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The Current Transcript for October 28, 2016

Host: Dave Seglins

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I think it's a fact that we are facing now, the sixth great extinction. And depending on which statistics you believe, this could be the greatest one the Earth has seen.

DAVE SEGLINS: Well, statistics just released about the mammals and birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians that make up life on earth would seem to confirm that dire prediction: the planet's biodiversity is under attack. The new numbers tracking wildlife species over the past half century are difficult to comprehend, but we'll dig into them first up today and ask what can be done to reverse the trend. One species behind this devastation is the only one capable of doing anything to stop it. And then—

SOUNDCLIP

What's going to happen after November 9^th? It's going to give. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. And I just see it. I see it coming pretty soon.

DS: What he sees coming is society coming apart at the seams and he's not alone. He's a prepper—digging in and getting prepared for the worst case scenario in a corner of America known as the Redoubt—more and more preppers are setting up homesteads hoping to weather the coming storm. We'll meet a community of preppers in a new documentary in half an hour. Plus—

SOUNDCLIP

My shoes were made in China. My shirt was made in Indonesia. And it's really incredible that all of these products can be shipped around the world and yet, my outfit was still really cheap.

DS: Cheap clothes, electronics, food, you name it—all of it travels the globe by ship. And the true cost of shipping is higher than you think. An eye-opening investigation into the murky world of shipping in an hour. I'm Dave Seglins and this is the Friday edition of The Current.

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Two-thirds of wildlife may disappear by 2020 — because of humans, says WWF

Guests: James Snider, Tom Oliver, Barbara Sherwood Lollar

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I’ve heard up to half of all frog species could be gone in the next 20 years.

VOICE 2: Yeah. There are 7,000 species of amphibian and they're all in danger.

VOICE 1: There he is. The very last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog. The very last one. Chytrid fungus wiped them all out in Panama so he's the last one. That's it. When he’s gone, they’ll be extinct.

DS: The extinction of any one species like that little frog is a quiet tragedy for our planet. But a new study released earlier this week reveals just how astonishingly common tragedies like that are becoming. It's the Living Planet report that tracked wildlife population since 1970. It found that 60 per cent of the world's wildlife has disappeared since then and by 2020, that figure could be more than two-thirds. The culprit unsurprisingly is human activity. The report was produced by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London. James Snider is vice-president of science research and innovation at WWF Canada and he's with me in our Toronto studio now. Good morning.

JAMES SNIDER: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

DS: Astonishing. The global wildlife population is facing a plunge of more than two-thirds by 2020. Explain what that means.

JAMES SNIDER: Really, we're seeing dramatic declines in global wildlife populations around the world and that means looking at abundance across a broad range of species, more than 3,700 species around the world. A large number. We are in fact seeing major declines in the numbers of those populations, so whether that be terrestrial species, mammals, as well as amphibians and reptiles. Right around the world we're having these dramatic declines.

DS: And what does this latest finding? How does it fit into the trends for wildlife biodiversity that we've known about in the past?

JAMES SNIDER: Right. Well, if anything, what's probably most worrisome is that these trends are worsening. WWF and the Zoological Society of London have been completing these Living Planet reports every two years. In our last report in 2014, we saw a decline of 52 per cent. Today in 2016, it's 58 per cent. So the trend is in fact going in the wrong direction. The declines are happening and they're not certainly turning around. And as you noted, if that trend continues by 2020—which is not far off, only four years from now—really we could see declines as much as two-thirds of the world's wildlife populations may be declining.

DS: Now when we hear of decline—

JAMES SNIDER: Sure.

DS: Does it mean extinction?

JAMES SNIDER: No. So that's a really important point, which is to say that not all two-thirds of the world's wildlife are going extinct but rather their numbers are reduced. The number of those species, the number of individuals in a population is being seen becoming smaller and smaller. What is important to note though however, as these populations become smaller, they become at higher risk for extinction, for extirpation because they are more vulnerable to those changes.

DS: Can you help us get in to—help us imagine specific species here. What are the rates of decline for different types of wildlife?

JAMES SNIDER: Right. So one of the most striking results that we've seen within the Living Planet report speaks to freshwater systems, as much as a 81 per cent decline in freshwater populations around the world. So that includes fish, that includes amphibians and reptiles that live in freshwater systems. And so really—and for instance here, turtles in Canada, that's a key species that we know is declining. Many of those species, freshwater turtles, are at risk here in Canada.

DS: Why is it that freshwaters sees such a decline? I understand that relative to others, mammals for instance, ocean species. Why is it freshwater that's taking such a hit?

JAMES SNIDER: Right. So many of the impacts that we see on land also, like habitat conversion, like pollution, also have impacts on freshwater. And so those cascading impacts through a watershed can in fact be magnified within freshwater ecosystems. And so that's because that actually leads to these dramatic declines that we're seeing.

DS: Bring us to Canada specifically. Walk us through which Canadian species have been identified as being most at risk of decline.

JAMES SNIDER: The story of caribou, migratory tundra caribou, in particular in Canada is striking. We've seen declines in some of the herds of these barren ground caribou as more than 95 per cent. And as a whole, barren ground caribou have been reduced by more than half. And so this is truly an iconic species. This is the species that's on the back of the quarter. Then it has historically high significance right across the country but now is rapidly declining.

DS: Why for caribou?

JAMES SNIDER: Why for caribou? For a number of reasons: one, there's the looming threat of climate change, so temperatures are changing, as well as industrial development and habitat conversions. For caribou, they have a really high affinity to what are called their calving areas. Year over year, they return to the same areas to calve their young, and so, industrial development is encroaching on those areas. And there really is an increasing need to protect those areas from development.

DS: What about other species other than caribou?

