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The Current Transcript for June 7, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

It was the first time in my 77 years that I ever heard a silent spring. There was no bird song in northern California at that spot.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: For years he has arrived at the same day of the same month and stood in the very same spot in Sugarloaf State Park in California and recorded the sounds around him. Over time, what Bernie Krause has heard is less and less sound, fewer birds, fewer critters. Over the years drought has muted the sounds of life. Bernie Krause has more than 5,000 hours of sounds recorded in nature and what he's discovered is that his microphone is picking up our changing and diminishing natural world, even under the sea. You can hear it for yourself in about an hour. Also today many times as she talked to regular civilians in Syria, Janine di Giovanni would hear stories about the day they were taken away; men and women of varying ages whose torture was worse than they could ever have imagined. They also told her how they managed to survive.

SOUNDCLIP

You choose. One moment you really wish you were dead because the pain is so agonizing, but you choose to live and you make a choice and you stay on this earth.

AMT: Hear long-time war correspondent Janine di Giovanni on the humanity and inhumanity behind the headlines of the Syrian war in half an hour. But we begin today with an issue summed up by a black teen placed in a group home by Children's Aid.

Ontario children's aid will collect race data to address overrepresentation

Guests: Kiaras Gharabaghi, Sonia Mills-Minster, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond

SOUNDCLIP

Today I made a decision that Children’s Aid can’t do this to me; that I can choose not to go back to that group home.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: As Ontario announces it will collect racial data on children in care, we’re asking why marginalized communities, Aboriginal, African-Canadian, see a disproportionate number of their kids taken away from parents. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

What we're doing is working with all of the Children's Aid Societies across the province to collect consistently data about the children and families that they're serving, in a particular race based data so that we can make sure that the services that are being provided are really meeting their needs. The reason that we've done this is that we have learned that there are some groups that are significantly overrepresented.

AMT: Well, that is Mary Ballantyne, the CEO of the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies and as you heard there she says it's time Children’s Aid collects race statistics. Her announcement yesterday came on the heels of mounting concerns about the over-representation of Aboriginal and black youth in the province's care. The Toronto Star recently found that 42 percent of children and youth in the care of the Children's Aid Society of Toronto have at least one parent who is black, even though eight percent of Toronto's under-18 population is black. Statistics Canada says nearly half of the 30,000 children in the country's child welfare system are Indigenous. Today we've asked three people to share their perspectives with us about the importance of collecting race statistics as a first step toward building a better system of care. Kiaras Gharabaghi spent 25 years working in residential services across Ontario. He is the director of the school of Child and Youth Care at Ryerson University. He's in our Toronto studio. Sonia Mills-Minster is the head of Millan and Associates, a private counseling company that runs a program to prevent African-Canadian children from going into care and reunites them with their families if they're in care already. She is also in our Toronto studio, and Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond is British Columbia's representative for Children and Youth. She joins us from Victoria. Hello, everyone.

GUESTS: Good Morning.

AMT: Kiaras Gharabaghi, how important is this decision by the Ontario agency to begin collecting race statistics?

KIARAS GHARABAGHI: I think it's incredibly important. It is important because it names the issue and I think it is time that we name the issue. If indeed we find out, as we already know quite honestly, that there is a severe over representation of some groups within the child welfare system, then it will beg some very serious questions about why we have a child welfare system that is designed based on value, based on concepts, based on theories, that are really white middle class theories, values, and concepts. The people who are served in the child welfare system deserve a system that is responsive to who they are and we need verification of what we've always known, that there is in fact an over-representation, particularly of African-Canadian youth and families, and also of Indigenous families. They deserve to know that they have a system that actually is based on their lived experience, and not on the lived experience of the white middle class.

AMT: You co-authored a report that looked at the bigger issues here. What else did you recommend?

