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The Current Transcript for May 8, 2025

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

SPEAKER: First of all, all the radars, three of the four radar screens went black, and they have no frequencies.

MATT GALLOWAY: It is the opposite of being cleared for landing. For 90 seconds, air traffic controllers lost contact with all planes taking off from, landing at, and flying by Newark Airport outside of New York City. The nightmare scenario left many who manage the skies there to walk off the job traumatized and has led to epic delays at one of the busiest airports in the United States. In 30 minutes, flying blind, and why Canada is also struggling to staff its control towers. Also this morning, some good news. You might know the axolotl as the smiling salamander. It's popularly seen as a kids’ toy, also a character in Minecraft. Mexican culture sees it as a god in amphibian form, which is why the precipitous decline in the population numbers was so alarming to people there. Coming up, the return of the axolotl, and why scientists see this as a sign of hope for species restoration elsewhere. Plus.

SOUNDCLIP

SPEAKER: Okay, Cory, let's get our feet wet. Show us how to surf the net.

CORY DOCTOROW: Okay. Well, when you're talking about playing around on the internet, you're talking about one of two things: playing with yourself, playing with other people.

MG: There was a time before spam and fake stories and the shouting that the internet was a user-friendly place built to connect people. What happened? That is the question the tech writer, Cory Doctorow, tried to answer in a new podcast. In an hour, who broke the internet and how we can fix it. But as suffering in Gaza grinds on and threatens to intensify, we begin with the laws of war and the Palestinians who are rising up against Hamas. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current.

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GAZA

Guests: Michael Byers, Moumen al-Natour

MG: It has been more than two months since Israel cut off humanitarian aid to Gaza. Supplies and food have not been allowed to enter the Strip since March the 2nd. Israel says this is to put pressure on Hamas to release the remaining hostages. The United Nations, along with other aid agencies, say 10,000 children are experiencing severe malnutrition. Last week, 40 countries took part in hearings at the International Court of Justice looking at Israel's obligations to allow aid and humanitarian assistance into Gaza. Michael Byers is the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. Michael, good morning.

MICHAEL BYERS: Good morning.

MG: What legal obligation does Israel have to allow aid into Gaza?

MICHAEL BYERS: Well, Israel has a lot of legal obligations dating back to the 1945 United Nations Charter, the 1948 Genocide Convention, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, all of which point to an obligation to protect civilians during time of armed conflict, to not engage in a siege, to not Use hunger and starvation as a weapon of war. This really isn't a question as to whether there is clear international law. It's a question of whether the Israeli government is willing to uphold international law and what the rest of the world can do if it won't.

MG: Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz, has said Israel's policy is clear. No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza, and blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers preventing Hamas from using it as a tool with the population. No one is currently planning to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, and there are no preparations to enable such aid. The UN has accused Israel of, in its words, deliberately weaponizing aid. The foreign ministers of the UK, France and Germany said the situation is intolerable. So go back to that question of international law. When you take a look at what the Israeli defence minister has said, how does that square or does it with international law?

MICHAEL BYERS: It doesn't seem to square with international law. And I'm being careful here because I'm not a judge. I'm not going to say definitively that Israel or any individual minister is engaged in a violation of international law. But I can say that Hamas has almost certainly engaged in mass violations of international law starting on October 7th, 2023, and yet international humanitarian law does not require reciprocity. So no matter how horrific Hamas has behaved, Israel is still required to uphold the rules itself. And although Israel has not ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, that court has deemed that it has jurisdiction over actions in Gaza. And the minister's statements certainly look like an intent to commit genocide. We're talking about the most fundamental rules of our international system. Israel seems to be violating them. It's threatening two million people with starvation and deportation. It doesn't get any more serious than this.

MG: Where does the law draw the line between the right for Israel to defend itself against Hamas in the wake of the attacks of the 7th of October and the rights of Palestinians in Gaza under humanitarian law?

MICHAEL BYERS: Well, first of all, the right of self-defence is part of a separate body of international law, the law governing the recourse to force based in the United Nations Charter and the inherent right of Self-Defence. But even that right requires proportionality. So your listeners have to ask whether several thousand Israelis being massacred in Israel, whether that justifies imposing starvation upon two million Palestinians, most of them innocent, many of them women and children. So there is a proportionality element there. But separate from that, parallel to that, there are rules of international humanitarian law set out in the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which Israel has ratified. And those are very clear that an occupying power must respect the humanitarian obligations that come with that status, that you must not use starvation as a weapon of war, that you are not allowed to cause people, to coerce people, to force people to leave their homeland, to be deported, which is what some Israeli ministers are now talking about. I have some sympathy for Israel. I've taught in Israel. I've taught international humanitarian law at the University of Tel Aviv, but what they are doing right now sends off all kinds of alarm bells in my head. These look like egregious violations of fundamental rules.

MG: Beyond you, I mean, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to, in its words, ensure the unhindered provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance. This came from the case that was brought by South Africa, accusing Israel of acts of genocide. What are the consequences for Israel not adhering to that order? That case is still working its way through the legal system, but the order was to make sure that aid and humanitarian assistance was delivered. What are consequences for not doing that?

MICHAEL BYERS: Well, there are specific consequences for certain individuals. So the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The focus of that warrant is the siege. Broader to that, you know, Israel might think that it can do what it wants, that what the international community thinks doesn't matter, but Israel is destroying its reputation internationally. It is violating fundamental rules. It is demonstrating that it is not trustworthy. The implications of this loss of reputation are not necessarily obvious, but they will be felt for a long time. You know, for example, people choosing not to go to Israel for tourism purposes, people not engaging in contracts with Israeli companies, Israeli diplomats not being invited to all important opportunities for networking and dialogue at the United Nations. There are all kinds of consequences that come from making yourself a pariah state, and Israel is close to becoming a pariah state as a result of these decisions by the Netanyahu government.

MG: You wrote a really interesting piece in the Globe and Mail in which you talked about what unfolded over the course of a semester in your class at UBC. And it speaks to the fact that there are populations that feel very strongly on all sides of this issue and that, you know, your students were articulating that. Canada has a new government. Just finally, before I let you go, what are you wanting to see from the Prime Minister, Mark Carney, when it comes to this conflict and what you have talked about?