JAMES SNIDER: Well, so certainly, we see out east, our northern right whale populations are being impacted. Those are declining. Forage fish we've also highlighted in Canada. Those are things like capelin and mackerel, which really are core to the underlying ecosystem for bigger species, right? That's the food that they rely upon and so the impacts that we're seeing there really are significant in terms of broad, cascading impacts.

DS: This is pretty depressing. Is there anything that can be done to reverse this?

JAMES SNIDER: Yes. The trends are dramatic but I would say that there is need for action now and that it is not irreversible. We are not seeing necessarily—these are not extinctions. And so we are able to take action. That includes in Canada. I would say there is a unique role here and unique opportunity towards establishing new marine protected areas. I spoke to the loss of marine biodiversity—globally that's 36 per cent decline—that's largely attributed to overfishing, over exploitation. The role of marine protected areas really is significant there. Canada has not been a world leader in terms of establishing those marine protected areas. We have less than one per cent of our ocean areas under protection. And to meet our international commitments, there's a lot of work to be done and that includes protecting places like Lancaster Sound in the Arctic Archipelago, where there's a very high diversity of species, of whales, marine mammals. And so that is one area for example where specific protection measures are needed and needed soon.

DS: Do you have any optimism?

JAMES SNIDER: I do have optimism. I think that the changes that we need to make as a society, as humanity globally can be made. We do know what those major threats are to these systems. For one, I would say the transition to renewable energy in the immediate future is a really core issue. And so as a nation there's an opportunity for Canada now to transition to renewable energy in a habitat-friendly way to minimize those impacts on biodiversity, knowing that our energy systems are in fact one of the primary drivers of this biodiversity change that we've seen.

DS: James, thanks for joining us today.

JAMES SNIDER: Thank you very much.

DS: That’s James Snider, vice-president of science, research and innovation at World Wildlife Fund Canada. He was in our Toronto studio. Well, as the number of species on the planet shrinks, scientists are asking what the safe limit of biodiversity is and whether we've already crossed that line. Our next guest studies the potential impacts of the loss of biodiversity. Tom Oliver is an associate professor of landscape ecology at the University of Reading in England and that's where we reached him this morning. Hello.

TOM OLIVER: Good morning. Hello there.

DS: What's your response to the WWF study findings?

TOM OLIVER: Well, I think—obviously very concerned. I mean these studies kind of confirm other analyses showing the continued loss of diversity and there's a real concern about the impacts of that. I think there's lots of uncertainty in the extent of biodiversity losses and also their impacts that we really need to deal with to make the message really for decision makers that the action needs to be taken.

DS: Help me understand: what function does biodiversity play?

TOM OLIVER: So there's a whole range of functions really. I mean in terms of pollination of the crops that we eat, you know [unintelligible] fruit crops and vegetables providing vitamins that we really need in our diet. Maintaining the soil, maintaining the climate, so storing carbon so that the climate doesn't warm as we pump CO2 into the atmosphere. Controlling floods by riparian vegetation, preventing you know rapid water flooding into rivers. I mean there's a huge range of functions and services that nature provides and those are the kind of physical ones. There's also the cultural ones, if you will: the recreational values, the spiritual values that biodiversity provides.

DS: Because I think in this report, I mean we're talking about wildlife and animals, but biodiversity also stretches into plants and you know the Flora, if we will.

TOM OLIVER: Yeah, of course. Yeah. So all those species you know have functions in terms of underpinning the well-being of societies. And I guess the question is you know how much biodiversity can we safely lose without starting to impinge upon those services and actually starting to impact the well-being of humans?

DS: Well, that is the question. How close are we to a global tipping point?

TOM OLIVER: So the idea of tipping point is kind of hotly contested really. I mean there may be global tipping points in some cases. So for example the climate system, where we can you know that after a certain point, we get you know runaway rapid feedback mechanisms so we get rapid changes. But those are still kind of controversial. We don't know if tipping points for some of these services I mentioned are really global or whether they're regional and also whether the tipping points are the same for those different services. It may be that some services such as, say pest control for example, you know insects such as ladybirds and beetles control the pests on our crops. In those cases, it may be that we need lots of species doing that service because they have a complementary effect. So some might come out for example at night time and eat the pests, some might come out in the daytime. So you need those groups and they have complementary reaction. In other cases, it may be that we can lose quite a lot by diversity before a certain function—let's say timber production—is really impacted.

DS: Now the baseline for the WWF study is you know it started back in 1970. We knew about the catastrophic effects that humans were having on the planet back then. Yet here we are. How optimistic are you that we can turn this around?

TOM OLIVER: So I think I'm optimistic because I think what we're starting to see is a mobilization of these huge datasets and it's a really amazing effort that all this data can be put together and collated and the message given about this of the global changes in our biodiversity. I think what the next step is really to try and reduce the uncertainty in not only the exact extent of biodiversity loss in different regions but also as I say what the impacts of that will be. And if you think about analogous case of for example the climate change community, it was only when climate scientists kind of got together with economists and started to really ask you know what are the potential impacts in terms of livelihoods and cost of property risks to health for example of heat waves? And actually starting putting numbers on those risks that they could really convince decision makers that we really need to change what we're doing and I think for biodiversity we're still at the early stage where we're starting to document those declines, but we can't really, at the moment, really quantify those risks well. But with a huge mobilization of data and new techniques, we're starting to reach that point. And I think soon you'll start to see you know really nice studies where we can put values on those risks.

DS: But beyond studies, I mean what do you think it says about us as humans that we've done so little to this point?