KIARAS GHARABAGHI: Well, we recommend that as an initial step that there be some serious consideration to stopping this process by which we treat everybody equally. It sounds intuitively like a good thing, but the reality is that the social location of people is not equal, and so it doesn't make sense to create structures, processes, institutions, group homes, foster care, in which everybody is treated as if who they are did not matter. It really does matter. It matters where people are located, it matters how people are finding their everyday lived experience in society, and systems have to be responsive to that.

AMT: Sonia Mills-Minster, why are black children in Ontario disproportionately in care?

SONIA MILLS-MINSTER: I believe first that we have to look at that child welfare system being built on white supremacy, racism and colonialism, which has led to the oppression of our children. We have to consciously work towards de-colonializing the system.

AMT: Okay, but what does that mean? You talk about colonialization and that was a long time ago. So what has lingered in terms of what that actually means? Are you saying that that people of European descent are making all the decisions?

SONIA MILLS-MINSTER: Yes. I'm also saying that the system is inherently racist, and those issues of racism, the fact that individuals would want to say that colonialism doesn't affect us today is 100 percent wrong. It does.

AMT: No, I'm not saying it doesn't affect us, I'm asking about your wording. So what you're saying is that we are-- can you give me an example to illustrate what you're talking about, like a hard example of something you see going on today that speaks to that.

SONIA MILLS-MINSTER: The disproportionate number and the disparities of our children coming into care and the overlaying--so for example, children from within the school system are disproportionately recorded, and monitored, placed in special needs classrooms, expelled, exposed, and reported to the child welfare agencies.

AMT: And so what is it that people aren't getting when they look at those children, and they target those children and those families? What is it that they are not understanding about the families because they are looking at it through the wrong prism?

SONIA MILLS-MINSTER: I believe that it's maybe twofold. One is that their own perceptions and knowledge of how they perceive families of African- Canadian heritage, another could be also their ability to look at African-Canadian communities and see that there is expertise within the community, so that when an individual of African-Canadian descent goes and tries to get services, or connects within their community, for that to be validated, for their experiences to be validated, and for them to have an outlet so that they can go and seek help and seek services outside of the child welfare system.

AMT: Okay, and Kiaras Gharabaghi, you are looking at the same system in Toronto. What do you see in very specific terms to help people understand how this really affects the children who are taken; the children in custody. What it what are you seeing in the day-to-day lives of these kids that people aren't getting?

KIARAS GHARABAGHI: So in the day-to-day life, once the young people are in care, it really does make a big difference what sort of racial background you might have. So it is still very common practice for example, for black young women in group homes not to be provided with hair products that might be necessary for them. It is fairly common practice to criminalize behaviours on the part of black young men in group homes and in foster care that would not be criminalized if the racial background were different. There is, in the context of Indigenous youth, there continues to be just a horrifying ignorance of cultural practices, of ways of defining identity, and so on, almost laughable ignorance actually. It's quite sad. Food is another good example that many, many young people who grew up within their own community are used to certain foods. It is common practice in group care, in particular in Ontario, to designate perhaps one day per month as a cultural day which is you know, just imagine being a young person and you get to be who you are one day a month. I mean that is quite worrisome. Even in the aesthetics of institutional care; of group homes, even in foster homes, very often there is a complete absence of representation of identities that fall outside of sort of the white norm. Role models are not provided that might fit with a particular racial or cultural identity. All of these things are still very common and they accumulate; the cumulative effect is that it is very hard to be either black or to be Indigenous and to feel that one's identity is being celebrated in the knowledge.

AMT: Because everything is being done through the prism of institutions that are created through a white perspective.

KIARAS GHARABAGHI: Absolutely, and you know, I just want to be really clear that this is not a criticism of individuals. I do see in the field and in our residential services review, we really do see great efforts on the part of the individuals to be aware of these things, to do something about those things, but even people who really want to do something about those things, and want to acknowledge those things, are still working within structures and within processes that are fundamentally based on that on a white middle class perspective on how the world should be.

AMT: Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, what issues you see in BC with the over-representation of certain cultural groups in BC?

