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The Current Transcript for February 20, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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I was on the German-Polish frontier, and the German hordes, tanks moved in.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The woman you just heard, Claire Hollingworth, was the British journalist credited with the greatest scoop of the Second World War. She broke the news of the German invasion of Poland in 1939. There are a few celebrated women who reported on World War II, but very few. The ranks were even thinner in the First World War, and you would be hard pressed to name a Canadian woman. But three Canadian women were pioneers in World War I reporting, breaking ranks, dodging censorship, to bring the story of battles, injured soldiers, and suffering civilians to Canadians. Hear about them and their stories in an hour. And then, a different kind of battle and new ideas in the fight against climate change.

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And the Arctic is connected to the rest of the climate system. The Arctic is not like Las Vegas, what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic.

AMT: There are predictions and fears that the Arctic could be ice-free 14 Summers from now. An idea to delay that involves spewing ice water from ten million buoys spread across the already thinning ice. It's far from the first proposal to geoengineer a way the planet's problems. We’ll be on that story in half an hour. But we begin with a far more conventional conflict.

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: Canada stands firmly beside Ukraine in response to Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea, as well as its support to insurgents in eastern Ukraine.

AMT: We're asking about Canada's military obligations in Ukraine. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is the The Current.

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Canada's support for Ukraine questioned amid escalating violence

Guests: Donald Bowser, James Bezan, Aurel Braun

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[Sound: gunfire and bomb blasts]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well those are the sounds of gunfire in the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka. The fighting has intensified since the inauguration of US President Donald Trump a few weeks ago. Dozens of soldiers and civilians have been killed in these last few weeks, but it's unclear which side is responsible for the latest escalation of violence. The war between Ukrainian forces and Russian supported separatists has stretched on for nearly three years now. And some observers say Russia now sees an opportunity to advance its efforts as political changes distract the US and Europe. So Ukraine supporters have called on Canada to maintain its own support in the country. Canadian troops have been helping to train forces in Ukraine. That mission is set to expire in March. The Liberal government has not yet announced whether it will extend the mission. Donald Bowser works in eastern Ukraine with United Nations Development Program, the UNDP. He is an anti-corruption adviser there and we have reached him in the Ukrainian capital. Hello.

DONALD BOWSER: Good morning.

AMT: What do you make of this round of fighting? What does it indicate to you?

DONALD BOWSER: Well, you know, we've looked at this closely. We have people who also work on the non-governmental side. So we've seen that over this stagnant period over the last year, where you have had peace but you've had continual fire on both sides, is that there's a strong desire for this conflict to be resolved. The separatist territory, the non-government controlled area in Donetsk and Luhansk is a relatively big area. We're talking about a population of about three million together at the moment that are sitting there. So this is a huge drain in terms of Russian support in there, and their own economies are fairly limited. So you see that there is a desire on both sides to eventually come to some sort of resolution. What the people on the ground see is that these continual exchanges of fire over the course of the last year have resulted in deaths and destruction of infrastructure. But you've had a pretty static situation. And in the last couple of months we have seen that the Ukrainian side has been moving towards their area of control, so closer towards the Russian separatists troops. And we've also seen a lot of movements on the other side in terms of regular killings of the leadership on the other side. So it seems that things are building to some sort of either political or military resolution to the current conflict.

AMT: So you're telling me that they're escalating the violence so that then they can go to the table?

DONALD BOWSER: Probably. From what we've seen is that there are a lot of announcements that have been made about resolving the conflict on both sides. Specifically, you've had these public statements by one of the main oligarchs Pinchuk. And this was followed up by then the Ministry of Occupied Territories coming out with an action plan about how to reintegrate these territories. We've seen from the Russian side even positive news that has been portrayed towards some sort of resolution of this. The problem is is that there's strong forces on both sides that do not want to see peace.

AMT: And it seems counterintuitive. The way to reach peace is to have an increased level of violence.

DONALD BOWSER: Well, you have to prepare the population to accept peace. And so one of the problem is there's a lot of spoilers, right? You have a strong nationalist movement within Ukraine, which in the last few days has been blocking essentially coal and other goods from coming over the border. The Ukrainian electricity system is dependent on anthracite coal, which comes from the separatist territories. So all of this time of where there's been war, there's been trade going on. And the economic forces that sit in the Donbass work both sides of the border. You have the same business people. So essentially, you know, to prepare the way for people to accept that there's going to be a peace deal where Donbass comes under Ukrainian control. Both the Russians and the Ukrainian government have to sort of placate some of these potential spoilers in any sort of future peace deal. One of the way to do this is to see an increase in violence.

AMT: After all the money and effort Russia has poured into supporting separatists in that region, why would it be interested in negotiating peace now?

DONALD BOWSER: Well, from what I've seen and I've done quite a bit of analysis with some of the other observers that are on the ground. One thing is for Putin to start to look like a world statesman, that he's also a bringer of peace not just of war. The other side of it of course is the huge drain on the Russian economy. And the third point is that the sanctions that are specifically about Donbass are related to oil and gas companies and their banks. So this is very much hurting the oil and gas economy in Russia.

AMT: If it doesn't get the annexation of eastern Ukraine, what would Russia have accomplished with this conflict?

DONALD BOWSER: Well, they still have Crimea. The Crimean situation and Donbass situation are fairly different in many different ways, there’s different populations that are there. But also Russia has essentially announced that it is annexing Crimea, is integrating Crimea completely into the Russian state. Whereas in the Donbass, they've left it up to these local separatists.

AMT: What relevance does Donald Trump's presidency have to Russia’s decisions in eastern Ukraine right now then?

DONALD BOWSER: Well, I think quite a bit has been a little bit overplayed. Now, of course you have a new administration and you see new movements. Definitely both sides are concerned about the unpredictability nature of the regime and both sides are maneuvering to somehow influence this. But this is discussions between Russia and Ukraine. Many of the things that are going to be decided are going to have to be decided multilaterally. The Americans will be involved and the Europeans will be involved. But what we've seen over the course of the last year is that there's quite a bit of dialogue going on between Ukraine and Russia on this. Trump presents a sort of new wildcard in the mix in this, but also it presents a fairly predictable way out of this, about blaming the Trump administration and for the Ukrainians side at least to say well, you know, what can we do? We have to come to a peace accord at some, without having that level of support we've had.

AMT: How important is Canada's involvement in Ukraine then at this point?

DONALD BOWSER: Well, very important in terms of morally supporting. The Ukrainians look on us is one of their true friends. So alongside Poland and the Baltic states, Canada has been seen as one of the truest allies of Ukraine.

AMT: OK. Donald Bowser, thank you for your thoughts.

DONALD BOWSER: You're welcome.

AMT: Donald Bowser is a Canadian, he's an anti-corruption adviser with the UN Development Program. And we reached him in Kiev, in Ukraine. My next guest hopes to see the Liberal government not only extend the current training mission in Ukraine but expand Canadian military support to that country. James Bezan is the Conservative defense critic. We reached him at his home in Teulon, Manitoba. Hello.