TOM OLIVER: I think essentially, you know individual humans you know maybe in some cases are ignorant to the impacts. They can be so distant. You know when we buy a product, we don't really think about its effects. You know it may be the impact, maybe in the environment in the country where that product was produced which can be you know on the other side of the world. And it's kind of a death by a thousand cuts if you will, all these small events having an impact that is cumulative. But I think the problem is well, I think we need to make people aware of those impacts but also our systems, our social economic systems. You know the way our economy is structured, the way we grow our food, the very industrial way, we you know have intensive agriculture—those systems in themselves need to change and they obviously are very resistant to those changes. And I think we need to start looking at how we can transition those systems into a more sustainable state and really think about what's keeping them locked in these unsustainable states.

DS: Professor Oliver, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you very much for joining us this morning.

TOM OLIVER: Thank you very much.

DS: That’s Tom Oliver, an associate professor of landscape ecology at the University of Reading in England. And that's where we reached him. Well, even as species disappear from the face of the earth, scientists do keep exploring for new forms of life. The study published yesterday suggests there is a newly discovered species of microbe found deep in the ancient underground water of the Canadian Shield. Barbara Sherwood Lollar is the study's co-lead and a professor of Earth science at the University of Toronto and she's with me in our Toronto studio. Good morning.

BARBARA SHERWOOD LOLLAR: Good morning.

DS: Tell me about your study. What were you looking at?

BARBARA SHERWOOD LOLLAR: Well, I think what's interesting about this is it really throws this loss of biodiversity into a really stark light when we think for a moment that there's much of the deep Earth we still don't understand about. So where we work is we work on the interface of, instead of just looking at life as two dimensions on the planet, we're looking at that third dimension—what lives in the deep dark parts of the planet. And people are used to—I think thinking about this a little bit in terms of the deep oceans, sometimes people have a sense of these hydrothermal vents on the deep oceans where life that sustains not by photosynthesis but by chemistry, by chemosynthesis exists.

DS: But you wound up in Northern Ontario.

BARBARA SHERWOOD LOLLAR: That's right and that's exactly the kind of place where we're sort of transforming that search for chemical driven life. It's not just in the dark oceans, in fact we've been investigating it deep in fractures in the continents as well and particularly in places like Timmins and Sudbury, all over the Canadian Shield.

DS: What are you looking at?

BARBARA SHERWOOD LOLLAR: What we're looking at is water because of course as always, there's a link between where we find life and where we find water. So we're looking at deep water in cracks and fissures, two and three kilometres deep underneath the planet.

DS: And I understand this is through the mining industry.

BARBARA SHERWOOD LOLLAR: The mining industry has been enormously helpful to us in terms of helping us get down there, because think about it: how do you get down two and three kilometres deep? You can either spend millions of dollars drilling a single hole or you can make lots of good friends and contacts within mining industries throughout the world and be able to go down with them and then access these naturally occurring waters.

DS: What are you finding in terms of evidence of life?

BARBARA SHERWOOD LOLLAR: What's interesting is there's a couple of ways of going about this. I mean one of the first things to understand probably is to think about how do we know when life arose on Earth? We know life arose on Earth maybe 3.8 to 4 billion years ago, but we didn't have fossils from that. Fossils came much, much later. The first life on Earth for billions of years was microbial and that doesn't fossilize. So sometimes when I'm talking to people, when I'm talking to students, they say then so how do we know that life arose that early? Well, we know from geochemical signatures. I liken it to this idea that you might not realize your son has come home from college in the middle of the night but you know it when you come down to the kitchen in the morning and find all the tooth marks on the food lying around. It's exactly the same principle. We use indirect evidence from geochemistry, in particular a technique called isotope geochemistry that can show us that in this case, the sulfate that we find in these waters has been obviously consumed by the microbiology. So at this point, it's an indirect evidence for sulfate-reducing bacteria in these waters.

DS: So you found the mess in the kitchen, the signatures of the existence but you haven't found a new microbe that you're taking to the surface.

BARBARA SHERWOOD LOLLAR: Well, this has been found. We have found that with teams of microbiologists that we work with in South Africa. With TC Onstott from Princeton and Esta van Heerden from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, we have indeed found a new species of sulphate-reducing bacteria within the waters in South Africa that are on the order of tens of millions of years old. But this is the first time that we've found them in the waters of the Canadian Shield or at least the indirect evidence of them in the waters of the Canadian Shield. And the reason that's interesting is these waters are even older. Instead of being tens of millions of years old, some of these waters are up to a billion years old. So this is expanding not only the space in the deep Earth where we might find these novel organisms, but also the age, the history of the planet around how long these kinds of organisms might have been sustained in the deep Earth.

DS: So what are the implications for what you’re studying to the lessons about biodiversity?

BARBARA SHERWOOD LOLLAR: Yeah, there are a couple of important points. I mean one thing to be sure is, we don't want to give the message that oh wow, there's so much biodiversity in the subsurface that it doesn't matter what's happening on the surface. That's not the case at all. As I mentioned in the opening, I think this kind of throws into even more critical, the loss of biodiversity on the surface if we understand how little of life we actually understand, that we're still exploring the depths of the Earth for life. The life that we find down there is low in biomass. Although it's really exciting to find these novel species, the numbers are small. They might be on the order of you know a hundred to a thousand cells in a whole litre of water. So it's the fringes of life. But what's exciting about it is that some of them are indeed novel species. So they may expand some of our understanding on the number of species on the planet but they're not going to massively change the biodiversity problem.

