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The Current Transcript for September 26, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I said my sister has been dating a N-word person and every time he puts a filthy black hand on her pure white body I cringe. His response to me was: "You're just kind of guy were looking for. When can we meet?"

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Ron Stallworth was 19 a new cop and the only black man on the force when he began an improbable undercover investigation. He would join the KKK. Years later after a long career working undercover in a range of U.S. cities he wrote a memoir and a small niche publisher picked it up. It is that book that director Spike Lee found in that memoir in Lee's hands is now a box office hit. Black Klansman has its moments of hilarity, but Ron Stallworth's story of a white supremacist organization with deep ties and community and tentacles and weaponized militias resonates decades later. Ron Stallworth is my guest in just a moment. Also today, if you work in any kind of institutional office you might have had that personality test the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

SOUNDCLIP

It is used regularly at 89 of the Fortune 100 companies. It has been translated into over two dozen different languages. It is across the globe.

AMT: But despite its ubiquity it's a test with no basis in scientific fact and its creators, a mother-daughter team, had no formal training in psychiatry. In half an hour, Merve Emre takes us to into the strange history of a personality test that is both persistent and profitable. And picture a movie screen where all you can see are raging angry flames. As they churn and swirl you start to see what's burning, elephant tusks arranged in a cluster of funeral pyres. Now imagine being the cinematographer who took those shots.

SOUNDCLIP

These are thousands of majestic beasts that have been killed mostly by poachers, by humans. You're human and so you feel the weight of that.

AMT: In an hour I will be joined by Nicolas de Pencier, Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky the formidable filmmaking photographic team that crossed six continents to document the impact we humans are having on our planet. Meet the beautiful minds behind the arresting and haunting images of the film Anthropocene. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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The true story behind BlacKkKlansman: How a black police detective infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan

Guest: Ron Stallworth

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Phone dialing].

VOICE 1: Paul, this is Ron Stallworth calling.

VOICE 2: Who am I speaking with?

VOICE 1: It'd David Duke grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. That David Duke?

DIRECTOR: Cut.

VOICE 2: Last time I checked. What can I do for you?

DIRECTOR: Well.

VOICE 1: Since you were asked I hate blacks. I hate Jews. Mexicans and Irish. Italians and Chinese. But my mouth to God's ears I really hate those black rats and anyone else really that doesn't have pure white Aryan blood running through their veins.

VOICE 2: [Unintelligible] talking about true white Americans.

VOICE 1: God bless white America.

AMT: That is from the trailer for the Spike Lee film the critically acclaimed film black Klansman. The movie tells the true story of Ron Stallworth. He was the first African-American detective in the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department and he ran a sting operation that infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. The movie is based on his memoir Black Klansmen a memoir and we have the real Ron Stallworth with us from Chicago. Hello.

RON STALLWORTH: Hello there. How are you?

AMT: I'm well thanks I'm interested to hear your thoughts on all of this. What was it like seeing yourself portrayed in a major Hollywood movie?

RON STALLWORTH: Very surreal. Almost like an out of body experience to sit in the audience and hear the words that I wrote five years ago and see the events that I lived 40 years ago recreated almost the in some cases to perfection.

AMT: You liked the movie.

RON STALLWORTH: I loved the movie.

AMT: Okay. Now that scene where you call the Klan, how close to reality was that?

RON STALLWORTH: Very true. The scene, the trailer edited he actually uses the so-called N-word, a term I hate by the way, he actually uses the so-called N-word which is what I did. And I said I hated them, N-word. And anybody else who isn't pure Aryan white like I am.

AMT: So you were acting long before the movie came out.

RON STALLWORTH: That's all undercover work is, a form of acting.

AMT: Well we'll get back to talking about the Klan. At first I mentioned you were the first black detective in the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department. Did you encounter racial discrimination when you joined?

RON STALLWORTH: I encountered a little bit yes.

AMT: What era are we talking when was that? Remind us.

RON STALLWORTH: I joined the Colorado Springs Police Department in 1972. November at the age of 19. And at the time I was hired I was the only black face in the lily white 250 sworn men department. It was interesting.

AMT: Tell me a little bit more about the kind of racial discrimination you had to confront.

RON STALLWORTH: Well the movie depicts some of it in the scene where officers come to the records bureau and ask for records on a toad. Toad was a term used by Colorado Springs officers to refer to black people. And at the age of 19 I was in a new environment. The police culture I wanted to be one of them and fit in with them and I went along with them and started using the term that they were using, the language of the Colorado Springs Police Department. I did not realize at the time that the word toad stood for blacks. And it took a little while before the light bulb went on in my head and I realize every time we asked for a record on a toad I was putting a record on a black face. So once I realized it I stopped responding to requests for records on toads. I made the officers asked me for a record on the individual by name, date of birth, race and gender. And it caused a few problems with some people initially but they eventually got over it and responded accordingly.

AMT: They got the message.

RON STALLWORTH: They got the message.

AMT: It is interesting. You were young man.

RON STALLWORTH: I was 19.

AMT: So there was a lot to take in I'm guessing.

RON STALLWORTH: It was, it was, it made me grow up quick and I was grateful for it.

AMT: So let's talk about your undercover assignment on the Klan. How did you decide to contact the KKK?

RON STALLWORTH: I was sitting in my office, as the movie depicts, reading a newspaper and I saw this classified ad. It simply said Ku Klux Klan for information. And then there was a P.O. box. So I wrote a letter and, like what the movie depicts, the movie has John David calling him. I actually wrote a letter to that P.O. Box and in a letter I basically said again I hate the N-word etc etc. And I told him I wanted to join in order to stop the abuse of the white race. And then I did a mistake. I made a mistake that I should have known better but I had a brain cramp that day. I signed my real name to the letter instead of my undercover name and I attached the undercover phone line to the letter with my real name and put it in the mail and forgot about it. About a week or two later I get a phone call from a German who described himself as Kennedale, the local organizer for the Colorado Springs chapter of the KKK, and he wanted to know why I wanted to be in the Klan. So I repeated what I wrote in the letter that I spice it up a little bit. I said my sister has been dating a N-word person and every time he puts his filthy black hand on her pure white body I cringe. I said I want to join so I can stop the abuse of the white race. His response to me was: 'You're just kind of guy were looking for. When can we meet?' And with that I ended up launching a seven and a half month undercover investigation into the KKK.

AMT: And this guy who answered the phone, the local organizer, he was a soldier.

RON STALLWORTH: He was a sergeant stationed at Fort Carson Colorado.

AMT: Very telling. So, meet face to face. This brings us to your colleague Chuck. So how did he get picked to go and pretend to be you?

