The Media has profoundly influenced environmental issues and even small items in local papers can influence events. In 1968, I saw a three inch newspaper report on the environmental impact of laundry detergents, given to high school students by Philip Jones, then a professor at the University of Toronto. He warned that the detergent phosphates could be accelerating the process of eutrophication - the natural aging process of water bodies.

During a later interview, Dr. Jones said that even well designed and operated sewage treatment plants at that time did not remove phosphorous and that the environmental impact of laundry detergents could be substantially reduced simply by restricting phosphates in domestic laundry detergents.

Following our meeting, I wrote an article in Water and Pollution Control magazine, quoting Dr. Jones' view that if the federal government would restrict the amount of phosphates in detergents, the natural aging process of water bodies might be slowed, even reversed. This magazine had quite a small circulation - less than 8,000 - and was circulated only to environmental professionals, hardly the right medium to change the affairs of state. But, I had decided to put in a summary of the article which would enable politicians, bureaucrats - even journalists - to understand eutrophication.

The resulting publicity amazed Dr. Jones and the publishers of the magazine. The article was widely quoted across Canada and had some spillover in the United States. Dr. Jones appeared on television, was profiled in magazine articles, invited to address a congressional hearing in Washington, as well as the International Joint Commission. Some of the celebrity status even spilled over on to me.

I was invited to meet Joe Greene, then Federal Energy and Resources Minister in Ottawa. Strange as it may seem, there were no environment ministers in Canada in those days. When I suggested to Mr. Greene that the environment was now so important, that perhaps it was time for a Ministry of the Environment to be created, Mr. Greene dismissed the idea. He said that the resources ministry was adequate to deal with ecological issues so there was no need for a Minister of the Environment. He was dead wrong. It was not too long afterwards, that I was interviewing Jack Davis, Canada's first Minister of the Environment while Joe Greene ascended to the soporific bliss of the Senate. Provincial ministers of the environment then began to sprout across Canada like an environmental Day of the Triffids.

Meanwhile, an issue which had begun with a three inch news clipping in a local paper, had developed into an international story which certainly influenced the Minister responsible for the amendment to the Canada Water Act, restricting the amount of phosphates permitted in laundry detergents.

The article did not go unchallenged. The highly respected Maclean Hunter magazine, Research and Development, responded with a cover story "Did we hang phosphates without a trial?" I knew both the journalist who wrote the story and his editor quite well, and greatly admired the powerful impact of the article and its imaginative graphics. In my humble opinion, I think they did a better journalistic job than I had done - certainly they threw in the substantial resources and considerable talent available at Maclean Hunter.

But by then, my article and the subsequent cross-Canada coverage, had established momentum in the flywheel of public opinion. Awareness had been made, opinions formed, and concerns about our lakes had been firmly established.

I should mention that the corporations involved in the manufacture of detergents turned out to be extremely ethical and fair-minded. They simply asked for space to put their own point of view in a subsequent issue and expressed gratitude when this was done.

Now that sewage treatment plants do remove phosphorous from wastewater, there could be a case to remove the ban on detergent phosphates as the removal facilities would be no more costly to operate. But it will never happen. It is very easy to make laws - a thousand times more difficult to repeal them. While Dr. Jones certainly played a powerful role in the detergent phosphates issue, in shaping public opinion, it must be noted that many other scientists did fine research work which impacted on the federal actions. Dr. Jones later headed up a new environmental engineering school at Griffith University in Queensland where he died in 1994.

There is a twist to the nutrient removal capabilities of modern sewage treatment facilities. Worthy of note is that an industrial wastewater from steel making - once thought to be an industrial waste - has proved very effective in removing phosphorous from sewage wastes. I was present at a meeting where a Globe & Mail reporter noted that he had seen tanker trucks discharging their contents at a Toronto sewage treatment facility. He voiced his suspicion that this was an industrial waste from the steel mills being dumped. I was happy to inform him that this was almost certainly ferric chloride (iron salts) which should not be viewed as a waste, but as a beneficial process chemical, which was helping to rejuvenate our lakes. It was rather nice to see his haughty suspicion replaced by bewilderment and even a fleeting moment of humility.

Greenpeace protesters rapelling on this BC skyscraper predictably made headlines. Many political events have been shaped by such spectacular stunts, rather than scientific reasoning. ES&E photo by Steve Davey.

