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The Current Transcript for November 29, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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This project, its vision, its goals are sacred.

To me, it's really this respectful, the way that they go about getting their okay with the Algonquins.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Two heartfelt views about one special and sacred place at the heart of the nation's capital and in the soul of First Nations. To a passing motorist, a few islands in the Ottawa River not far from Parliament Hill, may not have heard of called special meaning, but they represent a place of deep indigenous spirituality and a more recent history of European settlement. So what happens when a developer tries to entwine all of that history into a new complex of living spaces for the future? In a moment Kristin Nelson brings us the view from the middle of that debate. And then, Alan Rusbridger took over as editor of The Guardian just as the Internet and social media were changing the game.

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Living in the middle of a revolution is a frightening thing but it can also be exhilarating. I find the exhilarating bit was the complete refiguring of the relationship with the journalist and reader.

AMT: From WikiLeaks on war, to Snowden on surveillance and Murdoch on misdeeds, he oversaw explosive investigations. Alan Rusbridger talks truth in journalism in half an hour. And,

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Millions of people were feeling the effects in the air quality right now. It's among the worst in the world and bad air quality and advisories in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba as well.

AMT: The destructive wildfires that raged across much of Canada this past summer affected everything from air quality to mental health. Now a new report says cascading hazards triggered by climate change will create a series of interconnected health risks across the globe. We'll hear what that means for Canadians in an hour. I am Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Reconciliation or betrayal? 1st residents of controversial development in Ottawa-Gatineau move in

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JUSTIN TRUDEAU: Before I begin this morning I'd like to recognize the Algonquin nation on whose traditional territory we are gathering.

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: Sur le territoire taditionnelle Algonquin.

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: We acknowledge them as the past. Present and future caretakers of this land.

AMT: It has become a familiar refrain on Parliament Hill and beyond. Politicians educators business leaders and more, acknowledging the fact that Canada's capital was constructed on traditional, unceded territory. But just up the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill with the inside of the government buildings. There is a development under way that critics call an affront to the government's promises of reconciliation. Its proponents meanwhile see it as an example of reconciliation and action. The development is called Zibi, The Algonquin word for river. It encompasses 37 acres of former industrial land at the heart of the National Capital region. And when it is complete it will change the face of downtown Ottawa Gatineau. This month the first residents of Zibi are just beginning to move in. The Current's Kristin Nelson brings us the story. This is her documentary The Cauldron.

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KRISTEN NELSON: Every day thousands of people drive across the Chaudiere bridge, travelling between Ottawa and Gatineau, passing a series of islands in the Ottawa River. Two of them have been blocked off for generations, reserved only for industrial activity. That's changing. Now, old brick buildings next to the road have been painted over and big signs say Zibi.

WESTEINDE: Sure so I'm Jeff Westeinde, I'm the president of the Zibi project. We are on Albert Island, so on Albert Island there's these two old brick post and beam buildings that were built right after the great fire in 1901.

KRISTEN NELSON: These islands were once owned by lumber barons. The site of mills churning out pulp and paper products from the tall trees of the Ottawa Valley.

WESTEINDE: On this side was the old stables, yeah the paint shop was here, those types of things when E.B. Eddy was running the site.

KRISTEN NELSON: Now, save for a few heritage buildings, it's a construction site, with cranes, piles of rocks, hard hats and steel toed boots required.

WESTEINDE: So we're going to walk to the end of Albert Island and on to Chaudiere Island and start to see some of the construction that's going on there. We're starting to build our first buildings on the site, starting to plan out our first parks and public spaces on the site.

KRISTEN NELSON: The Zibi development is on prime, waterfront real estate. A condo building is already standing on the Gatineau side of the river, and when the project is finished 5000 people will live here. Plans include more condominiums, stores, offices, parks and public plazas. It’s billed as environmentally sustainable, pedestrian and biker friendly.

WESTEINDE: So this'll be the main entrance to the community here. Our city started here and it's been locked off, fenced off, for a couple hundred years now. This is our region's chance to get re-introduced to the waterfront.

KRISTEN NELSON: History runs deep in the veins of these rocky islands. In many ways Canada's capital is here today because of this place. Indigenous people, fur-traders and explorers were drawn here, where the Ottawa, Rideau and Gatineau rivers come together. It's been a meeting place for thousands of years.

WESTEINDE: And some of the stuff we're proud of - if you look at all our signage, you'll see trilingual signage because these lands are literally where the three founding nations of Canada came together.

KRISTEN NELSON: They came in part because of the once raging waterfall, tucked between the islands and the Gatineau shore of the river. The falls were dammed more than a hundred years ago to provide energy for the timber mills and it's still an important energy source.

WESTEINDE: You know, I'm ashamed to say it, I grew up in Ottawa and didn't realize this waterfall existed. And as you're about to see it's magnificent.

[Sound: Waterfalls]

KRISTEN NELSON: Legend has it the Falls once rivalled Niagara and the Algonquin people referred to it as the "Big Kettle" because in their glory the bowl-shaped falls were said to resemble a giant cauldron of boiling water. And now, for the first time in generations, the public can see the falls up close.

WESTEINDE: It's an absolute gem of a part of our region that most people didn't even know existed. It's been blocked off and fenced off for so long.

KRISTEN NELSON: It was also a sacred place for Indigenous people which is why Jeff Westeinde says from the beginning of the redevelopment. Algonquin input has shaped the project, starting with the name of the community.

WESTEINDE: Zibi. Yes. The name means river and we really wanted to celebrate the fact that this is Algonquin traditional territory. So that's a big reason why we picked the name Zibi.

WHITEDUCK: Zibi yes, it means river. This used to be the Ottawa River was actually originally called the Kichesippi river. It just means big river, big river of the Algonquins as it was known.

KRISTEN NELSON: Kirby Whiteduck is chief of the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan first nation. He sports a dark mustache and his shaggy hair is beginning to grey at the sides. Whiteduck's community has a benefit agreement with the developer. It includes hiring students, retail opportunities on the site and equity ownership and investment in the project.

WHITEDUCK: And it will give us some benefits going into the future. And some positive things that the youth and others can look at and say, well there's a project, you know what, we're involved in that.

KRISTEN NELSON: A couple other Algonquin first nations have signed "letters of intent" with Zibi, ensuring opportunities for their members and the promise to quote: "raise awareness about their people and culture in Canada's capital region". Whiteduck believes the developer's approach represents a new way of doing things.

WHITEDUCK: Well all private development that's happened at least in Algonquin territory there has been no benefit for the Algonquins. So this is a new thing that we think could set a precedent. Because in our view there is no treaty and it's all Algonquin territory. And that we should be out in the territory, having some visibility and some involvement and presence and have some say.