MARY ELLEN TURPEL-LAFOND: Well, first of all in British Columbia we've used data that identifies race for a long time, particularly to focus in over the last decade, on the unique situation for Indigenous children and youth and families. We have a very strong understanding here in British Columbia that Indigenous and minority youth, black youth, immigrant refugee youth, tend to be over-represented in child welfare. They're more often investigated, they're more likely to be removed from their families, more likely to spend long periods of time in foster care, and less likely to find permanent families or adoptions. The information that we've had based on having accurate data in BC has been extremely helpful to paint a more realistic picture of what's happening on the ground, but also it's been very empowering to allow young people to feel more comfortable, to come forward and talk about their experiences, which is overdue in the foster care and child welfare system.

AMT: And Mary Ellen, in BC there is also a real effort to involve Indigenous society into the care system in a way that may be sort of at the forefront of other parts of Canada, am I right?

MARY ELLEN TURPEL-LAFOND: I think yes and no. I think we, first of all, identifying the gross over-representation of Indigenous children in foster care and discussing it with First Nations, Metis, and other agencies and leaders, has led to a lot of anger. I mean, people are extremely outraged, as they should be because it's a deep systemic problem. These kids are in families and communities that have been viewed as low status and unworthy on a number of fronts, and have been subject to many policies to try and change who they are, so the anger has been important to come forward. The challenges that the government, and the data, and the outrage has really not been able to work effectively to change the system yet, and it's rising to a point where things are going to have to change. One of the good changes is when you start looking at data, you have to start understanding needs and you also have to remind yourself that even if someone is a member of a group in terms of sort of race based data, it's important we don't homogenize and see everybody in that group the same because their experiences are different. I see this with Indigenous children and youth. We have to remember that if a broad range of experiences and their experiences are not with the 50 year old experiences are, and you really need to listen to kids, but collecting data is an essential part of having a system and responding to the problems or the opportunities in that system.

AMT: Sonia Mills-Minster, how does your program help keep African-Canadian children out of care or get them out of care?

SONIA MILLS-MINSTER: Our program helps to get children out of care or to address the children at risk of coming into care by providing counseling services and advocacy for the children, youth, and their families when they're involved with the system.

AMT: And so it's almost as if you're working parallel with the system because they need you because the ideas you bring to the table haven't been integrated into the system.

SONIA MILLS-MINSTER: No, but it would also be very difficult for a child welfare agency. Their mandate is looking after the child; after the wellbeing of the child, not with regards to providing the services in the home and so on and so forth for African-Canadian families.

AMT: And so, what have you seen? What do you think of the way the system works now? You have talked about that the system needs to be almost pulled apart and refashioned.

SONIA MILLS-MINSTER: Yes.

AMT: Tell us more about that.

SONIA MILLS-MINSTER: There are two things. We're looking at race based data as well, right? So if the government is going to start or begin to collect race based data, I think that a position would be that whoever is collecting the data-- it's not--I think the bigger question is that we, let me frame it like this, it's not if the data should be collected, the big question is who should collect this data. Right now you can see different individuals and entities within the broader community vying to try to collect this data. I do believe that there are entities within our community, within the African-Canadian community which should be given the opportunity to collect that data. For example, the Anti-Black Racism Network would be able to collect the data, the African-Canadian Coalition on social and child welfare should be able to collect this data, and should be given the opportunity to do that.

AMT: And why is that important? Why is it important that they collect the data as opposed to someone else?

SONIA MILLS-MINSTER: It is important that the community collect their data because-- let me give you an analogy. It's like the SIU collecting the data on the police. The SIU is an extension of the police force, so how can the police collect their own data and monitor themselves? Why would we give the child welfare agencies the right to do that as well? We believe that it should be an outside agency because we need transparency within the system, there needs to be increased accountability, we need services. There is so much that the African-Canadian community needs and that services and the provisions should be directly from the ministry to the community without the go-between.