JAMES BEZAN: Good morning.

AMT: Do you see the latest violence as a move to solidify positions before a peace deal?

JAMES BEZAN: No, I was actually kind of surprised by some of those comments because we know that this level of violence that we're seeing in Ukraine right now was triggered by the Russian backed rebel forces advancing over the line that had kind of been agreed upon under Minsk II peace agreement, as to kind of the no contact line in Donbass. And they did a number of excursions over that, trying to capture some of the supply chains, mainly highway and railway access between different areas of Donetsk and Luhansk. And that is what really made Ukrainian military forces take action to protect Ukrainian territory. Although all of Donbass is Ukrainian territory, as is Crimea. And in the last week alone, we have seen Russian forces violate the Minsk peace agreement by firing over that line over 425 times. And over 65 of that time has been with heavy weapons. We're talking artillery, mortars, tank incursions as well. So, you know, I see this as I mean, Putin testing the resolve of President Trump and to see what type of reaction he gets from the new administration in Washington.

AMT: More Canadian troops are about to be deployed to Ukraine, even as the mission is set to end in March. What do you make of how the Canadian government is handling this?

JAMES BEZAN: Well, I’d like to see them provide more certainty. President Poroshenko has asked for more assistance, and we know that we have operation UNIFIER, part of the military training mission that we have in western Ukraine set to expire at the end of March. I know the signal is from the military, is that they're planning to stay. They're sending, you know, another 200 troops from Edmonton over to Ukraine this month, but that mission operation UNIFIER has to be expanded, has to be extended for at least another two years. The training that we've done and the role that we play in military policing has to also go along hand-in-hand, it helps in reformations of anticorruption that is happening throughout Ukraine, but also includes Ukrainian military. And, you know, I'd love to see the Liberal government reinstate radar shot imagery that they canceled last June without any notice. Those images are critical for Ukraine to see what is actually happening in Donbass and in Crimea, and how they can best position their military to defend the people of Ukraine. And, you know, the Canada Ukraine Defense Cooperation Agreement, you know, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper we negotiated an agreement, it was set to be signed in the fall 2015 and here we are, you know, a year and a half later, and the Liberals still haven't signed off on that agreement. Which would really help, I guess, streamline the relationship between Canada and Ukraine, when it comes to officer changes, training, joint exercises, as well as providing defensive weapons to Ukraine on an as needed basis.

AMT: Now, I want to ask about defensive weapons. Right now they don't get defensive weapons from Canada. You want that to happen?

JAMES BEZAN: Well, as you know, we've been providing non-kinetic or non-lethal military equipment to Ukraine, such as night vision goggles, you know, flak jackets and other kevlar, where so that their troops are better protected. But--

AMT: Do you want lethal weapons going?

JAMES BEZAN: As you just saw, the government has provided lethal weapons, lethal defensive weapons to the Kurds. And I do believe that there is an opportunity to provide those types of weapons to the people of Ukraine to help and, you know, whether it's an anti-tank missile system, sniper rifles, things along that nature that will better enable Ukrainian soldiers to hold the line against Russian backed rebels, I think is something that needs to be provided. And, you know, it comes down to, you know, we've already trained them to NATO standards. We know that there has been a dramatic change in the way Ukraine military had been formed, but they've still lost 2,200 soldiers since this conflict started. Over 8,000 have been wounded. We provided all sorts of medical training as well, to deal with traumatic injuries from the front. But it is time to to look at providing them with more equipment, as the rebel forces are getting from the Russians.

AMT: OK and before I let you go, Canada has a large Ukrainian community that has been vocal on this issue. What are you hearing from the community?

JAMES BEZAN: Well, the community definitely wants to see Canada support Ukraine. And we're hearing from the Ukrainians that they are looking for Canada to show leadership on this file. And, you know, there's been a major change in the Liberal government by having Stephane Dion removed as the foreign minister. And Chrystia Freeland, who has now become the foreign minister. And Chrystia and I are both of Ukrainian heritage, but Prairie Canadian kids, both from the farm. And, you know, she's on the record in the past, wanting Canada to do more in support of Ukraine. She like I, we've both been banned from Russia because of our outspoken criticism about Vladimir Putin and the actions of the Kremlin.

AMT: OK.

JAMES BEZAN: So, you know, we do expect her to continue on with isolationism of the Russian Federation. On making sure that we continue on with the sanctions, and I call on her to support my Mininsky bill.

AMT: OK Mr. Bezan, we’re going to have to leave it there but I get what you're saying. Thank you.

JAMES BEZAN: OK. Anytime Anna Maria. James Bezan, conservative defense critic. We reached him in Teulon, Manitoba. We did try to get the Canadian Defense Minister Harjitt Sajjan to talk to us. He's not available. We did get a statement saying essentially, “the government looks forward to soon announcing how it will continue to support Ukrainian efforts to maintain sovereignty, stability, security in the years to come.” Well, my next guest has been watching the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine closely. Aurel Braun is a Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Toronto. He's an Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University as well. Aurel Braun is in our studio. Welcome, hello.

AUREL BRAUN: Good morning.

AMT: Well, OK, so you were listening to the other two talk about what might be happening on the ground there. What do you think President Putin's goal is in eastern Ukraine right now?

AUREL BRAUN: It's difficult to say with precision but there’s circumstantial evidence that suggests that what he wants is a kind of permanent conflict, because this would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and from joining the EU. And this is the largest strategy goal that he has repeatedly stressed. He had prevented some of the other states that were members of the Soviet Union before, like Armenia, put enormous pressure on Armenia from joining the Eastern Partnership with the EU. We know that the crisis started in Ukraine over whether Ukraine would join the Eastern Partnership in the European Union. So Russia seems to be of the view that not only NATO, but the extension of the European Union is also a great threat to Moscow. And consequently they must find ways of preventing Ukraine from joining either one of those.

AMT: So in other words, our first guest says he sees this as the buildup to actually sitting down at the table, and you see Putin wanting just perpetual conflict there, to keep everybody destabilized.

AUREL BRAUN: With the greatest respect, I found that analysis a little odd, because it sort of equated the aggressor and the victim of aggression. We know that Ukraine was attacked, that Crimea was annexed illegally, according to every Democratic state, by Russia. And so they are not on an equal footing. I mean, Russia is a very major military power. They have used hybrid warfare, they continue to use elements of their cyber warfare, information warfare. We know that they have massively supplied the rebels in the Donbass. When we look at the rebels just a year and a half ago, they had maybe a couple dozen tanks. They have according to Russian sources themselves, something like 700.

AMT: So James Bezan has said he wants to see offensive weaponry go in there from Canada and Canadian troops extend for as long as two years, keep the sanctions up. What do you think?

