantial when you have as we've seen here the numbers of far right activists outnumbering the anti-racists or the Antifa. That's a really disturbing trend that's something that we're you know we've only just begun to see here.

AMT: How would you compare the far right activity in Quebec to what's happening in the rest of Canada?

BARBARA PERRY: Well we are seeing some indications of this sort of activity and in other large cities, large and small. In places like you know Peterborough, Ontario for example, you know Toronto has seen a number of rallies in particular some staged outside of mosques there are also you know formed by coalitions. So we've seen a couple in Toronto that have had you know the presence of Sons and Soldiers, Council against Islam as well as the Three Percenters as security, as they say. We've also seen rallies in some of the western provinces in BC. They're not as large yet but it feels as if you know the weapons - I think what the far right is calling the PR success of the August and November rallies that perhaps that will embolden their brethren - and I say brethren because they're primarily male - They're brethren elsewhere across the country so I think that that's a trend that we need to really you know keep watch on.

AMT: What would you like to see Quebec do differently on this front?

BARBARA PERRY: Well I understand that [unintelligible] opted to make no comment about the far right rally this weekend, and I think that that's an important place to start is for political leaders to take a stand against racism in Islamophobia and xenophobia an anti-immigrant sentiment, whatever the case may be, in their communities whether it's local mayors, -we have seen some of that - or whether it's premiers and prime ministers. That's a very important step but of course also education because I think there's a lot of ignorance and lack of awareness and knowledge of what the right really stands for. And we haven't really made a very concerted effort to deconstruct their narratives and to challenge the validity of their claims.

AMT: Well I want to pick up on that because there are some blurred lines in how people see things and how others, maybe who don't consider themselves in an alt-right group would agree with some of the concerns that some of these groups raise. And then we talk about the legitimisation through protests and that. I mean where do you see blurred lines?

BARBARA PERRY: Well I think this summer in particular we saw a lot of that as I mentioned earlier on around the border crossings in Quebec which has had a very high concentration. And that has been constructed I think in terms of again illegal as opposed to irregular immigration but it's also being constructed as you know a flood of Muslims. When in fact most of them were not from Haiti, were non-Muslim not that that either one is necessarily problematic. So I think that you know those are a couple of examples of the misinterpretation of sort of facts on the ground realities on the ground.

AMT: And so to what extent have far right groups been able to attract more Canadians to their cause in recent years the groups that maybe we saw in other parts of the world in the States in Europe?

BARBARA PERRY: I think if we look at the number of active chapters of older groups and new groups across the country, and we look at the online activity it does seem as if there has been quite a dramatic growth in numbers and a membership within those groups and again online activity. So I think I've been estimating maybe 20-25 percent increase just in the number of active groups across the country. Again based on online activity, based on the number of new groups that we're seeing pop up like Star Alliance. I mean that was one that was not really heard of previously. So I think that it probably is for example. So I think that there is a quite an increase. I mean there are some chapters in other parts of the world as well the U.S. and Europe.

AMT: Has there been an increase in hate crimes in Canada?

BARBARA PERRY: There appears to be. We will not know sort of official account for some time where there's usually about a 10 year lag in the data being released but anecdotally from law enforcement that I'm working with on another project, that's come up in conversation and many communities do feel like there is there are increases. But I think also if we look at the data from National Council Canadian Muslims and B'nai Brith two agencies that do monitor hate crimes reported to them, they're both indicating quite dramatic increases in the last year or so.

AMT: Okay well Barbara Perry thank you for your insights.

BARBARA PERRY: Thank you. Enjoyed speaking with you Anna Maria.

AMT: Barbara Perry, professor in the faculty of social science and humanity at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology She joined us from Surrey, England today. Have a few minutes to tell you about a special edition of The Current. Tomorrow we're looking at the state of dental care in Canada. About six million Canadians have no dental insurance. Those who do are not always fully covered. Those without are often living in pain. We are going to be talking about dental care and will even be having the debate about whether dental care should be included in our universal health care system. Listen for Filling the Gaps: Dental Care in Canada. Special edition of The Current tomorrow the CBC News is next and then they are some of nature's most sophisticated and vicious predators. They're also family oriented. We're looking at wolves and a few wolves in particular in the story of The Wolf. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti this is The Current.

How O-Six became Yellowstone's 'most beloved' wolf

Guest: Nate Blakeslee

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

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come.

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[Sound: Warning horns]

[Indistinct announcement]

AMT: Can’t understand all those words but the sirens and warnings are what you'd hear if you happen to be near Mount Agung. The volcano on the Indonesian tourist island of Bali has been spewing ash for a week. Volcanologists predict a catastrophic eruption. We'll find out more in half an hour. But first the incredible lives of some particular wolves in the dens and forests of Yellowstone.

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[Howling]

[Music starts in the background]

Now seven years old, 42 and 21, the alpha pair, have outlived most of their contemporaries, for they won't be allowed to enjoy their golden years in peace. Trouble comes in the form of number 113. A powerful young male, a lone wolf.

AMT: Well that's from the BBC documentary Wolf Wacked. Wolves have roamed and hunted Yellowstone National Park for thousands of years. They were eliminated in the 1920s. In the mid-90s the U.S. government decided to reintroduce grey wolves to the area and they did that with wolves from Alberta. Nate Blakeslee has looked closely at how those wolf packs fared. He's the author of The Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West. This is a saga featuring many feuding canine factions but there's one Wolf more notable than the rest, an alpha female named 0-Six. Nick Blakeslee is with me in Toronto. Hello.