RON STALLWORTH: I picked him. Chuck was a narcotics officer I had worked in narcotics a year before. Chuck came in after I left. He was a good cop and he was a good undercover cop and he was about my height, my weight. And when I when Kennedale asked how he would know me at this meeting, I described basically Chuck. And when I sent chuck into the meeting I gave chuck any identification I had minus a picture. He had credit card, library card, social security card, anything that identified him as Ron Stallworth. But there was no picture attached to the identification just in case they should try to ask him to prove he was who he said he was.

AMT: So what did your undercover investigation reveal about the working relationship between the Klan and other hate groups?

RON STALLWORTH: The Klan was trying to unite with other hate groups. One in particular the Posse Comitatus, very popular in Colorado Springs. The Posse later evolved into the militia groups of the 80s and 90s. The posse is a survivalist group. They have a white superiority ideological slant to them. They believe in stockpiling food and weapons in preparation for the big racial holy war that's going to come off, in their opinion. And whenever we dealt with posse members they did not believe in the constitutional authority of city police officers. To them the Constitution of the United States only recognizes the sheriff. And as a result they did not recognize federal aid agents or city police officers. So every time we would stop a Posse member for a traffic offense or any other fence and request identification, as we do in this country, they would refuse to respond. Naturally that created a conflict. I'll tell you how I resolved one conflict with a Posse member on a traffic stop. He was a short skinny guy. I requested his driver's license and registration on his car. He refused to give him to me on the slant that I was not of an official authority of the law. I asked him three times for this. He refused three times. After that I reached in the car window which was rolled down and literally pulled him to the window out of the car, threw him on the ground and handcuffed him and carted him off to jail charged him with failure to obey an officer. That was typical behavior of the Posse back then. So these guys were very ideological. They were very serious, very dedicated to their beliefs and they were dangerous agents.

AMT: Did you get any kind of a secret joy in knowing that you as an African-American was hoodwinking the Klan as this investigation went forward?

RON STALLWORTH: It was a secret. I was having fun. I was having fun making fools out of them, especially David Duke who prided himself on his intelligence.

AMT: You were assigned to guard him when he came to Colorado Springs. How did that go?

RON STALLWORTH: Yes on the day he arrived, January 10th, 1979, for publicity blitz, my chief came to me and told me that they were receiving death threats against Duke and he didn't want anything to happen to him while he was in Colorado Springs. So the chief said 'I don't have anybody else available you are going to be his security.' Now part of the job of the intelligence unit where I worked, part of our job, was VIP security as needed. So, it wasn't unusual to get this command. What was unusual was that I had an active undercover investigation into the Klan and I was talking to David Duke on a semi regular basis and being put in the position of having to be right beside him and shadowing him would prove - let's just say - it would prove interesting.

AMT: Good choice of words.

RON STALLWORTH: Yes.

AMT: He didn't go 'Jee, your voice sounds familiar', after all the phone conversations?

RON STALLWORTH: Well that was part of my apprehension in going and doing this assignment. But when I met with him, I identified myself as a detective. I never gave him my name. I said 'I am a detective with the Colorado Springs Police Department. You're receiving death threats and I've been assigned as your security'. I said 'I am a professional. I don't agree with your political ideology but I will do everything I can to ensure that you get out of my city safely'. He then gave me the Klan handshake. He thanked me, very kind, very polite. And that's when I asked him for if he would mind taking a photo with me. I bought a Polaroid camera. I hadn't planned anything other than to get a picture of me with him. And he said sure not at all. So I put my arm around him and the Grand Dragon, or state leader for the state of Colorado, Duke on my right, the Grand Dragon on my lap. I put my arm on their shoulders and Duke push my arm away. He said 'I'm sorry but I can't be seen in a photo with you like that'. I said 'I understand. Excuse me'. And then I walked over to Chuck who I had handed the camera to. So you had Ron Stallworth with the camera taking a picture of Ron Stallworth. And I walked over to Chuck and I said, 'on the count of three snap a photo'. And then I went back stood between David Duke and the Grand Dragon with my hands down by my waist and I said, 'one, two' and on the count of three I raised my hands, put my arms around their shoulders and the photo was snapped. Duke bolted away from me, tried to snatch the camera and the photo out of Chuck's hands and I got it. And he tried to- He reached over to try to get it for me and I looked at him and said 'If you touch me I will arrest you for assault on a police officer. That's worth about five years in prison. Don't do it'. What I said don't do it, Duke just glared at me, with the most intense look of hatred you can imagine and I glared back at him with a sly smirk on my face. And he then walked away over to his followers who were also stunned. And shortly thereafter he proceeded to give one of his white superiority speeches that I had quite frankly just destroyed.

AMT: Wow. You know David Duke continues to be a major player in the neo fascist movement in America and around the world. In August of 2017 he was at the White Supremacist rallies in Charlottesville Virginia. I've got a bit of tape here from Vice News. Have a listen to this.

SOUNDCLIP

We're telling the truth. We are talking about the ethnic cleansing of America and the destruction of the American way of life and a new Bolshevik style society, with no freedom, no freedom of speech in this country. That's really where we're going in America and that's got to change. See you all later. We will be back.

AMT: Ron Stallworth's what do you think when you hear that voice?

RON STALLWORTH: That's the same voice that I heard 40 years ago. I might add it's the same voice that I heard a little more than a month ago when he called me and insisted he was not a racist or white supremacist. David Duke is saying the same things today that he was saying 40 years ago, and things he was saying 40 years ago is what Donald Trump was saying two years ago when he campaigned for president of the United States.

AMT: I was just going to ask you, we see what seems to be those who identify as white supremacists making themselves very vocal, very public in rallies in different parts of the United States and quite frankly in Washington. How are you processing this? What are you thinking as you're watching this unfold right now?

RON STALLWORTH: Well it's not surprising to me. Like I said the events of today I was hearing 40 years ago there were the expressions the 'Make America Great Again'. David Duke was talking about returning America to its greatness. Same words. I mean same meaning just different phrasing. Basically Donald Trump used David Duke's playbook to accomplish what David Duke tried and failed to do.

AMT: So you know that your book that Spike Lee found, your memoir, all these years later that story and you make the point some of it hilarious. Why do you think it's so important for people to watch this movie now?

