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The Current Transcript for June 23, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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The Waukesha vote is all about the Great Lakes states telling Wisconsin that they can keep using the water from the Great Lakes, but only if it’s treated properly and returned to the Great Lakes.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well, his own State Senate passed a resolution opposing it, but an enthusiastic Michigan Governor Rick Snyder was all in on Tuesday, one of eight states agreeing to allow the Wisconsin town of Waukesha to siphon millions of litres of water daily from Lake Michigan. Community leaders say this diversion is a no-brainer. Their aquifers are low. They need the water. And, yet, mayors of Canadian cities along the other Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence see a threat. So where's the disconnect? We're asking in just a moment. And then, front line fashion.

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And the feeling is that they’d rather lose their hearing than lose their life. They shouldn’t have to make that choice.

AMT: From specially designed ear guards that block out gunfire to comfort clothing for snipers - there is a lot of military research that focuses not on bang-bang , but on the drip-dry, which is precisely where author and researcher Mary Roach finds her best stories. The author of Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War joins me in half an hour. And in the books that bear his name Curious George is always on a new adventure.

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NARRATOR: In all of the jungle no creature is as curious as George.

VOICE: Can I have my hat, please?

[laughter]

AMT: The man in the yellow hat gets a yellow fez. George gets a lesson in celebrating Ramadan. Author Hena Khan on how a beloved children's character teaches tolerance - in an hour. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti . This is The Current.

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Canadian mayors worry that water to Waukesha sets a dangerous precedent

Guests: Shawn Reilly, Keith Hobbs, Robert Sandford

AMT: Well, anger is growing in municipalities along the Great Lakes and even the St. Lawrence over a plan to divert water from the town of Waukesha, Wisconsin. Tuesday, a group of eight US governors of states adjoining the Great Lakes approved a proposal to allow Waukesha to draw 31 million litres of water daily on the condition that the town returns the same amount of treated water to the Great Lakes. Waukesha has been under court order to replace its current water supply after radium contamination and low aquifers. While the town lies 27 kilometres from Lake Michigan it falls outside the boundaries of the Great Lakes watershed. Critics say that allowing the town to borrow water from Lake Michigan sets a dangerous precedent and could lead to water battles between Canada and the U.S. My first guest does not see it that way. Shawn Reilly is the mayor of Waukesha. Hello.

SHAWN REILLY: Hello, how are you?

AMT: Well, I'm curious to know, what does it mean for your community that this proposal to take water from Lake Michigan has been approved?

SHAWN REILLY: For the city of Waukesha, it is historic. We've been working for more than 13 years to obtain water from the Great Lakes. We’re on an aquifer that's both declining and contaminated and we need to have a new water supply. It's been studied by the city of Waukesha by a Regional Planning Commission and by the state of Wisconsin and all the conclusions were that the best and only reasonable option was to obtain water from Lake Michigan. And then we applied for water through the terms of the compact. It's been a long process, but the end result was that eight governors, and the premiers of Ontario and Quebec also came to the same conclusion, that the only reason option for Waukesha was to have water from Lake Michigan.

AMT: But the premiers of Ontario and Quebec didn’t vote on this one, only the governors did.

SHAWN REILLY: They were fully participated in the findings of fact.

AMT: Right. In the discussions, but not in vote.

SHAWN REILLY: Well, the findings of fact are what the governors-- When they made their vote they had to base their vote on the findings of fact.

AMT: Okay. Fair enough. 14 years to get this?

SHAWN REILLY: That’s correct.

AMT: Okay. But at the same time, your community spent time fighting the original environmental protection assessment of the water that said you needed to do this. How much time did you lose on that one?

SHAWN REILLY: Well, that was before my time. I don't know how much time was lost, but probably two, three, maybe even more years.

AMT: And so what do you make of the argument that allowing Waukesha to divert the water will open the floodgates for other communities to exploit the resource?

SHAWN REILLY: I don't agree with that. When the compact was enacted with the approval with the approval of the eight Great Lakes states, Canadian government, US government, and Ontario and Quebec the boundary was set at that time and that boundary is the basin of the Great Lakes and, under limited circumstances, communities that are in counties that are partially within the basin and partially without.

AMT: Your critics say you have unchecked urban sprawl masquerading as a drinking water problem. How do you respond to that?

SHAWN REILLY: Well, I wish we had the growth that they say that we have. We expect a half a per cent growth per year between now and 2050.

AMT: Okay. So, you're going to give this water back. How quickly do you get it back?

SHAWN REILLY: Well, once it's up and flowing, it will pretty much be instantaneous. I mean, it's obviously the water that's coming out isn't going right back in at the same moment, but once the pipes are full of water it comes in to Waukesha. It’ll be used by the residents. It will then go to our water treatment plant, be treated—I’m sorry. It will be treated in our sanitary sewer plant and then it will be returned to the Great Lakes, you know, at the same time. There will always be a flow going in and a flow going out.

AMT: Okay. And this is because your aquifers are getting lower, right? And that you also have radium contamination as it drops? That's naturally occurring radium contamination?

SHAWN REILLY: Yes, it is.

AMT: So, are you the only community in that area that has water like this? Or is that the sort of the geographic landscape? Can we expect other towns to have the same problem?

SHAWN REILLY: The aquifer that we presently pull water from really starts in Green Bay and goes all the way to northern Illinois. We're in an area where the cone of depression-- And that's just a scientific term where the water is, right where the pipe is, where the wells are, and the water gets drawn down there-- in which the radium it's increased in that area, because we've gone pulled it down further. But there is radium in this aquifer that is naturally occurring throughout that entire area. The northern suburbs of Chicago already get water through the Great Lakes from a decision a long time ago. The other communities around us are lending their water with water from aquifers from shallow wells. Or, as you go further north, up into the Green Bay Area, some of those communities have gone to lake water because they're within the Great Lakes basin.

AMT: I see. So it's a problem, but yours is the most acute without the obvious solution, which is why you needed this deal.

SHAWN REILLY: Correct.

AMT: Okay. Well, Shawn Reilly, thanks for speaking with me today.

SHAWN REILLY: Oh, you're welcome. And I actually want to make sure that people learn some of the facts about this. It's not opening the floodgates for water to go to the west. In fact, the water from the Great Lakes can go past any community, any county that is partially within and partially without the Great Lakes basin.

AMT: Okay. Well, we’ll go to our critics and we’ll put that to them. Okay, thank you.

SHAWN REILLY: Okay, thank you.

AMT: That is Shawn Reilly, mayor of Waukesha, Wisconsin. Well, communities along the Canadian sides of the Great Lakes, even the St. Lawrence Seaway, are not happy about this plan to divert water from Lake Michigan. Keith Hobbs is the mayor of Thunder Bay, Ontario. He sits on the board of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative. That's a collection of 120 mayors from Canada and the US working to protect the Great Lakes. Keith Hobbs is in Barrie, Ontario today. Hello.

KEITH HOBBS: Hello, Anna Maria. How’re you doing?

AMT: I'm fine. I'm just wondering what you're thinking. He's making the point that, you know, he's in a county that that straddles the line, therefore, using water from the Great Lakes. This is not a slippery slope. What do you think?