KRISTEN NELSON: But while Kirby Whiteduck supports the project… it's been controversial right from the start.

[Music]

VOICE 1: It's a place that we were trading among one another.

VOICE 2: Protect what is ours and to not let it go from people that have stolen from us.

REPORTER: University professor Claudette Commanda gave the development qualified support.

COMMANDA: We are reaching out and we're offering you a hand of peace and friendship, to work with us.

VOICE 2: The first white men came there to build a saw mill then they build that dam, we were never asked.

KRISTEN NELSON: There have been public protests, land claims, lawsuits, appeals to the municipal board.

VOICE 3: Our people have been using that site for thousands of years, long before the arrival of the Europeans, it has always been regarded as a sacred site.

KRISTEN NELSON: But Zibi does have the backing of Ottawa's mayor, Jim Watson.

JIM WATSON: So after years of really dithering and not a lot of activity on this site we're finally seeing what I think is going to be a renaissance.

KRISTEN NELSON: In July, local MP and environment minister - Catherine McKenna toured the site.

CATHERINE MCKENNA: We often talk about what happening with the Zibi development - now we get to actually see it and it was a really great tour. This is a really exciting development.

[Music]

KRISTEN NELSON: But long before Zibi, there were other plans being made for this site.

CARDINAL: The Islands in that site are our sacred area that evolved and was created by the Creator himself.

KRISTEN NELSON: In the 1980s renowned architect Douglas Cardinal was selected by then prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to design the Canadian Museum of History… a now iconic building perched on the banks of the Ottawa river, right across from Parliament. He's Blackfoot - not Algonquin - and before he started any work on the site, he went to Chaudiere Falls to make a tobacco offering.

CARDINAL: My elders are Anishinabe people and they said when you go to Ottawa make sure that you give an offering to the great kettle, the sacred islands because they've been our centre for thousands of years. And the Algonquins are the host nation and those islands are important to all of our nations. That's always been our capital of our Anishinabe people. Nmade it that that's our cathedral, that that's our sacred site.

KRISTEN NELSON: Cardinal wanted to keep the area sacred. Back in the 80s, he was asked by some indigenous leaders to come up with designs for the islands in the Ottawa river. His plans involve turning most of Chaudiere island into a park. He worked with respected - some would say revered - Algonquin elder William Commanda.

CARDINAL: William's dream was like our elders dream it was the same vision, is that we would, at the centre, on those islands it'd be a place where we'd show all the values of our culture

KRISTEN NELSON: Cardinal still has his drawings… he flips through the large boards in his home studio…

CARDINAL: is the islands right here. The sacred islands.

KRISTEN NELSON: There are pictures of parks, areas set aside for ceremonies near the Falls.

CARDINAL: They wanted to be able to have the ceremonies in this area.

KRISTEN NELSON: And these plans had a purpose.

CARDINAL: They were to be submitted to parliament so that the land would be turned over to the Algonquins.

KRISTEN NELSON: But of course that's not what happened. Cardinal's designs were shelved, in part because of a lack of funding. In the 1990s the National Capital Commission, a federal Crown corporation, deemed the islands "a land mass of national interest.

MARIE LEMAY: It's extremely important for the Capital, for Canada's Capital.

KRISTEN NELSON: Another architect was hired and a tentative deal was struck for the NCC to buy the islands.

REPORTER: National Capital Commission is preparing to transform Chaudiere Falls and Island.

KRISTEN NELSON: But in 2012 the Conservative government rejected those plans. The NCC does own neighbouring Victoria Island and plans are underway to clean up the soil there and eventually build an Aboriginal Welcome Centre. But Albert and Chaudiere Islands were sold to the developer and re-zoned for mixed commercial use. Construction began in 2017.

CARDINAL: The people that are buying into this whole process are providing us all a lesson of how not to be and what not to do. You do not desecrate a sacred site. You don't build condos in the Vatican, in the centre of St. Peter's square because there's a lot of people there and ‘wow I can make some money. Or build a condo right on the wailing wall in Jerusalem’, you don't do that out of respect. There's no difference for us in the destruction of a sacred site.

[Sound: Waterfalls]

WHITEDUCK: I guess we're seeing it as a bit of a compromise, eh?

KRISTEN NELSON: Algonquin chief Kirby Whiteduck says he's just being realistic.

WHITEDUCK: And I know that some of the Algonquins, the other Algonquins were supporting having it made into a park. There should be no development and have a park controlled by the Algonquins. And I said sure I'll agree with that if it can be worked out I'll support that. But it couldn't be worked out with the government and the developers, it didn't happen.

KRISTEN NELSON: Whiteduck agrees that it's a sacred area, but there's already been development here

WHITEDUCK: I guess again it comes back to, well, how big is a sacred site. People will have a difference of opinion. They might say, well, the whole of Ottawa and Gatineau is a sacred site. And so this development has been going on for over 100-and-some years, eh. So there has been some recent refurbishing of sites around the falls that have been occurring, but for whatever reason, it's the Zibi project, which is not really adjacent to the falls that's been getting most of the negative attention.

KRISTEN NELSON: He thinks the positive parts of the development are getting lost in the debate. The jobs, the consultation, Algonquin street names. But it goes beyond just having a stake in the project. He even sees it as an act of Reconciliation.

WHITEDUCK: think it is because now we have a private developer wanting to involve the Algonquins and show recognition that this is un-surrendered Algonquin territory and involving Algonquins in the project. But we're looking for more than a plaque or street names, we're looking for more than that. Those kind of times are past, eh.

BOURGEOIS: This project, it's vision, it's goals are sacred, are reconciliation in action, are the answer to a Metropolis city that has struggled for many generations to reflect its territory, first peoples of the territory adequately."

KRISTEN NELSON: Josee Bourgeois is a member of Kirby Whiteduck's community. She thinks the Algonquin people need to be open for business. She sits on Zibi's Memengweshii council, it’s a small group of Algonquin women who suggest ways the developer can integrate their culture into the project.. Everything from signage to the replanting with native species….

BOURGEOIS: I grew up in Toronto, I lived in Toronto for 18 years, growing up, walking to school, the only native representations that I've ever seen were human beings on the street that were homeless and that really affected me over the years. I can close my eyes and think forward in years from now, when this project is done and I can be that 8 year-old girl again living in the big city and it's a beautiful feeling I have in my heart when I think about that. And I can walk through a public park that might be stewarded by the Algonquin people. Food, I can smell my culture, I can hear it, I'm going to hear the hand-drumming, I'm going to hear our language explaining when to cross, when to walk when to not walk. You know, little things like that. I really, really do think that Zibi is going to become this very magical place in the citizens' hearts of Ottawa. I'm trying to give the next generation of little Josee's a better city to grow up in.