MICHAEL BYERS: Well, the thing that I taught my students and that they agreed with is that you have to listen if you want to learn, and there are no sharp black and whites when it comes to these issues. But at the same time, it's important to be able to criticize international actors when they behave in egregious manner. And so in this situation, yes, Hamas behaved terribly. Hamas continues to behave terribly, but that cannot justify the deliberate use of starvation against millions of innocent people. And so I ask your listeners to go beyond the actual conflict and think about Palestinian children who are paying a severe price as Israel exercises a right of self-defence in what looks like a grossly disproportionate way. It's partly a moral issue, it's partly a legal issue, but at some point, you know, Canada has to stand up and say to Israel, look, this is not okay.

MG: Michael, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much.

MICHAEL BYERS: You're welcome. Thank you.

MG: Michael Byers is Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at UBC.

SOUNDCLIP

[protests]

MG: In a rare public demonstration, hundreds of Palestinians came together at the end of March in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza and called for the removal of Hamas. It is the boldest challenge to that group in years. Hamas has been in charge of the Gaza Strip since 2007. There have been no elections since then. Moumen al-Natour was just 11 years old when Hamas came to power. He co-founded We Want to Live. It's a grassroots youth movement that pushed back against Hamas rule in 2019. He's now 30. He was working as a lawyer before the war started. I spoke with Moumen al-Natour from Gaza City with the help of a translator who is based in Washington and began by asking him what the last year and a half has been like for him.

SOUNDCLIP

TRANSLATOR: The situation is from bad to worst. The war destroyed us all. We are looking and always hoping to have a place, a safe zone where we live in that doesn't have the two sides of the conflict, meaning Hamas and Israel.

MG: How are you able to get food, for example? It's been two months of a blockade of food and other supplies coming into Gaza. How difficult is it to get food?

TRANSLATOR: So even during the ceasefire time where the aides used to come to Gaza, we used to buy these aides from the black market. And currently, there are no products in the market available. There are few, and these few products in the market are extremely expensive, unbelievably expensive.

MG: There was a ceasefire, and you wrote in The Washington Post that the hostilities beginning were a crisis, terrible news for everyone in Gaza except for Hamas. Tell me more about that. Why did you say that?

TRANSLATOR: During the ceasefire, Hamas get back on the ground. They usually enter the ground, they go on ground, and they start to recruit more people. The most important thing, they control the aid, they confiscate aid, they resell these aids in high prices. During the ceasefire, Hamas was able to kill some of their opponents. They were able to go up the ground and resell the aids that were sent to the Gazans for free from many countries, and then Hamas would take it and resell it. Hamas want the world to think that all Gazans support Hamas, while in reality, we, the Gazans, we refuse Hamas. We need a new government. And when I say a new government, I want a government that is not controlled by Hamas and is not control by Fatah.

MG: Tell me more about that. You have said the world thinks that Gaza is Hamas and Hamas is Gaza. What does the world get wrong about Hamas?

TRANSLATOR: So many people think that Hamas was elected democratically with an election that have integrity, which is wrong. During the 2007 coup, Hamas killed all of their opponents. And in any opportunities where we push to democratize the institution in Gaza and call for election, Hamas was always postponing that, and they were not interested in that. So Hamas is not an option for us as Gazans. Hamas has been forced on us, and they use blood to strengthen their grip on Gaza Strip.

MG: We heard the sound of demonstrations in northern Gaza against Hamas. How widespread is that sentiment in Gaza right now?

TRANSLATOR: The demonstration, when they first started, they were big, huge and widespread, but they did not get the media attention that they need. Then later, when Hamas killed some of the protesters and when the protesters started to see that there are a lack of media attention to the protest movement in Gaza, we can say that Hamas at this stage was able to bury this wave of protest movement in Gaza because the people were terrorized by the killing.

MG: How have you been helping organize these demonstrations against Hamas?

TRANSLATOR: I just want to add here that I started organizing, co-organizing protest movement since 2019, during the We Want to Live protest movement. And now, recently, I worked in coordinating with some of the same leaders that they went in 2019 against Hamas in Beit Lahiya, a region to protest against Hamas. And the main reason was also that people, they don't want to be displaced again. And they are afraid that after they've been displaced from south to north, from north to south, the only solution to end their misery is to end the rule of Hamas. And this is why people were protesting. They're sending a signal that we don't want Hamas anymore.

MG: Some of the people who have been protesting against Hamas have been killed by Hamas. They have been tortured. How dangerous is it for you to speak out against Hamas?

TRANSLATOR: Anyone with a little bit of sanity would be afraid from Hamas, but we lost everything, and we have been displaced many times over the course of the recent war. So now, if we want to be displaced again, we cannot, because we don't have the money even to transport ourselves. And it's not me only. Majority of Gazans are like this. So this is, we lost everything. Why should we be afraid?

MG: Hamas says that there is no point in it negotiating with Israel if Israel does not end what it calls the hunger war against Gaza and if it extends its military operations in Gaza. Do you think Hamas wants to see an end to this war?

TRANSLATOR: Hamas want the time to go back before October 7 where they were in a totalitarian, radical way controlling all of Gaza, making a lot of revenues from taxes and from AIDS in order to build tunnels and continue their war. So I don't think Hamas is interested in negotiation. All what they are interested in is to stay in power and making wealth and money on the blood of the Palestinian people.

MG: What about Israel? Do you think Israel wants an end to this war?

TRANSLATOR: Well, they are as extreme as well, and they don't want to end the war. But there are other ministers, other officials who doesn't want Israel to be fighting all over. They are not like Smotrich. So we are hoping that those moderate elements within the Israeli government can work on that and ending the war.

MG: There have been huge protests in the United States and Canada on campuses and beyond around this war. And you wrote in The Washington Post, despite the headlines our protests have generated, the organized pro-Palestinian network in the United States has not yet risen to the challenge of supporting Gazans in our push for freedom from the tyranny of Hamas. What would you want from those people who are protesting the war?

TRANSLATOR: The protest movement, they have supported more or benefited Hamas more than us, more than the Palestinian cause, more than benefiting the Gazan civilians who are languishing behind fires. Did these protesters went in a demonstration calling on Gazans who are suffering, who are besieged, to be having a safe exit, to leave? Those who want to leave, can they leave out? Even if I live in a tent, I want to be living in a safe zone. I want to live in an area that Hamas is not controlling and that I'm not afraid that I will be killed by an Israeli bombardment. They have to know that the protesters, that we are humans, we get hungry, we get thirsty, and stop looking at us as idle. You know, where the Palestinian fighters, the Palestinian strugglers, that dehumanizes. We are asking them to look into this humanitarian aspect where we are hungry, we get cold, we got hot, and we need food, we need medicine, we need all of that. It's not this image of mortal Palestinian resistance that these campus students are supporting.