KEITH HOBBS: Well, first and foremost, it's not just the mayors of Ontario and Quebec that are opposed to this. The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative represents 123 mayors, including mayors from the United States. I know that the mayor of Niagara Falls in New York is opposed. The mayor of Racine, Wisconsin is opposed. The mayor of Duluth has concerns. I know the city of Duluth has concerns. And we're seeing unprecedented low water levels in the Great Lakes and we depend on the Great Lakes for 8.5 trillion dollars in business and commerce. It’s very disconcerting for us.

AMT: So what do you see happening? How do you think it will affect, well, let's start with Thunder Bay, specifically.

KEITH HOBBS: Well, you know, Thunder Bay, obviously, there’s outflows from the greatest Great Lake in the world, Lake Superior, and we're on that lake and we've seen unprecedented low levels of water. It affects our shipping lanes and fishing, recreation. But, you know, I just heard Mayor Reilly say that it's not precedent-setting and we believe that it is a hugely poor, poor precedent set. And we’re disappointed in the Premier of Ontario, the Premier of Quebec, and the eight Great Lakes governors. I think that accord has to be rewritten. And we need our premiers to have a vote on that. They don't have the vote as the compact is worded. And I think that just a wrong in itself. But where do we draw the line? What other counties that aren’t straddling counties will want this water? And Waukesha has other avenues. We spent about 165 million dollars in Thunder Bay building one of the greatest, best water treatment facilities. And radium is treatable and I think that's where the money should be spent. They also have other aquifers and they also have the Fox for water resources, rather than going to the Great Lakes.

AMT: So, you're telling me they should be spending their money on infrastructure and they wouldn't have this problem?

KEITH HOBBS: I totally agree and I think a lot of the mayors agree as well. They've had 13 years to work on their infrastructure and instead they worked to get water out of the Great Lakes.

AMT: Well, then, let's talk about the slippery slope, because we see a lot of infrastructure problems in American cities right now that are along the Great Lakes. Do you see that being the fallback position as opposed to using taxpayers' money to actually get better water systems in?

KEITH HOBBS: Yeah, I think infrastructure isn’t just a problem in the US; it's a problem all over North America and governments need to spend that money. We’ve seen last budget come out and 8.4 billion is going to First Nations infrastructure, which is sorely needed. So, those are the kinds of dollars that have to be spent. I just think it's a dangerous precedent and I know I’m speaking for most of the 123 mayors in the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Cities Initiative. And where the mayors come in, mayors are in the cities, on the shores of the greatest freshwater source in the world and we don't even have a say. It's pretty sad.

AMT: Do you want the Canadian government to do something or the Ontario and Quebec governments? Could they do something?

KEITH HOBBS: Yes, definitely. I know Mayor Coderre from Montreal has asked the Prime Minister to intervene with President of the United States. You know, this is issue isn't over. I, for one, as a board member of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, am going to push to have this taken right to the US Supreme Court. I think that's where it needs to go.

AMT: How big of a conflict could this be?

KEITH HOBBS: I think it's the start of water wars. And we talk about water wars, but this is the start of it. I’m not being an alarmist here. I think a lot of mayors agree. This is a huge issue. And when they talk about returning to the water in its natural state back to the Great Lakes, that’s a bunch of bunk. You talk to the mayor of Racine, Wisconsin and ask him what he thinks about the return through the Root River. He’s not happy at all.

AMT: Okay. Well, Keith Hobbs, thank you for your thoughts.

KEITH HOBBS: Okay. Thank you, Anna Maria. Have a good day.

AMT: You, too. That is Keith Hobbs. He's the mayor of Thunder Bay. He happens to be in Barrie, Ontario today. Well, I've got someone else standing by to get a broader understanding of what this means to Canada's national water strategy. Robert Sandford is the chair of Water and Climate Security at the United Nations University Institute for Water Environment and Health. He's in Canmore, Alberta. Hello.

ROBERT SANDFORD: Good morning.

AMT: I just said Canada's national water strategy. Do we have one?

ROBERT SANDFORD: Unfortunately, what's happened here is that we haven't had reform of the water policy in Canada since 1987 and what we're seeing is that Canada needs to get its own water house in order before worrying about the needs of thirsty neighbours. And what we're seeing, also, as our populations and economies grow and water becomes more precious, more of these kinds of issues will emerge in the future.

AMT: So, what do you think of this decision to divert?

ROBERT SANDFORD: Well, I tend to look at these matters from a broader perspective and this is happening all over the world. And the fact is that precedent is a big concern. Now, the States and the Alliance for Great Lakes did not take the matter of precedent lightly. They understood the danger of precedent in their decisions. But it's very important to recognize that this is not the end of the story and regardless of what happens with this decision there's a great deal more that will happen. And I agree with Mayor Hobbs that infrastructure is a serious issue in both Canada the United States. And problems in Toledo, Ohio and in Flint, 6,000 children were exposed to high lead level concentrations for 18 months suggests that we're quite vulnerable here. And the problem here is that you get policy advancements in the Great Lakes and elsewhere through accidental precedents, then what happens is that it can undermine decades of careful policy development. And what we recognize is 40 per cent of the boundary between Canada and the United States is water, so unilateral action on these matters related to share waters could be viewed really as a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1909 Boundary Waters Act. So, what I'm saying here is that we have proven successful mechanisms for resolving such issues and I think we need to be very careful to use them as these matters intensify in concern over time.

AMT: Right. But we have a successful mechanism. That's what allowed eight governors to vote for this, and the Ontario and Quebec Premiers could not vote. So, how successful is that mechanism?

ROBERT SANDFORD: Well, that's certainly true. And Mayor Hobbs has indicated the dissatisfaction with this and that really does point to the fact that Canada needs to be considering a national water policy. And it's very interesting, as per the United Nations’ 2030 Transforming Our World: Global Sustainable Development Agenda, countries are being encouraged to do that. And the other thing that I think is really important is that neither we nor the Americans can keep dealing with these problems on a piecemeal basis. Ultimately, we'll need a continental water strategy, perhaps, not unlike the European water framework directive in the future. And the US has already declared water availability and quality a national security issue. So, this is just the beginning of debates like these and we should be getting ready for these debates.

AMT: You heard Mayor Bob say this is the start of the water war. What do you think of that?

ROBERT SANDFORD: I think that the conventional wisdom right now, through much study over the last 5,000 years, is countries tend to agree and resolve conflicts over water, rather than going to war over them. But there's two things that should come to mind here. First of all, as we've seen in Syria, non-state actors can actually begin to target and use water resources as a weapon that can cripple food supply, destroy local economies, and disrupt water security with tremendous impacts outside the region. The second thing that's really important is what we haven't understood until now is that changes in the rate and manner in which water moves through the global hydrologic cycle are really suggesting that the fundamental stability of our political structures and our global economy are predicted on relative hydrologic predictability.

AMT: Okay. You’re talking bureaucracy. What did what did you just say? What does that mean?

ROBERT SANDFORD: what I'm saying here is that we have relied on the water cycle delivering water to us reliably and within variability that we can understand over the last century.

AMT: And now it's changing?

ROBERT SANDFORD: And now it's changing and as a result political stability and the stability of our global economy in a number of regions in the world are now at risk and we're only beginning to understand how complex this issue becomes.

AMT: Right. So let me just - we don't have a lot of time left. I just want to ask you - You mentioned our thirsty neighbours. The Americans appear - Canada has its own issues with drought in certain parts of this country. The Americans are ten times bigger than us with their issues. The Great Lakes looks awfully tempting. Just briefly give us some perspective. There's a lot of water there. How much of it is renewable?