Much of the news coverage of environmental issues has been dangerously incompetent. A classic case of the news media creating news, rather than reporting it came about when a shipload of Canadian PCBs arrived in London for incineration at a treatment facility in Wales. PCBs had not been an issue in Britain at that time and the ship had arrived from Canada and docked without incident.

Then a Canadian journalist casually mentioned to two London reporters that PCBs were a controversial issue in Canada. With that the grunge media, the UK tabloids, stopped feeding off the Royal Family momentarily to erupt with banner headlines warning of the Cancer Ship then docked in the Thames. Activists, quick to respond to this journalistic mischief, then affixed a skull and crossbones to the side of the ship.

British dock workers, their finely honed reflex actions for spontaneous industrial actions already in place, refused to unload the vessel. So, instead of disposing of the PCB wastes in a facility especially designed for the task, the ship was forced to return across the stormy Atlantic like a vessel carrying the plague. British workers lost both the jobs and economic benefits of the project - in a country with three million unemployed.

After a 6,000 mile return trip which certainly combusted tonnes of fuel which would negatively impact on the environment, Canadian demonstrators became violent when the vessel attempted to dock at Baie Comeau, which was then Brian Mulroney's riding. Perhaps this was divine retribution for earlier prime ministerial patronage when the port facilities were upgraded.

Inaccurate media coverage has often been expensive for Canadians. All too often it has produced unwarranted fears following news reports driven by entertainment values, rather than ecological significance. In some cases, government reaction to these reports have resulted in actions which proved costly both to the environment and Canadian taxpayers.

From an epidemiological point of view, few chemicals have been monitored as well as PCBs. The fact we have records on factory workers who had immersion contact with PCBs for decades gives reliable exposure data on humans. While there have been chloracne cases reported from PCB exposure, not one death has been directly attributed to this chemical. I am not saying that PCBs are benign; they are indeed toxic. But this chemical has never warranted the media hysteria it generated.

Ironically, there have been thousands of lives saved because of the long-lived fire retardant properties of PCBs used in transformers and other electrical equipment which requires stable, non-flammable coolants.

Indeed there is a growing tendency by the news media to create and stage news events, rather than report them. One notorious case involved contrived pickup truck fires on the NBC Network when toy rocket engines were ignited by radio to cause gas tank fires in truck collision tests. Viewers were unaware that the spectacular scenes of burning trucks were in fact contrived, not actual tests performed to assess automotive safety.

Then there was the Hill and Knowlton affair. This huge PR firm was a key player in the story where Saddam Hussein's troops were reported to have brutally taken sick babies out of incubators which were shipped to Iraq. Only after the war was over did the story emerge that the tearful testimony of the eye witness testifying in Washington was actually a contrived affair. The `witness' testifying before a congressional committee was later discovered to be the daughter of a Kuwaiti diplomat.

Surely the Gulf War did not need any `moral' justification by such blatantly fabricated propaganda? Yet a gullible media unquestioningly bought this story which was replayed many times world-wide as an example of Saddam's brutal treatment of Kuwaitis.

An even more contrived farce came later when the last of the 640 oil well fires was extinguished in Kuwait. This time there was no doubt that it was the retreating Iraqi troops who had set the wells ablaze, causing an eco catastrophe of global proportions. Billowing smoke, lurid flames, heroic fire fighters and pathetic birds struggling in oil slicks, all combined to make dramatic television. But TV's voracious appetite for spectacle required additional cosmetics.

The last desert fire had actually been extinguished days earlier. After the site had been cleaned up, the fire was actually relighted so the epic event could be extinguished for posterity. As for the oil-covered cormorants pitifully struggling in the slick? Well, certainly there were a lot of wildlife casualties but at least one avian species shown on TV was not native to the Middle East. One engineer I met who had visited Kuwait, suspected the dying bird footage was probably culled from stock footage from a tanker spill months earlier

Thomas Jefferson, the third US President, was acutely aware of the need for legislative checks and balances and the power of the media. He wrote "If I had to choose between living in a world without newspapers or governments, I would choose the world which had newspapers." If the principal author of the Declaration of Independence could now see how today's news media impact so powerfully on political decision-making, he might wonder if we live in a world governed by the news media.

Based on a guest lecture, Trent University, February 1996.