RON STALLWORTH: I think it's important because the movie resonates with people. They they see the connection. Spike made the connection very well between the white supremacy, the historical white supremacy and America that leads up to the current state of affairs we find our selves in with Donald Trump. When you see the opening scene of the Confederate flag on the battlefield in the movie Gone With The Wind, that begins it. Then you see the Birth of a Nation scenes in 1915. He moves forward in time with that depiction of how they saw blacks. Then you move forward to the Alec Baldwin's scene, Ken Brew Beauregard was the name that he used and he reflects the white supremacists of the 50s and 60s. And he then moves forward. You have David Duke and then you come to Donald Trump at the end and his comment about very fine people on both sides, referring to neo nazis and peaceful but nonviolent protesters. And then you conclude with David Duke again. Spike Lee very well wove the historical thread of white supremacy and the DNA of America.

AMT: You said earlier that David Duke called you more recently after the movie. What did he call you for?

RON STALLWORTH: Oh little more than a month ago my wife and I were in New York for doing publicity for the movie. And David Duke called me on the phone and I don't know how he got my number is not important but he called me. And the minute he said 'Ron' I recognized the voice. I said 'Hi David. What's up?' And it was like 40 years had not happened. We were carrying on a conversation like we did 40 years ago. The only difference was he knew who I was now and he had initiated the call. And he was concerned about his image in the movie, how he was going to be portrayed. He insisted he was not a racist or a white supremacist. He just believed in white culture and white heritage. I told him there was no such thing as white culture or white heritage. I told him if he wasn't a racist how come he supported Trump? He said 'Trump's not a racist.' I said yes he is. And I cited the immigration policy that Trump has put in motion keeping Muslims out, keeping Mexicans and Latin American, Central Americans out of the country. And Trump's statement about opening the immigration policy to Sweden and Norway.

AMT: What a surreal phone call to have all these years later.

RON STALLWORTH: It was kind of fun to be honest with you. I felt like I was working undercover again only this time I didn't have to pretend. And then he said 'I like Spike Lee and his works.' And he said 'I just hope Spike Lee gets it right.' And when I told Spike Lee what David had said, Spike's response was 'I don't need that. That's the kiss of death.'

AMT: Thanks For sharing your story.

RON STALLWORTH: My pleasure. Thank you.

AMT: Ron Stallworth is a former undercover detective with the Colorado Springs Police Department. He's the author of Black Klansman: A Memoir. Stay with us. The CBC News is next and then questions around Myer-Briggs, the most important personality test on the planet.

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Myers-Briggs tests in the workplace help the employer, not the employee, says author

Guest: Merve Emre

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

[Music: Theme]

AMT: The Anthropocene is the Earth's current geological age. The one in which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Anthropocene or Anthropocene is also the name of a new artistic project whose creative team travelled the globe to find dramatic images that illustrate just how much impact humans are having on the planet. I'll be speaking to the all-star Canadian team in just half an hour from now. But first unlocking MBTI.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Steven, I have a very comprehensive report.

VOICE 2: So what am I? That drum roll please.

VOICE 1: You are an INFP.

VOICE 2: INFP?

VOICE 1: Yes.

VOICE 2: STFU!

[Laughter and applause]

VOICE 2: So INFP. Is that a good one?

VOICE 1: Introversion, intuition, feeling, perceiving. It's typically the most brilliant, creative, intellectual minds.

[Cheering and applause]

VOICE 2: Intellectual minds.

VOICE 1: William Shakespeare.

VOICE 2: Okay not too shabby.

VOICE 1: Tim Burotn.

VOICE 2: Yes. What he did the Johnny Depp to Johnny Depp?

VOICE 1: Johnny Depp is another.

VOICE 2: What?

AMT: Well that was Late Night Talk host Stephen Colbert getting the good news from Julie Raynor Gross a master practitioner of the Myers Briggs type indicator the MBTI as it's commonly known. Myers Briggs type syndicator was first developed in 1943. It is the most widely used personality test today. Universities, Fortune, 500 companies, as well as other companies big and small, even the CIA use it. To believer's Myers Briggs is a great tool for self-understanding. To critics it's an unscientific weapon for corporate labor management. Merve Amre investigated MBTI and the mother daughter team who developed it. Merve Amre is an associate professor of English at Oxford University and what she discovered is in her book The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. Merve Emre is with me in Toronto. Hello.

MERVE EMRE: Hi. Thank you for having me.

AMT: For those not familiar with it what is the Myers Briggs type indicator?

MERVE EMRE: It is the most popular personality assessment tool in the world. And what it does is it assesses your personality along for different dimensions. Each dimension is mapped out by two dichotomies. So I can run through them.

AMT: Go ahead. It's not many but we need to understand.

MERVE EMRE: Yes of course. So the first dichotomy is extroversion and introversion. Where is it that you derive your energy from? Do you derive it from being around lots of people? Or do you drive it from being alone with your own thoughts? The second is sensing an intuition which is how do you perceive the world. Do you perceive it through your senses? Or do you have gut instincts hunches about it that you are attuned to? The third is thinking and feeling which is about how you make decisions. Do you tend to make decisions in a highly rational logical and objective way? Or are you attentive to the ways your decisions will affect people's feelings? And the fourth is judging and perceiving. How you go about organizing your life? What your attitude is toward organization? Are you somebody who likes to have a schedule, who likes sticking to it? Or are you someone who thrives on spontaneity, someone who loves to be flexible?

AMT: Spell it out. How prevalent is it in North America today?

MERVE EMRE: So it is estimated that one in every five of Fortune 1000 companies uses the indicator for hiring purposes. It is used regularly at eighty nine of the Fortune 100 companies. It is in 86 different countries. It has been translated into over two dozen different languages. It is across the globe.

AMT: I want to ask you about Catherine Briggs, the Brigg's in Myers Briggs. Tell us about her.

MERVE EMRE: So she was born in Michigan. She went to college at the age of 14 and she graduated from college number one in her class. And the man Lyman Briggs that she would ultimately marry was number two.

AMT: And this is in the 1800s. So this is even more extraordinary.

MERVE EMRE: Yes yes absolutely yes. This is in 1883. And when they got married there was no expectation that she would continue her education that she would ever be anything other than a mother and a wife. And she had three children two of whom died in very early infancy and the remaining one was a daughter named Isabelle, who she thought was an extraordinary little girl. And because she had suffered with the deaths of her children, she wanted to find a way to make her girl the most extraordinary version of herself that she could be. And so she started experimenting on her.

AMT: Experimenting How so?

MERVE EMRE: So she opened what she called a cosmic laboratory of baby training and she started doing drills with her daughter to teach her how to be obedient. So she would have her daughter hover her fingers over an open flame and then spat her hands and say 'No no don't touch'. And for her daughters obedience her daughter was rewarded with stories. So she would animate the objects in the house for her daughter. She would pretend that the rugs in the living room were alive that the chairs in the kitchen were alive that they would talk to her daughter. And her daughter grew up amidst this mix of punishing drills and imaginative play. And Catherine referred to herself as an obedience curiosity mother. But she was trying to cultivate both obedience and curiosity in her daughter.