MG: Just to be clear, you believe that the protests supported or gave more support to Hamas than to Palestinian civilians?

TRANSLATOR: When the protest movements in the US, Canada, Europe started, Hamas felt more euphoric. And they felt that all the world is supporting us. And that contributed to the fact that Hamas did not take the negotiation on the ceasefire seriously, and they started to delay it. And Hamas, they don't differentiate. They think maybe some of these protesters are supporting the Palestinian as a human, but Hamas took all the credit out of these demonstrations.

MG: What is the solution for Gaza and for the Palestinian people at this point? What is your dream for an end to this war and what might be on the other side of it?

TRANSLATOR: Ending the rule of Hamas and not seeing any militia presence in Gaza, starting a government from the youth, from the Gazans, that is not ideologically Hamas or ideologically Fatah. And then when we have our government, and then we start to negotiate with the Israeli to have a sustainable, peaceful solution where we have two states.

MG: You're part of that youth. You're 30 years old. Do you have hope for the future yourself?

TRANSLATOR: Of course, of course, I have hope, I have dreams. Every day when I wake up in the morning, I always think that we need to bring Gaza into prosperity and end the conflict and we need just to live as human beings, as a group, as people, and me personally, on a personal level. We are not going to stop dreaming.

MG: Moumen, thank you very much for speaking with us.

TRANSLATOR: Thank you, Moumen, for talking with us.

MG: Moumen al-Natour is a lawyer and co-founder of the We Want to Live movement that he started against Hamas in 2019. He was in Gaza City. We spoke through a translator. Your CBC news is coming up next, and then…

SOUNDCLIP

SPEAKER: We lost our radar and it's not working correctly. If you want arrival clearance, you can just call the towers and get closer.

SPEAKER: Okay, I'll wait for that frequency from you, okay?

SPEAKER: Okay, no, just walk me as far, look up the tower frequencies. And we don't have a radar, so I don't know where you are.

MG: I don't know where you are. It's a pilot's nightmare, flying blind. Last week, air traffic control for New Jersey's Newark Airport lost contact with several planes while they were in the air. It was so stressful that some air traffic controllers have taken special leave from the job to recover. We'll talk about how this happened and what needs to change so it never happens again. That's coming up in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app. Stay with us.

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AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS

Guests: Michael McCormick, John Gradek

MG: Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

SPEAKER: First of all, all the radars, three of the four radar screens went black, and they have no frequencies.

MG: It is a terrifying thing that no pilot or air traffic controller wants to experience, planes flying blind.

SOUNDCLIP

SPEAKER: 9674 approach, radar contact lost. We lost our radar, but just stay on the arrival and maintain 6000.

MG: This is a glimpse into the moments that air traffic control for New Jersey's Newark Airport lost contact with several planes. The situation is called Nordo, or no radio. It happened last week for about 90 seconds, sending one of the busiest airports in the United States into chaos and delaying hundreds of flights, including some into and out of Canada. The United States Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, blamed equipment outages and staffing shortages. The situation was so stressful that some air traffic controllers have taken special leave from the job to recover. And more than a week later, many passengers are still facing disruptions.

SOUNDCLIP

SPEAKER: I was delayed getting in here on United, and I'm getting delayed getting out of here on JetBlue. I'm just a little annoyed because I've never been delayed so much in my life.

SPEAKER: Today, our flight keeps getting pushed back for a fourth time now, and it's over five hours delayed now.

MG: The FAA says it will increase air traffic controller staffing at the approach control that handles Newark's air traffic. Later today, the US transportation secretary is set to announce a multi-billion dollar upgrade plan for the US air traffic control system. Michael McCormick has over 30 years of experience in the aviation industry, 10 of those working as an air traffic Controller. He was formerly head of the air traffic Control for New York, a position he held on 9/11. He now teaches the next generation of controllers at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. Michael, good morning.

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: Good morning, and good morning, Canada.

MG: It's good to have you here. You know the New York area skies really well. What do you make of what happened at Newark? I said it was a nightmare scenario, but for you who’s somebody who's been in that tower, is that the word you would use to describe it?

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: It definitely was a crisis situation for the controllers involved, and I definitely feel for the stress and anxiety that they went through in trying to alleviate the impact of this event.

MG: Walk us through what the air traffic controllers in that tower in charge of Newark Airport would have done during those moments where they had no contact. Again, you hear the radio calls, and it's I don't know where you are. That's what they're saying to other pilots. So what was going on?

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: Essentially, what's going on is you have the approach control facility, which is located in Philadelphia and provides the arrival and departure services in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport. And the controllers are sitting at radar displays, and they're plugged in, utilizing headsets and microphones to monitor on radar the flights of the air, of going into and out of Newark and the adjacent satellite airports, and they're providing what's known as radar vectors turns to intercept the final approach into Newark and turns for the departures coming airborne to get them on their route of flight to go to their destination, and they're climbing and descending aircraft. So it's a very complex environment. And seconds make a difference because you have air speeds sometimes exceeding over 250 miles an hour as the aircraft are flying to get on their route, and speeds of 200 miles an hour as the aircraft are coming in and starting their initial approach into Newark. So as aircraft converge at those types of speeds, you need to have your radar, and you need to have a radio in order to be able to provide a safe level of service and efficient level of service to those aircraft.

MG: And your understanding is, I mean, when they say I don't know where you are, the screens that those air traffic controllers are looking at, the screens just went blank?

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: Essentially, that's one of the things. The screens will go blank, and you'll lose all the targets and associated often numerics with those targets. So you're not able to track or identify aircraft.

MG: 90 seconds is a long time or a short time, depending on how you think about it. What is the worst case scenario for your screen being blank with those planes moving at those speeds for 90 seconds?

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: Ninety seconds is an extraordinarily long time in this approach control environment. As I mentioned, it's not a lot of airspace. You have aircraft in it, and they're going to continue to fly on their flight path until they can reestablish radio and radar with the approach control. So the system would then rely upon an onboard aircraft collision alert system that would then track all the adjacent aircraft that are independent of the air traffic control system, and then would provide alerts to the pilots in the event that there were any aircraft that they would be at risk of coming in conflict with. It would solely depend upon that onboard aircraft system to provide that safety net for those aircraft.