KRISTEN NELSON: Bourgeois knows that some critics say people like her have simply been co-opted by the developer.

BOURGEOIS: I'm very confident in the relationship that I have. I don't feel like I'm being manipulated in any way. My voice is honorably being listened to. At the end of the day when we are talking about opposition to Zibi we are talking about retired, non-native folks who have misplaced settler's guilt. That's what I've come strongly come to the conclusion of. And I'm allowed to say that as an Algonquin woman.

KRISTEN NELSON: What do you say to the other communities, to other Algonquins who feel differently?

BOURGEOIS: I am more than certain that they actually don't know what they're upset about. I'm almost positive that 90% of the time when I do encounter other few Algonquins out there that vocally contest this project, they are one of those people that are still running off of misinformation.

[Sound: Water]

ST. DENIS: See that groundhog, see, little groundhog.

KRISTEN NELSON: Harry St Denis was the Algonquin Chief of Wolf Lake First Nation. It runs this river tourism operation, a two and a half hour drive northwest of Ottawa. There's a shop and little café and rows of red and yellow canoes, ready to be rented.

ST. DENIS: Right now we're on the Ottawa River at Rapid-des-Joquim…

KRISTEN NELSON: And in the middle of November, a few months after we met, Harry St. Denis died. But on that summer day, we walked along the river to find a place to sit and chat about Zibi, a project he never supported. He said Wolf Lake wasn't consulted and he wasn't convinced that developer's arrangements with other Algonquin First Nations are meaningful.

ST. DENIS: I don't know much about them, we'll name some streets after Algonquins or whatever. I don't give a damn about stuff like that. That's all tokenism, as far as I'm concerned. And to me it's really disrespectful the way that the go about getting their pretended okay with the Algonquins.

KRISTEN NELSON: Harry St. Denis supported the idea of the site being turned into a park, for everyone… a place for peace, to keep it sacred.

ST.DENIS: It doesn't have to be owned by anybody. It doesn't have to be owned by big business where they're going to come there and build all of this mega-infrastructure and make their billions and then take off. And then we're stuck with that forever and our, the Algonquins sacred site is forever destroyed.

KRISTEN NELSON: St. Denis was disappointed that the federal government didn't find a way to preserve the site. And he expected more from Justin Trudeau in particular…

ST.DENIS: Since their parliament sits on our territory, our Algonquin territory that they would be a bit more respectful of us. And I remember the Prime Minister's opening remarks when he opens meetings, twice now, and he uses the same lines. He always says 'I want to recognize the Algonquin people on whose territory we are on today. I recognize them as the past, present and future caretakers of this land.' Well, how the hell can we do that if we can't even protect a sacred site? How can we really believe that he means what he says when he lets something like this occur right out of his back window?

[Sound: Crows]

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AMT: We've been listening to The Cauldron produced by The Current's Kristen Nelson. Liz Hoath is The Current's documentary editor. Let us know what you think as you listen. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent.

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AMT: CBC News is next and then Alan Rusbridger was the long time editor of Britain's Guardian newspaper. He was there when the news broke in more ways than one. He is my guest in our next half hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti this is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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Journalism must be remade to rebuild public trust, says veteran editor of The Guardian

Guest: Alan Rusbridger.

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

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AMT: Still to come: the connection between the health of the planet and our own health. A new report in the British medical journal, The Lancet, confirms climate change is having a devastating effect on human health and the future is not good. Dr. Courtney Howard, an ER physician from Yellowknife, has published the policy brief for Canada that accompanies that report. She is my guest in half an hour. But first, when the news breaks.

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VOICE 1: Do you recognize what you have done? Do you accept that this has damaged the country? Because this is severe criticism that I haven't seen before from the head of our security services.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well I think it is important context that editors of probably the world's leading newspapers in America, the Washington Post and The York Times, took virtually identical decisions. So this is not a rogue newspaper. It is serious newspapers who've long experiences in dealing with national security.

AMT: Newspaper editor is usually a behind the scenes figure but there was Alan Rusbridger, the then editor of The Guardian newspaper, front and center being grilled by a British parliamentary committee. It was 2013 and the committee was delving into The Guardian's decision to publish thousands of secret documents provided by a young NSA contractor named Edward Snowden. And it wasn't Alan Rusbridger first time in the hot seat. He's been involved in some of the most explosive journalistic investigations of the past two decades, shaking governments around the world. Alan Rusbridger has a new book out it's called Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and why it Matters Now and he's with me in our Toronto studio. Welcome.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Good morning.

AMT: What was it like facing those questions and accusations?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well one of the things I wanted to try and catch in the book is that if you do aggressive journalism in the public interest people will fight back. And we took on some very powerful corporations and individuals and governments and intelligence agencies. And they will come after you. And I suppose the only thing is if you do it for some time it gets less frightening, a bit less frightening. So that was the first time I think in centuries that an editor had been called into the House of Commons to account for him or herself and the police were in the next room and were just launching an investigation into me. So one wrong word and I could have been in deep trouble.

AMT: I'm going to talk about that with you as we go on today, but let's just talk about what the title of your book says in relation to the kind of work you have overseen. Why is the remaking of journalism so important right now?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well some bits of this story will be quite familiar. We know that the legacy media which I think of as a kind of sort of a vertical operation. If you had a printing press or a broadcast studio you stood on some level above your readers or listeners and you handed down the news to them. And if you were lucky they paid you for them. And what we have now is a world that has arranged horizontally. There are four billion people on the planet who can talk to each other. And in some ways they trust and respect each other more than they do the old legacy players. And so one aspect of this is that journalists are trying to reinsert themselves into that horizontal transmission of information and make themselves relevant. The problem is that money is in very short supply, but maybe worse people tend not to trust journalists. So journalists I think got quite complacent in the time when the money flowed in and now they having to compete against billions of people. They're finding that people either don't recognize great journalism when they see it. They can't tell the difference between a good source and a bad source, or they just instinctively mistrust jacketless. And so journalism has to be remade in order to address that trust problem.

AMT: And of course we're looking at covering different kinds of politicians right now. This is the age of Donald Trump, the age of Brexit.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: well in a way I think we have to ask ourselves to what extent did we help create these people. So if you run away from complexity and you deal in the ever ever short of soundbites and very simplistic messages, and in a lot of tabloid newspapers in the UK deal in fear and simplicity and emotion. Then, in a way you're helping mould a world in which people have very simplistic populist fear laden messages to win. And so there is a powerful urgent relationship between news and democracy and that is the great responsibility I think, journalists have to face up to.