AMT: Before we go further let's just go back for a minute in your research because I don't want to just skate over the fact- your attempts to find out more about her though, there were people who just didn't want you to know too much about Catherine.

MERVE EMRE: There were people who didn't want me to know about Isabelle and Catherine. So the primary archival source that documents Isabel Briggs Myers life is at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Her papers are there her personal papers and they are controlled by the Myers Briggs Foundation and the Center for the application of psychological type CAPT. And when I started my research into the indicator the first thing I did was right to CAPT and say I would like to come look at Isabel's personal papers. Can I fly down to Florida? And for about nine months we were in this ongoing conversation where they would interview me over the phone. They would have psychologists talk to me over the phone. At one point they actually flew up to New York where I was living and I had to go out to lunch with one of the vice presidents and her husband. And finally they said 'look there's one last step before we can give you access to these archives. You have to go to a weeklong re-education program. And once you've completed successfully then we will let you into the archives.' So I went to this weeklong program and at the end of it I was told that there were things that they had discovered about me through the program that they did not like and so they did not want to admit me into the archives. And so then I got mad and then I got productive and I started looking for other sources that could help me tell this story, which is what led me to Catherine's papers in Michigan. It's what led me to Zurich to the papers of Carl Young who's thinking the indicator draws on. It led me to Australia to the home of a man named Peter Guyer who was instrumental in helping spread the indicator in the 70s and the 80s. It led me to Berkeley to the Institute of personality assessment and research where famous writers like Truman Capote and William Carlos Williams were given the MBTI in the 50s and the 60s. And it led me to the Educational Testing Service in Princeton New Jersey which administers the SAT now and in the 70s was on the lookout for a personality test that could do for personality testing what the SAT had done for aptitude testing.

AMT: Note to future research people don't get in Merve Emre way, because she will find a way around it. What's your personality type that made you do that?

MERVE EMRE: Oh I'm an ENTJ I'm the commander or less generously the dictator type.

AMT: Okay, there we go. So you mentioned Carl Young, let's talk about him, the Swiss psychiatrist who plays a major role in the path to all of this. How so?

MERVE EMRE: Catherine and Isabel have this very very close relationship. And when Isabel goes off to college her mother falls into this very deep depression. And she says 'the experiment that was my life's work has now come to an end' and she has no idea what to do with herself. And in 1923 she reads a review of Carl Young's newly published book Psychological Types in the New Republic and she sends out for the book right away and she starts reading it. And she spends the next five years doing nothing but copying the pages of the book out in longhand on these little three by five index cards that she has. She becomes completely fascinated with his dissection of human personality and his understanding of the world as being divided into people of different types. And she becomes fixated with Young. So her obsession becomes more than just intellectual she starts to write to him. She says that she wants to become a kind of amateur psycho analyst and she wants him to guide her in this quest. She writes erotic fan fiction about him. She writes songs and hymns to him.

AMT: Catherine Briggs believes that understanding types can help a person meet himself or herself. What did she mean by that?

MERVE EMRE: Catherine's approach to type was deeply spiritual. She believed that everybody had a soul and that part of saving that soul meant understanding that soul, knowing who that soul was. And it meant encountering yourself so that you could become the master and arbiter of your own destiny. And you could do it in a way that was not judgmental, that was not self-hating. You could come to love the person you were and not apologize for who you were.

AMT: You can see where that could be very attractive, though.

MERVE EMRE: Of course I mean and this is part of the premise of the book which is that while the indicator itself may not be scientifically valid or reliable, and while its institutional history is deeply troubling to me and exploitative to me, I do not want to deny the individual experiences that people have with the type indicator. Which is that oftentimes when people learn who they are they feel seen, they feel liberated, they feel like they have a new lease on life to be cliché about it.

AMT: So how did the Myers Briggs Type Indicator finally come to be so?

MERVE EMRE: After Isabel went to Ridge she got married. She worked for a while as a very successful mystery novelist and then she had two children and she decided that that was going to be her purpose. She was going to be a wife and a mother. And she did that until her children went off for college. And that was right around when World War II started and with World War II there came this explosion in the labor force in the United States and the rise of all sorts of different personality tests to figure out how to match workers to the jobs that were best suited to them. And Isabel when her children went off for college was also searching for a new project, the same way her mother had done, and she apprenticed herself to a one of the first personnel management consultants in the United States a man named Edward N. Hay who had a really really long list of different kinds of personality tests and Isabel was responsible for trying to validate those tests. And as she was working her way through them she realized that there were two problems with the tests. The first was that they were often designed to separate normal from abnormal types of people. And she thought wouldn't it be nice to have a test that didn't tell you that some people are normal and others are abnormal, but just said here is the type of person you are and here is what you would be good at doing.

AMT: No wrong answer.

MERVE EMRE: Exactly. So she said What if I could design an indicator that gave people a really clear and compelling language for talking about who they were, but also allowed their employers to sort them and to match them to the jobs that were best suited for them. And she sat down at her kitchen table and she started designing this forced choice questionnaire which means there are two answers and you have to pick one. And she started doing it by asking her daughter and her son and her husband questions about their preferences. So she would say things like you know if you see the fire engine going down the street are you more inclined to follow it to see where it's going and where the fire is? Or are you more inclined to just go about your day? And she would ask them these kinds of prosaic suburban questions and from those questions she built these types with the language she borrowed from her mother and from Young.

AMT: How did her mother react? What did she think of the indicator when she first saw?

MERVE EMRE: Well this is really interesting to me because Catherine was very much against the use of a questionnaire to try to determine type. And she told her daughter that she had spent the entire second half of her life making herself into a person who had a kind of rarefied and special access to other people's souls, and she didn't believe that that kind of work should be outsourced onto something like a questionnaire. And she has this really lovely line that's from earlier in her life but it applies here to where she says 'science lacks the data that the soul possesses'.

AMT: Some of the harshest criticism directed at Myers and Briggs is that they were a couple of amateurs with no real background in psychiatry. I want you to hear a clip. This is from the television show Adam Ruins Everything.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Mama I'm bored of writing mystery novels. Everyone else is off having fun at war.

VOICE 2: Say. I have an idea. I just read some old Carl Young book about personality types. And I bet most, us too; unqualified nobodies could do a better job.

VOICE 1: Yes. Let's do some science or whatever. Let's create an influential task that will be widely used for decades.

AMT: Merve Emrah Oh you're not impressed. How did defenders of this respond to criticism that Myers and Briggs were not qualified to design a personality indicator? And you just heard them the poking fun there.