NATE BLAKESLEE: Thanks so much for having me.

AMT: What happened to the Yellowstone wolf population?

NATE BLAKESLEE: Well the reason wolves had to be brought back to Yellowstone is they were all hunted out by fur trappers and then later by cattle ranchers to protect stock. They were all gone as you say by the 1920s. And what you saw in Yellowstone was this explosion and the elk population. The Wolf was the apex predator in the park. The only animal really that preyed on Elk. There were so many elk in the park they began to destroy the habitat. Rangers in the park took to shooting them. They called them they shot thousands of them every winter just to keep their numbers down and to try to keep the park healthy. The idea that wolves might be a more holistic solution to solving that problem was around since the 1940s but it was very controversial. All of the descendants of those same ranchers that hunted out the wolves they're all still there. They're all still running cattle and sheep around the park. And then too elk cutting is really big business in the northern Rockies. Guides can charge thousands of dollars for out of town hunters, restaurants, motels cater to the hunting business and wolves eat a lot of elk. So the hunting industry knew that they stood to lose two of the wolves came back.

AMT: Hmm. But they still decided to bring wolves and they got them from Canada. Tell me about these whales from Canada where were they from?

NATE BLAKESLEE: Well they were from an area near Jasper National Park and near a town called Hinton. And the idea was that the Fish and Wildlife Service in the United States sent a trapper, a government trapper up there to make contact with some of the local trappers and convince them that if they were to catch some live wolves you know they would pay for them and carry them back to the United States. They were able to convince them to do that. They brought about 30 wolves back to repopulate Yellowstone and central Idaho. And it was immensely successful. They spread throughout the park and as planned they also spread throughout much of their former range in the northern Rockies.

AMT: How easy is it to catch a live wolf?

NATE BLAKESLEE: [Chuckles] It's not easy at all. You know the trapping business is built around getting those pellets and so ordinarily they're not concerned with whether or not the wolf survives the process or not. But in this case obviously it was essential.

AMT: So when they got to Yellowstone and they introduced them - you said the residents were not happy with this at all.

NATE BLAKESLEE: No. The dynamic was one that you often see in the American West these days. It was - because so much of that land is controlled by the federal government, you see this sort of Us versus them, this local control versus sort of intrusive federal bureaucrats at least that's how it's cast in the West. And this was a case of that too. Ranching is so powerful there. The hunting industry is so powerful there that all those state legislatures were largely opposed to reintroduction, even though a number of people that lived there were very excited about it. But it was driven by the federal government and the federal government was determined to see it done. And the land on which they reintroduce them was federal land.

AMT: And so the wolf packs are brought in to Yellowstone. How do they behave?

NATE BLAKESLEE: Well first they built these enormous pens, these acclimation pens. Nobody ever tried anything like this before. And for all they knew the wolves of just take off straight back to Canada. And in fact an early alpha pair did immediately leave the park with disastrous consequences. But once they got established, they did exactly what biologists would predict that they would. They reduce the size of that elk herd. They caused the elk that remained in the park to begin behaving differently; to stop congregating in valleys, to stop eating their preferred foods along stream sides which was degrading the habitat for trout, for beaver. All of those species bounced back and many others that they didn't necessarily expect to. The park had far too many coyotes because there was no canine competition. The walls reduce the coyote population. You saw a rebound in the rodent population, which meant there was more food for weasels and badgers and large raptors. There was this avian renaissance in the park that no one knew they were missing. And they call it a trophic cascade, this endless cascading of positive consequences all the way down the food chain.

AMT: Some of the seemed to act as gangs protecting their turf. How did they do that?

NATE BLAKESLEE: Well wolves are extremely territorial. The quality that makes them so useful to humans as good guard dogs makes them very dangerous to one another. Every single part of the park is controlled by one pack or another. Any time a wolf leaves its own home territory he or she does so at the risk of his or her own life. And wolves must leave their home territory. You mentioned lone wolf earlier. A wolf in order to establish his or her own pack and territory must leave their home territory and go out on their own and try to find a mate and try to find a territory of their own. It's extremely dangerous. The most common cause of death in the park for wolves is conflict with other wolves.

AMT: So tell us about the Druid's. Why were they so special?

NATE BLAKESLEE: The Druids were sort of the face of the reintroduction program for the first 10 years. They were the pack that rose up in the Lamar Valley which is the easiest place to spot a wolf. Yellowstone is the one place in the world where you can reliably spot wolves from the roadside with a spotting scope. You don't get close to them but the scopes are so powerful even, if they're a mile away you can see every detail. You can see the expressions on their faces. When they were brought back to the park. It was not meant to be a tourist attraction. The biologists assumed that they would just leave the Lamar Valley because it's it has a road running through it. It's popular with visitors. It was thought that you would need a plane or at least a horse to go back and observe wolves. But to their surprise some of them did stay in the valley. They didn't seem to mind having people on the road watching them. And the Druid's was that pack that most of those early watchers got to observe.

AMT: And the people watching them, people became quite obsessed with them. Tell me about the people who were watching.