AMT: When you became editor in 1995 the World Wide Web was still in its early stages. Did you understand how profound that development would be in newspapers?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: At one level yes. I remember going to America to see the World Wide Web. I could probably have seen it somewhere in Britain but America was far ahead of what newspapers were doing. And there was complete confusion. The New York Times thought it would never work for news. In Chicago we saw it being used for adverts. No one knew how or if you could make money off it. But I I remember rushing back to London and pounding out a memo to my editor saying this is going to change everything. And I think I thought instinctively this is going to be the end of print. I mean over decades. But but print can't cope with this and digital is definitely going to be the future. But of course I didn't see social media, because nobody saw social media then, and in a way that was a even bigger revolution.

AMT: Why did the Guardian did it prepare for the challenge?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well the one thing - we didn't do we made lots of mistakes like everyone else - but the one the one mistake we didn't do initially was simply to put the stuff up there. I knew this was not just a new transmission mechanism, that this was the new media and you had to remake the stuff in order to work on the Internet. So we would set up a very good team which grew and grew and grew, of mainly young people, but people who understood technology, people who were prepared to think differently. And I think if we hadn't done that early on we would have encountered the same problems that all so-called legacy media organisations run into which is really seeing digital as a sort of afterthought to print.

AMT: In the midst of all of that, of course, you were the face of some of the most high stakes investigations in the British media over the last two decades. You talked about a minute ago, that you really have to prepare yourself for the pushback if you can only do this. But talk to me a little bit more about the challenges in a publication like The Guardian in probing powerful institutions and individuals.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well the first thing is it's probably going to take time and money. When we did the story of phone hacking within the Murdoch organisation that took one reporter seven years to do that. We did a big story about an arms company in Saudi Arabia and bribes. That took nearly 17 years of digging. So you have to have a company that understands that there is an indirect financial return from allowing reporters the time to do this sort of work. And the second lesson is that there's no point in publishing something unless you're prepared to defend it. Otherwise it's just the worst of all worlds if you retreat in the face of attack. And that again is going to cost an awful lot in lawyers and an awful lot of time. And so the financial cost of doing serious journalism is considerable. But what the accountants have to understand is that what you're doing is building a - I won't call it a brand because journalists hate that word, brand - of what you're doing is building a paper that has a reputation for being on the reader's side and for the holding power to account. And that in the end translates into dollars.

AMT: Let's talk about the Murdoch investigation. You had your investigative reporter Nick Davies investigate news outlets, most news outlets. You said he said 'go ahead'. How unusual is it for a newspaper to be investigating other newspapers?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: It was quite unusual and of course other newspapers hated it. I mean you you can understand that in the current climate news organizations feel very beleaguered. And they say look we should be shooting and not shooting in. We should be circling the wagons. But the way that Nick looked at it was he had evidence of a board cover up of criminal behavior in probably the largest private media organisation in the world, immensely powerful organization News Corp. And I often think what other editors would have done with that if they'd been brought that story. Do you say - well if that was a bank or an oil company or an automotive company we would certainly investigate that but because as one of ours we're going to look the other way. I don’t think you can. So it was a very uncomfortable story to do. It fractured my relationship with some fellow editors but I don’t regret doing it.

AMT: Well that it was News of the World, Rupert Murdoch's paper, part of News Corp. You described having a talk with Nick Davies about what you called the Heart Attack Convo. How was it?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well that was when Nick came in and told me that the story had been- that there had been one News of The World rotten apple who had been hacking phones and he went to jail and [unintelligible] go back to normal life. He discovered and he was being led in this by News of the World journalists who hated having to do what they were being asked to do. That in fact this was rife throughout the whole newsroom. This is how the newsroom was winning all its awards and getting all its scoops. It was just criminally a hacking into phones or getting private detectives to do it. And this had surfaced and the company was being sued for it. And James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's son had authorized a million pound payoff to keep it quiet. So rather than dealing with it and saying 'we've discovered actually this problem was much worse than we thought', they bought silence. And you can see why that doesn't look good in an organization that's committed to transparency. But it was frightening. It was frightening because Murdoch is a very aggressive individual and the longer we did the story, we realised that everybody was frightened of Rupert Murdoch. The police had a one day investigation before clearing them. The MPs didn't want to go there. The regulator didn't want to go there. Other newspapers didn't want to go there. So you were very much on your own.

AMT: You describe at one point looking in the mirror kind of like stealing yourself.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well I guess yes it happened two or three times as a way you think this is going to be horrible, and it's going to take the next in a year two years of my life, and it could be very personal. Am I up for this? That's a good question to ask because if you're not up for it then you should make way for somebody who is up for it. But it would be human, I think, for some editors to think actually this this is too much pain.

AMT: Remind us the initial response to the phone hacking exposes that The Guardian published??

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well the Murdoch organisation came out and said it was all lies. The police announced the investigation in the morning and by the afternoon they had closed down the investigation. The regulator which was supposed to regulate the press did a long report blaming The Guardian, not the News of the World and an awful lot of MPs just ran the other way and it got almost no coverage anywhere else in the media. So after about a week I think News Corp thought they had us where they wanted us and had prepared a gigantic counterattack. And it was only when Nick's source, who up to that point hadn't actually handed over any physical documents. He was so disgusted by what he saw was happening. We had this very dramatic Commons committee of hearing when Nick produced all the documents in the middle of this packed hearing. And then it all went a bit quiet because they, I think, they thought 'oh help The Guardian's got more than we thought they had'.

AMT: And then they found the hacking of Milly Dowler. Who was Milly Dowler?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Milly Dowler was a young schoolgirl who had gone missing and then later found murdered and it transpired the News of the World had been hacking into her phone at the time that the police were looking for her. And that was a story. Sometimes it just takes one story that elevates an investigation that's been rumbling on and people are sort of noting it, but not really doing anything about it. It was something about that that was just so repulsive; hacking into the phone of a missing schoolgirl who was later murdered. And that elevated it into a moment which couldn't be ignored and it provoked ia lot of resignations in the police, in the organisation, in the Murdoch organisation. And it led to the setting up of the Leveson Inquiry in the UK.

AMT: And News of the World no longer exists.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: In the middle of it, Rupert Murdoch shut down the News of the World which was a quite extraordinary thing to do and we hadn't seen that coming. But it was the power of advertisers. I mean advertisers just said this is a repellent paper and we no longer want to advertise it. So I think Murdoch sometimes does very ruthless things and that was one of them.