AMT: And you made the point earlier that the African-Canadian community also has to be involved in terms of solutions on a wider scale; in terms of actual real hands on involvement. Tell me a little more what that would look like.

SONIA MILLS-MINSTER: Right now, when the African-Canadian community is involved, it's always submit your suggestions to us, we'll take them into advisement, into consultation, and then we'll let you know later on whether or not we're going to be able to incorporate your suggestions. What we need is to see is African-Canadian communities at the table where decisions are being made each and every time. For example, we have the child and youth mental health, we're not there. The system right now, the government, has dissected our position on the system in such a way that the necessary components that we need in order to address the disproportionality that affects the African-Canadian community, we're not going to have access to that because we're not at specific tables that will contribute to addressing the issues of disproportionality. Until the government is able to make those necessary shifts, put us at the table, and to put us in a role where we are now making the decisions for our people by our people, we're not going to be moving forward.

AMT: Kiaras, Mary Ellen is making the point that there's a lot of anger in the First Nations communities over how this has gone forward. At the same time there is a structure in First Nations communities to advocate for those children. There is no real structure in quite the same way that as is recognized in other communities, in other marginalized communities. Or does there need to be?

KIARAS GHARABAGHI: I think advocacy coming from communities is an incredibly important component of shifting the system, without a doubt. But I think it goes far beyond that, and I think both Mary Ellen and Sonia made the point that it is about participation in the design of systems. There is a very important distinction between participating as a feedback mechanism on how well the system works, which is basically what we currently do, and participating in the design of a system.

AMT: And being a decision maker.

KIARAS GHARABAGHI: And being an equal partner. It's about partnership rather than feedback, and we have a long way to go to get there, although I do think there is a little bit of optimism in me largely because I'm hearing the conversation in government and also at the agency level shift a little bit to a much greater acceptance of the idea of partnership. In practice, there's a long way to go. You cannot transform the system if it continues to be designed by the same people who designed the previous system and the one before that. You must change that conversation and have new conversation partners.

ANT: Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, what can Ontario learn from BC when it comes to the collection of data that will be used for these decisions?

MARY ELLEN TURPEL-LAFOND: I think data and race can be helpful. It needs to be collected and used appropriately. It's not an easy process, and I think like Kiaras is saying, it is very important. People want participation in the systems but most importantly children and youth have a right to be heard, they have a right to participate, and very often we've been treating children and youth as if all of their needs are the same. We need to understand their needs from a variety of perspectives to see if they've actually come into foster care just because they come from economically deprived groups, or because their parents have faced multiple shocks and barriers in Canadian society and they have in fact been marginalized. I think the story of Indigenous children, which is the story still being written, is one that you know, in my early childhood, Indigenous people were not identified, you were just simply identified in child welfare as Protestant or Catholic. When we think about that today, about how we think of Indigenous children, we say well that's just completely disgraceful, but that was just 20 years ago. And so we need to be thinking forward about what are we going to do with how we serve people, how we meet their needs, how we understand their families and communities, and the child welfare systems in Canada have a long way to go. There and many instances stuck in that 1950, 1960 mentality.

AMT: Well, we have to leave it there but thank you all for your conversation today. I've been speaking with Kiaras Gharabaghi, director of the School of Child and Youth Care at Ryerson University. Sonja Mills-Minster is the head of Millan and Associates. She is also in Toronto. Mary Ellen Turpel-LaFond is BC’s representative for Children and Youth. We did ask to speak to Ontario’s Ministry of Children and Youth Services; no one was available this morning. Stay with us the news is next. This is The Current.