NATE BLAKESLEE: They did. Thousands of people would come through the park and watch wolves you know for a day or two and then they would post what they saw on Facebook. This is how 0-Six became so famous. She was the easiest to view in the park, during the time when Facebook was just exploding in popularity. And so people would take a picture or video or they would see her do something and post this breathless account on Facebook and her legend just sort of spread. And she became an attraction in the park, like the Tower Falls or are old faithful something you saw when you came there. But there was also this much smaller group of diehard Wolf aficionados, this subculture that exists in the park which was fascinating to watch and be present for. People who come to the park every single day for whom one sighting is not nearly enough, who track the wolves using their radio callers get them in their scopes and watch them for hours.

AMT: And in fact your book which reads like a great novel and tells the story of these wolves. [Unintelligible] you couldn't you couldn't interview the wolves of course. So who did you get the notes from? Who did you talk to who was little was watching them so much?

NATE BLAKESLEE: Well I wanted the book to read like the biography of a wolf. And as you say the obstacles to doing that to having a wild animal be a main character in a book that is narrative like a novel. The obstacles are considerable but 0-Six was different. She was by far the favorite Wolf of that subculture of wolf Watchers I described. And I met this woman, a retired schoolteacher from San Diego her name was Lori Lyman and she had this treasure trove of notes. She had taken notes every day for three years on the life of this wolf pack, 2400 pages. And I read it and it was like reading the diary of a wolf. And the author and me said you know imagine what you could do with this material. It's like a Jack London story but it's all true. You can create a nonfiction book that reads like a novel in which the main characters were wolves.

AMT: So 0-Sic - First of all why is she called 0-Six?

NATE BLAKESLEE: It's a nickname. It's the year of her birth. Once the wolves do get a research collar they'll have a number. But until then the watchers Lori and her friends they come up with nicknames.

AMT: And 0-Six was her nickname, what did she look like?

NATE BLAKESLEE: She was a grey wolf. They're all grey wolves that's the common name of the species but they can be grey or black and occasionally white. She was a grey wolf. She had uncommonly sort of attractive facial markings she had sort of this owl like mask around her eyes. She was unusually large for a female she was 105 pounds. She initially came to Lori's attention and her friends because she was such an accomplished hunter. They watched her as a lone wolf for a couple of years. Wolves in the park eat elk. Elk are in the deer family but they're enormous animals. The bulls can be 700 pounds and it usually takes a pack to bring them down. The females, the faster lighter females, will run them to exhaustion, the bigger males will come around and grab them by the throat to crush windpipe. 0-Six perfected the art of doing that by herself which is something that had seldom been seen in the wild until Yellowstone reintroduction.

AMT: Okay, so 0-Six is this amazing Wolf. She's an alpha female. Correct?

NATE BLAKESLEE: Yes.

AMT: And before we go further on the alpha females, let's take a step back and talk about another wolf, because some of these wolves have lives that like are right out Shakespeare. Tell us about 40.

NATE BLAKESLEE: [Chuckles] 40 was known as sort of the evil stepmother of the hailstone wolves. She was an early alpha female of the Druid pack. And so she was widely watched by thousands of visitors. She was an unusually cruel alpha female. All alpha females - every pack has a hierarchy and every wolf sort of defends their spot in the hierarchy through a certain amount of sort of very controlled violence. For want of a better word they will howl each other down. They will pin one another. Usually it's largely symbolic. For 40 it wasn't. You know she was she was not a benevolent ruler and the pack did not thrive during her tenure.

AMT: She kicked her own mother out of the pack at one point, didn’t she?

NATE BLAKESLEE: She forced her own out of the back. She cruelly abused her sisters in order to prevent them from breeding, which again is instinctive behavior but not usually done with the gusto that she did. She did not come to a good end. It is really it a sort of a fairy tale type story. The watchers observed her. She would diligently police her sisters to make sure that they did not become pregnant. However, one season two of them did.

AMT: And they were mating with her alpha male. Am I right?

NATE BLAKESLEE: Yes. And so the watchers observed her pursuing one of her sisters to the den. They presumed it would result in the death of that sister's pups - which is something that wolves sometimes do to protect their own territory. The next morning they saw a wolf by the roadside badly wounded near death. They assumed that they would find that sister. Instead they found 40. And it seemed that the other females in the pack had decided that they had finally had enough. And it was the first recorded instance of the pack. I guess matricide is what you would call it, a pack deciding that they had had enough in killing their own female ruler.

AMT: The view was that that actually lured her into that den.

NATE BLAKESLEE: Well it's hard to say exactly what happened.

AMT: The wolves aren’t talking.

NATE BLAKESLEE: The Wolves aren't talking but she had clearly been attacked by more than one wolf. And she was very near death when they found her and she died shortly thereafter. And the wolf that took over became the new alpha female, who was known as 42, became the queen of the Druids for 10 years or more. Her reign was you know it was still talked about today. She was like Yellowstone royalty 21 and 42. They're like the Kennedys [laughter]. The Kennedy family of Yellowstone wolves.

AMT: It's wild. And so people could do that just by tracking them by watching them all the time you could figure out these life patterns. You could see who was whom in the pack.

NATE BLAKESLEE: Yes there is a man in the park named Rick Macintyre. He works for the park service. He's been there since day one of reintroduction. He is the park's Wolf guru. He is so obsessed with wolves. He famously never missed a day in the park for 15 years whether it was on the clock or off. Every morning it was the same thing: Go out before dawn. Find them with telemetry set up the scope and wait and watch for wolves. He can pick out almost any wolf in the park in his scope and he can tell you that Wolf's lineage. He can tell you a story about the Wolves mother, about the Wolves father, where they denned, any landmark in the park he has a wolf story. He's this amazing font of wolf folklore in the park.