AUREL BRAUN: It's a very difficult question. And we know that people like Angela Merkel have been very reluctant to provide Ukraine with what are defensive weapons. And I think when we look at the situation two years ago, one can see some of the logic in that, because there was a hope that Russia somehow would come to a settlement. But the evidence is that despite all this restraint, despite the fact that in Washington you had a president who was looking, in the case of the Obama administration, was looking in every possible corner to try to find a peaceful resolution, strategic patience, leading from behind. None of that deterred Russia from continuing its massive intervention. So consequently, we have to ask the question, can we in good conscience keep telling the Ukrainians, who are dying in large numbers, as a result of a massive Russian intervention, that we are going to deny them defensive weapons?

AMT: So can we? Or do you want to see those defensive weapons get shipped over there?

AUREL BRAUN: I think not only the moral case, but even the strategic case for withholding these weapons has basically disappeared in the past two years, because restraint on the part of the West has not resulted in a commensurate restraint on the part of Russia. Russian escalation has continued. So Russia has agency, this kind of notion that Russia merely reacts has been disproven. Russia has an agenda, they have a larger strategic goal. That strategic goal is to keep Ukraine out of any kind of western orbit and they have proceeded along those plans. They have use ceasefires periodically to sort of try to create some opening but not a resolution.

AMT: So you're telling me you want Canada to dig in and do more?

AUREL BRAUN: I think Canada needs to move beyond symbolism and just providing a tripwire. It needs to do it together with other allies. Canada cannot act unilaterally, but we are highly respected, we are influential within the alliance.

AMT: So you want to see Canada take the lead in this, in a way that the others aren't doing?

AUREL BRAUN: I think Canada could work with the United Kingdom, for example. And I think there is an increasing push within NATO to provide Ukrainians with more capacity to resist.

AMT: Well, and it's interesting we're talking about this. Today there is a story in The New York Times that one of Mr. Trump's personal lawyers and a business associate of his have teamed up with a Ukrainian opposition politician to offer their own peace plan. They're not in any way sanctioned to start negotiations. Where is the Trump administration fitting in all of this?

AUREL BRAUN: Well that is a very interesting question. There's a kind of cacophony coming from the Trump administration that is confusing not only us but the Russians as well. What is interesting is that the Russians seem to be more disillusioned with the Trump administration. They do not have the same kind of confidence. And this perhaps might be one of the explanations why there has been that offensive by Russia supported forces, this bromance may not last. Because if you look at the long term, the interest, of the Trump administration and of the Russian administration are not really congruent. When the Trump administration says that they want to make the United States into a very major exporter of energy, that would be devastating to the Russian economy, which so heavily depend on energy exports.

AMT: So in other words, you're saying these different signals are coming forward. And so then what are you saying? Canada, just briefly, Canada has an obligation to move in a much more decisive way right now?

AUREL BRAUN: We need to obviously to coordinate with allies, but we can't just be sort of listening to everybody else and not take any initiative. We're not insignificant. We do have capacity. So we have to look at what is morally, legally right and what is politically, I mean, strategically the correct approach.

AMT: Aurel Braun, thanks for coming in.

AUREL BRAUN: Thanks. My pleasure.

AMT: Aurel Braun, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Toronto and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He joined me in our Toronto studio. Stay with us. The news is next. And then the cold hard truth about what melting Arctic ice means for the world, and a radical idea to disrupt it. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

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Can a $500 billion geoengineering project save the Arctic from melting?

Guests: Steve Desch, Ian Bruce, Jim Fleming

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

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AMT: Still to come, recognizing the Canadian women who reported on what was called the war to end all wars. But first, trying to put the freeze on retreating Arctic ice.

[Music: The Disruptors Theme]

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VOICE 1: The Arctic is connected to the rest of the climate system. The Arctic is not like Las Vegas, what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic.

VOICE 2: It's been the warmest year on record a NASA scientist has said. And ice in the Arctic Sea is expected to bear the brunt of it.

VOICE 3: As the Arctic ice melts at a staggering rate, the Arctic has secured its place once and for all as the world's climate change barometer, and we Inuit are the mercury in that barometer. Aur hunters are now rerouting themselves where they used to be able to go very safely. We have lost lives as a result of it because of the melting ice.

VOICE 4: Without ice, the Arctic loses its cooling mechanism. The implications are both widespread and devastating.

VOICE 5: By protecting the Arctic we can be saving the planet.

AMT: Well, for years Inuit residents and scientists have been sounding the alarm over the rapid warming of the Arctic. And now the alarms are getting louder. This past year has been a particularly hot one for the far north. In some parts of the Arctic, temperatures have been 20 degrees above normal. And incredibly, some forecasters say the Arctic could be ice-free by summer of 2030. The last time that happened was 100,000 years ago and an iceless Arctic could have a catastrophic impact on the world's climate. That grim outlook has some climate scientists proposing some radical ideas. And one is to refreeze the Arctic ice. So as part of our project The Disruptors, I'm joined by Steve Desch. He is working with a research team that's proposing a massive geoengineering project that would disrupt and reverse ice loss. He's a Professor of Astrophysics in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. And Steve Desch joins us from Phoenix, Arizona. Hello.

STEVE DESCH: Hi there. Good morning. Happy to be here.

AMT: What are you proposing?

STEVE DESCH: Well, we published this paper in the journal Earth’s Future in December, and in the paper we propose two things. One is an idea and one is a possible technology. And the idea is that we we need to intervene actively in the Arctic immediately, because of all of the effects that we just heard. The ice is disappearing, it could be ice-free in the summer as soon as 2030, and we need to act there before that happens and sooner than we can wait for anything else on the world stage to change. The technology we're proposing is that if we put pumps on buoys with wind turbines, the wind power could be used to draw the water up from below the sea ice a few meters up, to be spilled over the sea ice on the surface where it's colder. And we calculated that this would increase the rate of freezing, possibly adding a metre to the thickness of the ice over one Arctic winter where this is employed. So we proposed studying this.

AMT: OK. And all of these buoys, what would this look like? Help me picture it.

STEVE DESCH: Sure. One individual device or buoy would be maybe five metres in diameter and have a wind turbine on top that is like many that you've seen. And it would be drawing water into a tank and from there the water would be distributed via hoses or pipes to be spread out over perhaps a tenth of a square kilometre. And one of these would affect that much area and you would need a large number of them.

AMT: How many?

STEVE DESCH: To have an impact on the ice, you need quite a large number. We have to keep in mind how many cubic kilometres of ice are on average disappearing from the Arctic every year. So to have an effect on this, you need about ten million of these spread out over about ten per cent of the area of the Arctic.

AMT: These five metre large buoys, ten million of them on the ice that is there that's thinning. And they'd essentially be spraying water out? Is that what I would be picturing?

STEVE DESCH: Yeah, you've got it. Each one will be spilling out water. You would put them in place during the summer, when the ice is not there and then over the winter as the ice freezes around them, this would help to thicken the ice that freezes there.

AMT: OK. And what would that cost?