AMT: A lesson on staying on a story and not giving up when you know you're right and you're being criticised by the people who are trying to say you are problem.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: And it became a great landmark piece of investigative journalism and Nick had already written a book about journalism and he had coined the word 'churnalism' to describe what he found going on a lot of newsrooms. So in a lot of newsrooms had given up on that kind of reporting, and essentially young reporters would come in and be given 10 press releases and told to write 10 stories during the course of the day. And I'm afraid that goes on in a lot of newsrooms today and it is just not going to be the route to salvation because readers can smell that. They can smell churnalism. They can see that no work has gone into these stories. These are not stories that are holding anybody to account. And people think why should I read this still less why should I pay for it. So that's how you get into the sort of the complicated economics of all this, because on the face of it having a reporter doing one story for seven years is economic madness but it does say something about the paper and whether you’re prepared to do those kinds of stories.

AMT: I want to turn to WikiLeaks. It's been in the media a lot since the 2016 U.S. election but The Guardian had a lot of experience in dealing with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and for that. The original collaboration, remind us?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well we had done a bit while he was living in Kenya and giving us some stuff. And then actually it was Nick Davies again who saw a tiny little news in brief saying that Julian Assange was, as it were, on the run with a suitcase full or a backpack full of the most classified documents the world had ever seen. And so he reached out to him and said look why don't you come and do that with us. And we worked together for a few months. But, like many of the working relationships that Assange has with people, it didn't last.

AMT: Well what happened? Why did it fall apart?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well it was partly because Assange is a kind of information anarchist. So he believes that information should just be out there. He doesn't really believe in editing. He thinks editing is censorship. And his instinct was always to take home you know hundreds of thousands of documents and just chuck them out there on the web and let people decide. Why should newspapers set themselves up as gatekeepers. We should trust the people. And that's not what a newspaper does. So there was a fundamental disagreement about what we were doing and a tension between his urge to give everybody everything and our urge to redact and to contextualize and try and do it as safely as possible. So there was that tension. And then of course there was the whole Swedish rape charge thing or accusations of rape. And it is one of those difficult moments where you think the mistake to make would be to jump in behind Julian Assange and say he's our guy he's our source. This must be a cover up we're going to stand by him. But I thought that was unwise you know. What he did in his bedroom was was nothing to do with any work. We were collaborating on The Guardian and we had to keep our distance from that. But that didn't make life any easier in terms of our relationship.

AMT: This week Julian Assange attacked The Guardian for an article saying that champed campaign manager at the time, Paul Manafort, secretly met with Assange several times in the lead up to the U.S. election. He says those meetings never happened. How would you handle a story like that where one of the main participants denies the accuracy of that story?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well one of the things I did on the Guardian was to create a post I called a readers editor, because I always thought it was rather odd that if you want to complain about something on a paper and say look that's untrue. That the complaint goes to the person who made the mistake the first place, the editor. And I thought in modern governance terms you should have somebody who could investigate and if the readers’ editor says well actually there is no evidence of this or we got it wrong. He has a space in the paper to say so. So that's what I would do. I would say well look we've got people who are giving different accounts. It would be wrong for me to defend my own journalism. But but luckily we have somebody within the office who's completely of an independent from me, you come to a decision.

AMT: We don't have a lot of time in and we haven't talked about Edward Snowden yet and his catch of top secret documents. So we heard the clip off the top. Why did you decide to run those stories?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well I mean it turns out he was incredibly prescient. What Snowden was saying is, from the inside, I know how this works. You have to have a firewall between the state and these giant tech companies. You can live in a country like China where China is essentially inside Google and inside Facebook. There are equivalents of, but in America if that firewall is breached then the state can see into your mind, into your movements, on your health records, into your love live, into your medical conditions, into your legal affairs. And is that the sort of sad society we have. And if we want it surely we as citizens get to discuss it. So it seems to me a fairly mild proposition. But it did need somebody from the inside to show how it was working. So I had no doubt that that was a story of the highest public importance. And the fact that it's been confirmed by numerous court cases since that that these agencies were working illegally I think adds weight to what we were doing.

AMT: And we heard their parliamentary committee basically asking you how you got off you know as an editor deciding to release things that were issues of national security. You were actually ahead of the Washington Post and some of the stuff. You had made, you and your colleagues in whom you had great faith, made a decision even before then that this has to go out.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Yes. We were ahead of the Washington Post on a on the very first story and then we were kind of neck and neck for the other stories. And we ended up sharing a Pulitzer Prize. But I think it was an incredibly difficult story to do legally, ethically, morally, technically. But at the heart of it was a very serious issue which I don't think you know- everything that's happening in Facebook now this issue of personal privacy against the intrusion of all kinds of technology and the state is going to get bigger and bigger bigger one. And either the state is totally independent from media and editors are free to make these kinds of decisions, or we live in a kind of country where the state can, as it did in London, march into an office and smash up your computers and attempt to try and stop you from reporting. So you can criticize the decisions we made but you can't stop newspapers in advance from reporting. It is the classic publish and be damned. But the important bit is you begin by publishing.

AMT: You could have gone to jail.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: I could have gone to jail.

AMT: You knew that.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Yes.

AMT: That didn't stop you?

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: It was one of those moments when I looked into the mirror. But sometimes you just have to look at the documents and you say this is telling an important story. We will publish this as safely as we can. We will we will talk to all the authorities before we publish to try and minimize the harm. But actually when I've met calm mind security people since, most of them have said to me actually this was a debate we needed to have and we couldn't have gone on like this. And so I'm very pleased we did it. And I think just as Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers you know this was a man who was regarded as a traitor by President Nixon, and now he has big Steam's Bill Boaks films that everyone thinks this guy is a hero. I suspect in future we will see Edward Snowden as a as a bit of a hero.

AMT: And also once you know something, you can’t not know it, as an editor. You have to figure out how to get it out there, otherwise you are keeping it quiet. You have to make those decisions.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Well there are stories that you know and decide not to publish. There was quite a lot in the Snowden archive that we just decided we wouldn't publish, because this was not a story about the users of intelligence against terrorism or in war. This was about the bulk collection of all our data, including you know ordinary civilians just going about their everyday lives. So you do decide not to publish some stories. But then you have to be sure you can defend the ones that you want to publish.

AMT: Alan Rusbridger we're out of time. Thank you for coming in. You are a journalistic inspiration to a lot of us. Thank you.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: Thank you. It's been a good time.

AMT: Alan Rusbridger former editor of The Guardian. His new book is called Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters Now. He's in Toronto today. Stay with us. In our next half hour a Code Blue for planet Earth. We're talking about the health effects of climate change in Canada. This is The Current.