MERVE EMRE: Can I just start by pointing out how astonishingly sexist that clip is. My book really wants to take seriously the idea that doing domestic work could teach you something about the world and could produce a valuable kind of knowledge. And so the way in which that clip makes fun of the blend of the personal and the professional ignores the fact that many of the leading psychologists of the time, including Henry Murray, Donald McKinnon Young himself, were people who were very actively bringing their personal and their sexual lives to bear on their professional practices of analysis.

AMT: But you also make the point that there's no basis in scientific fact for this.

MERVE EMRE: No there isn't. I mean and to me that's not as interesting as asking, Well, given that we already know it's not based in science, why is it that people continue to believe in it with the kind of ardor that one often sees reserved for matters of the deepest faith? Why is it that even if you know it doesn't mean anything in a kind of rational objective sense that we still use words like introvert and extrovert in our everyday conversation to describe the people that we know, and to describe ourselves? That to me is not a scientific or even a psychological question. That's a question about culture. That's a question for humanists to answer.

AMT: You say attempts to find a more perfect type of man promotes many disingenuous ideas about race, gender, class, social perfectibility ideas that have motivated and continue to motivate terrible forms of bias and discrimination, and I'm quoting there, how does it do that?

MERVE EMRE: Well I think an interesting experiment is to think about who can even take the questionnaire in the first place. So when I was at the re-education program there was a college counselor there who worked at a college in Minnesota where 70 percent of his students were the first person in their family to go to college. They were immigrants. They were women. They were students of color. They were coming from lower class backgrounds. And one of the things that he asked at the program was you know some of these questions are not even culturally legible to my students when they encounter them, because they can never imagine themselves in the position of someone who has a stable job and has to decide how they approach that job on a day to day basis, or someone who is planning for a vacation and has to decide where to go. And he asked the woman leading the program he said how do I account for this? What do I do when it seems like this instrument is only directed at a white upper middle class suburban population? And she said ‘Well that is just what the pool of success looks like?’ And your students will have to learn to swim in it and better that they learn now than later. And so I think many many personality inventories are used to prop up already existing hierarchies of race and class and gender. And if we wanted to I could take you further back into the history of the indicator to show the ways in which these hierarchies were quite explicitly acknowledged in the design of the indicator.

AMT: Well give me a few examples.

MERVE EMRE: Sure. So when it was initially designed in the 40s there were different answer sheets for men and for women. And the assumption was that women were always going to be biologically more inclined to feeling. Another example when the indicator was originally being used Isabel Briggs Myers claimed that nobody with an IQ under 100 had a differentiable personality type. And so the only people who got to have personalities were people who were already highly intelligent people, who already had access to powerful jobs, people who were overwhelmingly white and male.

AMT: That's so interesting because the times have changed like our perceptions have changed. We realize this now. Right but we're still using tools from another era.

MERVE EMRE: Yes and I'm thinking just recently there's this case that's gotten a lot of attention in the U.S. which is that Harvard University's admissions department had a personality assessment, and overwhelmingly Asian American applicants were described as not being likable or warm and they were often described as being like automatons or robots. And these judgments were used to deny them application to Harvard. But you can see the way in which that exact logic of who gets to have access to a personality that still has a presence in our everyday culture in our everyday lives. And it shapes people's lives in in horrifying ways.

AMT: Well that's why it's so important here this backstory to understand where this is all coming from as we look at what's going on today. Why have big corporations been so interested in giving their perspective employees personality tests?

MERVE EMRE: So when the Myers Briggs type indicator was first designed in the 40s through say the 60s the interest was really in figuring out a quick and easy and cheap way to match workers to the jobs that were best suited to their abilities. Later on, once you get to the 70s the 80s and the 90s, corporate culture really becomes infected with this idea that work is something that you should love. It should be a source of self-actualisation. Then one of the things that you see are these tests being given to help workers figure out how to find the things that are right for them so that they can bind themselves freely and gladly to the work that they do, and they're doing it in a way that takes care of their psyches as well as turns profits for the corporation.

AMT: I was just going to say so what was this indicator administered for the benefit of the corporation or the employee?

MERVE EMRE: Well it's definitely for the benefit of the corporation and the corporation of course is presenting it as if it's for the benefit of the employee. And one of the really interesting moments in the history of that type indicator for me is when the Educational Testing Services is trying to validate the indicator in the 50s the 60s and even up to the early 70s. They very quickly realized that they can't validate it, that it's not valid or reliable. But they say you know oftentimes corporations will give people a whole battery of personality tests and many of the test they're giving them do label people as being abnormal or normal, good or bad. What if we also gave them the indicator and then gave them their results on the indicator. So they felt like we were doing them the service of self-discovery. And at the same time we could use all of those to actually make our hiring decisions and weed out the good apples from the bad apples. So it becomes you know really this way of manipulating employees into believing that the corporation is looking out for their best interests, that the corporation does care about their selves.

AMT: Were there concerns that companies were digging deeply into the minds of the people they were hiring?

MERVE EMRE: I mean I think there continue to be. There have been a number of really interesting lawsuits filed in the states on both the state and the federal level about the privacy violations that these kinds of tests or indicators enact on the people that are asked to take them. This is of course compounded by the fact that many of these methods of assessment are not valid or reliable. But I think the bigger question is why is it that our psyches, why is it that our interiors should be made available to the people that we work for? Why is that something that they should have access to and why should work be a source of self-validation?

AMT: These are all good questions.

MERVE EMRE: [Laughs] [unintelligible].

AMT: What eventually happens to Catharine Briggs?

MERVE EMRE: Katharine Briggs dies in the mid-60s of dementia and very shortly thereafter her daughter Isabelle is diagnosed with cancer and enter into the picture CPP, consulting psychologists press which is the current publisher of the MBTI, and they offered to buy it from her when she was on her deathbed. And the hitch was that they asked her to make a number of changes so they cut down the number of questions. And they also said your descriptions of the individual types are far too specific. We run the risk that if somebody gets a type and reads that type description they won't actually identify with that description. So we need to make these more general. And I think this is actually one of the reasons that people so often compare Myers Briggs to astrology, is because the incredible generality and the flexibility of those type descriptions seems really similar in both of those cases. But that was also a historical decision. It was a decision that was made CPP so they could start marketing the indicator as widely as they possibly could. Isabelle Briggs Myers agrees to these decisions and she sells them the indicator and she dies in in 1980.

AMT: Extraordinary story of two women.