STEVE DESCH: Sure. Yeah, a lot because you have ten million of these, although we calculate a total price tag of about 500 billion dollars. But the point of the paper is not that it's a very large number but it is not an impossible number. This is a large number but it's something that federal governments could do. And for comparison, it's on the order of, you know, the Manhattan Project or the Iraq war. So it's not impossible.

AMT: OK. And so this would obviously be a big disruption. You believe we need to consider something this radical, this disruptive, this expensive now. Why is that?

STEVE DESCH: I think, yeah, I think we do need to consider these things, we really need to have all sorts of options on the table. The climate is accelerating in its change and the feedbacks that happen in the Arctic with the loss of ice, the loss of reflecting power of the ice, the threat of the permafrost thawing and releasing methane, all of these things are happening very quickly. We need to have options on the table to deal with these problems in the next decade. And we need to start studying them now.

AMT: Any drawbacks, any consequences that might be unintended that concern you?

STEVE DESCH: Right. This is always the concern when we start to actively take a role in the climate on purpose, which I say is the opposite of actively taking a role in the climate not on purpose, which is what we're doing now. But we certainly do need to study what possible impacts these have. But I do think that of various geoengineering technologies, this one has more benign effects because its aim is to simply restore the ice to the level that it was two decades ago. And the means by which we do it is simply an amplification of a natural process, the freezing of seawater into sea ice.

AMT: OK. And so the idea is that if you're pulling up the seawater that's just underneath, that it's colder and so it will freeze and it'll make another layer of ice that actually sticks around?

STEVE DESCH: Yeah. Right now though, the sea water freezes at the bottom of the sea ice, the heat has to be released and conducted to the surface, that's where it's coldest. What this does is just move the water up above the ice, puts it on the surface where it's already very cold. That helps it freeze faster.

AMT: But if the ice is freezing anyway, is this a long term solution or is warming at the point where even that would not be able to freeze at some point?

STEVE DESCH: Right. It's important to remember that this doesn't solve everything. This simply helps the ice thicken the way it used to over the winter so that it has a better chance of surviving and not melting through the summer. This is something that helps the ice get back to where it was a few decades ago. But if the CO2 emissions do not get reduced and if we continue to change the climate at an accelerating pace, then ultimately this won't work in the long run. But what this does is it buys you time, it buys you several decades to deal with the CO2 problem and get the emissions down.

AMT: And remind us how important is Arctic ice to the world's climate and to the world?

STEVE DESCH: It's very important. And it's essentially the air conditioner for the world. During the summer, the way it's supposed to work is that most of the Arctic Ocean is covered in sea ice that reflects back over 90 per cent of the sunlight hitting it, whereas what's happening now is that by the end of the summer, well over half of the ice that used to be there is now melted and that open ocean absorbs sunlight. So this is a feedback, as the ocean absorbs sunlight it gets warmer and the trends accelerate and feed on themselves and the release of methane from the thawing permafrost is a real concern as well, since that is also a potent greenhouse gas.

AMT: OK, and so what do you do next in pushing this proposal?

STEVE DESCH: Well, we think that the next steps are both technical and non-technical. The technical steps we're taking as the team are to design and develop the prototype and hopefully test it in the Canadian Arctic in the next few years. And also to work with climate modelers to make sure we understand the effects that this technology would have if we scale it up. But we also believe strongly that we need to broaden the discussion to include many stakeholders in the Arctic, including those who live there and perhaps the Arctic Council.

AMT: OK. Well, we've started the discussion here, so thank you.

STEVE DESCH: Thank you very much.

AMT: Steve Desch, Professor of Astrophysics in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. He's in Phoenix. Well, for another view on geoengineering as the answer to arctic melting, I'm joined by Ian Bruce. Ian Bruce is the Director of science and policy at the David Suzuki Foundation. And he's in Vancouver. Hello.

IAN BRUCE: Hello. Good morning Anna Maria.

AMT: What are you thinking?

IAN BRUCE: Well I mean, you know, this is a difficult even conversation for me to have just, you know, talking about how serious it is when we're talking about intervening at this kind of stage. But, you know, I think, you know, one thing it's very clear that the geoengineering that we're talking about is it's certainly a high risk, and I would say sort of a last ditch effort to be addressing climate change. And I think one of the real concerns that I have is certainly around the unintended consequences. Making sure we're not sort of swapping one problem for another. Just in general, in the history of our society, we have at times been very overconfident that we can control or manage ecosystems. And I think that we often fail to recognize unintended consequences. So I think in a proposal such as this, you know, we just need to be very very cautious that we've researched this problem adequately and that we're not sort of creating one problem that may have very serious unforeseen outcomes. And just in general, if we think about in the past, I mean, we've developed numerous things to help deal with problems that we've had. And, you know, back in the sixties and seventies, we were looking at addressing pest control using DDT. And at the time we thought it was fantastic and it was really helpful for farmers, but we didn't realize the unintended consequences that it had. When we looked at bio cumulation and when those toxins bioaccumulate up the food chain and what serious risk it presents to both animals and people.

AMT: Right. Now this time they're talking about using the seawater, they're not talking about adding chemicals to it. Do you still see there is a risk in experimenting in nature in this way?

IAN BRUCE: Well, I agree that, you know, some of these geoengineering proposals, some are more benign probably than others. But I do think that there needs to be a lot of research done to see, you know, what the what the impacts could be. I mean, just taking vast amounts of seawater, you know, from from the ocean and redistributing it to the surface, you know, will it have an impact on plankton? On other species that could disrupt the food chain? Anything there that could disrupt fish stocks, for example. And so we wouldn't want to sort of create an imbalance in the ecosystem. But I do think, you know, talking about it, researching it, and doing more due diligence and talking to stakeholders is a sound approach. You know, certainly we shouldn't be ruling out geoengineering. Climate change is such a serious problem that we do need to marshal a number of solutions to address it.

AMT: [interposing] Now, go ahead. Go ahead.

IAN BRUCE: One of my big concerns is that, you know, geoengineering tends to really focus on the symptoms of the problem of climate change and it doesn't adequately address the root cause, which is the buildup of carbon emissions in the atmosphere largely from burning fossil fuel.

AMT: Right. Now, he's saying this would be a stop gap, this would buy time to deal with something as opposed to not dealing with it at all, not having the time. But I asked about the costs and he didn't actually give the number. But in my notes it says it could be as much as 500 billion dollars to do something like this. What do you think of a project at that cost for this specific thing?

IAN BRUCE: Well, it certainly is a very large number but in context and that, you know, we look at sort of the global economy, and what we invest, you know, day in and day out at a global level, it is manageable, it is doable. He did bring up some examples, you know, about the Manhattan Project or other things that happened.