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Fears around climate change are causing some people to seek out support groups

Guests Courtney Howard, Annita McPhee, Dana Snell

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

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VOICE 1: As if the wildfire danger hasn't felt real enough. People in Prince George woke up to dark skies.

VOICE 2: It was so dark, it was just this ominous dark cloud hanging over the community. It was just-- it was it was unbelievable.

VOICE 3: There was so much smoke when we left telegraph that the sun was actually red.

VOICE 4: When we got up at 04:35 o'clock Friday morning, it had raised 44 inches overnight. The truck was in the water. The driveway was under. We couldn't get out.

VOICE 5: Their home is one of the last before this roadblock. We can even get further into the community to show you what's happening there. But residents say the river is actually flowing up onto the road.

VOICE 6: A heat wave is gripping parts of Canada too. Just weeks after scorching temperatures left at least 53 people dead in Montreal alone, parts of Quebec once again in the hot zone.

VOICE 7: Our bodies reach a limit especially if we're vulnerable. If I'm older or if I have a chronic disease, then my capacity to cope after a couple of days might be overcome.

AMT: News of extreme weather events: fires, floods, heat waves from this past year here in Canada. The changes that come with climate change become more apparent. It is not only the environment that bears the brunt. Doctors and health experts say our physical and mental health is taking a real hit as well. The Lancet Countdown is an ongoing international research effort that tracks those health impacts and reports on them every year. Its latest report warns that human lives and the viability of health care systems are at risk unless policy makers take more action. Dr. Courtney Howard is an ER physician in Yellowknife. She's the lead author of a Canadian policy brief that was released in conjunction with The Lancet Countdown report. And she's in Toronto. Hello.

COURTNEY HOWARD: Hi, how are you?

AMT: Ah well I'm interested to know what you know. We've been hearing a lot in the past couple of months about just how quickly climate change is accelerating. What are the health and mental health effects?

COURTNEY HOWARD: So the international Lancet Countdown report is a collaboration between 24 institutions worldwide that tracked 41 different indicators on the health impact of climate change; how we can adapt to them in terms of our health care system, the ways that we can decrease greenhouse gas emissions and improve health at the same time, and also the financial and economic drivers that are required to drive that transition, as well as the political engagement and media engagement that are required to sort of convince populations and educate people enough that they want real change. Though the mean messages this year are that present day changes in labour capacity, particularly with regards to people trying to work under extreme heat conditions. There's billions of hours lost, particularly in agricultural workers who are trying to work under hot conditions and so forth that has socio-economic health impacts for those people as well as for other countries and it's just dangerous. It can lead to heat stress, heat stroke, really severe heat related illness. Also we're seeing increases in dengue fever worldwide as well as changes in the distribution of malaria. And there's real concern for food security along term, because we is decreasing yields in many regions. And the thing is that the decrements are not actually limited to health, as we see potentially more food and insecurity, more a population displacement, more extreme weather just taking out health care systems. You know the big hurricane Maria down in Puerto Rico actually damage the world's largest normal saline remanufacturer last year. And so what we saw was I.V. fluid shortages already all across the U.S. and Canada. So damage to hospital infrastructure is actually something we need to think about, as well as sort of heat proofing and storm proofing our hospitals. So that plus potential increase conflict and displacement actually threatens our very health care structures.

AMT: So when you look at Canada, what are the biggest looming health issues related to that in Canada?

COURTNEY HOWARD: So the dad and we got from the Lancet Countdown report this year showed us that, well, it is getting hotter. So we know we had about 80 or 90 heat related deaths, in Quebec this summer. And the data they showed - and it's interesting because they used a very recent baseline. So the baseline period was just 1986 to 2008, so you know most of us were alive then. And they compared it to an overlapping period between 2000 and 20 17. So when they looked at the mean summer temperature experienced by vulnerable Canadians from earlier period to the later period was actually 0.2 degree Celsius higher in overlapping later periods. We're seeing a really rapid increase in heat. And you know just something we covered last year related to pollution, so we saw that there were about 7000 deaths from chronic exposure to anthropogenic fine particulate components of air pollution in 2015. So about 450 of those were due to coal and about a thousand were due to land based transport. So one of the nice things about learning to look at the health impacts of climate change is that a lot of the things that we can do to decrease greenhouse gas emissions also decrease air pollution. So we can see immediate benefits in terms of less asthma exacerbation, less kids missing school you know decrease--

AMT: Okay. Let me just stop you there. You are connecting the dots then. I mean we know that people have respiratory issues and asthma, but you are connecting the dots. 7000 deaths from fine particulate matter directly related to climate change.

COURTNEY HOWARD: Well what's neat about the air pollution, so air pollution does go up as the climate changes. So we see increased ground level ozone as things get warmer. The particulate matter that we were looking out was coming from human sources. So we like to talk about that because it's something that we can change. You know with all these extreme weather events that impact health: the wildfires in the west of Canada, the drought in the middle of Canada, the prairies, over the summer that could potentially crops and food security, the tornadoes in Ottawa, the heat related deaths in Quebec. I know a lot of Canadians are feeling really worried and are looking for things to do. So one of the major things we can do is to phase out coal. And that's something that Canada has committed to. So that will not only decrease our greenhouse gas emissions but it will also save us potentially 450 air pollution related deaths every year.

AMT: I just wanted to take you through a few things, then. How prepared is the health care system to deal with some of these effects? And what are doctors learning?

COURTNEY HOWARD: We haven't done a great job. Medical curricula is notoriously slow to change. And so this is one of those things that hasn't made it into the curricula despite the fact that the World Health Organization called Climate Change the biggest health threat of the 21st century. So when the Canadian Federation of Medical Students did a survey of outgoing medical students about two years ago, none of them had had it covered in their curriculum. So they're currently engaged in the campaign to try to have this get a foothold in medical education by 2020 with a fuller integration by 2025. That's one of a supporting rapid integration into the curriculum, is one of the main findings of this report.

AMT: And no wonder too, you mentioned already a factory in a place that is still making saline solution gets hit by a hurricane. How safe is our system that feeds into our hospital care from the effects of climate change?

COURTNEY HOWARD: Well certainly I had a conversation with someone who works in disaster planning at the time did, and who had also worked for Doctors Without Borders. So he's somebody who is used to looking at logistical supply chains in unstable situations. And climate change was really on his radar because we have a single source supplier system often and we often don't have a lot of extra staff in town. So when we have one of those single sources hit, like we saw in hurricane Maria, it causes big problems. We've also seen quite a few of our hospitals needing to be evacuated in the last couple of years due to wildfires. So Fort McMurray had to emergently evacuate their hospital in a matter of minutes to hours, which you know I find incredible that they managed to do it. Kudos to them. That's amazing. And there were also quite a few healthcare facilities that were evacuated in B.C. over the course of the last two wildfire season.