ROBERT SANDFORD: Well, not much of it is. I mean, there's a lot of water left over from earlier weather periods and post-glacial circumstances and so the renewable aspect is very small. But I would also submit to you that Canada and the United States, perhaps, as a model for the world, have been very good a cooperating over water and resolving these conflicts. And I hope that we can continue in that vein rather than leaning toward conflict over water resources in the Great Lakes or anywhere else along our shared borders.

AMT: Okay. Well, Robert Sandford, thanks for your perspective.

ROBERT SANDFORD: My pleasure.

AMT: Robert Sandford is Chair of the Water and Climate Security at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. He’s in Canmore, Alberta. What do you think? Is the Canadian government doing enough to protect the water we share with the US? Is this a slippery slope? Let us know. You can tweet us, @TheCurrentCBC. Post on this segment on our Facebook page. Email us by clicking on 'contact' link, cbc.ca/TheCurrent. Well,all sides of this issue at least agree that water is a precious resource. In fact, it may be becoming a little too precious. That is the conceit behind the latest mockumentary from our friends over at CBC's This is That. Their satirical short made the rounds online last week featuring a Canadian hoser smuggling the stuff of lakes and streams south of the border.

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CINDY MCNEIL : [talking outside] I mean, the best part of this is that this is all free, you know? And Canada’s got tonnes of it. And now I get to profit off that. And, you know, it's what we’ve got up here. It’s great.

[car door opens, outside noise is silenced]

CINDY MCNEIL: Okay, so we’ve got one, two, three, four, five of the mediums. I think all that is like a thousand bucks, which is a really good day. Actually, I use, I use these green ones just because the border agent’s going to think that’s Spritz Up. So, same colour.

BORDER AGENT: Pop the trunk, please.

CINDY MCNEIL: [beeped]

BORDER AGENT: Travelling with a fair bit of beverage, huh?

CINDY MCNEIL: Yeah. Yeah.

BORDER AGENT: How’s that Spritz Up? Is it good?

CINDY MCNEIL: Yeah, actually, yeah. I really-- I love it. I really can’t get enough of it.

BORDER AGENT: Yeah, I like Squirt, but sometimes it's too citrusy. I’ll have to try that. Alright, well, safe travels. Thank you very much. Have a good day. Drive through.

CINDY MCNEIL: Thank you. Yep.

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CINDY MCNEIL: That’s… that's how you do it. Alright, let’s get the [beep] out of here.

REPORTER: Who are you selling it to? Where will the water ultimately end up?

BUYER: This water will probably end up in Vegas. I don’t know. Maybe the fountain at the Bellagio, something like that. A golf course in Phoenix. They can use it.

AMT: There you go. CBC’s This is That. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, and online on cbc.ca/thecurrent.

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Sharks, bugs, and genital injury: author Mary Roach on military research

Guests: Mary Roach

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

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AMT: Still to come, a new lesson from Curious George and the Man with the Yellow Hat. But first, grunt science.

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Almost everything that the US soldier carries and wears, except his weapons, is designed and thoroughly tested at Natick Clothing and Organics Materials Laboratory. Constantly seeking to meet the challenges of new environments, the team of highly-trained specialists that make up the staff usually begin work by developing just the right material for the job. These fabrics are been subjected to specially designed tests, which duplicate severe environmental conditions: they are bleached and pulled; bombarded by intense ultraviolet radiation which duplicates the sun's rays. This workout can compress two years of wear or into a single week.

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AMT: Well that is a U.S. Army promotional video. You can tell from the sound that it's old, it's about 50 years old. It's about Natick Labs, a military research and development centre. When we think of defense research, most of us imagine labs designing lethal weaponry: guns, bombs. But researchers at Natick have looked at almost everything else that affects the life of a soldier: uniforms, food, the weather. Natick Labs is one of the many facilities Mary Roach visited in her exploration of seemingly mundane aspects of military research. What she discovered was that work on subjects such as sleep deprivation, protective clothing, even insects, affects a soldier to an unexpected degree in the battlefield and in training. Mary Roach is the author of Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, and she joins us from Oakland, California. Hello.

MARY ROACH: Hello.

AMT: Let's start with that one unexpected area that we just heard about: fashion. The U.S. military hires fashion design school grads, why?

MARY ROACH: The fashion team at Natick, the two women that I spoke to: one had been a swimwear designer, the other had done high end wedding dresses. Which I found sort of odd until I had started speaking to them and they said, well, when you think about it, swimwear is a very specific activity that you're designing for, so you need specialty fabrics that need to accommodate the job. A wedding gown is layering of varied fabrics, and for a garment that you might just wear for one day. Kind of similar, I suppose, in a way, to a bomb suit. She also showed me, they were working on a sniper top which looked very sleek and sort of fashion forward, and I commented on that, that the front was sort of flat and clean. And she said, well, that's actually because if you're lying on your belly for hours at a time, you wouldn't want a zipper or buttons down the front of the shirt or jacket, because that would be uncomfortable. The pockets are on the arms, so that you can access things in the pocket rather than on the chest, if you're lying on your belly. So there were these sort of interesting needs that the job required the designer to take into account when designing the clothing. Also morale. If it looks dorky, morale suffers.

AMT: They're not going to wear it, yeah.

MARY ROACH: Exactly.

AMT: Let's go back to the snipers, though. So how do they get into their shirts?

MARY ROACH: Sure, it has a side opening, they were buttons. And I said, well what about Velcro? Why would you not have Velcro? And two reasons: one, if you were lying down, dirt and debris gets into the little hook and loop design, and that [makes ripping sound] that stuff, and it stops working. A zipper as well, you get dirt and sand into a zipper, and it doesn't work. The other problem with Velcro is that it's noisy and you would give away your position.

AMT: So interesting, and I guess then zippers, you wouldn't want a metal zipper because you might get a glint off that from the sun, and the sniper on the other side might see you.

MARY ROACH: True, I didn't even think of that. That's also true, yeah.

AMT: Okay, now aside from the uniform, earplugs are a daily essential for a lot of soldiers in battle. That seems like an obvious necessity around loud tanks, the sound of gunshots. But earplugs can be risky for soldiers, you discovered, why is that?

MARY ROACH: War is very loud, obviously. There's bombs and rifle fire. I mean, you can protect yours with earplugs or bigger cuffs that go over the ears, but now you've lost your situational awareness, as they like to say in the military. You can't hear someone coming up behind you, or even a car driving up behind you. And when you walk on patrol, on foot patrol, you're often 15 feet or more apart, because that's the killing radius, as they say, of a grenade. So you don't have soldiers walk in a cluster because then one grenade could kill three people. So they're walking far apart, so if you've got hearing protection and you can't communicate easily with the other people in your group, that puts your life in danger. And then the feeling is among most soldiers is that they'd rather lose their hearing then lose their life. They shouldn't have to make that choice. There is a system called TCAPS-- Tactical Communication and Protection System-- which is pretty cool. It's a headset that you put on, and it takes the sound coming in and it amplifies human voice or something quiet, and it quiets down something very loud. There's also communication built in so you can communicate wirelessly with the other people in your unit. So that's something that would be great, if everybody had that.

AMT: Their studies actually show they actually put themselves in more danger if they can't hear.