DS: Alright. We have to leave it there. Professor Sherwood Lollar, nice to meet you. Thank you for joining us. Barbara Sherwood Lollar, professor of Earth science at the University of Toronto. She was in our Toronto studio. The CBC News is next, and then we'll meet a group of humans trying to preserve their species: preppers. They're bracing themselves for the planet's demise in their American Redoubt. I'm Dave Seglins and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

Back To Top »

'Prepper' movement brace for the worst after U.S. election

DS: Hello. I'm Dave Seglins and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

DS: Still to come, shipping routes are the invisible arteries of our world—practically everything we use has crisscrossed the globe on massive cargo vessels. Yet we seldom stop to think about the scale and impact of shipping. I'll speak with the director of an eye-opening exposé about freighters titled Freightened. That's in half an hour. But first, be prepared. Amidst the seemingly endless mudslinging and scandal, two of the least popular presidential candidates in US history continue to make their case to sit in the White House's Oval Office. If the polls are to be believed, Hillary Clinton seems likely to win on November 8^th—but don't tell that to the millions of passionate supporters of Donald Trump. For them, a Trump loss will be a sign that a broken political system is beyond repair, perhaps even proof that this election was rigged. And the feeling that the political system has failed is just one of many concerns facing some Americans. From worries over climate change and the economy, to fears about natural disasters and terrorism, a number of Americans are consumed with a sense of impending doom. It is this feeling of dread that has given birth to the American Redoubt. Borrowing its name from a military term for a temporary fortification, the American Redoubt is a geographic place of sorts. It's made up of the states of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon. It's a place where mostly conservative and mostly Christian Americans worried about the future are encouraged to move. The goal is to create a safe haven where like-minded Americans can become self-sufficient, live off the land and wait out the calamities to come. It's a movement and a political migration that some say has picked up speed during this divisive and contentious US presidential election campaign. Erin Collins is a senior reporter with CBC national news and he recently travelled to the Redoubt to take the political temperature of the region and its residents in the lead up to this election. Here's his documentary, Hope for the best – prepare for the worst.

[Music: “Sixteen Tons” - Tennessee Ernie Ford]

[Sound: Chopping wood]

GLEN MARTIN: What appeals to me more than anything is not living in a city, living more in an open environment where you're more easily free to move around, not worry about neighbours and just a much simpler lifestyle.

ERIN COLLINS: The cool fall mist hangs in the air as Glen Martin splits wood outside his fiancée’s rustic cabin. The sound of splintering tamarack logs is the only sound that breaks the silence. The cabin here actually is a cabin—a small red A-frame on 10 acres of lush northern forest, completely off-grid and nestled in the hills of Bonner County, Idaho. Heated only by a woodstove, chopping wood is a must this time of year.

[Sound: Chopping apples]

ERIN COLLINS: I step inside the warm but dimly lit cabin. Jean Olson slices apples to feed to her two Emus, Ladybird and Larrybird.

JEAN OLSON: This way I just chop them up and stick them in their food bin.

ERIN COLLINS: Pets she rescued from a neighbouring farm two decades ago shortly after moving here to shed the trappings of the modern world.

SOUNDCLIP

JEAN OLSON: Here you go, Larry.

JEAN OLSON: Basically I have lived without power for 23 years. I do have solar within the last seven years. And I refuse to be collared by, “I can't have something because I have no money,” so I find ways to create it from nothing.

ERIN COLLINS: Cutting costs and living more sustainably are the big reasons Olson went off the grid and moved here to northern Idaho. But they aren't the only reasons—Olson also worries about the changes she has seen in the environment.

JEAN OLSON: Americans, we always need to see it to believe it—is the natural Earth changes which involve the weather. I mean like I said before, we have had these two hurricane level winds that we haven't here in 20 years. We have had a drought for the last five years you know, the well water is affected. So these are evident things.

ERIN COLLINS: Olson feels she is best prepared to meet those changes here, unplugged from the modern world. And her fiancé Glen Martin's concerns are also green in nature but they have little to do with the environment. Martin believes that Americans and their government have borrowed too much for too long, putting the country's future prosperity at risk.

GLEN MARTIN: The economy I think is heavy on my list, a big priority, the idea that a collapse could be in front of us and you know what’s going to happen with our grocery stores, our chain of supply? Living a more self-sufficient lifestyle, you prepare for these situations. You know you either stock up with food or you have food, you’re growing food, you’re raising food. So not quite the concern.

ERIN COLLINS: Martin isn't just preparing for the future—he is helping others to do the same—running prepperbroadcasting.com.

SOUNDCLIP

Be ready my friends because you never know when the day before is the day before.

ERIN COLLINS: The website provides podcasts on everything from canning to survival skills for when a disaster strikes and delves into more contentious topics like how much you should prepare your kids for the pending social collapse—skills and information that are in high demand here. Martin now has more than a quarter of a million downloads a month, up from a 100,000 just two years ago. An indication that some Americans worried about the future are moving here.

SOUNDCLIP

Free consultation will help you develop an emergency preparedness plan that makes sense for your family.

ERIN COLLINS: The American Redoubt was first proposed by survivalist James Wesley Rawles in 2011. There is no way of knowing the exact number of so-called political migrants to the region, but local authorities estimate as many as several thousand. Martin believes that number is ramping up—fueled by a contentious and divisive US presidential election.

GLEN MARTIN: I don’t know. You know I think about their last debate, the debate that was on TV the other night and it was a spitting match. It wasn't anything in regards to the concerns that everyone has, you know where are we going? What is going to happen with our economy? What is going to happen after November 9^th? It’s going to give. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when. And I just see it. I see it coming. I see it coming pretty soon.

ERIN COLLINS: Depending on who you talk to, that "disaster coming soon" could be global warming, a terrorist attack or a deadly virus. For Martin, the 2008 financial crisis underlines just how important it is to be able to survive on your own.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Plane running]

Just trying to find a GPS signal.

ERIN COLLINS: About a 160 kilometres south near Hayden, Idaho, Chris Walsh sits in the cockpit of his 1954 Beachwood Bonanza plane. Dressed in a zip-up camouflage jacket, Walsh is surrounded by boats, snow mobiles, tools and trailers inside his personal hangar—toys to be sure, but also tools of his trade. Walsh is a real estate agent, specializing in helping people relocate to the Redoubt and he uses his vintage plane to scout and show remote properties to his clients.