MERVE EMRE: They are extraordinary and I think one of the things that I want people who read the book to come away with it from is to realize how much their biography actually undercuts the notion of type, that these are two women who could not be typed. They are completely idiosyncratic. And to quote one review which I really love they are "irreducible weirdos" and I think that really goes against the notion of type and the way that we have been taught to think about ourselves as types. I'm actually tired of thinking and talking about the self. And I think there is a limit to how productive those conversations and those questions about who you are can be. And I increasingly want to think more about not what does it mean for me as an individual to flourish but what kind of a social world could we make where everybody could flourish regardless of their individual type.

AMT: Thanks for your work.

MERVE EMRE: Thank you.

AMT: Merve Emre is the author of The Personality Brokers The Strange History of Myers Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. She joined me in our Toronto studio what do you think? Let us know you can tweet us@TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent. Irreducible weirdo's, I think is the phrase she used. Stay with us in our next half hour. We're going to find out why Kenya burned the tusks of ten thousand elephants, and why that's seen as an example of the Anthropocene. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current. [Music: Theme]

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Anthropocene multimedia project conveys apocalyptic beauty of human imprint on planet

Guests: Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtysky, Nicolas de Pencier

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

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[Sound: Fire roaring]

AMT: That roar is the sound of fire. Imagine all you see is fierce orange flames and then your eye finds it, the unmistakable curve of an elephant tusk.

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I can confirm that this ivory here is exactly a 105 tons. 10,000 or so elephants.

AMT: So picture that, the tusks of t10,000 elephants piled into enormous funeral pyres. That's the opening of the new documentary: Anthropocene. The tusk burn is one of the many astonishing moments captured in Anthropocene. It's a documentary as well as a multimedia art exhibit, an ambitious project bringing together film photography as well as Augmented and Virtual Reality installations. The images were taken all over the world on every continent except Antarctica. And they reveal in stunning detail large scale mining, logging, agriculture, urbanization. The film opens in theaters this Friday and the exhibit opens the same day at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The artists behind Anthropocene are the photographer Edward Burtynsky, filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal and cinematographer Nicolas de Pencier and they all joined me in studio. Hello everyone.

GUESTS: Hello. Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: So Jennifer let's begin with that tusk burn. Why did the Kenyans decide to burn that ivory?

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: Well this was an incredible unprecedented move that the stores of ivory that Kenya had been gathering from poaching and other natural death, whatever, for years and years and years, and it's very difficult to keep because they have to guard it all the time, because everybody wants it. And they decided to send a clear signal that there is no trade for ivory period and that this was the way to do it. So that ivory was worth over 100 million dollars. And they burned it in one day invited dignitaries and media from around the world to say if there is any ivory trade at all, there will always be abuse of that. There will always be illegal ivory. And this is the only way that we can do it, is to say Ivory belongs to elephants. There's no trade in ivory. Period.

AMT: Why did you choose to give this event such prominence in the film?

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: Extinction is one of the markers of the Anthropocene. We are basically in a state now in the middle of the sixth grade extinction and extinction rates are up to 10,000 times natural background rates. So we're witnessing extinction of an incredible magnitude all caused by humans. And this story for us was- it's both apocalyptic but it's also hopeful because there are all of these people are working towards change. So it became for us the way to get into the whole topic of extinction, anthropogenic extinction.

AMT: Nicolas de Pencier, what was it like to be there as the tusks were set on fire?

NICOLAS DE PENCIER: I think you have this mix of emotion where you realize, on a visceral level you really feel it, that these are thousands of majestic beasts that have been killed mostly by poachers, by humans. You're human. And so you. You feel the weight of that. And yet Dr. Winny Karu who's a wildlife biologist who we heard from in the clip it was really her brainchild. And she's the one who had to sell it to the Kenyan government and organized it all. She cataloged and indexed every one of those tusks. And this was her dream to say that there is no market for ivory. And so I think Jen is right that this is a hopeful story too. It was a real mix of emotions mostly really heavy to see this conflagration. I mean it was like something ripped from the pages of the Bible.

AMT: Because every every task represents that elephant.

NICOLAS DE PENCIER: My God. Exactly.

AMT: And there was a pride of lions nearby?

NICOLAS DE PENCIER: This was as the night fell and the Halloween orange of the flames was reflected back on us all. And for me as a cinematographer it was gold. It was absolutely magic to be able to film this. And we had a very last minute permission right from the president, through the Canadian ambassador who was literally running with us helping us running with our equipment cases that we could fly a drone. Right at that last light of day, which was incredible for us just to show the scale of how big there were 11 piles of ivory, if you think of how big 100 tons is. And one of the stories that came out which we thought because we were waiting for the shuttle buses to come out of the park back towards the parking lots, and in the pitch black no one could see anything once you got away from the fires, was that a pride of lions had hung around all night, who would normally be very afraid of human presence and also a fire. But there was a speculation that they were almost there to pay their respects. So there was a confluence of many narratives and many emotions being part of something like that.

AMT: Edward Burtynsky what does the tusk burn say to you about the impact we humans are having on this planet?

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: Well it's interesting that the death of those elephants is actually preventable because it's not for food. They go into a group of elephants and they'll look for the one with the greatest and the biggest tusks. They call them super tuskers and they're not many of them left. And one of the piles that we actually captured in 3D was the president's pile the President Kenyatta. And we took over 2500 images and reconstructed them as a three dimensional image of that pile so now you'll be able to experience that pile at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the National Gallery and walk around it using your iPhone or whatever and that's a way to represent the scale of what's happened here. 12percent are being lost per year so at current rates of depletion of this you know fantastic animal by 2025 2030 they will be extinct so it is something that can be prevented by just killing the trade.

AMT: Ed Burtynsky before we go too much further let's define the term. I actually learned that word from you Anthropocene, or Anthropocene, which one do you say?

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: Anthropocene.

AMT: Okay. So we've talked about it before on this program but what does it mean to you?

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: Well in many ways in 1982 I began photographing a large open pit mines in Sudbury and unwittingly, through a body of work, when that word came forward it seemed like so many of the things I'd been looking at plugged into that. And five years ago after watermark, Jennifer and I were at a screening almost at the end of the tour of water mark and we were in Washington and we said, should we work together again? And then Jennifer said: 'Well, maybe. How about the word Anthropocene? Why don't we evangelize? Why don't we take that word and make it more understandable to the world through film and through photography?' And that began this collaboration and I thought, great idea let's do that. And it was a big huge idea because it's basically all the things we as humans are doing to the planet that is leaving a mark that will go deep into the future. So the Anthropocene working group are looking for evidence that somewhere in the future, a million years from now, if there was a geologist you'd be able say: 'Ah here's techno falls, either plastics or aluminaum or things that nature doesn't produce are now still evidence on the planet deep into the future.' And anthroturbation is actually tunnels. So many things like cities would be covered up and our greatest techno fossil is concrete because nature doesn't produce concrete. So that would be the number one techno fossil also. But the thing that will leave an indelible mark of all the equipment and tools and electrical stuff are all the tunnels and all the mines and all the subway systems will go deep into the future. So they're fascinated by that.