MG: Are you surprised in 90 seconds that nothing smashed into something else, do you know what I mean? I spent a lot of time looking at, you know, those flight apps that you can have on your phone, flight radar and what have you, and it shows you how many planes are in the sky at once. You have to be able to manage all of those things. If you can't see where they are, it's kind of incredible that nothing catastrophic happened.

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: I believe that it was the calm, professional work that the pilots and air crews did in order to keep moving and keeping safe. They were able to do things such as contact directly Newark International Control Tower and be able to speak to the controllers there. And they have a tower radar display that they were able to utilize to assist those aircraft. Additionally, other pilots contacted the adjacent radar area at LaGuardia Airport and were able to talk to air traffic controllers there. So it was that flexibility, that professionalism, that creativity to think about what else can we do in these 90 seconds that can help us keep on moving?

MG: You've been in those towers. As I mentioned, you were in one of those towers, head of air traffic control for the FAA's New York Centre on 9/11. Tell me a little bit about the pressures that air traffic controllers face on a day-to-day basis.

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: Controllers have to make quick, effective, efficient and safe decisions in moments. There is no time to look at alternatives, ponder results. Controllers have to assimilate all the information that is being displayed on their radar monitors, or looking out the window in their traffic control tower and perform an orchestrated movement of aircraft where you're actually developing a mental model and then projecting that model in the future and then coming up with a plan and then going back and monitoring to ensure that your plan is effective and everybody is following it.

MG: Do you understand why those people who were in control of Newark when the screens went dead, a lot of them just walked off the job. They left on stress leave because of what they were dealing with.

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: Yeah, I wouldn't characterize it as walking off the job.

MG: Well, they took stress leave.

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: Absolutely. It's a traumatic event. And to have to be a part of that can be very, very stressful.

MG: There is a nationwide shortage of air traffic controllers in the United States. The FAA says it's short of about 3000 controllers. 90% of US airport towers apparently are understaffed. In Newark itself, you need 16 controllers that are available for call every single day, and that's fewer than half that would actually be needed to cover all of the different shifts there. Why is there this shortage?

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: The shortages occur for two reasons. One is that whenever there is a US government shutdown due to either a lack of a budget or a lack of a congressional authorization, then the FAA has to stop all hiring and all training of air traffic controllers. However, when the government is shut down, you still have controllers who are treading out, mainly through retirement, or ageing out due to the mandatory retirement age. So you have those occurring over a decade or more. And then when we had the pandemic, the FAA for a year couldn't hire and train air traffic controllers. So that exacerbated a pre-existing shortage, and that leaves the FAA where they are now with 3000 controllers short.

MG: How is that impacting flight safety?

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: The Federal Aviation Administration and in close cooperation with NAV Canada, they work to throttle down the system whenever there is any shortages in terms of staffing. They can reroute aircraft or they can put in what's known as traffic management initiatives to slow down the traffic in those areas so that safety is not compromised in any way. But efficiency is, and it results in delays.

MG: I think one of the things that people would think of, though, is, and again, and I understand that this is still being investigated, about that fatal crash at Reagan National Airport in January. There have been a number of near misses as well, and people think if there aren't enough controllers in the tower, mistakes, what you talked about, making those decisions in real time with lives at stake, that mistakes can happen. Do you think staffing shortages have played a role in incidents like that?

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: No, I don't believe that staffing has contributed to any degradation of safety across the US national airspace system. I think what the staffing contributes to is that lack of efficiency and then the resulting delays.

MG: Later today, the US transportation secretary is going to announce, in his words, a whole new air traffic control system. The US president put out on social media this morning, I will fix the air traffic problems. What will fix those problems?

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: Certainly, a detailed look at the state of infrastructure and technology within the US aviation transportation system is warranted.

MG: One of the things I read was that, I mean, some towers are still using computers with floppy discs, for example.

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: I would have to counter that and say all the controller facing technology in the United States air traffic system is state of the art. It's the backroom technology that really has the need to be evaluated and updated.

MG: Do you think people, I have to let you go, but do you think, one of the reasons why this story gets so much attention is because when we fly, we turn ourselves over to a number of different things, the technology, the pilots, the people who are there taking care of us and ensuring that we're safe, but also the fact that those in the towers know where we are at all times. Do you think people should feel safe to fly in the wake of a story like this?

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: I would ask your listeners to consider the fact that aviation remains the safest form of transportation in Canada and the United States. And the greatest risk you're going to take when you're flying someplace is getting into a car and either Uber or driving to the airport. There's a thousand times more risk that you will be involved in a fatal accident in a car than you are in an aircraft. So… go ahead.

MG: Yeah, no, I was just really glad to talk to you. I'm going to have to leave it there, but I think that's a really good point. And your insight in this is fascinating, having been there, but also, as I say, training that next generation. Thank you very much for joining us this morning.

MICHAEL MCCORMICK: Thank you. It's a pleasure being on. Have a good day.

MG: And you. Michael McCormick is a former air traffic controller and trains, as I said, air traffic controllers, that next generation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. We're talking about what's happening in the United States, but there's also a shortage of air traffic controllers in this country. Last month, the Vancouver airport saw several days of widespread delays. NAV Canada, which owns and operates Canada's civil air navigation system, said the delay was because of a shortage of air traffic controllers. John Gradek is an aviation expert, professor in the aviation management program at McGill University. John, good morning to you.

JOHN GRADEK: Good morning, Matt.

MG: How significant is the shortage of air-traffic controllers in this country?

JOHN GRADEK: It is not as bad as it is south of the border. I think that, you know, we've had NAVCAN take some initiatives over the last 12 to 18 months to kind of address the need for replacement controllers that had either retired or were reduced when we had COVID. There's about a thousand short at this point in time, but there are plans afoot to try to close that gap. It'll take a few years to get there, but NAVCAN has expressed the opinion that everything is under control. They have. There are temporary shortages of staff, as you saw in Vancouver, but that is something that NAVCAN is saying that is well managed at this point.

MG: Why are we seeing that shortage?

JOHN GRADEK: We're seeing that shortage because of the fact that we have retirements in air traffic controller roles. You know, the number of people that have left air traffic control over the last decade has been significant, and that has been a question of going through COVID and going through normal retirements. And, you know, normally, people leave these jobs for other jobs. And so there is a worldwide demand for air traffic controllers. I know at this point, I mean, you see the Australian air traffic control system actively recruiting North American controllers to operate the Australian system. So there's a worldwide effort to, in fact, increase the number of controllers to meet the demand that is being created for airspace by the airlines. And what's happened in Canada over the last two or three years is that the industry, the airline industry has in fact recovered significantly. There are probably, we've reached the 2019 flight levels and even gone beyond that level over the last couple of months, and that stressed out the supporting systems, both at the airports as well as at air traffic controllers to be able to manage that amount of flying. So there is a lot of pressure put on NAVCAN to be able to handle additional flying.