CHRIS WALSH: I would say that the primary thing that they are worried about is a financial collapse inside the country itself, a domestic you know collapse of the dollar. They want to be around people that are more like-minded. They are big fans of the second amendment. They want their gun rights. They have guns but they don’t necessarily carry them on their person every day. But the big idea is that they want to be someplace that is more civil.

ERIN COLLINS: It isn't easy to reach the properties Walsh sells. He often has to fly in to see them. Today, he takes me on a drive down a series of winding rural roads that is regularly broken up by stops to open locked steel gates adorned with no trespassing and private property signs. Privacy and seclusion are part of the attraction to the homes for sale here. And Walsh says many people who make the decision to pull up stakes and retreat to the Redoubt can trace their decision back to a single event.

CHRIS WALSH: I had an old guy in Fort Lauderdale in Florida that basically, he called me one day and he told me that his wife had died about a year ago and they had a dog and they had lived in the neighbourhood for 37 years and it was a good neighbourhood. He walked out one morning and somebody had shot his dog in the head and killed it. So he thought it was an anomaly so he went out and he got another puppy and he brought it home and it was four months old and two days after he bought it, somebody shot it too. So he called me and he said Chris, I just want to be someplace where people are friendly or more civil. He said I don't know what’s happened here but he said I need to leave it. And that is pretty typical.

[Sound: Footsteps]

CHRIS WALSH: Okay. So Erin, what we’ve got here is we’ve got a property that’s 12 acres, a little over 12 acres. It’s got a little 800 square foot house in it. The property itself is off grid. It has solar panels. It’s got a 3.6 kilowatt array.

ERIN COLLINS: This is what most of Walsh's clients are looking for—an off-grid sanctuary to retreat to when the worst happens. Some properties for sale in the Redoubt even include bunkers and safe rooms. Walsh's don't, but he does offer tips on how to use higher ground and choke points to defend the properties he sells. Walsh says that while many Americans concerned about their country's future are moving to the area, the movement extends beyond the borders of the Redoubt.

CHRIS WALSH: I’m working with 2,700 people right now myself. I think that the movement itself is really, really giant. Okay? And when I say that, I am not talking about people that are just moving to the Redoubt, that are moving to these states, but I think that it’s giant in terms of nationwide. I think there are a lot of people in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that are buying cabins and smaller homes that are in the country in Pennsylvania in the Allegheny Mountains. And I think that there is a very serious you know back to sustainability movement.

ERIN COLLINS: Walsh says his clients come to the redoubt to find homes that will continue to work even when the rest of society has broken down. They don't trust the economic and political institutions at the very heart of America—a theme he sees taking centre stage in this year's presidential election and a big reason that he will vote for Donald Trump, even if he may not like him.

CHRIS WALSH: Oh, I think a lot of people don't like Donald Trump but it’s not Donald Trump that they are attracted to, they are attracted to the message. They are attracted to the change in policies. They want differences. They want things to be different than what they are right now. The Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment are really, really tight together in terms of the way that they look at things and the way that they do things. Our country really needs change and real change.

ERIN COLLINS: [To Chris Walsh] It’s not so much Republican or Democrat, it’s just anything different.

CHRIS WALSH: It’s something different. People understand what we’ve got right now and what we have had for the last 20 or 30 years and they want it to be different. They want to see things change for the better. But really change, I mean legitimately change.

[Sound: News on the car radio]

ERIN COLLINS: That desire for change is palpable here in the Redoubt and easily heard on America's airwaves this campaign season. And for many, Donald Trump embodies that change, an outsider ready to tear down the status quo, no matter what the cost.

[Sound: Car door open and shut]

ERIN COLLINS: Chuck Leveque moved here to the foothills of Flathead County Montana about 16 years ago. Ten years in, he started preparing for what he sees as an uncertain future.

CHUCK LEVEQUE: This is our fuel storage container and we have a tank with 275 gallons of diesel and a tank with 275 gallons of non-ethanol regular gasoline.

ERIN COLLINS: Leveque's biggest worry is that America's power grid will go down, leaving the entire country in the dark. That's why the retired Las Vegas police officer is storing fuel, food and water in abundance at his comfortable and modern home. He says it is enough for he and his wife to survive off grid for as long as four years. But Leveque isn't a young man and he knows he will need help to protect what he has stored. He has plans to be joined here by younger family members in an emergency. And like most here in the Redoubt, Leveque has stockpiled weapons and ammunition too.

CHUCK LEVEQUE: Well, the United States and Montana in particular is a gun culture. The country moved west and the pioneers had to use guns to settle the land. We now look at it like we need the guns to defend ourselves and our homes because of the increasing crime rate. And in the event of a large catastrophe, we would need the guns to defend ourselves against people that would want to take our property and our preparedness stores.

ERIN COLLINS: [To Chuck Leveque] Is the waiting the hardest part?

CHUCK LEVEQUE: No. Uncertainty is hard. Uncertainty is hard. Like this morning, I got up about 4:30 and I didn't have any power. So I am thinking well, the wind blew. So I went over and turned on my battery radio and when I got music, I knew that it had not been an EMP. But when you wake up in the middle of the night and you have no power, it gives you reason to pause to see what the problem might possibly be in a worst case scenario.

ERIN COLLINS: An EMP is Leveque's worst case scenario: an Electro Magnetic Pulse bomb detonated by terrorists that would knock out the US's entire electrical grid. It hasn't happened yet but Leveque believes it is only a matter of time.