MARY ROACH: Yeah, that's right. There were a couple of military audiologists doing an interesting project; they were using the Marine Corps paintball team as stand-ins for an actual battle scenario. They put on them hearing loss stimulators, it was a helmet that knocked out anywhere from 20 to 70 per cent of their hearing, and then they look at their performance, and they looked at lethality and survivability. What happens when you have a hearing loss, it's not that you were just sort of going what, what did he say? It's that you were unsure of what was going on, and you tend to withdraw and just not participate. It did have quite an impact on their ability to stay alive and do their job, you know.

AMT: So this is really interesting. You basically roamed through defense research and got access to all the stuff they're doing.

MARY ROACH: I did, yeah, yeah. It took a little doing sometimes. [laughs]

AMT: I bet.

MARY ROACH: Took about--

AMT: A lot of this is classified, is it not?

MARY ROACH: Oh, no, nothing classified. If anything was classified, the answer right upfront was no. Sometimes things that you wouldn't expect to be classified were classified. The camouflage research lab at Natick Labs, that work is all classified, which I wouldn't have anticipated. I was out on a ballistic missile submarine out in the Atlantic, and parts of the submarine I couldn't go into, because I don't have clearance.

AMT: It sounds like a really interesting research project, but let's stay with the submarine, then, because you are looking at sleep on submarines, were you not?

MARY ROACH: Yeah, submarines are interesting for sleep researchers, because on a submarine, there are no windows and there's no sunlight. And sunlight is the main cue for our bodies, the wakefulness and sleepiness cycle that we all go through on a 24-hour basis. And the thought was early on well, since there's no sunlight, maybe we can create a day length that suits our purposes better. There was a kind of artificial day created. You know, you'd be sleeping six hours and then working six hours and you had six hours of personal time. But as it turns out, the human body wants to be on a 24 hour cycle, so what you're doing to these guys, it was like sending them from California to Paris every day. It was creating jetlag on top of sleep deprivation. They're switching back to a circadian friendly cycle, which hopefully will help. Because the submarine that I was on was a, it's carrying Trident missiles, it's part of U.S. strategic deterrence. So you definitely want the crew to be alert.

AMT: You definitely do. But what do, they like literally just kind of like roam around under there?

MARY ROACH: Yes, well, it's passive sonar, so they're just listening. They don't send out the beeps that bounce back and tell them what's in their immediate environ, so they're just staying down and staying hidden.

AMT: Where are the beds on a submarine like that?

MARY ROACH: There are racks of bunks-- standard sleeping quarters, small bunk. But the preferred place to sleep, actually, is in between the missile silos, the Trident missile silos, because the missile compartment-- it's kind of like that stacks in the library, it's four or five decks high. Not much going on there, a pretty quiet place to catch some sleep. Obviously, not is not in the case of a missile launch.

AMT: [laughs] That's pretty fascinating. And how has the attitude towards sleep research changed in the Navy?

MARY ROACH: It's funny, in the Navy, particularly submarine force, it's a point of pride to be up long hours. They'll kind of brag about it, you know, like a pilot in the Air Force might talk about how many Gs they can withstand, that a submariner or will tell you how long he's been up. I never saw anyone yawn. I'd ask them how long have you been out, how much sleep did you get last night? Oh, four or five hours, I'm fine. But the scary thing is, one of the sleep researchers for the military. Dr. Greg Belenky, was talking to me about how when you're sleep deprived for a long period of time, that feeling becomes your normal. So you're not aware that you are compromised. Kind of like being drunk, you think, ah, I'm fine, I can drive. But you're not fine, your cognitive abilities do decline with extended sleep deprivation. But it's a point of pride, like, they have a slang. If you're somebody who complains, like, I'm going to go take a nap, they call you a rack hound. Rack being the Navy slang for the bunks. Nobody wants to be a rack hound. Well I do, I am.

AMT: [laughs] Yeah, you'd be just snuggled up there against the nuclear missiles.

MARY ROACH: [laughs] Exactly.

AMT: Happy as a little rack hound. Now, speaking of the Navy, what research has the military done about sharks?

MARY ROACH: Oh, the Navy did a tremendous amount of research in the '60s, and it was following up on this very bizarre project by the OSS in World War II to develop a shark repellent. This was the first time we were fighting a war over and on warmer waters, so there was a tremendous amount of kind of hysteria about sharks, so the OSS was commissioned to design a shark repellent. And they did it in a kind of haphazard way. They had these big tanks and they would throw stuff in, you know, let's try nicotine. Let's try clove oil. Let's try-- So they did this for a while with a number of kind of lackluster captive sharks, and then they thought, no, we need to take it offshore and have a feeding frenzy and throw it in the water. This went on and on. The Navy came in at a certain point and said look, we need to do this in a systematic way and first of all, let me just say that if you throw any compound into an ocean, it's going to get diluted very quickly. And they actually did a study that looked at if a shark is coming at you and has 35 feet between you and the shark, by the time the shark gets to you, that whatever compound you've released in the water is going to be diluted to the point where it's probably not going to do much repelling.

AMT: It's not like bear spray.

MARY ROACH: Exactly. It's just-- and they ended up, the shark chaser, which was put into life rafts including the Gemini and Apollo astronauts, was mostly dye, inspired by squids. There would be this inky cloud that you kind of hover in and hide and hope that the shark didn't see you. [laughs] So that was kind of a bust. But the Navy went on to do some really interesting work. They felt like, okay, we can't really repel a shark, but let's figure out what attracts a shark. And what they found was blood, specifically fish blood, which is the preferred prey, fish blood is very potent shark attractant but mammal blood, not so much. This one was kind of amazing, they took a rat and they-- you know, with a wound, put it in the tank. The sharks were completely disinterested. But then they took a rat and they put what they called mullet blend, which was mullet put in a blender with some water, I believe. Anyway, they coated the rat's fur with mullet blend, and now the sharks came over. Because the shark senses not only fish, but a fish that's in danger and is easy prey.

AMT: And then there is research on insects.

MARY ROACH: Yeah, flies were a tremendous problem in earlier conflicts in the in the 1800s and early 1900s. You had this scenario where there were open latrines, and there were often decomposing bodies, and food not refrigerated, and mess tents that weren't screened. What was happening, flies come in-- unbelievable, massive flies. They're walking around on the material in the latrines and then they head over to the food. The bacteria get in from the flies' feet into the food, multiply exponentially, and you would have a situation where just the whole unit, everybody who ate at the mess tent that day was going to get sick. And some-- typhoid fever, serious stuff. So one of the most helpful inventions was air conditioning, because now the mess tent could be sealed. The other side of flies, though, this was something discovered in World War I by a surgeon, Dr. Baer. A couple of soldiers came in with these wounds, leg wounds, open, infested, lots of maggots. And of course, everyone's horrified, cleaned out the maggots. Baer noticed this healthy pink fresh new skin growing where the maggots had been. And the maggots had been performing kind of a natural debridement. Maggots selectively eat dead tissue. When you do surgical debridement of a wound, you're getting rid of the dead tissue, which facilitates the growth of new tissue. And they would seem to be somehow fighting infection, because these wounds were not getting infected. And Baer actually tried intentionally, in the civilian population some years later, tried this technique out. And it is still used today, mostly in diabetics with foot ulcers that are not healing. Maggots are, in the U.S., there are a FDA-approved medical device. You have to have a prescription.

AMT: Wow.