MG: We asked to speak with someone at NAVCAN. This is the organization that oversees air traffic controllers. They weren't available for an interview. They sent us a statement in which in part it reads, you know, don't compare the United States and Canada when it comes to air traffic management systems. But they also said that they're taking, to your point, a number of steps to address the shortage of air traffic controllers, including, in their words, an extensive recruitment process, very competitive pay, and hiring experienced air traffic controllers. This is a job that pays you while you're training. $100,000 a year roughly is the starting salary, but it comes with an awful lot of stress. As you understand it, why is it so hard to get people to do this job?

JOHN GRADEK: Oh, I think that, you know, as you mentioned, it takes a certain level of competency, a certain level of skills, and a certain personal characteristic to be able to do the controller's job, as Mike mentioned to you earlier. This is not a job for the faint of heart. You have to be able to have what I call spatial recognition of what's going on around you. You're looking at screens and talking to radios. The screens show everything in two dimensions. In your mind, you have to work in three and sometimes four dimensions to be able to in fact understand the area and the territory that you're looking to to oversee. So, you know, it's not everybody that can do that. There's very, you know, it takes a lot of time to train an air traffic controller. People that are in training sometimes don't make the cut. So for every hundred people that are going into the program, NAVCAN says only about 40 make it.

MG: Wow!

JOHN GRADEK: So there's a lot of people that fall by the wayside because of the standards and because of the training regimen that our friends at NAVCAN have.

MG: In the meantime, what kind of pressure does a shortage like that put on the folks who are in the towers working as air traffic controllers if we're a thousand short in this country?

JOHN GRADEK: Well, I think what Mike said is really important. I think that what's happening in North America, and, you know, we're not as bad as the US, but we still have stresses, is that what you saw happen in Vancouver is the reaction by the air traffic control system.

MG: That the system will slow things down, if there aren't enough people there, the system will slow things down such that it may create delays, but it's going to be safe.

JOHN GRADEK: It's safe. We're not compromising safety. We're not compromising, you know, the ability for the controllers to manage the airspace that they have in front of them because the system will reduce the workload to in fact match the staffing levels that are in place at any one point in time.

MG: Just before I let you go, I mean, this is the question that I asked Michael. If somebody's listening and they hear about a story like this, one of the reasons it gets a lot of attention is because it plays into some of their worst fears about flying. His point was you're more likely to get injured, you know, walking down the stairs on your way to the airport than you are when you're in the plane. What would you say to somebody who's worried that their next flight isn't safe?

JOHN GRADEK: Oh, I don't think there's any compromise in safety. I think that, you know, that, like I said, the system, however you want to define the system, manages the demand on the controllers to the point where the controller is in control. And there isn't a situation where things have reached a point where you have risk in terms of flight safety. So.

MG: Until the screens go blank.

JOHN GRADEK: Well, you know, but there are procedures. There are procedures in place when the screens go blank. And I think Mike was very, you know, very comprehensive in talking about those procedures. Pilots are part of that equation, and there's other air traffic control systems available in surrounding areas that will probably give you a level of safety that is second to none. So I think that, yeah, will Canadian screens go down, will Canadian screens go black? Chances are very minimal, but it could happen. But I think we have, you know, a system in place and practices and procedures in place to ensure the safety of our air travelling public.

MG: John, good to talk to you as always. Thank you very much.

JOHN GRADEK: Take care, Matt, and have a good day.

MG: And you. John Gradek is a professor of aviation management at McGill University. He was in Montreal. This is The Current on CBC Radio. My name's Matt Galloway. I want to tell you about something coming up on the program next week, and we need your help with this. Stocks are down, then stocks go back up, then maybe they go back down. There are warnings about job losses and inflation. People are throwing around the word recession, which you never want to hear, and gives people that kind of weird feeling in their stomach. The economy's in flux in the wake of this trade war with the United States. Many Canadians are living with a real sense of uncertainty and financial worry. They're wondering whether their jobs are going to be there. They're wondering about whether their kids who are graduating from school are going to be able to find a job. How are they going to pay for things? What is going to be in short supply? We're going to try to get you some answers. We're going to bring in an economist and a personal finance expert on the program next week to answer your questions. So we want to know what you're worried about in this moment. Are you worried about things that are going to be more expensive? Are you worried about putting off a big purchase? What about job losses? How safe is your job? What about the real estate market and what's going on there? Send us your questions about, I mean, people talk about the economy as something big, but the economy is what we live through. It's money, it's how we interact with the world every single day. What are your questions about this economic moment and the turmoil that we are in and how that is affecting you? You can email us, no question too big, no question too small, thecurrent@cbc.ca. Or even better, pull out your phone and record a voice note. Just search for voice memo on your phone, hit record, and then email us that memo. And email it to thecurrent@cbc.ca, and we will get you some answers next week. I don't know if Steve Miller is a certified financial planner, but he has some financial advice for you. It's the Steve Miller Band, “Take the Money and Run.”

[Song: “Take the Money and Run” by Steve Miller Band]

MG: Come on, what a great tune. Steve Miller Band. Coming up after your regional update, we're going to talk about the internet, why it's not as good as it used to be. Have you used Google lately trying to search for something? It's impossible. You gotta sift through all the ads, weird posts, search again, search again. That's by design. Who broke the internet is the question Cory Doctorow was trying to answer on a new podcast, and he will join us with the answer and how we fix the internet coming up in 90 seconds here on The Current. Stay with us.

[song fades up and out]

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CORY DOCTOROW

Guest: Cory Doctorow

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current. Here's how it goes. You're online, you're searching for a product, some information. There are ads everywhere. You have to slice through all sorts of sponsored posts, and you still can't find exactly what you're looking for. Maybe you're on Facebook, you just want to see your friends' posts. Instead, your Facebook feed is filled with AI-generated celebrity fake news. The internet of 2025 is full of ads and trolls and algorithms and yelling and privacy issues. It is a far cry from its early days when the internet was fueled by egalitarian ideals around connection and knowledge sharing. What happened to those ideals? Cory Doctorow has a word for it. He calls it the enshitification of the internet. That is the focus of Cory's new CBC podcast, Understood: Who Broke the Internet? Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, activist and tech journalist. He's in Los Angeles. Cory, good morning.