[Sound: Canning tins]

ERIN COLLINS: At the base of the same mountain inside a non-descript industrial mall, DJ Lebaron puts the finishing touches on a can of dehydrated eggs. Lebaron, who is originally from Southern Alberta, runs Big Sky Preppers near Creston, Montana. He provides survival products and training to help people looking to weather any storm, be it financial or natural. And it's not just eggs that Lebaron cans for his customers.

ERIN COLLINS: [To DJ Lebaron] How many bullets can you fit in a can like that?

DJ LEBARON: Let's see. We put .38 specials—I think we canned up about 600 to a can and then it was going to get too heavy.

ERIN COLLINS: [To DJ Lebaron] 600 rounds?

DJ LEBARON: Six hundred rounds to a can, yeah. You want to pack them tight so that they don't sound like bullets if somebody shakes it and then the can was labeled. We labeled all of his salt or sugar.

ERIN COLLINS: [To DJ Lebaron] What about bullion? How much gold can you get in a coffee can?

DJ LEBARON: I didn't count all of his stuff that we put in because we mixed in gold and silver. He wanted to blend it and he had some large stuff but a lot of it was small. And I think we put about eight pounds per can and then stuffed the rest bottom and top again the same way, so it doesn't sound like it when you shake the can and whatever else.

ERIN COLLINS: [To DJ Lebaron] Why is it important to have that, like to have a can of bullion or little...

DJ LEBARON: Well, that’s your money. That’s like hiding it under the mattress. You are hiding it in a number 10 can and it is going on the shelf because if somebody comes into the house and they are looking for gold bullion and they run by a shelf that has salt and sugar on it, they are not going to touch it. They are going to leave it alone.

ERIN COLLINS: For Lebaron, life in the Redoubt is all about preparing for the worst while continuing to hope for the best—a mantra Lebaron learned to live by while consulting for FEMA—America's disaster management agency—including during the earthquake that shook the Bay Area in 1989.

SOUNDCLIP

DJ LEBARON: I went down with the state of Washington. I worked in the emergency disaster—

ERIN COLLINS: Lebaron draws from his experiences with FEMA at a course he teaches on bug out bags—essentially a backpack full of basic survival supplies you would use if you had to evacuate your home quickly.

SOUNDCLIP

DJ LEBARON: After about two days, almost three days, they pulled someone out of the 880 bridge. The only thing—it was so great when they pulled him out. It was an exciting moment because so many people perished in that. What he died from was?

STUDENT: Dehydration.

DJ LEBARON: Dehydration. Not enough water. Now if you’re like me, I’ve got plenty of food [unintelligible], but what I can’t live without is water. And none of us can live without water.

ERIN COLLINS: From Quebecers who waited out the ice storm to residents of Fort McMurray who were forced to leave their homes as wildfires ravaged their community, it is a lesson many Canadians have learned the hard way.

DJ LEBARON: People are not prepared. And when bad things happen, people that you have called your friends for years are no longer your friends. When people are cold, tired and hungry, they forget all about friendships. They’re worried about taking care of the cold, tired and hungry and I have also learned that the haves—the have nots will take what the haves have in a disaster.

ERIN COLLINS: While he dehydrates a large bucket of ancient wheat grains, Lebaron tells me his biggest worry is that a natural disaster like an earthquake or flood will disrupt normal life. But he says the growing uncertainty about America's political and economic future is a close second. And Lebaron says the current presidential election has left conservatives in the Redoubt with a tough choice.

DJ LEBARON: People are very conservative here, very conservative in Montana, so you know people are going to be voting—if they do vote—for Trump. But as you said, people don't want Trump because nobody can control him and they are worried about what he might do. So I guess I’d call that a manmade disaster right now that we are dealing with.

[Sound: Guns being cocked and shot in range]

ERIN COLLINS: Back in Idaho, that potential disaster is bringing people into Ed Santos’ busy Post Falls gun shop and shooting range. Customers line the display cases here, served by staff wearing side arms and showing off everything from automatic weapons to handguns. Santos, a former army officer, cop and minor pro hockey referee knows a little something about law and order. And he says he is seeing a steady influx of people into the area looking for a refuge of sorts.

ED SANTOS: We hear it every day. It’s not a guess on my part. It’s not an opinion. We hear it every day. We are signing new members in our facility on a daily basis and many of them, the vast majority of them in fact, are from out of this area. And I am finding that many of the things that attracted my wife and I to this area are the same things that are attracting people today and we have been here 22 years. So things haven't changed. People want to live in a community that feels like a community. People want to feel safe when they go out at night.

ERIN COLLINS: Santos says that for many Americans that move here, gun ownership goes hand in hand with personal safety and political liberty. He says that’s why the right to bear arms is a big deal for people moving to the Redoubt. A short drive away, Warren Campbell sits behind the till at Redoubt Surplus and Tactical, flipping through a catalogue. Above him a large banner with a map on it reads "Pray for the Redoubt.” Campbell moved his family here from California to the Coeur d'Alene area about a year and a half ago, attracted by the values he saw in the people here.

WARREN CAMPBELL: The American Redoubt is a stronghold. It’s the last bastion for God, country, liberty, constitution, second amendment and home schooling.

ERIN COLLINS: Guns and God loom large in Campbell's life and in his work.

[Sound: Metal chairs]

ERIN COLLINS: Past the tactical gear and through a hall on the other side of the store is Pastor Warren Campbell's other venture: the Lordship Church. Campbell is setting up metal chairs and tables for his weekend service where about three dozen people will come to hear his unique take on Christian theology.

WARREN CAMPBELL: We would differ in that we love to preach on liberty, the holy cause of liberty. Patrick Henry called liberty a holy cause. George Washington called liberty a sacred fire and our liberties are very, very dear to us, especially our liberties that we have in Jesus Christ.