MARY ROACH: Yeah, there was military entomologist at Walter Reed named George Peck. He was advocating a return to treating combat wounds with maggots because with IEDs, what happens-- a buried explosive, when the bomb goes off, it blasts at high speed a tremendous amount of sand and dirt, this just wall of dirt. You know, and the tissues blown away from the bone, this debris that is laden with bacteria and fungi gets into the wound, the flesh comes back down and traps it. And so now you have the potential for recurring infection, and it has bedeviled a lot of medical personnel trying to keep on top of these infections.

AMT: Walter Reed is a military medical centre.

MARY ROACH: Yeah, a medical centre, and also has a research arm, that's right, yes.

AMT: We've just talked about IEDs. Some of the injuries now from IEDs, people would have died from once, and they don't anymore. So some of the research into those injuries is really advancing. Specifically, genital injuries.

MARY ROACH: Two things have changed: first of all, the bombs are bigger, so you're getting injuries higher up the body. It used to be a landmine would blow off a foot, maybe, or below the knee. But now, the injuries are as high as the pelvic area. And the other thing going on is that the combat trauma care, emergency medical care, has gotten much better and more people are surviving a wound like that. There's many more men surviving to need reconstructive work. So this is fairly new and interestingly, some of the techniques are coming out of the transgender surgical world, which makes a lot of sense. You can build a penis using, you want to use skin that has no hair, obviously. The underside of the forearm is a popular site to use, and you take a flap, and you kind of roll it up and-- I've seen photographs, they're very realistic. The erectile tissue, you can't take that from anywhere else in the body, so that can't be really reconstructed. They use implants that can be inflated with saline. There's a little reservoir of saline in the scrotum, you pump it up.

AMT: We don't talk about this in the civilian world, but in the military world, this is like-- this is an issue.

MARY ROACH: It is an issue. Not only the surgical techniques, but the aftermath. I talked to a woman at Walter Reed who's a nurse there who talked about how there is no one on staff who is a full time sex therapist. And that's important not only for somebody who's had reconstructive work on the genitalia, but if you're someone who's lost a couple of limbs or both hands, you know, how do you have sex? What positions work? What kind of resources, equipment is available? And it should just be a matter of fact, standard operating procedure, that this is a counselor that's available to you. The drugs that these folks are often on after these tremendous injuries, they're on painkillers, nerve stabilizers, anti-depressants, things that interfere with your ability to keep an erection, so that's something that should be discussed, also. And there's been a tendency to kind of dance around it, or to treat it like a lifestyle issue, and to make it very low priority. And there are some wonderful people at Walter Reed who are very outspoken and just saying no, it's important that they be able to have sex, that they be able to talk about sex with their spouse. I mean, you know, I asked this one woman, Christine DesLauriers , who's been spearheading this. I said, what's the divorce rate like? And she said, divorce rate? Try suicide rate. You know, this stuff matters.

AMT: You say there's an anecdote that everyone tells.

MARY ROACH: Well, people say if you step on an IED, the first thing a soldier says is, is my junk okay? And I didn't find that to be true. The soldier that I watched, he was having his urethra rebuilt, and we had a conversation after the operation. And I said, could you describe, you know, walk me through what happened. And he described, you know, the bomb went off, and there was a flash of red orange, and I felt myself thrown through the air, and I did that tuck and roll thing, and I landed, I sat up and I saw that my leg was gone. I put on my tourniquet and the first thing that he was yelling was, who's hit? You know, the heartbreaking thing, he's trying to stand up and take count of who's there, and everybody's going no, no, everybody's okay, it's just you. His junk was really not the first thing on his mind at all, and it was pretty inspiring.

AMT: We did see in the news the first penis transplant in the U.S., just about a month ago.

MARY ROACH: The first U.S. transplant happened, in fact, at Mass General, Massachusetts General Hospital, which was not where I went. I guess there was a penis race kind of underway. Anyway, that patient was a cancer patient who was waiting for a donor. In fact, still, is a veteran.

AMT: It's interesting because that first patient actually said in a news conference later, this will help veterans, as well. He made the link.

MARY ROACH: Yes. I mean, it's a complicated transplant because there's different types of tissue, so there's more chances for the body to reject at least one of those types of tissues. So you know, faces and genitalia are more difficult, say, than a liver in terms of immunosuppression.

AMT: In your research, you're looking at everything from surgery and injuries to clothing and fashion and all the stuff in between. How much did you know about the military when you started the book?

MARY ROACH: Almost nothing. I'm what they call in the military a pogue. An outsider, a know-nothing, hasn't lived, it hasn't been through it. So it was all new to me.

AMT: How did that your research change your view of the military?

MARY ROACH: Well, I started out with a view of the military as this monolithic entity, "the military." And as always happens when you dive into a topic, you begin to see that there is no "the military," there's the Army, the Navy, the Marines. There's the scientists and the surgeons and the medical examiners at the morgue. There's the people at the Pentagon and the policy makers and the generals. And a lot of fondness and respect for the people that I met in the book, both the men and women who'd been in Afghanistan and Iraq, and also the scientists and the surgeons who really care and work really hard. And all of them are bedeviled by a lumbering bureaucracy. It's a huge government organization, and it's hard to make changes, get changes approved. It's hard to communicate directly. If you're in the field and you're trying to say, look, what you're telling us, how much water we need to bring or whatever it is, you don't understand, you're not here and you don't get it. So it's hard to have a generalized feel about the military anymore.

AMT: And how much to civilians benefit from the military research in the end?

MARY ROACH: I guess the biggest beneficiary of war, perhaps the only beneficiary of war, depending on your politics, is medicine. The techniques, particularly keeping someone alive. You know, when someone's a major artery is bleeding, you have a couple of minutes before they bleed out and die. Medics and Navy corpsman who give medical care to the Marines, they've gotten really good and really fast. So it's amazing what they're able to survive. And so you know that helps not just people who stepped on bombs, but people in automobile accidents. Emergency medical care has come a long way. And also, you know, things that you wouldn't necessarily think about. Like diarrhea kills 2.2 million people a year, still, mostly in developing nations, and lots of children. There was a Navy captain who in the past century came up with a just-- by adding, you could add glucose to the rehydration fluids of, somebody's got cholera, say, and you need to rehydrate them quickly. It used to be that they had to get to a clinic and be hooked up to an I.V. that you couldn't-- they couldn't absorb liquids fast enough by drinking it. But by adding just a simple addition to those fluids, now they could. That is a huge advance. So there have been advances in medical care, and emergency medical care, specifically, that have come out of war. And it would be great if there were a better way for these things to come about, but they've been some great advances, yeah.

AMT: And after going through all of these places with the research and being a bit of fly on the wall, what did you learn that you can use in your own life?

MARY ROACH: Well, if I'm ever lost at sea, if I'm ever adrift in a life raft and a shark comes over and starts heading for me, I now know that in fact what the shark is interested in is the fish that have gathered in the shade of the life raft. That they're not interested in me, so that will relax me a little bit. And also keeping your shirt wet in a situation where you're in the heat, you can conserve 70 per cent more of your bodily fluids by just keeping a cool, wet shirt on.

AMT: Lots to learn from U.S. military research.

MARY ROACH: [laughs]

AMT: Mary Roach, thank you.

MARY ROACH: Oh, thank you so much, Anna Maria, it is my pleasure.

AMT: Mary Roach, author of Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. She joined us from Oakland, California.

