A new book, McLuhan's Children*, says that the Greenpeace phenomenon owes much to the late Marshall McLuhan, a genuine Canadian original. I interviewed him at the University of Toronto years ago when virtually every sentence he made contained nuggets of eccentric brilliance. When television was still a novelty, he presciently defined the new medium with his adjectivally brilliant phrases which have yet to be bettered:"The medium is the message" and "The Global Village.

The phenomenal success of Greenpeace around the globe confirms his theses. No multinational corporation, government or advertising agency can remotely match Greenpeace's mastery of media manipulation. When activists successfully stopped Shell from dumping the oil storage rigBrent Spar in the North Atlantic, Greenpeace had satellite TV facilities to show their activists swooping in on helicopters, bravely confronting the water cannons of the giant oil company.

Richard Sambrook, a BBC editor, summed up the Brent Spar coverage at a National Television Festival in Edinburgh: "In some sense we were had. There was never enough distance between ourselves and the participants. Greenpeace spent an estimated £350,000 ($700,000 CDN) on TV equipment and feeds, far more than the BBC could have afforded". (ES&E, January 1996).

But the news media were willing co-conspirators. When fourteen Greenpeace protesters were finally airlifted from the rig, nine reporters were ejected with them, a quite astonishing ratio. Might we soon see the day when each activist goes into action with his own personal journalist ­ much like film stars have personal fitness trainers?

Brent Spar presently lies in a Norwegian Fjord. Few noted that hundreds of tonnes of fuel were consumed to tow it there without the disposal problem being solved. While the Brent Spar issue is dormant, but unresolved, serious other water problems remain, yet environmental professionals and their achievements ­ are still being largely ignored by the newsmedia.

When countries face military threats, they send in elite troops who are highly trained in specialist roles. They do not scour bases for their lowest paid soldiers. Yet this is exactly what Canada does when confronting environmental threats. The low-bid selection process is arguably the biggest single obstacle facing the scientists, engineers, chemists and equipment suppliers charged with detecting and treating health threats hidden in our water resources.

There is a wide variance between the expertise and reliability of consulting engineers, laboratories and treatment equipment suppliers. Yet price continues to be the dominant factor in many cases when projects are being considered.

Why is this? Perhaps it is because environmental engineers and scientists have not done a good job in educating the public of their worth. Not unnaturally, politicians routinely ignored their expertise for years when setting policies. At the same time, many activist groups, armed with youthful energy, idealism and a penchant for media manipulation, pressured politicians to create unworkable policies and programs which were more idealistic than realistic.

The abandonment of cement kiln incineration technology after successful experimentation, the creation of the Ontario Waste Management Corporation and the short lived Interim Waste Management Authority (neither of which actually treated any wastes), to name just a few, cost hundreds of millions without producing any environmental benefits.

Yes, Canada is richly endowed with water resources which are under threat from various sources but these problems require our most highly trained specialists to solve them. We cannot afford to handicap our environmental professionals by using rigid low-bid templates which blank out talent, learning and experience in the selection process.

Environmental professionals have repeatedly demonstrated their expertise in learned disciplines ranging from biology, hydrogeology, toxicology, chemical and civil engineering ­ to name only a few.

Missing from this impressive array of learned subjects are the potent communications skills with which Greenpeacers so ably manipulate the media with imagination, flair and daring. Environmental professionals who neglect these skills are destined for the sidelines of history.