CORY DOCTOROW: Good morning, Matt.

MG: Before we get to the internet of today, go back to 1994. In the first episode of this podcast, we hear a very young you, you're 23 years old, and you are talking to the CBC, showing Canada how to, as they said, surf the net back then. Take us back. What was the promise of the internet for you back then?

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, you know, I listened to that interview. I hadn't heard it in quite some time. And I think I had it pretty right on, which was that the promise of the internet was that it would let people make connections with each other and that they could make those connections, even if other people maybe didn't want them to, that we could talk directly to one another, that that much vaunted disintermediation where we get rid of the people who were deciding what was going to be in front of you and who you could talk to and what you could say. And I think, you know, if we want to flash forward to today, what's happened is the people who brought us this intermediation then just promptly re-intermediated us and gave us a new set of gatekeepers.

MG: One of the things, you talk about this in the podcast. One of the things I remember, you and I are around the same age, from that time, is how small the internet felt, but also in that smallness, how it seemed like you could step through a door and everything was available, that you would go on these Usenet message groups and you would be able to connect with people about things you couldn't possibly imagine you would be able to find those connections with. Do you remember that smallness?

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, and the excitement of finding a stranger who turned out to be someone who was really interesting and just the person that you needed to be talking to. And that was a theme that came up every single time we interviewed someone for this podcast. All these old internet hands, the thing that they all said was it was a way to connect with people. As Clay Shirky once said, content isn't king, conversation is. Content is just what we talk about.

MG: Is that just nostalgia or are things really bad right now?

CORY DOCTOROW: No, I think things are really bad. You know, Tom Eastman says that we live in the internet of five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. And I don't think that people are wrong to say that the vibes on the internet have turned pretty rancid, but where I think this podcast series and my analysis brings something new is to try and create a kind of material account of what happened. So there's a lot of semi-mystical ideas about what happened to the internet. You know, people were greedy and they were mean, and venture capitalists came in and they spoiled our Edenic garden. The great forces of history bore down upon us to make the internet consolidated, or maybe it's the iron laws of economics and return to scale and so on. But what I think actually happened, and this is really the thesis of the series, is that named individuals in living memory instituted policies that could predictably have this outcome. They were warned that that would happen at the time. They instituted them anyway, and everyone forgot who was to blame.

MG: Let's talk about one specific example, and this starts off the podcast series, and this is Google search. I remember a time before Google. I remember how it changed everything when it came in. And people now, I mean, people use Google just as a default. It is the way, the portal that they use to get into the internet. When somebody uses Google search, how do you see it being broken?

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, it's funny because I think, again, a lot of us have an impressionistic idea that Google search doesn't work the way it used to. And, you know, certainly, when you remember back to the dawn of Google, if you're my age, you'll remember this, Matt, that there was a time when we searched with things like AltaVista and Ask Jeeves. And you could ask Jeeves all day long and Jeeves wouldn't give you an answer that was any good. And then along came the Google search box. And you just typed a few sort of vague words, and then almost by magic, you would get exactly what you were looking for, and none of the spam and none of the bad stuff. And that just doesn't seem like it feels that way anymore. And because Google was just on trial for anti-trust violations in America, it actually just lost three anti-trust trials. It's been adjudicated a monopolist three times over. We suddenly got some insight into what happened to Google. And in particular, we found out that in 2019, Google had an all hands alert because search revenue and search volume Were stalling. And the reason it was stalling was really straight forward. They had 90% of the market. And so they have this all hands meeting, and Prabhakar Raghavan has this incredible idea. He says, what if we made search less accurate so that you had to search more than once to get your answer, and every time you have to refine your search, we get to show you more ads. So it's a way to juice growth. And I think, again, like this is not a coincidence. It's not changes to, you know, the global environment. What happened here is that Google became a monopolist, as a court in the United States has found. Google illegally purchased every search box on the internet. So they bribed Apple to be their default search engine and Mozilla. So they're the search engine in Firefox, Samsung, all the carriers, so that any search box you ever found will be a Google search box, which basically cleared the market of people trying to make a better search engine. Because what's the point of making a better search engine if no one's ever going to find it because all the search boxes default to Google? And so once Google became too big to fail, they became too big to care.

MG: Google had this motto that for many years kind of spoke to what people thought this company was, this idealistic vision of what this company was. And you spoke with the journalist Steven Levy. He wrote the history of Google. Here is how he described that.

SOUNDCLIP

STEVEN LEVY: A very famous motto that Google had was, don't be evil, you know, which was coined by an engineer when someone from HR had a meeting and, you know, said, what is our motto? What is our values? One guy said, what are you talking about? Just like, don’t be evil. And the company, the top executives, they embraced it. They wrote about it in their IPO letter. You know, that's our motto.

MG: How does a company go from don't be evil to too big to care?

CORY DOCTOROW: You know, Google bought all of its competitors. It used to have to care about its workforce as well. So, you know, that don't be evil thing, we make fun of it. But one of the things that don't be evil gets you if you're Google is an advantage in an incredibly tight talent market. So one of the things about tech companies is they're famously extremely productive, right? The amount of money they generate per hour worked by their employees is higher than almost any other sector, which is how you get like Instagram being bought by Facebook for a billion dollars at a time when it only had 12 employees, because they were just insanely productive. So in a market in which there's a job waiting for every tech worker across the street, you have to keep your tech workers happy. It's the kind of power that workers usually get from unionization. But in this case, they got it from scarcity, and they could really tell their bosses to go to hell whenever their bosses ask them to do something terrible. And so don't be evil, it let them hire people who have their choice of places to work. And, you know, the disappearance of don't be evil coincides in large part with the labour market catching up with the demand, where we finally had enough engineers. And you start to see these mass layoffs across the sector, but especially at Google.

MG: Let's talk about one of those other large companies, Amazon. You spoke with Lina Khan, who's the former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. This is another company that people love to hate or hate to love. I mean, it's integrated in so many parts of people's lives. What were her biggest concerns around Amazon and the size of Amazon now?

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, I think that the thing that happens when a platform gets big enough is it goes from being a facilitator, right? So there's nothing wrong with a facilitator. You know, I'm a writer. I don't want to print my books, publish my books and stand in a street corner selling my books. Your Toronto listeners might remember there was a great writer called Crad Kilodney.