[Music: Sting]

AMT: I wish I had my smartphone, because Piya Chattopadhyay is already in the studio, and I just saw you dancing to that music bridge.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: You were going to videotape me without my consent? No way?

AMT: [laughs] Well, I said I don't have the-- I don't bring my phone into the studio.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: I do.

AMT: Because it would be a digital distraction, okay?

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Okay, we're outing ourselves.

AMT: I'm still ,I'm focused on what Mary Roach had to say about sleep. These guys who sleep between the silos of nuclear weapons.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Yeah, yeah. [laughs] Uneasy night's sleep.

AMT: So sleep is on everyone's radar now.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: You're right, you talked to Arianna Huffington awhile back about--

AMT: The sleep revolution?

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Seems to be in the zeitgeist. In fact, we're talking about it tomorrow, about in hospitals for children and their parents, pediatric patients and how they need more sleep, so we'll be talking about that tomorrow. But sleep is everywhere.

AMT: Well, except where we want it.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: [laughs]

AMT: I was trying to get together with the girls last night, it takes like a month and a half, you know, to get us all together. And then I begged off and I sent a little email saying I'm operating on three hours sleep, can't do it. And I get a message right back saying, I'm on two hours sleep, and then another message, I'd kill for three hours.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: [laughs] You were having a sleep-off.

AMT: So I went, okay, ladies.

[both laugh]

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: I'm not sleeping, and neither are you. We're peppy.

AMT: No, we are wide awake and we got some wakeup calls coming up as we go through the tweets, the posts, the e-mails. This is The Current.

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Psychologist describes Australian migrant camps as an atrocity

Guests: Paul Stevenson

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I’m Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[clapping music]

VOICE 1: He would be a grand contrast to the kind of nasty old Grandma that is running on the other side.

VOICE 2: Their appearance unsettles certain assumptions about how easy it is to be either male or female, and that’s the only possible biological possibility, this is what we are taught in high school.

VOICE 3: I think overall, you have to realize these are choices. Any healthcare is a choice.

VOICE 4: Those kinds of memories are caught up in the cottage so we do see quite a bit of tension among the kids, and I think that happens quite often.

AMT: That's a taste of the week that was on The Current. And there was no shortage of reaction from you, our listeners. This week's Friday host, Piya Chattopadhyay, is with me to read through your tweets, posts, and emails. Hi Piya, shall we get to it?

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Let’s get to it.

AMT: Okay, Monday on The Current , we spoke with Americans who live in Canada about the US election campaign. We heard from supporters on both sides of the US political spectrum.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Mrs. Clinton has a history in elected office so we know where she stands, and she has changed her position on some policies , but at least we have a bit of a track record to look at. I hope there is a bit more focus on policy so that voters can be educated and know what they are choosing come November.

VOICE 2: He’s energetic. He does three very big things, he’s going to restore American spirit, he’s going to be responsible with respect to expenditures, the enormous debt overload, finally he is vigourous with respect to our enemies. We are at war.

PC: That was Tom Velk talking about Donald Trump and before that Krista Leben on Hillary Clinton. Well, after that segment aired, we heard from many of you.

AMT: Shari Menard of Orillia, Ontario, writes: Tom Velk's response to Donald Trump's racist nonsense was depressing. He sure loves the policy of fear. He sounded bought and paid for by the industrial military complex.

PC: Paulina Bolduc from Gatineau, Quebec says: I was beyond shocked that someone like your Republican guest is teaching at one of Canada's great universities. If a well-educated man is failing to analyze and call Trump for what he is, a caricature, then what are the chances that the uneducated will?

AMT: Lawrence Seminoff of Vernon BC shares this: What a shame that Bernie Sanders is not given the credit he deserves. Does Hillary Clinton think that independents will vote for her after she, the DNC and her media have conducted the dirty primary that they have? Being the war hawk that she is and the tensions between NATO and Russia at this time, I feel that she will make bad judgment calls as she has before.

PC: John Kneeland from Hamilton, Ontario had these thoughts: As an American living in Canada, I would like to sum up the candidates. Bernie Sanders is a big talker, who is out of touch with minorities and he has disingenuously allowed his own supporters to think the primary was rigged. Donald Trump is most certainly a racist. Hillary Clinton is by far the most qualified and far-thinking.

AMT: And we thought our listeners didn’t have opinions. Bring it on.

PC: [laughs]

AMT: Moving on.

SOUNDCLIP

I constituted a fascinating case and I was then referred to a surgeon who was making a name for himself in this area, and he felt that he could intervene on my seven-year-old body, and they wrote up in my report that they has produced a very pleasing cosmetic effect. Not only physically did it hurt, but I put together very quickly that this wasn’t happening to my peers, they weren’t disappearing for three weeks at a time off to hospital. And so, I knew that I was somehow unusual in a way that I had not understood before.

AMT: That is Morgan Holmes. She was born intersex and last Wednesday she spoke to us about the surgery she had a child designed to make her anatomy look more like other girls. Ms. Holmes shared why she advocates against the intrusive, and mostly irreversible, medical interventions intersex children are subjected to often at a very young age.

PC: And after that interview, it inspired many of you to write to us. Anne MacMullen posted on Facebook: Terribly sad business to do surgery of this nature on children. And worse, to make a spectacle of a little girl with no thought for how she might feel. Whatever happened to do no harm?

AMT: Kona Katranya writes: Intersex people are the last true frontier of recognized gender. I'd like to see legal options to recognize their right to personhood as they were born, not as those with the power to decide and intervene would like it to be. We can create a safer future for all.

PC: Not everyone agreed. @WendellWard3 tweets: These people you spoke with are the unhappy ones. Are there any happy examples? They would probably be the silent majority.

AMT: One more letter from a listener who wrote in with their own experience of being intersex and undergoing surgery as a teenager in 1971. The letter reads: After surgery, as I lay recovering in my hospital bed, doctors, trailed by medical students, entered my room, said, "we're just going to have a look at your surgery", They pulled back the covers on my bed, opened my legs and proceeded to discuss my (then) rather exotic and unusual surgery. It took years for me to acknowledge how terribly violated I felt. If I had known then what I know now, I would have delayed the surgery until I was well out of school, because the psychological and physical after-effects wreaked havoc on my self-esteem and relationships.

PC: And now an update to a story we brought you in the spring.

[drum beats]

SOUNDCLIP

There’s a lot of damage that has been done to a lot of people. I mean, obviously the asylum seekers and the refugees has been completely ruined and destroyed and I see that they won’t ever recover from their time in detention. In Nauru, they live in mouldy tents, they have cardboard flooring. On Manus there's a lot of malaria, there's a lot of disease and sickness. There's mud everywhere. People live cramped together in small spaces. In Manus island there was an old World War II hut with a tin roof and there were 50 double bunks in there, just full of single men, with a couple of toilets that were overflowing. Apparently the food is very substandard and often has things like maggots in it.

AMT: That's director Eva Orner describing what happens to migrants who are forced by the Australian government into camps on the island nation of Nauru and Manus island, Papua, New Guinea. In April she was on The Current to talk about her film Chasing Asylum which used hidden camera footage to capture the horrific conditions for detainees and the people who work with them. The documentary is now playing to packed cinemas across Australia and generating debate about the treatment of refugees trying to reach the Southern continent. A prominent Australian psychologist and traumatologist who has worked with the staff and the detainees on those island camps is now speaking out. Dr. Paul Stevenson has spent over 40 years working with people in trauma after 16 deployments to Nauru and Manus. He believes this is the worst atrocity he has ever witnessed. Paul Stevenson joins us now from Brisbane, Australia. Hello.