AMT: The Iraq War. He used the example of as well. How did either of those work for us? [chuckles]

IAN BRUCE: Well this is it. I mean, this is, you know, this is certainly a huge endeavor. But I guess what concerns me is the fact that, you know, there have been numerous geoengineering proposals out there, researchers that were using a model, a very prominent model from the University of Victoria looking at climate change. You know, did say that they looked at five different technologies of geoengineering. It wasn’t this particular proposal in front of us, but five different ones. And they concluded that geoengineering, that the potential for it to address climate change without really focusing on mitigation was very limited. And so I think one of the takeaways from that to me then is that we really do need to focus the discussion on the root cause of the problem in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. And if we're going to spend, you know, billions of dollars in solutions, we have to be very cautious we're not investing in solutions that just deal with the surface of the problem. In other words, a Band-Aid solution let's call it.

AMT: Right. Well and there are those who have argued that we've actually geoengineering our way into this problem by the burning of fossil fuels and other ways that we've created these emissions, so what makes a man made geoengineering solution a problem?

IAN BRUCE: Well, I mean, I think it is a very high risk last ditch effort I would say. So we have to be very cautious, you know, that if we're intervening with the Earth's ecosystems at this level, that there are numerous unintended consequences that could happen. Like I said before, you know, moving displacing large amounts of nutrient rich seawater, will that or could that present a problem to fish stocks, could it collapse fish stocks? So these are some of the issues that we need to be aware of. But you're right. Climate change, the issue of climate change itself and burning fossil fuels, that was an experiment that, you know, our grandparents and our parents generation didn't know about the problem of climate change. We now do know about this problem and we have the ability to act but we need to be focusing and prioritizing our efforts on addressing the root cause, which has primarily been the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. So we definitely need to be moving to clean energy systems. And I'm very confident that we can do that. But we need to obviously focus there and put the majority of our resources there. We will also have to adapt to climate change and cope with some of the impacts of climate change that we're dealing with today and into the future. But I think we just have to be very cautious with some of these geoengineering solutions and make sure that we understand them adequately before we consider them.

AMT: OK. Ian Bruce, thanks for your time.

IAN BRUCE: Thanks very much. Yes.

AMT: That's the Ian Bruce, Director of science and policy at the David Suzuki Foundation. He's in Vancouver. My next guest has studied the remarkable and often controversial history of geoengineering projects that have been proposed and sometimes implemented. Jim Fleming is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science Technology and Society at Colby College. He's the author of Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. And he's in China, Maine. Hello to you.

JIM FLEMING: Good morning Anna Maria.

AMT: So as you listen to this and you take a long historical view, what's the context for the kind of proposal that Steve Desch is proposing with ten million buoys on Arctic ice?

JIM FLEMING: Well, certainly history matters. And I'm thinking that, I'm actually in agreement with some of the things said already. That is I think we should study this but we shouldn't do it. I think it's a perfectly perfect thing for an astrophysicist to do, is think about the planet, but planetary surgery as James Lovelock said in 2009 is sort of like barber surgery. The physicians and surgeons of the Middle Ages. It's very crude. The climate models are not predictive. They won't find us what's going to happen in the Arctic if we tinker with it. And so what I'm hearing is in the genre of what I called geoscientific speculation. Kind of like Freeman Dyson's Dyson sphere, surrounding the planet with the debris from the asteroid belt. These proposals are truly speculative. And I do agree with Ian Bruce that they are high risk. When you started the segment, you said what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. And we have no idea what would happen if we start putting, you know, five or ten water pumps on every square kilometre.

AMT: Give us some examples of earlier proposals for geoengineering the climate and the atmosphere.

JIM FLEMING: It goes way back. In 1840s, our first US national meteorologist James Espy proposed making pretty much an artificial volcano by lighting giant fires along the Appalachian Mountain ridges. He thought the smoke and the heat from these fires would make it rain and would bring refreshing rains to the east coast of the US. A hundred years later, Irving Langmuir, who was a Nobel Prize winner, thought that he could control hurricanes and he could make the desert blossom and he could actually also control sort of what we call El Nino out in the Pacific, with his silver iodide chemicals and his dry ice technologies that came from General Electric. These people have recently been called barking mad. They lost their scientific reputations by going too far in their speculation.

AMT: Did any of those actually, did they try any of that stuff?

JIM FLEMING: Yes they did. And the one that's more recent and they really did try. Which is not about climate change, but it's about planetary engineering, was the 1962 H-bomb detonation and the magnetosphere, just to see what would happen. Well really to see if they could block Soviet attacks on the US or whether they could disrupt radio communications with an H-bomb in outer space. This actually happened, it was called Starfish Prime.

AMT: And so they set off the bomb so that the radioactive particles would cut out the communications?

JIM FLEMING: Well, when James Van Allen discovered the magnetosphere in 1958, that the metaphor was on the blackboard at Iowa where his workers were was space is radioactive. And so the military thought well, maybe we could make it more radioactive in times of national crisis. And so we could block out radio, we could possibly make an electromagnetic pulse halfway across the world if we needed to say, somewhere, maybe like over Moscow. And so these techniques have truly been militarized. Even the Langmuir story, the silver iodide, was seen as a possible cloud weapon. I wrote a paper called Cloud Wars, where the military got into this in the 1950s. And so anything you can do with the high technology, earth shaking technologies, you could possibly use in a nefarious way too. I'm not saying that's the case here. I'm just saying it's a perfect study for an astrophysicist but maybe not a climatologist.

AMT: Right, OK. Let's go back to the H-bomb. What happened? What did people see?

JIM FLEMING: [laughs]

AMT: Don’t leave me hanging. [chuckles]

JIM FLEMING: The Atomic Energy Commission was very excited to have the public know about their tests, about their prowess. And so they shot bombs on the surface under the water in the high atmosphere, in the magnetosphere. So they announced the shot and they had gigantic cocktail parties and planned to watch the shot out in Hawaii. They were called rainbow bomb parties and people gathered on the hillsides and they looked out over the ocean, and they actually generated what they called an aurora tropicalis. We in Maine and Canada know about the aurora borealis, but this was a neologism light show that was up in the sky and the EMP from that Starfish Prime knocked out the traffic lights and some garage door openers, heavy electrical switching in Hawaii in 1962. And so the current concern is, you know, about the EMP. But this is a real thing and it really did happen.

AMT: What year was that?

JIM FLEMING: 1962.

AMT: Wow. [chuckles]

JIM FLEMING: At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was the potential exchange at the surface of bombs. And the US was demonstrating their prowess in outer space.

AMT: OK, well, clearly, we're almost out of time here. But before I let you go, there's a lesson here.

JIM FLEMING: Yes there is. It's based on intervention not control. I was on the US National Academy Research Council panel and we named our studies climate intervention not climate control. The analogy to AIM Arctic Ice Management is to the solar radiation management. And we had Marcia McNutt, the Chair of our national academy saying management is too strong of a word for this. This is not management. This is tinkering.

AMT: OK. And tinkering can lead to trouble. And when you look back on it in history we say what were they thinking?

JIM FLEMING: History, yeah. [chuckles]

AMT: Jim Fleming, thank you for your time.

JIM FLEMING: Thank you.