AMT: So interesting. And despite the fact that we learned, the sisters turned on 40 and she dies this lady Macbeth kind of death will show amazing empathy toward other wolves. How does that empathy show itself?

NATE BLAKESLEE: [Laughs] Well that was a revelation to me and that is what sort of Rick and Laurie considered to be their mission in the world is to rescue wolves from this fate that they have suffered largely, because of their reputation as sort of these remorseless killers. In fact they are much more and the empathy that you describe you really can’t see it through the scope. Wolves raised their pups collectively. Every adult wolf participates in raising the pups. They feed them, wolves feed their pups like birds. They'll fill their stomachs with food and regurgitate for the pups. The delight that each and every adult wolf shows on those pups is astounding. And when you watch them through the scope you feel like in some ways you're watching a human family. Of course you don't want to anthropomorphize as a wildlife biologist or as a journalist but you really can see it. And it's a survival strategy. Unlike a grizzly or a mountain lion that will spend 90 percent of its life alone, wolves spend all of their time in the company of other wolves. They hunt collectively, they defend the den collectively, and they raise pups collectively. And that ability to get along and cooperate with other wolves to understand the emotional state of another wolf and respond accordingly is a trait that has been selected for just like their amazing sense of smell or their endurance or their strength or agility over thousands of years.

AMT: So let's get back to 0-Six. First of all her connection to the Canadian wolves that were brought in in the mid-90s was direct lineage?

NATE BLAKESLEE: She is fourth generation. She's a descendant of 21 and 42.

AMT: Okay. And she does become the most famous wolf in Yellowstone because so many people start to watch her.

NATE BLAKESLEE: Yes. She's the easiest Wolf to spot during the time that she was the alpha and she was the queen of this same area that the Druids ruled the Lamar Valley. She was sort of their successor.

AMT: So she gets on Facebook.

NATE BLAKESLEE: She gets on Facebook, people start to learn her legend, she becomes a stop. You know Wolf watching became such a big business that there were tour guides that will take you to see the wolves in the park. And when she fatter for her first litter she chose this den that was perfectly visible from the park road. And so when she brought the pups out of the den for the first time it was this grand unveiling. You know there were dozens of people there with their scopes and their cameras.

AMT: So these wolves at this point were protected from human hunters because they're in the park and you cannot hunt them. Correct?

NATE BLAKESLEE: Yes.

AMT: Then in 2012 the United States government takes the wolves around Yellowstone off the endangered species list.

NATE BLAKESLEE: Yes,

AMT: Why?

NATE BLAKESLEE: The book tells the story of 0-Six but it also tells this parallel narrative of this fight that has been going on for decades over how wolves should be managed in the West. The original deal was the federal government promised if you let us reintroduce these wolves as soon as they become sufficiently established and numerous we will remove federal protection, and the states will be able to govern how they're managed and everyone knew that would mean hunting and trapping. The devil was in the details. Local officials felt like they had reached that threshold only after five or six years. But the federal government was resistant and even after the federal government was ready to cave local activists environmental groups were resistant. And the lawsuits went on for years and years and years. But finally as you say, in 2012 they did authorize that first legal hunting season in Wyoming. Wolves in the park are always protected but it doesn't matter because their ranges are so huge a wolf can routinely travel 20 miles in a day - up to 40 miles on some occasions. All of the packs routinely leave the park. 0-Six sadly, did leave the park during that first legal hunting season and who could have foreseen that one of the first wolves that would be shot during Wyoming's first legal hunting season in generations would be the park's most beloved animal, arguably the most famous wild animal in the world.

AMT: So 0-Six is shot and a remarkable scene takes place right after that shooting, what happens?

NATE BLAKESLEE: Nobody knew who shot 0-Six. He wisely kept his name out of the papers. The area in which he shot her is incredibly remote. He did not want to become the next Cecil the lion, that Minnesota dentist that became sort of the target of national scorn. But when I found him about a year later he had changed his mind and he was ready to tell his story.

AMT: Anonymously.

NATE BLAKESLEE: Anonymously. And he did tell me what he saw that day. And for most people it would have been a life changing experience and I think it may have been for him too. He spotted 0-Six and her mate, was known as 755, not far from the road in some willows. He had cut their trail in the snow on the road from his truck he pulled over onto a friend's land. He got out. He sounded this predator call which makes the sound of a dying cottontail rabbit, it's known to bring out coyotes and wolves. It brought 0-Six and 755 out of the willows about 200 yards away. He told me they just stood there and looked at him and he had time to choose which one he wanted. He did not know he was looking at the world's most famous wild animal.

AMT: He didn't even notice the color.

NATE BLAKESLEE: e didn't notice the color it was winter their coats are very thick in the winter and the colors are hard to see. He decided he wanted 0-Six. He shot her, 755 flew off into the willows. And this man who in the book I call Stephen Turnbull begins walking through the snow to retrieve her carcass his trophy, and then 755 comes back out of the willows and just sits there and stares at him. And he told me he had never seen anything like it in his life and he didn't know what to do, and he just stopped. And then 755 started howling and then he had no idea how many wolves he was stalking, all the rest of the pack started coming out of the willows. And pretty soon there were 10 wolves around 0-Six and they were all howling.