PAUL STEVENSON: Hi, how are you?

AMT: Well, I’m curious to know why you say that. What have you seen on those islands that make you say it so bad?

PAUL STEVENSON: Firstly, I’ve had a lot of comparative experience during my career with disaster management, and particularly perpetrated disasters like the Bali bombings, the bomb explosions in Jakarta, so comparatively speaking, the kind of trauma I witnessed on Nauru and Manus island is in a very different category from that in terms of its intensity and in terms of the amount of torture and suffering. There is no heroism, there is no bravery, there is no resilience. People are just worn down every day from their experiences of indefinite detention. It’s, I suppose, a situation where there is a complete lack of any positive influence or any humanity. It’s just a very, very demoralizing situation all the time.

AMT: Well, you went 16 times on deployment. Who were you working with? What were you doing there?

PAUL STEVENSON: I was working for one of the contractors for [indecipherable] Services, which is now Broad Spectrum, and as a psychologist and trauma specialist, it was my job to treat the staff for their vicarious trauma, and help them manage the asylum seeker critical incidents that occurred. I did mainly training and critical incidence de-briefing and counselling.

AMT: It was your job to treat the staff for the trauma they would experience because they were working there?

PAUL STEVENSON: That’s right.

AMT: What does it say to you that the government hires someone to treat workers to deal with their trauma? That means everyone knows they are being traumatized by this situation.

PAUL STEVENSON: Exactly. It’s an attempt under our duty of care as a first world nation to look after the workers that we send there, but no duty of care to the asylum seekers themselves.

AMT: But by sending a psychologist to deal with the trauma of the staff who are detaining these refugees, is the government of Australia not tacitly admitting that it is doing harm?

PAUL STEVENSON: Well, I think you can make that argument, Anna Maria, but the other argument of course, is that it is actually acknowledging that in all of these kinds of war zone experiences that are Australians are involved in, they are providing the right services for the staff. But yes, it does tacitly concede that the environment is extremely traumatizing.

AMT: In the documentary, Chasing Asylum, there are graphic depictions of the self-harm that the detainees engage in. What have you seen?

PAUL STEVENSON: I gauged that the incidents of self-harm, suicide, and suicide threats is around about four times what would you expect in the general average in Australia. We can have on Nauru anything up to 20 incidents a day, which are quite serious incidents. We have an enormous volume of self-harm incidents. I personally consider that self-harm is a currency and it is the sort of thing that a very, very desperate person does when there is no other avenue to express one’s self so self –harm becomes your voice. By harming your own body, you get attention to your plight, you have a voice, you can speak to people about your suffering, and you, physicalize the emotional and mental torment that you are experiencing, through self-harm. The people on Nauru and Manus Island have only their own bodies to use in protest. I think that’s the bottom line. They have nothing to make any kind of statement or give any message but the harm of their own bodies, and that’s a very desperate situation for anybody to be in.

AMT: And at the same time, what is the state of mind of those who are hired to work with them?

PAUL STEVENSON: Well, you get lots of different people You get some very very compassionate people who go there to make a difference, you get some people who go there just for the money, and you get people who have a military background who don’t know any other way to live but in a war zone, and so they all self-select to go there for different reasons. Generally speaking, those who go there to take up a very lucrative job that pays enormous amounts of money, doing so to help their young families to get ahead, to help pay a mortgage, or put their kids through school, and sadly they last only a very short time. Some people only last a couple of weeks, and some only last a couple of days, and the more hardened, experienced ex-military service people tend to be able to have more tenure there, but they also suffer more problems like alcoholism, and dysfunctional families, and domestic violence and all of those kinds of issues. It’s hard to say what the correct protocol is for the person who will do the most amount of good and sustain that over time. It’s kind of an experiment to work out what is the best kind of person to send there.

AMT: And by speaking out, what risks do you take?

PAUL STEVENSON: The first risk is that I lost my contract. I just renewed a contract with Broad Spectrum last week and it was cancelled on Monday when my article came out in The Guardian. I expected that, though. I expected that I would lose the contract and hopefully I’ll not suffer more consequences myself.

AMT: It is illegal to speak out about what goes on there, is it not?

PAUL STEVENSON: That’s right.

AMT: So you could be charged?

PAUL STEVENSON: Yes. Yes, and I think it’s just a thing you have to take on board when you take on something like this. I would still do it again, it’s the right thing to do.

AMT: Dr. Stevenson, thank you for speaking with me.

PAUL STEVENSON: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

AMT: Dr. Paul Stevenson is a psychologist and traumatologist. He joined us from Brisbane, Australia. If you missed my conversation with Eva Orner about what she discovered making her documentary, Chasing Asylum, you can listen to it on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent.

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Curious George explains Ramadan to the masses

Guests: Hena Khan

PC: Okay, on to our next story.

SOUNDCLIP

My role as a surgeon is to share where my expertise is after decades of experience and training, but I’m not an expert in traditional medicine so they often share what they are planning on doing to the degree they feel comfortable with, and I tell them what the pros and cons are of the surgery. Very rarely have someone who says they don’t want surgery, they are only going to do traditional medicine. If they only want to do traditional medicine, our final thoughts are can we stay in touch? We have to realize these are choices; any healthcare is a choice.

PC: That was Dr. Nadine Caron. Not only was Dr. Caron the first Indigenous woman to graduate from the University of British Columbia's medical school, she did so at the top of her class.

AMT: Dr. Caron then went on to become Canada's first female First Nations general surgeon. After our interview aired, we heard from you.

PC: Taylor Carlson tweeted: Nadine is an inspirational, well-spoken asset to the medical and First Nations community, but her response to First Nation healing felt elusive at best.

AMT: Alasdair Veitch on Facebook said: This was a great interview to hear on National Aboriginal Day in Canada. Let's hope there are more Dr. Nadine Caron's coming along!

PC: And Krikor Aghajanian added: Great story, but I was really dismayed to hear that most of the recognition and awards and accolades she has received were directly related to being the first or best for a Native person, rather than just being the best period.

AMT: On to the next story. Muslims around the world are marking Ramadan, the holiest month on the Islamic calendar. For many non-Muslims, Ramadan can be something of a mystery. One children's book author has enlisted one of the most beloved child literary characters to help change that. Hena Khan is the author of the new book, It's Ramadan, Curious George, and she joins me now from Rockville, Maryland. Hello.

HENA KHAN: Hi, thank you for having me on your show.

AMT: How did you come to write, It's Ramadan, Curious George?

HENA KHAN: Well, the publishers were actually the ones who came to me and asked me if I would be interested. They found me because I written a couple of other picture books about Islam and Muslims for children and they said that Curious George had celebrated other holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah , St Patrick’s Day, and Halloween, and they thought it was time for him to celebrate Ramadan and asked me if I would be interested in writing it.

AMT: Okay, now tell me about your own Muslim background.

HENA KHAN: So I was born and raised in a Maryland suburb right outside of Washington, D.C. as a Muslim. My parents immigrated from Pakistan before I was born and I was raised in a fairly diverse community, but I still felt when I was growing up that those people knew very little about Islam and Muslims, and even though I was a big reader as a child, I never saw myself in the books that I read.