AMT: Jim Fleming, Charles A. Dana Professor of Science Technology and Society at Colby College, the author of Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. He's in China, Maine. Let us know what you think of the idea of refreezing Arctic ice. Share your thoughts on Facebook. You can tweet us we're @TheCurrentCBC, email us through our site cbc.ca/thecurrent. And while you're there click on features and The Disruptors, and check out some of the other disruptions. We've been bringing to you some ideas for disruptions over the past season. Stay with us, this is The Current.

[Music: Extro]

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Firing Lines: How three Canadian women became war reporters in WWI

Guests: Debbie Marshall

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

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: bomb blasts and gunfire]

AMT: Second time we've had sounds of war on this program today. This is from the First World War as imagined in the 1930 film All Quiet On The Western Front. That war began more than 100 years ago and its stories have been told and retold over the years, in movies, books, poetry, theatre. But in all the historical accounts that have been collected over the last century, the majority of stories have been told from the perspective of the men in the trenches. Men of course did most of the fighting and dying in the war. It was women who took up their places at home. You've heard the stories of women working in munitions factories, offices, field hospitals. But you may not have heard of the women who first told the stories from the field. The small group of Canadian women who worked as war reporters, war correspondents during the First World War. Beatrice Nasmyth, Mary MacLeod Moore and Elizabeth Montizambert were three of those women, and their stories are being told for the first time in a new book called Firing Lines: Three Canadian Women Write The First World War. I should mention I wrote the foreword for that book. Debbie Marshall is its author and she's in Victoria. Hello.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Hello.

AMT: I didn't know about these women. How did they come across your radar?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well I was working on another book about a First World War nurse who was elected to the Alberta legislature. And these three women covered her election and one of them was her publicity campaign person. So that's how I came to know about them. And I thought there had to be more to tell about them, so I started collecting their articles.

AMT: How many other female Canadian war correspondents were there at the time?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Oh, very very few. I think there were a few British, a few American women that were overseas, Canadian women maybe two or three. Very small number.

AMT: Now, before the war broke out, how common was it for women to be working in Canadian newsrooms? Well, there were about 200 out of about 1,500 men. So 200 Canadian women to 1,500 Canadian men.

AMT: And what was the working environment like for them at the time?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Oh it's not easy. There was a lot of sexism. A lot of the men hit on the women. They faced a lot of sexual harassment. They were often given the women's page as their focus, hard news reporting was pretty difficult to find. A few examples, Kit Coleman covered the Spanish-American war, people like that. But very few women got the hard news beat.

AMT: So how did these three end up as war reporters?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, the thing is that men go off to war. So many male reporters joined up in the cause. So there was a sort of a need to fill pages in newspapers, and these women were adventurous by nature. They were eager to have that opportunity and they were suffragettes too. So they saw this as an opportunity to show what women could do in a nontraditional job.

AMT: So they were really ahead of their time in that kind thinking right?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Very much so. Very much so.

AMT: And so they go and they start reporting. How was their role as female war reporters perceived by the public back home?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, they were seen as giving the women's angle on the war. One of them said about tearing apart the veil that stood between a woman in the home back in Canada and the men fighting overseas. So they were giving a sort of a bird's eye view of what was happening to the men that these women loved back home.

AMT: And they obviously had perspectives as women. How did that affect the kind of reporting they were doing?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, I think that they had a real empathy for the men. They were very concerned with intimate details, you know, how they were doing in hospital, their loneliness that they suffered overseas, the sacrifices that they were making, that kind of thing. I think that would have been seen as a more feminine perspective perhaps. But they could be pretty tough too. They would interview men in hospitals whose faces had been burned beyond recognition really, by these flame throwers for instance. So they were tough too.

AMT: And of course, by talking to the wounded, they were able to piece together what was happening at the front in a different way.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Yeah and often the less savoury kinds of sides of war too. They would hear because the men would trust them. You see as women, they weren't so scary to the men, they weren't seen as a serious in some senses I guess as reporters. So the men would open up to them like a sister or mother or friend.

AMT: And it's interesting, because a lot of the war reporting at first was very patriotic, very much like our guys look at how great they are. And they were finding very different kind of scenes in hospitals.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well yes, and they met with men who would often share stories about war crimes they had committed for instance, which I found quite surprising. I didn't expect that in the research that I was doing.

AMT: Well, to get a sense of their reporting, we have recorded some passages from their work. Let's listen to a little bit of this. This first is the work of Mary MacLeod Moore writing about how the war changed the way of life for people on the home front in Britain.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Mary MacLeod Moore, London, February 1916.

[Music: patriotic war marching song]

VOICE 1: There is a good deal of talk about economy but it is taking people a long time to learn that really to be economical will mean ceasing to live as they have been accustomed all their lives, ceasing to have six or eight servants in a small family and managing with two or three. Ceasing to spend money easily in buying all they fancied or thought was necessary to their position. Ceasing in fact, to regard their position before the war as a standard and realizing that to help the country, they must start afresh. So far as a manner of living is concerned. No young woman need be long without work. So there is no question of the made suffering if they are discharged. On the contrary, there is immense difficulty in getting good servants. For so many have been attracted to other fields of labour. Only very high wages will induce them to give up the positions and the independence the war has placed in their way. These women, many of whom never saw machinery so to speak before the war, are employed on 471 different processes. They work on airplanes making bullets and cartridges and many of the other branches of the great work of supporting our armies.

[Music: patriotic war marching song]

AMT: OK. Mary MacLeod Moore's work there read by one of our producers at The Current. It's so interesting Debbie Marshall, because she was essentially embedded with a society, partly aristocratic and partly not, that actually was dealing with the first deprivations of war.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well she herself had grown up in sort of genteel poverty and she had a certain disdain, I think, for some of these very wealthy women who were all complaining about the lack of servants during the war and yet these servant girls were going off to jobs where they were earning much more money, were independent, didn't have to work these long long days as domestic servants in big houses, and the rich people didn't really like that very much. You know, it was a very stratified class centred society in Britain at that time. And the war changed a lot of things.

AMT: How much was Mary MacLeod Moore affected by that need to be economical?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Oh very much so. When she went to Britain, she stayed with her brother initially, who was a wealthy, he was an advertising executive, so he was making good money. But then he joined the war effort and they had to move into these, what they called rooms with attendance, which were basically bed sitting rooms where food was cooked and brought up to the tenants. And she supported her mother while she was working as a journalist. So she really struggled hard.

AMT: Now, how close were they getting to the front?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: In the case of Elizabeth Montizambert, she was living in Paris when the war started and she would often be right near the front. She would go out to Verdon with the Paris Press Syndicate, which was an association of journalists. She would be a volunteer and would report on her experiences serving coffee and things to the poor French soldiers who were wounded. One of the things that really stuck out for me was they would have these squares of gauze that they would go along and they would put on the wounded men's faces who had terrible wounds. And there were flies that would be landing on their faces and these squares of gauze would prevent the flies from landing on them, because the men were too weak to bat them away.

AMT: Well, she actually talks about that in a reading we have of her work.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Oh.