AMT: And how far away is he at this point?

NATE BLAKESLEE: He was about maybe 75 yards away. And he told me he was just dumbstruck and he didn't know what he should do. Naturally he was worried that they were going to come after him.

AMT: They can take down an elk as you've already pointed out.

NATE BLAKESLEE: They don't attack people but you know it's one thing to know that sort of intellectually it's another thing to be standing out there with the lone wolves, who are behaving, to him, very strangely.

AMT: It's like they're in mourning.

NATE BLAKESLEE: He told me - Well first of all he went back to his truck.

AMT: Carefully.

NATE BLAKESLEE: [Chuckles] Carefully he drove back to a cafe he told anyone in the cafe who would listen what he had just seen. I'm not sure how many believed him because it was such an amazing story. He went back there out there an hour later and they were gone. And that's when he was able to get her. But he told me… As he's telling me this story in his cabin, I think he saw on my face, I had been I'd spent months with the watchers by that time talking to them about 0-Six, hearing all of these stories you know, Queen of this wilderness beyond compare. He seemed to realize how that would sound to me and how it would sound to watchers in the park and he said it was it was almost sad was how he put it. And you know it was still to this day one of the saddest things that I have ever heard in my life that story.

AMT: Does he regret shooting that wolf?

NATE BLAKESLEE: He was extremely defensive that first day. Because he had been - even though his name was not in the papers he had been dragged through the mud. And he kept saying over and over again “I didn't do anything wrong. And I would do it again.” And legally he was right. He didn't do anything wrong but morally I think he himself was maybe on the fence.

AMT: What is the status of the wolves around Yellowstone today?

NATE BLAKESLEE: Well I think you would have to say that the sort of the anti-wolf forces have the upper hand at least in the northern Rockies. Wolves are hunted and trapped in all three states that surround Yellowstone National Park. But wolves have also spread beyond the northern Rockies. You know as an area becomes denser the population becomes denser, they begin to disperse looking for new territories and they have moved west into Oregon and Washington and down into California even, places that haven't seen wolves in eighty years. And so now the fight today is over whether or not those wolves should remain protected because of course there's ranchers there too and there's hunting guides. And so this idea that the wolves should be taken off federal protection and the rest of the lower 48 states is something that's being contested today. Part of the reason I wanted the book to tell a story is that the story itself is part of the message of the book. If you're a game manager in a place like Wyoming you spend all your time trying to calculate how many hundreds of wolves can you afford to let hunters and trappers kill this year, or how many hundreds can be killed on behalf of livestock protection. The book asks readers to ask a different question which is what is the value of one wolf's life? And if every wolf leads a life that has this wonderful adventure story as 0-Six did, and there was nothing unusual about 0-Six except that we knew enough details about her story to tell it. If every wolf's life is like that and every wolf killed by a hunter ends such an amazing story, does it force us to re-evaluate the way we think about those policy goals? And does it force us to go back again and take another look about what our values are in that process?

AMT: Good questions. Thanks for making us think.

NATE BLAKESLEE: Thank you. I hope the book does.

AMT: Nate Blakesley his book is called The Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West. If you want to weigh in on what you're thinking you want to share it with us as you listen to our program today. You can find us on Twitter we are @TheCurrentCBC. Go to our Facebook page or on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us in our next half hour. Nicole and Colin Kutchyera had to adapt to a new life, when their 8-week-old son was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder. The parents of baby Cohen talk about Spinal Muscular Atrophy, and how the illness has changed the game-plan for their young family. It's a personal side to our series Adaptation and you'll hear that in just a moment. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio 1, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

[Music: Theme]

Parents of disabled baby overcome expectation and adapt to new circumstances

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

[Music: Adaptation theme]

AMT: Our season long project Adaptation features some of your stories, personal stories of adapting to life's unexpected events and hardships. We received an email from Nicole Kutchyera who wanted to share her story and she writes “at eight weeks old my son Cohen was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease called spinal muscular atrophy type 1. SMA 1 is similar to ALS but with infantine onset. At the time of the diagnosis doctors told my husband and me to brace for the worst, that Cohen would lose the ability to move swallow and breathe. Shortly after his diagnosis we found out about a brand new drug treatment that may be able to help. Cohen started receiving this drug at Sick Kids Hospital at three months. Now at 14 months old. He is healthy and doing well. Adaptation has become a key theme in our life over the past year and will continue to be. We don't know what the future will look like for Cohen but we do know we will have to adapt to the life of a family with a child with severe physical disability.” Well after receiving that email we asked Kathy Alex at CBC in Thunder Bay to visit Nicole her husband Colin and their baby Cohen.

SOUNDCLIP

[Baby crying]

NICOLE: Cohen where did Dada go? Where is Dada? [To Alex] It was really when Colin was about five or six weeks old and we started to notice a change in his movement and in his muscle tone. So all of a sudden I remember sort of sitting him down on this little step in the bathroom and he was shrugging his shoulders in a really funny way and then almost I remember thinking it almost looks like he's trying to move but he can't. But kind of just thinking like “oh no that's crazy of course that's not happening.” [Music] I had really pretty normal and healthy pregnancy. And you know towards the end of a pregnancy a little bit I kind of started to notice that Cohen wasn't moving as much in my belly as maybe I would have expected him to. [Cohen moaning] And then it was just little things from there like we kind of said to each other like “oh I can't remember the last time I saw him lift his arms up to suck his thumbs or lift his arms above his head.” And then I recall and was holding him one day and when you look at him his arms and legs just sort of flopped backwards almost like a little rag doll. So the doctor did a few tests and basically he lifted up Cohen's limbs and let them go and they kind of flopped right back to the table. And then he checked for reflexes and Cohen had none at all. And then he left the room and he came back five minutes later.