ERIN COLLINS: Most people in the Redoubt are Christians and their shared beliefs are seen as key to surviving here if the worst is to happen. There is a sense that in the absence of government or other institutions, you want to be around people who live by the same moral code. A code made clear as Campbell points out a painting that hangs on the wall in his chapel.

WARREN CAMPBELL: This painting is called the “Pilgrims Going to Church.” It was done in 1867 and it shows our founding fathers on the way to meeting house carrying their fowling pieces in their hands. So there is a long history in America—matter of fact you could be fined in early America in the 1700s if you didn't bring your firearm to church.

ERIN COLLINS: When it comes to modern politics, Campbell has some doubts about Donald Trump's

[Music: “Sixteen Tons” - Tennessee Ernie Ford]

DS: Erin Collins is a senior reporter with CBC News in Calgary. This documentary was produced by Josh Bloch. And if you want to see some 360 videos and some photos of the places that Erin visited in the American Redoubt, we're going to put them up on our website. That is www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. What some of the preppers and the American Redoubt see as trouble on the geopolitical horizon might be described as the return of history. And that is the name of a new book by Jennifer Welsh. She is a Canadian professor at Oxford University and a former special adviser to the United Nations secretary general. Jennifer Welsh also delivered this year's Massey Lectures on the theme of the return of history. It's a retort of sorts to the cheery 1990s pronouncement by thinker Francis Fukuyama that we had arrived at the so-called end of history. Well, this year's Massey Lectures are going to air on CBC Radio. They'll be on Ideas beginning Monday night. But we're going to talk to Jennifer Welsh. You can hear her in conversation with Anna Maria Tremonti on Monday right here on The Current. Well, coming up in the next half hour, I am going to speak with the director of Freightened, a new documentary film about the truly high price of shipping—its economic, environmental and human toll. I’ve Dave Seglins and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

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Documentary unveils murky world of shipping

Guests: Denis Deslastrac

DS: Hello. I'm Dave Seglins and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. Well, depending on where you live in this country, you might occasionally see the cargo ships and freighters that are forever sailing around the globe. And you probably don't give those ships too much thought. Well, a new documentary is aiming to change that.

SOUNDCLIP

You are on navigational bridge of motor vessel Puelche. She is a container carrier. I am Captain Razvan Adrianita from Romania and I am the master of this nice lady.

NARRATOR: This nice lady is more than 300 metres long. It belongs to a German owner but it flies a Liberian flag. Its crew is made up of just 20 men capable of running this floating city with no other help. In its containers, 80,000 tonnes of products transported from one end of the planet to the other on behalf of thousands of exporters.

DS: That is a scene from Freightened: The Real Price of Shipping. And after taking a journey into the world of shipping, it is safe to say you'll never see those ships the same way again if you do catch a glimpse of them. Denis Deslastrac is the director of the film and he is with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

DENIS DESLASTRAC: Hello. How are you? Thank you for inviting me.

DS: Well, pleased to have you. I've never been on a container ship. You have. Described the Puelche. How much does it carry?

DENIS DESLASTRAC: It carries 300 containers and that's a lot of containers, but of course that's nothing compared to the big ships that we have today that can carry up to 21,000 containers in one trip.

DS: There's a remarkable line in the film where 18,000 containers, if they're stretched out end to end, 120 kilometres long.

DENIS DESLASTRAC: Yes.

DS: Well, what is inside all these containers?

DENIS DESLASTRAC: We don't know. The captain doesn't know. The shipping company usually doesn't know. The container is loaded by the exporter, by you know whoever wants to send something to his customer on the other side of the planet. And there is a form that is stuck on the container which says “Said to Contain” and that's about all we know about what's inside the containers. And of course that is the source of a lot of issues and concerns around the world.

DS: These are the goods that make the world go round. These are consumer goods. Is it automobiles? Is it parts?

DENIS DESLASTRAC: Well, we're talking about 90 per cent of everything, everything we consume and it's not only containers, it's also bulk you know carriers. It's also tankers. So raw materials. Grain, liquids, oil, cars, cars’ parts. Everything.

DS: Give us a sense of the scale of this industry. How much traffic is there? How many of these big ships are out there?

DENIS DESLASTRAC: Well, there's 60,000 commercial ships constantly sailing the world's oceans. And we don't really see the ships and they have of course a huge impact because it's the base, it is the backbone of globalization you know. If some people think that globalization was started with low wages in Asian countries, but if we didn't have the ships to carry us, you know to bring us those products that are made by low wage you know people in Asia for example, well, you know we wouldn’t use this workforce. So the ships are really the link between the offer and the demand and without them there would be of course not the same products on our shelves. And you know consumption would slow down very quickly.

DS: Now you try to illustrate some of the issues raised through this global shipping industry through the example of a jacket. The label on the jacket says “made in Bangladesh.” Tell us about that. Tell us how shipping factors into that jacket and that label.

DENIS DESLASTRAC: It's funny because the jacket actually was the trigger of the investigation. A few years ago, we were—you want me to tell you this little anecdote?

DS: Please.

DENIS DESLASTRAC: I invited my crew, the people of my crew in Barcelona to a wrap party of the previous film at the beach. And on the horizon there was a big ship. And of course one of us said you know what do these guys carry? And we didn't know. And we all started to look at the tags on our clothes and of course nothing of what we were wearing was made anywhere near Barcelona where we were at time. And so my jacket was made in Bangladesh and I started—just for myself, I didn't have the idea of making a film. I started to scratch beneath the surface and look at what's hidden behind the tag. And of course you know I discovered that the cotton was grown in the US and then was sent in India to be weaved and dyed. I took the example of the buttons also. The buttons were made of plastic, collected, recycled throughout Europe then sent to China to turn it into you know balls of plastic and then sent to Vietnam to be made into a button. And when you add up all these kilometres, that was 48,000 kilometres hidden behind the tag. And of course, Barcelona-Bangladesh is not 48,000 kilometres.

