State of the Environment Report for Canada

Merritt Clifton was an environmental journalist and lived in Brigham, Quebec.

Acclaimed by the mass media, State of the Environment Report for Canada is in effect a Canadian environmental encyclopedia. Extensive statistical summaries appear concerning the ecozones of Canada; agro-ecosystems; forest ecosystems; aquatic ecosystems; wildlife; land use changes; contaminants in the environment; contaminants and human health; legislation and expenditures; Canada in a global setting; and environmental perceptions of Canadians.

Although all of this information has been published before, this is the first volume that brings it together in readily accessible form. Each chapter is a book in itself. At $25, State of the Environment is a flat-out steal. An equivalent library of individual government reports would require at beast 12 feet of shelf space. I know, because I have such a library, which this desk-shelf volume will often supercede.

Unfortunately, access to all this condensed information isn’t nearly as easy as it should be. Inexplicably, the book lacks both an index and a listing of tables. Thus, while one can quickly find general information on a given issue, one cannot quickly verify details. Furthermore, the individual responsible for the typographical design ought to be condemned to read State of the Environment in a single sitting — and then to be tested on comprehension. Combine this impossible typeface with often abstract, bureaucratic prose and the result is a very short attention span.

Some meddling is apparent. Although Canada is the free world’s largest producer of asbestos, and although asbestos is a pollution issue everywhere it has ever been mined, processed or used, the word “asbestos” never once appears. The well-known cost of sustaining the heavily-subsidized industry and the equally well-known cost of related clean-ups, care for victims, and so on are ignored completely — even as less controversial resource extraction industries receive detailed scrutiny.

Only newspaper readers would realize that as the book appears, the governments of both Canada and Quebec are intensively lobbying in Washington D.C. against a proposed ban on asbestos imports by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

State of the Environment has been criticized for “grading” the nation on response to various major environmental problems, from acid rain to toxic wastes to nuclear radiation. If I were to grade State of the Environment similarly, I’d give it a “B” — for a job not finished to the standard that it should have been.