COLIN: Just tell when he left the room that something was not right.

NICOLE: So when he came back he said you know this is sort of what I'm seeing. I am seeing that Cohen’s brain is perfect. You know he's bright and alert and everyone's working well there but his body is just not functioning. And there's really only a small handful of problems that could be causing that. And I think the most likely one is something called spinal muscular atrophy type one. And I had never heard of it before. So I asked him what the prognosis was with that. And he started to tear up. So we kind of knew it wasn't going to be good news. And he said you know I'm sorry but these kids can't move very well. They progressively lose their ability to control their bodies; will lose the ability to swallow, to move and eventually to breathe. And most of them will pass away from pneumonia before the age of two.

COLIN: You know our first initial reaction is obviously tremendous grief and sadness. I mean from there it was “what could we do? There must be something that we can do.” We ended up finding some experimental treatments that we started to look into and when we started the drug it still wasn't Health Canada approved. So Health Canada wasn't going to be paying for it. The drug manufacturer was the one taking care of all the costs. During that time that we started a couple of months later, the drug was approved in the US and went for sale there.

NICOLE: They valued it at $125,000 a dose. And these kids need three doses a year for life. [Cohen moaning] Medical optician's we've had to make for him. They're there I know he's different than other kids. So at night Cohen sleeps on a ventilator. He's hooked up to a pulse oximeter and so that measures his pulse and his blood oxygenation levels. And it's kind of like the world's best baby monitor because if anything changes at all [chuckles] it gives you a nice loud alarm. Kind of hard last year, just before Christmas, we got a nice big shipment from the ventilator equipment pool with about 14 boxes worth of stuffers’ room. And you know we set everything up in his beautiful nursery which once had just sort of fun and had a crib and toys and books and everything now sort of looks a little bit more like a hospital room. And that was hard I think it made us both really sad. I remember one night lying in bed and Colin and just kind of said to me “you know we hate that his room is full of medical equipment now. I just hate it.” And that was sort of little moments like that were part of the process of getting used to the idea that he had different requirements. We got multiple lessons from the respiratory team at Sick Kids about how to use everything. At Sick Kids when we had our first sort of intro lesson about how to use the equipment, there was another family in the bed next to us in sort of a ward room. And I remember her dad kind of coming up after and smiling and saying you know like “I know how scary it is. I remember when they did this and it won't be so scary once you once you do that.” And that's very true. It doesn't scare me any more honestly when I go in his room now. I don't even notice it. I see his room as a normal baby room and you know I see it as a normal nursery again which I think is sort of a nice metaphor for how I see Cohen in general. He is starting to try a little wheelchair. There's a little wheelchair out there. It's kind of like a toy wheelchair almost for really young kids. It's called a Zip Zac and it looks a lot like a bumbo seat with wheels on the side, but things like that and we'll give him some independence. So he's not quite as dependent on us for everything, even play.

[Music]

COLIN: I'd say just having a go through my mind that I'm not going to have the exact father son relationship that I thought I would have, you know where we're really going to be the ones to play catch. I'm not going to be coaching his baseball team. You know maybe we can be the statisticians.

NICOLE: When I see him, it's just Cohen, you know to me it's just Cohen. It's just him. This is you know there are certain things he can do and certain things he can't do, but I don't really think about him as a baby with a disability. [To Cohen] See the microphone? [Cohen moans] Yes. That is very interesting.

[Music]

AMT: Thanks for Cathy Alex of CBC Thunder Bay for baby Cohen's story of adaptation with parents Nicole and Colin.

[Music]

'Extremely dangerous': Unclouding the threat of Bali's Mount Agung volcano

Guest: Glyn Williams-Jones

AMT: This is The Current on CBC Radio One, on Sirius XM. I am Anna Maria Tremonti. As many as 100,000 Indonesians are on the move today. They've been ordered to leave their homes near an active volcano on the island of Bali, after Indonesia raised its volcano alert to the highest level yesterday. Mount Agung is spewing grey ash, nine thousand meters or 30,000 feet into the air. Volcanic debris and water are flowing down the volcano slopes. The fear is that an even larger eruption may be imminent. Tens of thousands of international travelers including at least 400 Canadians are stranded on the island after Bali’s International Airport was shut down by the dangers of ash. Robin Lim lives in Bali. She's been out trying to get a better look at the mountain.

SOUNDCLIP

ROBIN LIM: Well it's been pouring rain here and the sky's been dark sometimes in the early morning will get a little bit of sunshine. This morning my husband and I got up early and we got our motorcycle and went a little ways up the road in around the corner so we could get a view of the mountain. We could see there was you know significant ash clouds fanning out. Actually right over Ubud which was interesting because it has been – it has been mostly going up north, I would say north east out to sea. And here it was kind of in the Southwest, the cloud. It was you know kind of a not so clear day although there was some sunshine this morning and then pretty quick it turned into dark and rainy. It's been pretty dark and cloudy and overcast, I would say.