AMT: I had never even thought about that. Not only the tunnels but the sewers. Like all of the things we burrowed through the earth.

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: Subways, parking lots, all of these things will persist for thousands of years and will be a record. And as Ed said that they will become lithofied. You know most of the Anthropocene working group are geologists, there are many many other kinds of scientists there too, but they're looking at it in geological time. So you know the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and they are looking at the impact of a species that has only really been up and running for 10,000 years in terms of modern civilization and yet we are able to have an impact now that is greater than all natural processes combined. That is the definition of Anthropocene, the human epoch.

AMT: I want to talk about the impact a little more because the images you three have captured are remarkable and I'm guessing as powerful as they are it's even more powerful to be right there. Jennifer can you describe the feeling of being at the the lignite mine in Germany?

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: Oh my goodness. So Hombach mine is the biggest open pit mine in Germany and it provides roughly five percent of Germany's energy, that was a stat that we got from the workers in the mine. So you can imagine how big it is. Lignite is soft brown coal so it's actually quite dirty to burn. And there have already been four towns razed to the ground to make way for its expansion. Two more are facing relocation. There's one that we filmed that has now gone as well as an ancient forest. But it was like being in hell. It was a huge open pit with these dark coal seams at the bottom and there's these machines called baggers, the bagger 291 is one we filmed, that are the largest land machines on the planet. And to just stand in front of it, to contemplate the scale is extraordinary. It's a bucket wheel excavator that moves the overburden from one side to the other to expose the coal seam. And each of the buckets in this bagger can hold a car. That's how big it is.

AMT: The machine itself looks like it's the size of a huge building.

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: It's like what?

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: 100 metres high by 300 metres long.

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: Yes 100 metres by 300 metres long and when you're standing and it starts to move the whole ground shakes. And so it was extraordinary to be in the middle of that. But then at the same time to connect that to the very particular story of Nicole, the carrot farmer, who is still living in the town of Amaranth or was when we were filming waiting to be relocated to be given a similar parcel of land as a farmer somewhere else, that they couldn't find for. She lived in a town where there was nobody left and they're still farming their carrots with the mine right beside them. And you just think it's always for us in some way about a dialectic of scale and detail. You can only understand the vastness of that place when it is connected to the very particularity of this story.

AMT: The pictures are so compelling and an Ed Burtynsky I want to ask you what kinds of emotions do those landscapes bring up in you?

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: Ah well there is a kind of a bit of a dread. I have children, two girls, and I worry about their future. When you see the scale in which we're operating and there seems to be nothing that's beating that scale that it's worrisome I think. It's worrisome because I don't think we as a society globally as well are moving quickly enough to get in front of a problem. So the more I've seen it the more I realize that we're in trouble and we need to face that head on.

AMT: At the same time some of those massive aerial shots are our breathtakingly beautiful. Why do you think we see beauty? I'm saying we, I don't think I'm the only one, in what are often scenes of environmental devastation?

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: Well I think these are human systems and I think design, even the tailings pond is by design. All mines, all factories, everything are human designed and just as we design are cities. And I think there's a human imprint in all of that somewhere. It's not necessarily that we as a society can proceed without going into nature to our food, to get our water, to get our minerals, all the things that we need to build our cities. That's not going to change but I think it's also allowing us to be able to see these. To kind of reimagine these wastelands in a way that we kind of own them, we embrace and we look at that we don't avert our eyes. And for us, I think I speak for all of us, we want to communicate out there with people. We want them to look at these things to try to ask questions about these landscapes. And if you represent them in a kind of, you know make them ugly or are just you know photograph them in an unsightly light or whatever, they don't resonate. They don't make us wonder about this place. So invoking that sense of wonder I think is one of the key tools we, as artists, can actually bring to the table. And once that wonders invoked I think people begin to talk about it and begin to think about these places.

AMT: And, Jennifer, in this project you also look at the people who work at these large scale projects. So then you hone right in on individuals. Why was that important to you?

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: Well it's there's ambiguity and complexity and everything right. And in terms of the beautiful wide view if you don't invite the contemplation and our work is always meant to be non-didactic and experiential and connecting people to places that they're connected to or responsible for but would never normally see. But then once in that place to be witnessing not accusatory regulatory in some ways so that that is the goal. And for me that has to include the details of life that happen in these contexts. We were in the city of Norilsk, 320 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle.

AMT: This is in Siberia.

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: Siberia biggest coloured metal mine and heavy metals smelting complex and the world and the biggest producer of palladium, which is in all of our cell phones not to mention many other things. And it's a completely surreal landscape and it's a completely polluted city. And yet there was a parade on metallurgy day and we talked to three women who were crane operators in the copper smelter who soon, as I saw them I just squint I want to talk to them, and we hear about their lives. And one of them says you know you become a romantic here, you see beauty in a flower that's bursting through the stone. And I started to cry because that's the complexity right there. This is a place where people work there.

AMT: They have their lives there.

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: They have their lives there. They need this place to survive. On the other hand this the you know the effluent is going out and scrubbed to the point where you're standing in the town and if the wind blows the wrong way your eyes start twisting and your throat starts to sting. And we're there for a week and there are people who live there their whole lives. So it feels to me like we always have to draw these parallels and find this balance between scale and detail to understand the complexity of the story, and also to bring people in to the witnessing in the right way. Because if witnessing opens up consciousness and opening up of consciousness is the beginning of a change in behavior or understanding then we've done what we set out to do.

AMT: Nicholas let's just stay with the work in Russia for a minute because it had its challenges behind the scenes too. What happened?

NICOLAS DE PENCIER: Well beyond all of the creative challenges and ongoing access challenges, the Russian government who had given us visas, much to my surprise, I think was not happy somehow that we were there. So we got detained on a regular basis throughout our whole stay which was over three weeks there. And in the beginning it was all your passports are fake so you've you know you've got to come down. And then it was you have to sign this confession that you're doing journalistic work and you didn't say you were doing journalistic work. And I think they couldn't compute that we were there doing actually what we had said we were going to do. It's an art project with a documentary film and a museum and I don't know why they just didn't understand that people would expend that amount of energy and be up at 4:00 in the morning, because the sun never sets and that was the nicest light, you know filming through the night, or were they didn't trust us but it was you either wanted to be working or sleeping and five or six hours at a time down at the police station was not anybody's idea of fun. And we actually said in the end that are our safest place to be was a thousand feet down in the potash mine in the Ural Mountains where the police couldn't get us.