AMT: And of course the whole issue of mental health effects.

COURTNEY HOWARD: Yes. So we know that evacuations like that can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. And people remember those images of people driving out past the flames, as they evacuated Fort McMurray. I mean that was really frightening for people. So it's no surprise that later on they saw increased levels of anxiety when people came back to town. They have also seen similar things after other natural disasters. And you know all of these things, especially if somebody has a pre-existing mental health issue, can sort of be one of the stressors that puts them over the top into a crisis. But for the rest of us and some of the research that's been done in in Canada, particularly in the north - I live in Yellowknife so we're seeing really increase temperatures, part of my patient population in the Inuvik area is already experiencing temperatures more than 3 Celsius warmer than they were in the 1950s. So there's a big deal when you're talking about the difference between solid water and liquid wire. You know you can work on the solid [unintelligible] and drive curves on it and cheaply transport goods and building supplies and food for your families. And it also connects communities. So it allows for social connection in a way that is very expensive during the fly in time. Also when permafrost is exposed at the bottom of a slope it can actually cause the whole slope to be destabilized, and to slide down and cause what looks like a landslide. So elders who are living in that in the high arctic talk about how there weren't any landslides when they were little. And now there's a lot of them. So you can imagine how odd that would feel and disconcerting. So the word that has been used for that is 'solastalgia' which means feeling homesick when you're still at home, because you stay there but now your home looks different.

AMT: And the effects all of that has. Courtney Howard we have to leave it there. Thank you for your time, giving us a good example of all of these interconnected risks. Thank you so much.

COURTNEY HOWARD: Thanks and thanks for your coverage of it and I'm looking for it hearing from your next callers.

AMT: Okay thank you. That's Dr. Courtney Howard E.R. physician in Yellowknife, lead author of the Canadian Policy Brief that is part of the wider Lancet Countdown on health climate change. That Countdown now comes out every year. They started it last year and they will continue to do it for a number of years. Courtney Howard is speaking to us on the line from Toronto. Well we're going to focus in one Canadian community. More than 250 people from Telegraph Creek, in Northern B.C., were forced to flee their homes when wildfire ripped through in early August. Months after being forced to stay in hotels with friends and family, the evacuees have been given the go ahead to start returning home now. Annita McPhee is the health and social leader for the evacuees from the Telegraph Creek fires. She is from the Tahltan nation. She's been staying mostly at a hotel in Terrace B.C. since she had to get out of there when the evacuation occurred. And we have reached her in Terrace. Hello.

ANNITA MCPHEE: Good morning.

AMT: Can you tell me about the day you had to leave because of the fire?

ANNITA MCPHEE: Oh man. It was horrible. We were just at my sister's place where we were staying and she just came running in the door saying 'they're evacuating people'. She said 'anybody who has respiratory illnesses or elders has to leave'. And she said 'Peowa has asthma. You guys have to go.'.

AMT: And who is that?

ANNITA MCPHEE: My daughter.

AMT: Your daughter. How old is your dad.

ANNITA MCPHEE: She's 11. So we just started to feel really panicky and anxiety and we started to grab our fast food and you don't really have much time to think. So we just grabbed our stuff. I was feeling like I was almost in tears and then my daughter, I felt bad because were trying, me trying not to panic but you can't help it. She started to cry and say 'are we going to die?' And I said 'no we;re not, but we really need to give her stuff and leave here'. And it was just a really awful feeling because we didn't know what our villages could be like when we came back, or when we were coming back, or how it was going to be. So it was pretty traumatizing.

AMT: It was reported that the fire was 1200 square kilometres in size. Can you tell me about the damage it's cost?

ANNITA MCPHEE: Oh man the damage cost to our people. A lot of these places that we considered sacred. I mean I went back there. I had to take some of our people who lost their homes back to the community, during the fall. As soon as we came to this one place all you could was burnt trees. There was lots of places that didn't seem recognizable anymore. It just didn't feel like her home anymore. We lost 29 homes and structures. So a lot of homes burnt down in our village.

AMT: How confident are you that climate change played a role in that fire?

ANNITA MCPHEE: Well from myself, like I'm not a fire expert or anything, but I grew up in Telegraph peak in the north, and I think that climate change has a lot to do with these fires. Because this summer was the hottest summer that we've ever had. I mean some days it was up to 37 degrees. It was hot every single day. I just never seen something like that.

AMT: You know we heard reports of terrible air quality in the province during the fires. What was it like then during the fire season, especially for your daughter?

ANNITA MCPHEE: Well that fire really took off, you could just see this smoke coming over our village. And it was starting to get [unintelligible]. She even took pictures of it and the quality was really bad. And then when we got to Dease - which is about an hour and a half, two hours away from when we left our village, like telegraph Creek - even in Dease Lake because there were fires from there from the north and south- or from the West, I mean. I soke up middle of the night in Dease Lake and it was just smoky and in the hotel room. Like all you could smell was smoke. So the very next day, August 5th,.I just told my family, i just I said we got to go. Let's go to Terrace. So we came down here to Terrace. We stayed with our relatives. And then we stayed there for a few days and I was volunteering and then we started staying in a hotel. And we've been here ever since, and that was in August.

AMT: What's it like having to be away for so long, Annita?

ANNITA MCPHEE: Well when you are displaced, I mean it's really hard to- You have to have a lot of adjustment, without having things that you normally would have in your home. The hardest part was, you know, seeing our people be really really sad. A lot of people were feeling sad. At one point we had, almost 100 evacuees in Terrace and a lot of people have returned to Dease Lake because they have homes - not homes, but temporary homes or places to stay. But there's still at least about 30-40 people here right now.

AMT: Annita, we're going to have to leave it there but thank you for sharing your story with us today.

ANNITA MCPHEE: You're welcome.

AMT: That's Annita McPhee, health and social lead for the evacuees from the Telegraph Creek fires. She spoke to us from Terrace, B.C. where she's been, as you heard, since just the days after getting out because of that fire having to evacuate the region. Canada's northern and Indigenous communities are often on the front lines of changing climate and that's taking a toll on people's mental health. Ashlee Cunsolo was the director of the Labrador Institute of Memorial University in Happy Valley, Goose Bay. She works with the Inuit communities there to find out how so-called eco anxiety is playing out in their lives.