MG: Who used to stand on the side of the street.

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, with a sign that said, very famous Canadian author, buy my books. And he had a really cheeky sign that just said Margaret Atwood. It was quite funny. Crad was a great writer, but there are a lot more writers I want to hear from than are capable of writing, publishing and selling their own books on young street in February to drunks spilling out of the bars. And what an intermediary does, what a platform does is it steps in to mediate between buyers and sellers or drivers and riders or any of those other relationships where it would be quite burdensome for the worker doing the work to also do these arrangements. And what happens is when they get power, they go from being the facilitator to actually commanding the market, to effectively becoming a regulator. So Amazon, for example, now charges between 45 and 51% of every dollar that its platform sellers bring in in the form of these various junk fees. Now, there are a lot of businesses that just can't exist with a 51%, you know, tax that they're paying to Amazon, and those businesses just don't sell on Amazon. And if you're not selling to Amazon, in many cases, you're not selling at all, because about 90% of affluent US households have Amazon Prime, which means they've paid in advance for a year's worth of shipping, which means that they would be fools to go and shop somewhere else and pay for shipping when they've already paid for it. So their search for a product starts and ends on Amazon. So if you're not on Amazon, you're effectively nowhere for the majority of affluent households and an absolute majority of American households. So about 56% of all American households and 90% of affluent households are Prime subscribers. And so what Amazon can do is they can structure this market so it's as though you had a regulator stepping in and saying these products are for sale, these products are not. They get to set the prices for those products. So we saw in the anti-trust case brought by the DC Attorney General, Karl Racine, that one of the ways that Amazon hides the fact that it's taking 51 cents out of every seller's dollar is they require those sellers to price match their lowest price anywhere else in the world on Amazon. So if you raise your price on Amazon so that you can pay the 51% Amazon tax, you have to raise your price at Target, at Walmart, at Loblaws, at your own factory store and everywhere else you might sell. So Amazon is actually also setting the price that we pay at every store, not just at Amazon.

MG: What do you make of the fact that governments are now trying to rein in these companies, like Meta and Amazon and Google?

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, it's really quite a remarkable phenomenon because it's global, in Europe, in Australia and in individual European member states, Germany, France, Spain, and it's amazing to see. It is, I think, a genuine sea change in the way that people feel about corporate power and the way that politicians understand what giving into corporate power will do to their electoral chances.

MG: There are questions, and I just mentioned Lina Khan because you spoke with her. She's the former FTC commissioner, and she filed a lot of these anti-trust cases that are being heard under the Trump administration. And there are questions as to whether all of those cases or some of them will continue, given his proximity to billionaires. Here's what she told you about her concerns now that she's not at the FTC.

SOUNDCLIP

LINA KHAN: I do think there's an open question as to whether these tech executives are going to be able to notch these sweetheart deals that get them out of this litigation. And I think as we see a lot of these companies and their top executives trying to cozy up with the new administration, I think there is, you know, we just all have to be vigilant to make sure that these legitimate law enforcement actions are not quietly settled on the cheap in ways that don't do justice to the American people.

MG: Cory, let me end here with just two quick things. One is, she says the American people. Do you think people, whether it's Americans, Canadians, what have you, do you think people care that the internet isn't what it used to be? Because they still use it. They still use Amazon, they're still using Google, they're still, I mean, there's all the services that people complain about, but they still use. Do you think people care?

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, I really think they do. I think they do because the tech companies have had to go to the most extraordinary lengths to keep people locked onto their platform. And really, the crux of our podcast is that there are these specific policies that ban people from tinkering with the code that they use. They're called anti-circumvention rules. And these started in the US in the 90s, and they spread to Canada in the 2010s. And the tech companies spend a fortune maintaining the integrity of these laws because they seemed to understand that if we could change how our technology worked, we would.

MG: Well, and if we can name the people who broke the internet, like is it possible to fix it? Will we be able to say these are the people who helped stitch this thing back together or created something that actually captured what we all, you know, those of us who were around then, remember as the promise of this thing when it was created?

CORY DOCTOROW: I think more important than naming the people behind these policies is naming the policies, right, describing what changed in the policy environment. You know, criminologists, they talk about crimogenic environments, environments that encourage crime. We created policies that created an enshitogenic environment, an environment that encourages enshitification, that allows companies to worsen their products without losing money. We need a digital infrastructure that is fit for purpose. And we'll only get it when we abolish the policies that created the enshitogenic environment.

MG: And you think we can do that.

CORY DOCTOROW: I absolutely do. I mean, this is not like recovering the lost art of a fallen civilization, right? These are policies that we've had to implement before in the last Gilded Age. It was done by people who were no smarter than us, who faced challenges that were no greater than ours. And if they can do it, we can too.

MG: Cory, it's great to talk to you about this. The podcast is fantastic, but it also just speaks to the frustration that so many people have in wanting something better. Thank you very much.

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, thank you, Matt.

MG: Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, an activist and a tech journalist. He hosts the CBC podcast, Understood: Who Broke the Internet? His most recent book is “Picks and Shovels.”

[Music]

AXOLOTL UPDATE

Guest: Luis Zambrano

MG: This is The Current. My name is Matt Galloway. If you have young children, you've probably heard all about axolotls. The axolotl is an amphibian. Very cute-looking salamander. It seems to be smiling all the time. For kids, they are popular as stuffed animals. They've also appeared in video games like Minecraft and Fortnite, and they are loved as pets in aquariums. But in their natural habitat, in Mexico City, they're endangered. Now, after years of work to save them, new research is showing that axolotls bred in a lab. Seem to be thriving when they're released. Luis Zambrano is a senior researcher at the Institute of Biology at Mexico's National Autonomous University. He has been studying axolotls for decades. He's in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Luis, good morning.

LUIS ZAMBRANO: Hi. Nice to meet you. Hi Matt.

MG: It's great to have you here on the program. I want to talk about the recovery in just a moment, but talk about why the recovery was necessary. What happened to the number of axolotls that lived in the wild over the years?

LUIS ZAMBRANO: I mean, we have made census or countings of these animals since 1998, and they have becoming, I mean, a huge problem in terms of population. I mean, in 1998, there were about 6000 per square kilometre. And in the last census we did was in 2014, and it was only 36 per square kilometres. So their depletion has been huge in the last decade. We are doing, at this moment, a census, and we will show the results in about a couple of months, but they are in real danger.