AMT: How bad did it get, Ed Burtynsky?

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: Well I never felt like we're going to be detained or that we were going to get thrown behind bars. But it was really irritating because again he were saying we're not journalists, but I think they were surprised at the scale of what we were doing the number of people we had with us, the amount of equipment we had with us. They really saw I that we must be working for somebody we must be part of the CBC or something like that.

AMT: And that explains everything.

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: So you know again you know I think we try to make light of it as much as possible, but once we start getting fingerprinted we thought oh how bad is this going to get. But ultimately we kind of persevered.

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: We wouldn't stand down.

AMT: How did you resolve things?

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: They wanted us to sign a paper to say that we'd lied and we come in under false pretenses and we said we're not going to sign that paper. So they produce their paper and we produced our paper and said this is what we are saying that happened and this is what you're saying happened. And then they let us go but just provisionally because they kept checking in with us again. It felt like a very arbitrary kind of muscle that we just had to sort of accept as a part of being there and it was distracting. But I'm still glad that we went and we got that footage because it's an extraordinary place.

AMT: So can we talk logistics a little bit? Like how many people do you travel with? Like what does your team look like?

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: Well it expands and contracts depending on where we are. I mean sometimes it's just Nick and me who are going as we've done for 25 years. Sometimes it's Nick and Ed. Sometimes it's me, Nick, Ed, one of our field producers Jim Pinu, our drone operator Mike agreed and then we have a bunch of people working with us. It's best when we're all together because we can talk about all the time our head gets in it. We've been in some pretty incredible places together and then it feels like we're deploying everything at once and everybody's doing what they're good at.

AMT: Do you always agree?

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: No.

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: We have a good resolution we just talk it through.

JENNIFER BAICHWAL: They just do what I say.

NICOLAS DE PENCIER: Jennifer fixes a lot of problem.

AMT: Well Jennifer and Nick your partners, you are romantic partners and creative partners and Ed, then you join this, what's it like working with them?

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: It's great. No these are wonderful people. I mean they have a very kind of a Kirt language when things aren't going well and I just step aside and they work it out very well.

NICOLAS DE PENCIER: And he has his marriage counsellor's license as well.

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: Like I don't take sides I just try and find and find a way to kind of navigate all the space. But I think what we're releasing this fall would be impossible for one person to ever do.

AMT: As I watch this I actually wrote something I said the very things that sustain us, all of the things you looked out the big industrial projects that we get our energy from, the lithium that we use in our cell phones and in electric cars, the very things that sustain us are the things that could illuminate our planet if we don't take a step back. We're doing something to ourselves here. And you want to give us that message but you're hopeful too. So where are you getting your hope from? Who wants to start?

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: Well I think what we what we're trying to do in the film is while there are some more hopeful stories. Like the lithium story is a hopeful story if we can move away from fossil fuels, that's the first really important thing to do because right now burning coal, oil or natural gas is causing one of the greatest existential threats to the planet. Because that CO2 concentration and the acidification of the oceans that's occurring in the heating of the oceans is a direct result of that. So that is certainly an area that you know cannot be stressed enough to say that that's a huge problem. So that's a positive story, the lithium story. And also what we're trying to also say is that we went to two Vancouver Island to show the ancient forest. They're still amongst us, that biodiversity is still here and we want to talk with that biodiversity because it's in that diversity we have a future. If we kill that all of replanted forest is not a forest it's a garden. And what can live underneath the canopy isn't what lives in an ancient forest. So you know we have that amongst us so we were trying to say, look, we need to be very careful with what's left. I think we all feel that governments can be doing a lot more and it's so hard to do the right thing even our federal government's trying to put in a carbon tax and we can see the pushback that's happening right now. We can see the setbacks that America is having right now. And governments can do so much by incenting the right behaviour and you know penalising or at least taxing the behaviour you don't want.

AMT: This is something you have mentioned before. I mean so much of these landscapes, they are by design. Governments have proved their existence. It's not like there's not a conscious decision being made somewhere along the line to bring us to this point, but we have to think about it.

EDWARD BURTYNSKY: Almost every image I have taken throughout my whole career as business as usual, this is all agreed upon, licensed activity. So I'm not going in there and photographing something that behind the scenes, shouldn't be happening. These are all above board corporations doing their bidding to get us the things that we need and making profits.

AMT: I was really struck too by the irony of it. Closer to the end of the film. you are at the the - I don't if I'm saying it right - the Schenley oil field seawall and they're building a seawall to protect the oil fields because of climate change and the rising ocean. And the man says I've been doing this for 20 years. I mean now how much more proof do you need that the very people who run the fossil fuel industry have known for decades, even though people have denied that climate change was an issue. They've known for decades they needed to work on this.

NICOLAS DE PENCIER: You're right to point out that that feedback loop which exists everywhere in the world. And I think in terms of hope, doing this work is a hopeful act. And if you identify problems that you see and challenges that we have I'm compelled to act, we're all compelled to act. But what do we do? Our thing is making films and making these images. And so that's better than passively standing by the wayside. And the hope is that and the ambition is that everyone who sees this work will be at least awakened in some way if not transformed and that can lead to action as different as all of the subjective capacities and interests and potentials of the people who do. So if you're an engineer, if you're a politician and. Everyone who votes in a democracy, who votes with their dollars in the marketplace will be compelled to act differently and in a way that works towards the better.

AMT: Thank you all for your work.

GUESTS: Thank you for having us.

AMT: Photographer Edward Burtynsky filmmaker Jennifer Bairchwal and cinematographer Nicolas de Penier. The artists behind Anthropocene, the documentary film and exhibition opening this Friday. The film in theatres. The exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Ottawa's National Gallery of Canada. That's our program for today. Stay with us on radio 1 for Q. Rod Stewart joins Tom Power to reminisce about 50 years in the music business and to talk about his latest album Blood Red Roses, his 30th album. Rod Stewart with Tom Power today. And join me again tomorrow for this:

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AMT: Well for many Canadians Hockey Night in Canada was the CBC and then in 2013 the unthinkable happened. CBC lost the national broadcasting rights for NHL hockey. The Globe and Mail's sports writer David Schultz take tells the dramatic story of the high stakes face-off between the CBC, Rogers and Bell Media over those broadcasting rights. In his new book called Hockey Fight in Canada. I'm going to speak with him tomorrow but the back story and the fallout of that fight for hockey in Canadian television. It's a great story. He's got a lot of stuff that you haven't heard. So listen for that. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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