Highway to the danger zone
EDITOR'S NOTE
When I was in Grade 3, my mother took me to Disneyland. Staying with friends in Santa Cruz en route, we got to experience another, unexpected California phenomenon: an earthquake, and a pretty big one, at 6.7 on the Richter scale. We were in a stationary vehicle in a mall parking lot when the tremors started. The lamppost in front of us swayed back and forth, dipping perilously close to the hood of our car.
My mom, terrified, pulled me close and let me know it was possible that we might die, right then and there, in a mall parking lot in Santa Cruz. My eight-year-old self, unaccustomed to pondering mortality, had a different take on the situation: “No way! This is fun!” Within seconds, the violent shaking was over. There was no lasting damage, except maybe my mom’s new nickname, “Mrs. We’re All Going to Die Now.”
We spent the next hours gathering first-hand accounts: tales of grocery clerks shovelling mustard and mayonnaise from the condiment-aisle floor, surfers thrown from their boards. We revelled in tales of damage, destruction and survival. The stories were riveting. Such is the way with disaster.
Nearly two decades later, on September 11, 2001, my roommate woke me up by shaking me gently (it was early in B.C.): “Jessica, I’m sorry to wake you, but New York and Washington are burning.” I’ve never woken up so fast before or since. I’m not one to chase ambulances or preach catastrophe. I made it through Y2K stockpiling nary a chickpea, but, like everyone else on that fall day, I could not tear myself away from the TV, although there was no new information to be had for hours. When I finally had to leave my house to go to class, I stopped at Radio Shack so I could buy a little radio to keep up with the lack of news.
Author and journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, who has made a career of studying disaster, suggests in an interview with This columns editor Graham F. Scott that people are riveted by disaster because it reaffirms our own secure place in the safety zone. “We have entered a new age where man-made disasters can be more potent, destructive and longer lasting than natural ones,” he observes.
It’s those disasters that are the focus of this issue. In our cover story, environment and science writer Zoe Cormier explores the threats, both current and potential, of our overreliance on cheap and disposable plastics. “They are used frivolously for mass-produced cheap toys, flimsy grocery bags, needless packaging and dollarstore Tupperware knockoffs,” she writes, “when we should be placing a much higher premium on them.”
Veteran investigative journalist Alex Roslin tells a chilling tale of biotechnology and its lack of regulation. High school kids in Canada are genetically modifying E. coli, giving it antibiotic resistance as part of standard science instruction. Globally, labs are similarly altering the deadly virus, due to its ability to propagate rapidly, quickly demonstrating the results of scientific experimentation. The modification of bacteria has escaped the public radar and regulatory bodies’ scrutiny alike, but the potential consequences, as Roslin demonstrates, are alarming.
Definitions of disaster depend on who is doing the catastrophizing; Richard Poplak explores what could be the scariest question of our time: What if Google failed?
Elsewhere in these pages you’ll find our old nemeses killer bees, as well as flood, famine, plague and, perhaps most frightening of all, tax cuts.
Consider yourself warned.
Jessica Johnston
editor[at]thismagazine[dot]ca