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We made a documentary film called Lament for the Land that highlights 24 Inuit’s experience with climate change and mental health in Labrador. And at the end, the Inuit talker, the mayor at the time of Nain - which is the northernmost community in Nunatsiavut, Labrador. He identified it, he said Inuit are people of the sea ice, and if there’s no more sea how do we be people of the sea ice. And I think for me thats one of the most profound moments that stand out because what we're looking at with climate changes is not just loss of infrastructure or property. It's loss of identity, of culture, of knowledge systems and of our connection to place and who we are in the world. I'm also seeing eco-anxiety arising in the broader population, in that sense of heightening anxiety around compassion for other people or worry about that safety of theirs and security of their own lives, worried about ecosystems. I think when we feel grief and we feel anxiety it's because we have a connection to what we're afraid to abuse and we grieve because we love something. And that I actually find a lot of optimism and hope because you know a lot of this will be motivated by people's fear but also by their love. And that's where I think we have to really focus on, is those positive emotions that build resilience and strength.

AMT: Well my next guest has been wrestling with that sense of eco-anxiety and how to find optimism when things feel so bleak. In fact Dana Snell's anxiety became so severe she ended up joining an online support group called the Good Grief Network to try to cope. And she's with me in our Toronto studio. Hi.

DANA SNELL: Hello.

AMT: When did you first noticed as this was becoming a problem?

DANA SNELL: I think, much like your previous caller, it was this past summer. It was just so hot and the summer of 2016 was also very hot. And I remember just looking at the temperatures for the week ahead and if I was above 30, I would really feel my heart sink and it wasn't just about 'oh there's going to be an uncomfortable day'. This was 'what's going to happen? What does this mean? What's going to happen for the future?' I was very concerned about my young daughter's future she's going to be two and a half on Christmas day. So she's so young and right at the beginning of this very uncertain future. So I found this summer very difficult and I thought I need to try and get some help for these feelings because they're becoming quite overwhelming.

AMT: How is that affecting your daily life?

DANA SNELL: I mean it was just it was just hard to I guess fall asleep at night, kind of my various frightening thoughts were kind of range from, at the most extreme, my daughter's going to be embroiled in some resource war in some desert future hell's cape, to just the sadness and the grief of 'she's now going to know what a pleasant summer it feels like', for her summer is going to be something that you have to slog through, the way we slog through winter. No offense to people who love winter. [Laughter] And I think I am not alone in saying it's a tough season. Summer is supposed to be the time that you don't want to end. What if it's going to be a time when we have to stay inside and-- So you know it would range throughout those feelings?

AMT: Are you someone who was really following the issue of climate change? Are you going out of your way to make sure that you understood what was happening?

DANA SNELL: I have been. I've cared about this for a long time, since I was a teenager in the 90s, which was a time I think of a kind of an emergence of a ecological thinking. And so being someone who's followed this for the past you know 20 years and watching this kind of slow motion train wreck of climate change, it's very difficult because it's your anxiety builds and builds and builds. And that's kind of where I was at.

AMT: And I'm guessing you felt pretty helpless, then, as an individual.

DANA SNELL: Yes absolutely.

AMT: And you made the point that you didn't feel you could protect your daughter.

DANA SNELL: Yes I mean, I think as a parent of a young child, I think many of us are concerned with protecting our child. This just seems like such a huge problem with so many different variations that could endanger her and it absolutely feels like there's just no political will to do anything about it.

AMT: So in the midst of all this you find the Good Grief Network. What is it?

DANA SNELL: I did. I was searching, I really wanted to deal with generalized anxiety although I understood that that was something that I would probably have to deal with for myself. But I want to do with people that were actually worried about this very specific problem. And so in my search I came across the term eco-anxiety which is useful. It's always useful when you have a name for something. And from there I was able to kind of use that to look further and I found the Good Grief Network. It was the only one organisation that I could find that was actually dealing with this very specific type of anxiety. It's an online support group. They're all American except for me. We meet once a week on Sunday evenings 7:00 p.m. Mountain time, that's 9:00 p.m. Eastern. And we meet over one of those online meeting apps. And it's kind of based on the Al-Anon program. And so we meet and we we talk through the steps and we talk about how we're feeling and how we're coping. And the whole aim of it is to build resilience.

AMT: And is working to quell some of the anxiety that you've felt?

DANA SNELL: IT is. I've kind of moved past feeling that my daughter's life is in danger which is kind of where I was going, and kind of moved a little bit away from that which is nice, and kind of felt myself being able to be more inspired to make some small changes in my life, even though I still don’t think that they're not going to make a real difference. But they are, they do make me feel better and they certainly don't hurt.

AMT: You're talking about being proactive on issues of the environment?

DANA SNELL: Yes,you know always was. But there are a few things just in my own life that I just hadn't you know bothered to do, which is like reduce the amount of meat that I eat. So I've done that. And these little changes, they feel it make me feel there's some momentum. And also just kind of being inspired with the work that all the other people in the group are doing and just sharing kind of coping strategies that definitely has helped a great deal. And I'm very grateful for it.

AMT: Well it it's important to hear your voice on this because this is exactly what they've been identifying in these new things, that this also affects our mental health and our sense of wellbeing. Thank you for coming in.

DANA SNELL: Thanks for having me.

AMT: That is Dana Snell, a member of the Good Grief Network, an online support group for those dealing with anxiety about climate change. She joined us from our Toronto studio. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio 1 for Q. The prolific actor and comedian Andrea Martin is on the show and she's being inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. We heard from Alan Rusbridger earlier in today's program - former editor of The Guardian newspaper - at the forefront of some huge stories and some major changes in the way news is investigated and distributed. He's also managed to carve out some time along the way to learn to play piano in his 50s. In 2010 he set himself the challenge of learning Chopin's Ballade in G minor, in the space of a year. His quest was written up in his book Play It Again. Here's a bit of how it sounded. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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I have quite a busy job. At the newspaper, it turned out to be a very busy year. There was WikiLeaks at the beginning of this period and then there was phone hacking at the end. So that sort of book ended the year that also had tsunamis and riots and wars and all the usual things in a newspaper life. But I did want to prove that you could, if you wanted to, just nibble out 20 minutes a day. This Chopin's G-Minor Ballade was written just after the death of Beethoven. And it's one of the first great revolutionary pieces of the Romantic era. It is a work that inspires terror. Even a professional pianist, Murray Perahia, talked to me about it and said this was one of the most difficult pieces in the repertoire. The period in which I was trying to learn this piece was I think the most frantic 18 months my life. When the diary would sometimes end at two o'clock in the morning, with some meeting, or with transatlantic [unintelligible] call, or a piece of editing. And then I would be plunged into a seven o'clock piano lesson and then by 07:59 I'd be back into phone hacking or WikiLeaks, whatever it was. But I think there is something about having a walled off piece of your life where you're using a completely different bit of your brain and that in the end felt quite an important bit of the day.

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