AMT: Now Robin Lim works with a community health clinic named Bumi Sehat in a village 30 kilometers from the crater. She says officials have widened the evacuation zone and more people are moving.[sc]

SOUNDCLIP

ROBIN LIM: By now I think they've moved because they're evacuating people eight to 10 kilometers from the crater’s peak. And I would say easily by today there's probably over 100,000, without any exaggeration, over a hundred thousand displaced people. And that number will be growing as events unfold. And those are people that may not - they may not get to go home ever. We don't know or at least for decades, even generations.

AMT: Well volcanologists around the world are watching this. Glyn Williams-Jones is a professor of Volcanology at Simon Fraser University. We've reached him in Port Moody B.C. Hello.

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Hello.

AMT: What did you hear as you just listened to Robin Lim?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: It's sort of again that kind of classic thing of waiting, being in a in a crisis situation but really not knowing what to expect. What's so tricky with these kinds of situations is they can change by day to day and we don't really know which way it will go.

AMT: She mentioned homes how destructive can a volcanic eruption be?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: It can be extremely destructive and it really depends on how close you are. So as she mentioned they're now evacuating up to about 10 kilometers from the summit. You know we can have lava flows coming down, bulldozers of molten rock. Here in Bali Indonesia one of the bigger problems are these mud flows or the Indonesian word that we use ‘Lahar’ and these are incredibly erosive down the river valleys and really just destroy everything in their past.

AMT: You've spent time in that region and looking at the volcanoes?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Yes I had a project in actually not far from Bali in eastern Java on a volcano called cau egin. And so I mean it's an amazing country. It's got the world's largest number of active volcanoes and it's the fourth most populous country in the world. So it's unfortunate that bad mix of big Population, high population density and many many active volcanos.

AMT: This is the ring of fire area my right? Is that what it's called?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Yes that's right. It's essentially if you just you know connect the dots all the way around the Pacific Ocean. We have two thirds of the world's active volcanoes scattered all over all around. And you know at any given moment or around the Earth it's probably least a dozen or more volcanoes that are actively erupting. So this is not uncommon and it's more so an issue in Indonesia.

AMT: And so they can erupt without the kind of havoc that this one might wreak. How big could this eruption be?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Based on what it did in the past, the last big eruption in 1964, it was much bigger. The eruption cloud went 20, 25, 30 kilometers up. And you know fifteen hundred people or so were killed in that event. So the signs that we've been seeing in terms of the initial steam blasts coming up and then more and more are starting to come out, it is suggestive that it could become much more important and therefore the you know the important Hazard Management approach of extending the evacuation zones. You know you can't take these things too seriously enough.

AMT: Is it the lava that usually kills people or is it the ash?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: In this situation the most dangerous is actually what's called a pyro classic flow so it's a glowing cloud of ash and gas coming down the flanks of the volcano. We sort of have in our mind these huge eruption columns like the 1980 European of St. Helens. Some of those collapse back down. And you know these percussive flows can travel hundreds of kilometers an hour and are many hundreds of degrees Celsius temperature so extremely dangerous. But again in Indonesia the bigger issue I think is this mix of heavy rains and all the ash that is around that can generate these mud flows or Lahars.

AMT: And you know there is a chance that it won't blow at all isn't there?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Absolutely. You know volcanoes are tricky beasts to understand. And it's not the first time that a volcano has gone into you know a situation like this or a level of activity and then for one reason or another we don't really understand it calms back down again. However given the signs of activity that we're seeing now really the only thing you can do is prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

AMT: You're part of an international volcano monitoring fund. Are you involved with Indonesia? Do they need their help?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Yes. The funding that we working was a small non-profit based here in Vancouver and to date we've not had any projects in Indonesia. Mainly it's been in Central America. Indonesia is extremely well equipped to monitor their volcanoes, just by necessity they've had to, they've had so many eruptions. So there's a great team of volcanologists on site. And as we're seeing here in Bali really one of the most important things is a great communication between the volcano experts and the civil defense in order to evacuate people.

AMT: Now if you were there how close would you get as a volcanologists? What would you do?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Well that's where you sort of split the ego side wants to get you as close as you can to see all the nitty gritty details. But at the same time you know I would not be going in much closer than the evacuation zone, because when you're in the situation you really never know what's going to happen. And you know for this reason ideally what we have is a network of instruments already set up on the volcano that's doing the dangerous monitoring for us. We really don't want to put people in harm's way.

AMT: And that network of instruments can you access them as a vulcanologist in another part of the world?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Yes absolutely. More and more with internet access, the more people are able to have networks that you can control from the other side of the world. In this kind of crisis situation as we call it all, of the information is going to the Indonesian scientists, they are the ones that are managing it on the day to day, hour to hour level. But you know we are at it at an interesting time technologically and with computers now and you know the power of broadband Internet to start to really think about international proper networks of instrumentation. And here with all this big ash we really are also sort of relying a lot on satellite monitoring.

AMT: How long have you been a volcanologist?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: I guess I'm well I've been working at Simon Fraser now since 2003 but I've been tromping on volcanoes since for well over 20 years now ,all over the world, in Central America, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, wherever there's something else that's going on trying to understand what makes these things take each different. So it is quite a tricky to understand what's going on.