AMT: This is from her volunteering on a hospital train during the war and that took her very close, as you say, to the action. Let's listen to that clip.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Elizabeth Montizambert, Paris, July 1915.

[Sound: steam train sound]

VOICE 1: The stretcher cases come first and are carefully lifted up the inhuman height a French train thinks it necessary to rear itself up the station platform. A wagon can hold 18 stretchers when necessary. One nurse orderly is attached to each wagon and as a rule they are very gentle and sympathetic, though they make no claim to special skill.

[Sound: flies buzzing]

VOICE 1: One of the greatest trials we have had to combat were the flies, which swarmed in thousands over every train, harassing the wounded and adding to the discomfort of the heat. Luckily, some friends had sent me a supply of little paper fans from Paris and they were the delight of all the men with arms available to use them. Of course, the nearer one is to the trenches the worse they become. So what to us seems a veritable plague is a comparative relief to the man.

AMT: OK, a sample of reporting from Elizabeth Montizambert, who was sharing those little paper fans from Paris with the wounded. What stands out for you about the way that she reported?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, she was always willing to insert herself wherever the action was. She would run to the scenes of recent bombings. She was very unafraid, but yet she also had this sort of aristocratic flair. She came from a very wealthy family, she was very cultured, so she was equally at home covering a display for instance by Rodin who was alive at this time, as she was at going out to the front and looking after the wounded men.

AMT: She was actually a fashion reporter in Paris first?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Yes she was.

AMT: And what's interesting about that is that at some point, the fashion workers start uprising. What happens?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, they go on strike because they're being paid quite poorly for manufacturing, for instance, the men's uniforms. And she was very supportive of them because the French soldiers were among the poorest paid of the Allies, so their families were living in terrible poverty. And many of these manufacturers also during this period, used it as an excuse to pay the women even less than they were already earning. And so they were really struggling. And most people in French society supported the strike of these women.

AMT: This fashion strike actually became a much wider strike.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: It did. The men at the front also went on strike. They stopped fighting. This was huge. There were a few men executed for sort of initiating this mutiny, as it was seen. But the French had to raise their salaries, had to help the men as a result of it. They were even being put to work even when they were off of the front lines, when they were being pulled back. They were still put to work. So they were exhausted and they were so poorly paid and poorly fed as well.

AMT: It's interesting because, you know, what looks like on the surface a trivial beat at a time of war that then morphs into something else, really gave her insights into what society was doing and she was able to report on the societal changes as the war gets closer.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: She was kind of bohemian in some ways. Her wealth that allowed her to go through all levels of society. She was equally at home hanging out with the Massey family for instance and folks like that, as she was with hanging out with poor French artists in little tiny flats. She was very open minded herself, very avant garde in many ways.

AMT: Today there are a few major battles that we talk about when we talk about Canada's role in the First World War. Vimy Ridge, the Second Battle of Ypres. What did these three reporters have to say about those events at the time?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, they reported about them from afar of course, and they were extremely patriotic in some senses. We would talk about them as being very biased. We wouldn't see those as objective accounts. I think they more talked about the wreckage of war afterwards. What happened to these men after they had been in these battles and how they survived, how they came back and often how they went back to war.

AMT: How strict was the censorship they had to deal with us they sent their stories back to Canada?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: It was an offense, it was seen as treasonous if you wrote anything that cast anything of a bad light against the war. So these women had to be very careful about what they wrote. But Beatrice Nasmyth didn't like being censored and she often sent reports home via her brother who was a businessman, who would come to Britain during the war. So they didn't have to go through the undersea cable to Canada, where they would face censorship again. They would first be censored in Britain, then they'd be censored when they got to Canada before they even got to the newspaper. So she would get around that directly to her editor, who would then have to make a decision himself as to how far he would go in allowing her stories to run.

AMT: Mm. Well, we have a reading of some of her work as well. She witnessed a zeppelin bombing raid and managed to get her description published in the Vancouver Province. Let's listen to an excerpt of that.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Beatrice Nasmyth, London, September 1915. The night was starry and there was no moon.

[Sound: zeppelin motors]

VOICE 1: As we strained our eyes upward, there was a sound as if 50 motorcycles, each with the exhaust open rounding the home stretch on a heavenly racecourse. Then two dazzling lights struck.

[Sound: small blast]

VOICE 1: Full of different angles on the two foremost marauders and touched them into mammoth glow worms of shimmering silver. It was an unforgettable sight.

[Sound: machine gun bursts]

VOICE 1: Simultaneously, there was a hoarse hollow coughing from the stationary guns and an accompanying volley of explosions.

[Sound: bombs volleying]

VOICE 1: And two bombs fell and burst about half a mile away. Fortunately, quite in the open fields where no damage was caused. There was something wonderfully enthralling in the vision of these silver ships of the sky. Their great aluminum bodies gleaming like the surface of a placid sea in a full moon. In the vivifying light from the great search lamps, we can see the shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns burst and fall back in a shower of gold. It was like looking on at some dream of a future century, and when the pageant was over we came back to the president with a shudder that such horrors could really be in our own day and night.

AMT: Beatrice Nasmyth’s report there. Debbie Marshall, that's an example of something that would have been censored if it had gone through.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Yes yes. Very much so. They were trying to keep those stories back, especially of civilian casualties that really horrified people, the notion now that civilians were victims of war as well.

AMT: That's not the first time she was really close to a bombing right?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Oh yes, she was often close. And what was really interesting about Beatrice is I have her letters home, which paralleled the same story that she produced. So I know that these were very genuine accounts of the bombing raids and she would hang out the windows looking at these bombing raids. She really was an adventurous individual.

AMT: Yeah, you're supposed to run the other way.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Yes, very much so. It was very dangerous, especially from glass flying. Many people were killed from glass.

AMT: In fact, I mean, this was at a time in London where they had blackouts right?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Yes.

AMT: I mean, if you went down into the streets, like, you didn't even know where you were going because everyone had lights off so that the bombers, the German bombers wouldn’t know where to drop their bombs.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, she tells a hilarious story of leading a whole group of people along a road because they're all lost, they can hardly find their way along the street because it's so black out. And she finally goes up to a house and asks for a lantern to borrow. And she later finds out that the woman who she's borrowed the lamp from is Marie Lloyd, who is a silent film actress. And so she said she has a lot of adventures.

AMT: How much danger were they in day to day?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, certainly not the same danger as the men were facing in the trenches. But they would have frequent bombing raids. Paris was bombed by the long range gun of the Germans. Many people were killed. Churches were destroyed that were filled with people. You just never knew what was going to happen next.

AMT: And they were living just amongst everybody else.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: That’s right.

AMT: That's really, random, really.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: And when they went to France and they were part of the first group of women, Canadian women, allowed to officially tour the battlefront, the lines of communication in particular, many of those hospitals were bombed and women died in those hospitals during the war. So it was still risky business.