DS: Sixty thousand.

DENIS DESLASTRAC: Yeah, due directly to the shipping industry.

DS: So you mentioned the air. What about the water?

DENIS DESLASTRAC: Very, very invisible pollution is the acoustic pollution of ships. The 60,000 ships that constantly sail the world oceans have a very big engine because they have a very big hole and there's a lot of friction. And the hole of course acts like a drum and it emits a noise that is similar to the frequency in which the whales and dolphins communicate on low frequencies. And that's a huge problem. There's been studies also, pretty recent studies. When you see sometimes on television and you see these whales that go on the beach and die there, for a long time we thought that that was because they couldn't communicate and they got lost. Recent studies said that it's not that they are lost, it's because the noise is too high and they want to escape this environment which is too painful. One-third. You know so when these whales go and die on the beach, there's autopsies. Okay? We look at the internal ear and one-third of them have irreversible damage ear damage. So they basically escape this medium which is too noisy and too painful for them.

DS: So you attribute this to the shipping.

DENIS DESLASTRAC: Yes, yes, yes. I mean the shipping and the noise and the echoes and pollution. Inthe Atlantic, 90 per cent of the habitat of the humpback whale has been—you know they can't be there. They only have 10 per cent habitat where they can actually live because the shipping lanes between Europe and North America are very dense.

DS: Why did you want to make this film?

DENIS DESLASTRAC: I wanted to make this film because throughout the research when you find this data, you know that 90 per cent of everything we consume comes by ship, I didn't know that. And when I get surprised, it gets to a point where you say okay, there is a film here and there is a story I need to share. I just can't keep it for myself because it’s too heavy now to carry.

DS: It is heavy. Labour conditions, pollution, environmental implications, this problem with the flags of convenience. Is there any optimism to see things improving?

DENIS DESLASTRAC: There's a lot of optimism of course. There's on the technological side, there's many improvements that are appearing. For example, we have in the film this German company which is called SkySails. It’s still in the experimental phase but they are developing wind energy for the shipping industry and it works pretty well. They have giant kites that are all automated and you know computer controlled that can save 10 per cent of fuel. And if you add all the technological solutions like very simple things like painting. There's new kinds of painting that reduce the friction. There's fuels that can be a little bit less contaminating and ship owners don't have to wait until their ship dies after 30 or so years of life on a beach somewhere in Bangladesh or in India to improve them.

DS: There was an interesting issue that you raised in the film: the shipping efficiency index. What's that?

DENIS DESLASTRAC: There is an NGO a group based in London and it's called the Carbon War Room. So what they've done, they have collected all the information of all the ships: how much fuel they burn, how much emissions they create, et cetera. And you know when you are a cargo owner and you want to hire a shipping company to carry your you know cargo from one place to another, you can get on this database, put the name of the ship or the company and you can see how efficient or not this ship is. And that is a very important thing in the shipping industry. It's like when you rent a car, you pay for the fuel and it's exactly the same when you rent the space on the ship. You pay for the fuel. So that doesn't put any pressure on the ship owners to make them more efficient because the cargo owner is going to pay for the fuel. So if you are a car owner and you get on this database and you see the ship you are being offered to use to carry you know your container is not fuel efficient then it's going to cost you more. So you are automatically going to go towards a more efficient chip. And naturally that's going to leave the less efficient chips you know with less customers basically.

DS: Do you think that's having any impact?

DENIS DESLASTRAC: I was actually in London four or five days ago and I was with the Alisdair Pettigrew, whom you've seen in the film and he works at the Carbon War Room and that was his idea to create this database. It's still not complete. Not all the 60,000 ships are there but they have 50,000 ships now, which is a lot. They are very happy in the way that it’s starting actually to get in the habits of some cargo owners but I think there's still a lot of work.

DS: So your film does level a lot of criticism of the industry. Has the crew on the Puelche seen it?

DENIS DESLASTRAC: [laughs] I got—about three weeks ago, I got the friendship request on Facebook by the captain you've seen in the film. And the first thing he said and he said you know I would like to see the film. And so of course. And I was really worried. Is it going to—how is he going to you know see the film and feel? And he wrote me a very long message and I found it very—I think that's a real message of hope to me. He said you know I think the film is very provocative and I didn't like everything you say in the film because you know it hurts to be criticized. But at the same time, he said I think we should use the film and I would like to ask you for the permission to show the film—and you know because I sent him a link with a password—and to show the film to the people in my company and to be able to show the film on the ship because I think we need to change things. And he also said I learned a lot of things I didn't know and I've spent you know almost 20 years in this industry. So I think it's like for a person, if you're not able to receive criticism and to digest it and to try to use it to become a better person, then you're not going to you know change and you're not going to get better. If this industry takes this film also as a tool to you know to learn a few things and to you know steer in a more sustainable direction, I think that there's hope.

DS: Denis, thank you. Nice to meet you. Thank you for the film.

DENIS DESLASTRAC: Thank you so much.

DS: Denis Deslastrac is the director of Freightened: The Real Price of Shipping. He was in Toronto. We're going to put a link with more about the film on our www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Well, that's our program for today. Stay tuned for Radio One and q. Sam Roberts Band will be in studio performing from their new album. And finally it's been two weeks since Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and yet, where is he? The enigmatic songster and poet has yet to acknowledge the honour, so we thought we'd end today off with a song from Bob Dylan. It could go out to all the preppers getting ready in the American Redoubt for impending doom. This is “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” I'm Dave Seglins. Thanks for listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music – “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” – Bob Dylan]

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October 28, 2016 full episode transcript

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