MG: This is a story about development in many ways, right? It's development that has destroyed their habitat.

LUIS ZAMBRANO: Yeah. I mean, one of the problems for the axolotl is that the habitat of the axolotl is in the middle of the city, that Mexico City where, I mean, we live 22 million people there. So the habitat has been particularly deteriorating in the last, well, in the last two centuries. The worst part has been in the past 50 years or something like that. So the population is going down because of the urbanization of the area.

MG: And so you and your team bred axolotls in the lab. Tell me about releasing them into the wild. There were 18 of them that went out into the wild?

LUIS ZAMBRANO: Yeah, actually, it's not exactly in the wild. It was in a refuge. I mean, when we saw that the population were coming down, then my lab started to create a program called Chinampa Refuge. Chinampa is the islands that are around this habitat that has been for 1500 years in Mexico City. So we created this refuge. And part of the experiments we tried to do was, okay, if the habitat is working and the restoration is working, and we saw that yes. And this second part of the experiment was how do they move, if they can move properly in this refuge or not. And we saw that they can move, they can survive very well in these areas, and they can feed, and they increase their body mass, for example.

MG: How did you track them? I mean, once you released them, how did you know where they were?

LUIS ZAMBRANO: Ah, because we use telemetry. Telemetry is like a chip that we introduce in the animal, and then we follow them with antennas and see in which area they normally stay. So particularly, it's not that we caught them every time, but that we see where they are. And then at the end of the experiment, we try to retrieve all of them because we know exactly where they are and when. We try to use nets and every type of thing to recollect them. And they are very, very difficult to catch, let me tell you.

MG: You did catch them, and you were able to see that when they were out there in that refuge, they were thriving, right?

LUIS ZAMBRANO: The ones that we could catch, I mean, yeah, they were larger, fatter, I mean, and bulkier, basically. So we understood that they are quite happy once you release them in these areas, in these refuges. I mean, there is enough food for them, basically.

MG: Were you surprised by that?

LUIS ZAMBRANO: Oh yeah, I mean, well, it's not like we were surprised in terms of that we didn't expect something like that, but we were quite happy to see that the refuge are working and there’s enough food for them. The thing that we were surprised is that they move by far much more than we expected. When you see those animals in tanks, you don't see them moving too much. But when you release them in the wild, then in this refuge, you can see that they can move 100 metres, 200 metres per day, which is a lot. So every time I see these things, I say, okay, they are quite unhappy in these small tanks because they could move around all the time.

MG: What does that tell you, what you learned, about the possibility of ensuring that this species comes back? As you mentioned, the numbers of them have fallen off dramatically. So does this give you hope that you could restore them to their natural habitat?

LUIS ZAMBRANO: Yeah, actually, part of the things that we are quite happy is that the programs that we're creating can work properly once it's inevitable that we have to reintroduce them. Basically, it's good news that we’re going in the good direction in terms of restoration, and the only thing we need now is like the people and the government to understand that this is the correct path in order to go in that direction for the restoration of the animals in their own system.

MG: This is important, I mean, for your work, but it's also important for Mexican culture. I said that for people around the world, they know them as stuffed animals. You said that this is a part of Mexico's identity in many ways.

LUIS ZAMBRANO: Yeah, actually, it's funny because everybody started to know about axolotls in the last 10 years or something like that. But in Mexico, a part of our culture for 1500 years, was part of Mexican pre-Columbian culture. He was considered the twin brother of the most important god, for example. So since Aztecs and Aguas, the people loved this animal and was part of the culture. From then to now, it happens many things. For example, it has been used for food or it has been used for traditional medicine. And in the last 50, 60 years ago, people like, painters like Diego Rivera used to paint these animals in many of the most important moral.

MG: What does it mean for Mexican culture, beyond the scientific value, what does it mean for the culture to see these coming back?

LUIS ZAMBRANO: Okay, I think that it’s our identity. I mean, it's part of, it’s like the maize or like the jaguar that is part of Mexican identity. When you come to Mexico and see a lot of this nature around us that creates our culture, the axolotl is part of this Mexican culture.

MG: You said, I mean, you're talking about Mexico City, which, as you said, has 22 million people. It's an enormous urban area. You said if we can restore this habitat and restore the axolotl's population in this city of more than 20 million people, I feel we have hope for humanity. What did you mean by that?

LUIS ZAMBRANO: I mean that if the habitat is by far managed and destroyed for 22 million people, it has the knowledge and the policy to restore everything. That means that in any place around the world, the people can join together and start to create restoration program in any place. That will help us a lot in this environmental crisis that we are living at this moment with the climate change for one side, the reduction of the biodiversity on the other side. We face a lot of problems as a humanity in many areas. I mean, and now, I am in Sao Paolo, and if you see the destruction of the nature around Brazil, it's huge. But if we could restore a very, very bad place for a very important animal for our identity, then we can do it in other places around, I mean, in Africa and in South America, in North America and Europe. You can do many things and how to create the environment, the social environment, the economical environment in order to restore that area because it's far more important than other things, easy money or the next generation of iPhones, for example.

MG: That must be really encouraging. I mean, this is your life's work, and you must feel enormously gratified in seeing this small step.

LUIS ZAMBRANO: Yeah, actually, we have very good news. And I mean, we have, we seldom have very good news, and this is a very, very good news that help us to have a step forward to the restoration. I hope that we, we need at least 10 or 20 good news like this one in the next five years in order to still having hope and going in the good direction for the restoration area. So we’re quite happy at this moment.

MG: Good news is in short supply. I'm glad to talk to you about it. Luis, thank you very much.

LUIS ZAMBRANO: Thank you, and I mean, and please be in touch with us for the next set of news. In the next two or three years, there will be. Some of them will be good, maybe some of them will be bad. So yeah, this is a long run.

MG: We will be back in touch, and we'll get you back on the program with an update. Thank you.

LUIS ZAMBRANO: Thank you very much.

MG: Luis Zambrano is a senior researcher at the Institute of Biology at Mexico's National Autonomous University. That's The Current for this Thursday, the 8th of May. Q is up next on CBC Radio. We were talking about the axolotl and Mexico City, its home that they're trying to reestablish. Let's stay in Mexico City to say goodbye. This is Little Jesus and “La Magia.” I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll see you tomorrow.

[Song: “La Magia” by Little Jesus]

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Thursday, May 8, 2025 Episode Transcript

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