AMT: They did all meet up on some of this work in Paris. Were they friends?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, they were associates I think. They were all covering similar stories and they belonged to clubs, the society of women journalists. So their paths did cross quite often, but I don't think their friendships were really close. They came from very different backgrounds.

AMT: I'm really struck though, that their reporting really was about the wounded soldiers and the regular civilians caught in the middle of it all.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Yes. The women who had lost four or five sons for instance. They would interview Belgian refugees who were pouring into Britain early in the war. They would interview individual soldiers and then later they would write their obituaries, which I think must have been terribly hard. Sometimes they would have even relationships with these men and then the men would go back and be killed.

AMT: Which newspapers were carrying their stories?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: The Vancouver Province, The Montreal Gazette, Saturday Night Magazine, The London Sunday Times and then they also freelanced for magazines as well. They had to work very hard because they made their income from freelance writing. Beatrice wrote on the back of her visiting cards all the names of the articles she wrote and how much she was paid for them during the war.

AMT: It's so interesting, because we often think about women covering war, and we look to Martha Gellhorn, who was credited for really changing the way frontline reporting was done around D-day. She went to the hospitals and she talked to the civilians. And for Canadians to know there were Canadian women covering that, for Canadian journalists to know too.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Yes.

AMT: The Canadian women were doing this, they were already doing this kind of thing and changing the way war was covered.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: I couldn't bear the thought that these three women were out there writing these incredible stories. They had thousands of readers and now we know nothing about them. And they were really breaking the ice for other women, they were opening doors.

AMT: Why do you think that is? I mean, we make a lot of a few men who reported, mostly of the Second World War but who reported war for Canada, and these women just weren't on the radar.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, I think there's a lot of mythology around the First World War, and we're especially caught up with the writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who wrote these wonderful poetry and sort of lyrical accounts of war and their angst around war. And I also think we buy the idea that women stayed home. We buy the ideas of the politicians and the religious leaders that women were too fragile to be out at war somehow during this period. When women were in fact working as military auxiliaries, they were working as nurses and of course, French women were right within the sound of guns. They were farming within the sounds of guns, they still had to support families. Where were they going to go? So women were always in the theatre of war, it's just that we don't tend to credit women journalists as being out there.

AMT: And so Beatrice Nasmyth, Mary MacLeod Moore, and Elizabeth Montizambert were not able to make a living only from their writing. How did they make ends meet?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, Beatrice worked for the Alberta government as a publicity agent. She had to work full time. Elizabeth had her own money. She was a very wealthy woman, came from a very wealthy family. Mary MacLeod Moore had a prodigious output. She was writing all the time to support her mother and herself. And later she married her editor and he was very well-to-do. So she was able to get support there.

AMT: Beatrice actually was like sort of working both ends against the middle, something you'd never see today.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well of course, being a publicity agent for the Alberta government. So you wouldn't hear of that today at all. And of course, she covered the Versailles Peace Conference. And again, while working for the Alberta government and for Premier Sifton, who was a signer of the Versailles Peace Treaty.

AMT: That's right, she was actually helping other people to cover it as a publicity person and then writing about it at the same time.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Yeah, yeah. Little biased there.

AMT: How did their writing change and what does their writing tell us about how their views of the war changed over time?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, I think as the war progressed, the sense of patriotism was dulled. I think they began to get a very realistic sense that war wasn't just this heroic great thing with the British Empire riding in and saving the day. They began to realize it was a much more complicated thing than that. And towards the end of the war, there's a great sadness that I think comes into their writing, a sense of toughness and it's not so much of an adventure anymore.

AMT: Elizabeth Montizambert actually started writing and warning of the rise of Nazi Germany at some point too.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Yes, yes she did. She was very concerned. And being in France I think gave her a very close bird's eye view of just the impact of the war, the devastation that Britain didn't experience in the same way that France did. I mean, France was a terribly devastated country at the end of the war. And Mary was also deeply concerned, because she traveled in Germany after the war, and began to be very concerned for the League of Nations. She wanted to see peace continue. And then she started witnessing things in Germany like young children doing the Hitler salute and this kind of thing in the thirties, and she became very frightened.

AMT: What happened to them?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well, Beatrice went back to Canada. She married a soldier, a British soldier and she did freelance writing for Chatelaine and she wrote fiction, strangely enough. She didn't write hard news again. Elizabeth became the London editor for The Montreal Gazette and I think that's an incredible breakthrough, because that was just unheard of, for a woman to be a senior editor in a newspaper.

AMT: And what year would that have been roughly?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: That would have been about 1920.

AMT: Hm. OK.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: It's amazing really.

AMT: Yeah.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: And Mary MacLeod Moore continued to write right through into the Second World War.

AMT: Elizabeth ended up with dementia.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Yes she did. And I sometimes wonder if that had a little bit to do with PTSD. But, you know, her only memories that she seemed to preserve, and I have her medical records, was of the war. She remembered the First World War and she would tell stories to the doctors about her reporting at that time.

AMT: And of course no one would have been able to diagnose PTSD at the time.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: No no.

AMT: And Mary MacLeod Moore disappeared at one point, she just kind of dropped away.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Yeah, her writing stops before the end of the Second World War and nothing else is heard of her. I couldn't track any more stories. It's as though she did disappear. And she dies in 1960, and she's buried with her husband and her mother, and there's not even a marker on the grave with her name.

AMT: Hm.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: And I find that very sad.

AMT: Hm. And so all of these women really, they broke they broke molds, they were real disrupters in their own way, huh?

DEBBIE MARSHALL: They did. And I think, and they're funny too. I think many of accounts are really humourous, especially Beatrice’s. And they still seem to speak to me across the years. They're really fresh in many ways.

AMT: Well, by rediscovering them, you've given us all a little piece of our history. So thank you.

DEBBIE MARSHALL: Well thank you.

AMT: Debbie Marshall, author of Firing Lines: Three Canadian Women Write the First World War. She joined us from Vancouver. Well, let us know what you think find us on Facebook. Tweet us, we are @TheCurrentCBC. Who else are we missing from the way we cover our history and we don't talk about? Let us know if you know. You can also find us on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's our program for today. I want to remind you you can always take The Current with you with our CBC Radio app, you can browse through past episodes of our show you can listen in just a few seconds and you can also search for stories you missed or want to hear again. Listen live to your local CBC station through the app on your smartphone or your tablet. And of course, you get the app free from the App Store or Google Play. Now, we were talking about the conflict in Ukraine at the start of our program. If the country thought it might get some relief by hosting this year's very popular Eurovision song competition, that hope is fading. 21 members of the Ukrainian organizing team for Eurovision quit last week. They say they've been cut out of the decision making process. Well, no matter how that plays out, Ukrainians can still glow in the memory of last year's competition, because Ukrainian singer Jamala won it all. So we're going to leave you with Jamala singing 1944, at last year's Eurovision competition. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti thank you for listening to The Current.

[Music: Jamala]

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February 20, 2017 full episode transcript

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