AMT: And that's the academic reason. What's gets out there, what excites you about that work?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Well I mean you know you can't get away from the fact that it is exciting, it's thrilling. And you know there's my day job I get paid to go to wonderful places like Indonesia and see just the incredible wealth of different types of volcanoes. There's always that underlying sort of connection to, especially in a crisis like this, it's exciting academically. I get to go there and then come home to a nice safe country like Canada. Whereas the people who are living there are having to deal with this on a daily basis. So that that kind of puts things into perspective a bit. But it's exciting. And I'm lucky to have a great team of students who continue that excitement wherever we're working.

AMT: So when you when you're in class this week talking to your students, how are you using what's going on in real time in your class?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: I mean we do run this kind of thing in real time because it's you know it's a state Old same but you know an image is worth a thousand words. And now video is even more so. And because there is so much video coverage the details that we now can see, based over the early just sort of simple academic models, can give us a lot of detail. And in fact this week we're running a volcano disaster simulation in my class and that's trying to put the students into almost that kind of mindset. So over a six hour period we have the students playing the different roles that might be going on similar to what's happening here in Indonesia. Probably not the same but it's as close as we can get to giving them that kind of feel and the intensity and the stress.

AMT: And when this kind of stuff happens do they have to actually watch for people who want to get close because they think they're going in you know see something that should not, who kind of jump the cordons.

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Yes. That's always an issue. There's also the, especially in somewhere like this where you have high population density, people they have farms they have homes on the sides of the volcano. The soil from that volcano is very rich. So it's very good for agriculture. And you've just got you know population pressure so that it's very hard to force people to leave everything in a moment's notice sometimes we see that here in Canada as well. So that is a problem. And the last thing you need is then some bozo who's trying to get the best in the extreme video for his Facebook feed. That just adds a problem to already a difficult situation.

AMT: I remember looking at Werner Herzog's documentary Into The Inferno and we're actually going to end our show with a little clip of him later but they showed the lava flow going right by this particular couple of scientists who always got real close and one day they got just too close.

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Yes. That was [unintelligible]. They probably did more for Volcano science in terms of getting it out of the public than anyone else has ever done. They were spectacular and unfortunately they took too many risks. In hindsight, and hindsight is always 20-20 as everyone says, but they were caught in one of these pyroclastic flows in Japan. That was the eruption was a bit bigger than expected and it does go to show that they are enigmatic systems. They are very difficult to - you'll never get to predict. At best we can hope to forecast something and it every now and then they catch us unawares. Well actually been in a good situation and there was a long lead time building up to this level of activity. So there was a lot of time in advance of this activity but sometimes you know zero to 60 in three hours or less.

AMT: You just don't know.

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: We just do not know. And so there's more volcanoes than volcanologists. So you know everyone keeps chipping away and you try to do your best and the nice thing is again it's a tight knit community. So we all share our experiences.

AMT: But it's like a beast you just don't know what it's going to do?

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Yeas. And you just like any sort of wild animal you need to respect it and give it its space and not put your constraints on it. It's going to do what it will do and we're getting better and the closer we get to an eruption the better we are saying okay look this is probably going to erupt significantly it's maybe going to get worse. But it's it's not a sure thing by any means.

AMT: Glyn Williams Jones good to talk to you today. We'll keep watching to see what happens. I'm sure you will. So thank you.

GLYN WILLIAMS-JONES: Absolutely. My pleasure.

AMT: Bye bye. That is Glyn Williams-Jones. He's a professor of Volcanology at Simon Fraser University. He's in Port Moody, B.C. that's where we reached him. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio 1 for Q. Tom Power is speaking to global pop star Ed Sheeran. 2017 has been a big year for Ed Sheeran. He released his third studio album. He set a new Spotify streaming record with the song Shape of You, and he embarked on a huge international tour. He is up next with Tom on CBC Radio 1. And we were just talking about Wermer Hertzog and that documentary Into The Inferno. Werner Herzog and volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer traveled and filmed at six active volcanoes, including in Indonesia's ring of fire. And I talked to him about that documentary last season. You can hear the entire conversation we put it back on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. We're going to leave you with some of that discussion and it starts with Wermer Hertzog describing what it is like standing on the edge of a volcano. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

WERMER HERTZOG: It's just very awesome. When you look into the boiling magma and lava of the volcano it is literally everywhere [unintelligible] on all continents. I mean do you dig drill deep enough under the sea beds. It's everywhere. The entire interior of our planet is molten, extremely hot magma and nothing is really permanent here. The tectonic plates drifting and shifting and creating friction sounds, and that in fact actually creates volcanoes. But we shouldn't be panicky about it because volcanoes in fact created the atmosphere that we are breathing. Before there was methane.

AMT: So we need them. But again when you were looking into the mouth of a volcano.

WERMER HERTZOG: We filmed a volcano in Indonesia which was kind of quiet, quasi quiet for a couple of years. Even farmers were working where they shouldn't have been and the volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer actually kept an eye on the volcano and saw that there was something not right. Huge boulders, I mean the size of the whole building came tumbling down for us. In the distance they looked like small pebbles and he knew there was something not right. And all of a sudden it exploded. We filmed it. It didn't do any harm. But 60 seconds later we were out. You turn your car facing, I say in quotes ‘the exit’ and you don't hesitate a second and you flee.

AMT: I mean you've got a shot at one point where like the rim is so thin that somebody is actually straddling it, they are sitting on with a leg on each side taking measurements.

WERMER HERTZOG: Yes. Right you have to and our camera of course has to be cautious. You don't make a false step because it's vertically down into the crater itself.

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Tuesday November 28, 2017 Full Episode Transcript

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