AMT: And so when you were approached to bring Curious George into that mix, you must have loved that idea.

HENA KHAN: Oh, it was so thrilling. I grew up reading Curious George myself and as a mother I read his books to my children and they watched movies and you know, it was it was an honour and very exciting.

AMT: So what does George do in the book?

HENA KHAN: George celebrates Ramadan with his friend Kareem and Kareem’s family. As an observer and the curious monkey that he is, he joins in making treats for Ramadan, he helps his friend and keeps him busy while he keeping his first fast, and he gathers for the breaking of the fast and visits the mosque to make charity baskets, they spot the moon and George gets an Eid gift from his friend, and then finally celebrates the Eid holiday at the end of the month. It takes you through the major events of the month, the idea of fasting, the celebratory aspects, exchanging gifts, the foods, things like that.

AMT: And in the exchanging gifts, I think we can give this away to the adults, the Man in the Yellow Hat get a yellow fez [laughs].

HENA KHAN: [laughs] He dons the fez instead of his traditional hat, which was just a fun little thing I wanted to throw in, which is of course cultural.

AMT: And of course, Curious George is a monkey. How hard was it to write the book and not insult some more religious leaders?

HENA KHAN: Well, I think the book is a very light treatment of Ramadan. It doesn't go deep into the religious significance of fasting or anything like that and so, like I said, he's just observer and a friend to this little boy Kareem and he's curious, and I think it is respectfully treated in terms of him taking part in the activities he does. So far I haven't seen any pushback from anybody you know, about being offended in any way. I think people, or the Muslim community so far have been thrilled to have this book exist.

AMT: In fact, some people wanted you to go to the Hodge.

HENA KHAN: [laughs] Yeah, I've had some comments about that. They're like, this is so great, what else can he do?

AMT: Of course, he can’t go to the Hodge because only Muslims can go to the Hodge, right?

HENA KHAN: Right. In the book, he’s not a Muslim himself, nor is The Man with the Yellow Hat, they’re just friends of Muslims.

AMT: And that's the point too, that they're learning about this other religion and being included in the celebrations.

HENA KHAN: Exactly. And especially in a time like now where you know a lot of Americans and North Americans hold a lot of misconceptions about Muslims and a lot of people who are polled say they don't have, I think more than 60 percent of Americans say they don't have a Muslim friend or don't know a Muslim personally, and I think it's a great tool to have someone like Curious George who is such a loved character make that effort and have a Muslim friend and teach others through his experience.

AMT: Well your book is coming out in the shadow of the Orlando killings. Tell me how you process the news of the doing it in the name of extremism. Islamic extremism.

HENA KHAN: It's impossible to even process [laughs nervously]. I think you know with all the excitement around this book and I think we were just coming off of a really wonderful event the night before at a mosque, a beautiful mosque community here in Maryland where the room was packed with people, so you know celebrating Ramadan and celebrating this book and then to wake up to the news of the shooting was just so devastating and really mind blowing. How can something like this happen and how do you reconcile these conflicting feelings and I think, you know the hardest part is obviously as a parent trying to explain it to your kids, but I think the more time that has passed since the shooting more and more it seems that the individual is just deeply disturbed on many levels, which of course you have to be to commit something like an atrocity of that magnitude. I mean, it's just unbelievable.

AMT: How do you communicate with your own kids about Islamophobia in America?

HENA KHAN: Well, it is it is a challenge, it's a hard time for kids to grow up Muslim and very stressful as a parent to worry about what they might be hearing or feeling. We try to ask them regularly about what is happening in their lives and you know, has anyone said anything. Are you discussing these things at school? We try to give them space to talk about their concerns and really explain to them that the people out there who are saying hateful things, are taking actions that are really horrible, are the ones who are going against American values and the founding principles and they understand that. My kids are a little bit older now and they also understand that violent extremism is not reflective of the Islam that is practiced by over a billion people peacefully around the world. It is foreign and it is scary for them to hear, you know especially candidates or elected officials say things that are hurtful and terrifying as a Muslim, but thankfully for now it seems that they're able to separate and make some sense of it [laughs].

AMT: And your book is helping young readers get a different view of all of this. Thank you very much for talking to me today.

HENA KHAN: Thank you.

AMT: That is Hena Khan, is the author of It's Ramadan, Curious George .She's in Rockville, Maryland.

PC: Okay, let’s get to our final bit of feedback. We want to know, who gets the family cottage?

SOUNDCLIP

Usually when families are coming here, they are in a dispute. They’ve recognized that they can’t resolve it. They don’t want to take each other to court, that’s not the way families like to work, but they are unhappy. The fear is really driving them; the fear of what could happen, and I truly believe you can buy and sell cottages, but families are hard to come by. They don’t want to risk the family so they are willing to try to negotiate. In my experience, as families get really generous when they all sit down together and have the opportunity to make decisions themselves, and not feel like things are forced on them.

AMT: That was psychologist and mediator Barbara Benoliel. She spoke with The Current yesterday about how she helps families resolve succession disputes, the nastiest ones often involving vacation home.

PC: Well, that segment had many of you hitting the keyboard. Alison Skinner in Toronto writes: My parents have just had this conversation with me and my two siblings. The cottage has been our meeting place for over 45 years now and it is a special place full of great memories for three generations. Fortunately for us, dad has been a lawyer for 50 years and has seen too many cases of siblings squabbling over estates. For that reason, it is clearly outlined in my parent's will that the cottage will be appraised for market value and one of the three children is able to purchase the cottage for that price. Sharing a cottage is often so rife with conflict that this might be the most equitable solution.

AMT: On Facebook, Megan FitzGibbon commented: It's so sad that a family would tear itself apart over objects and places because they couldn't talk about it before grandma died. Not everyone was moved by this family issue. Chris Killam tweets: This was the ultimate #FirstWorldProblems segment, what to do with the family cottage inheritance.

PC: Or depending where you’re from, the cabin.

[Instrumental music]

PC: Okay, that's all the time we have for feedback today. And, now it's time to give credit where credit is due. The week that is on The Current was produced by Idella Sturino, Howard Goldenthal, Ines Colabrese, Lara O'Brien, Julian Uzielli.

AMT: Sarah Grant, Pacinthe Mattar, Taylor Simmons, Josh Bloch, Sujata Berry, Liz Hoath, Marc Apollonio, Willow Smith and Karin Marley.

PC: The Current's writer this week is Shannon Higgins. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technicians are Gary Francis and Jennifer Rowley.

AMT: Our senior documentary editor is Joan Webber. Our senior producers are Richard Goddard in Toronto and Cathy Simon in Vancouver. And the executive producer of The Current is Kathleen Goldhar.

PC: And of course, we always want to hear from you. To add anything you hear on The Current, weigh in by tweeting us @TheCurrentCBC.

AMT: Post on our facebook page or email us by clicking on the contact link at cbc.ca/TheCurrent.

PC: And while you're there, you can subscribe to our podcast or stream segments you missed through our season.

AMT: Our 14^th season of The Current ends tomorrow. We go into summer programming as of Monday. The Current goes to one hour, 8:30 to 9:30 in every time zone. AT 9:30 we will have special programming for the summer. A new season of The Current begins on Labour Day but we continue all summer with guest hosts. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti.

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June 23, 2016 full episode transcript

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