'Five years of suffering:' Journalist Janine di Giovanni on everyday life in Syria

Guests: Janine di Giovanni

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, the music of nature. I will speak to Bernie Krause, he's spent his life in the woods and wilds of the world, recording the sounds of nature, and he has noticed some troubling changes over time. We will listen with him. But first, the killing fields of Syria.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: It's worth remembering that the Syrian revolution began as a series of peaceful protests. But by 2012, as journalist Janine di Giovanni began to focus on Syria, she realized she was documenting a country on the precipice of war. Already those clamoring for democracy were the target of President Bashar al Assad's regime; citizens disappeared into jails: tortured, raped, killed. In her new book, The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria, Janine di Giovanni details a country's descent into a grinding conflict that will leave its scars on that society for generations to come. The stories are compelling and important to hear, but I will tell you we are warning you, some details that we will talk about are disturbing. Janine di Giovanni is a long-time war correspondent, and she joins me from Paris, hello!

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Hi, Anna Maria.

AMT: Janine, when you first arrived in Syria in June of 2012, the revolution was underway and you write that it was on the brink of war. What was the mood like in Damascus?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: It was surreal for me to see, because Damascus at that point was not-- it was not burning. It wasn't like Homs or Aleppo or Idlib, or other places that were really actively in the midst of war. So people were in this very strange schizophrenic state, which is that the war was coming and it was literally on their doorstep in suburbs like Douma and Busra, and if you drove to Homs along the way-- which is you take the road from Damascus and go to Homs-- you really could see how quickly the landscape changed. But inside Damascus, I was going to the opera with people, I was going to dinner parties, there were commercials being shot, there were fashion shows; the hotel I was staying in, which is where the U.N. monitors were staying, still had Thursday night pool parties, which were these kind of incredibly debauched parties where people were drinking and partying. And, you know, down the road in Homs, people were dying.

AMT: It's really incredible, you really watched this war unfold. Like, in real time.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Yes. Yeah, it really was in real time. It really was like watching it in-- almost like in snapshots. You know, okay, here is Damascus in June, and at this stage I'm sitting on a rooftop, and I'm smoking a shisha, and I'm having dinner with friends, and we're laughing and telling stories. But outside of Damascus, a war is going on. And then it's a month later, and people want to leave, and people are beginning to get frightened. And then it's another month later and there's car bombs and I'm rushing to the scenes of car bombs. And little by little until eventually, the massacre at Darayya. After that, I was not allowed to return to the regime side and I began covering the war from the other side.

AMT: And the massacre at Darayya was in August of 2012.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Yes.

AMT: What happened?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Well, there's two versions of this: one if you-- the regime, the Assad side and journalists supporting the regime would say that it was a prisoner swap that went wrong. If you speak to residents of Darayya-- and Darayya today, by the way, is one of the besieged areas of Syria. The people have been besieged by Assad's forces for three years and they're starving to death. Their food is basically leaves, grass, soup made from whatever kind of herbs they can find, a bit of salt. Last week, a U.N. convoy finally got in, and they were carrying mosquito nets and anti-lice shampoo, but no food. So when I message my friends in Darayya and I ask them what they've eaten in a day, they'll say things like a radish, some grape leaves, some grass, and a bit of salt. Literally starvation is being used as a tool of war. But back in August 2012, I entered the town with a local woman and I spoke to witnesses who claimed there had been a massacre. That paramilitary and Assad forces had come in, and that there were more than three hundred people who were killed. So basically, the reports I have which were then backed up by Human Rights Watch and the local Darayya Council was that there was indeed hundreds of people that were killed over a period of days.

AMT: And why would that have happened?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Well, Darayya had long been a centre of resistance and opposition, but it's not uncommon for-- look at Homs, for instance. You know, areas like Baba Amr, which is where the opposition was based, or where it was known to be fighters, or what the government, seeing it from their side, would call this jihadists. You know, would say that these are jihadists, they're foreign fighters, they would always claim that there are foreign fighters there. Which in Northern Syria is not altogether untrue. There are foreign fighters, there are fighters from Qatar, there are fighters from Saudi, there's fighters from Chechnya, Bosnians, Kosovars. cost of ours. You know, those who have come to fight the jihad. But in this case, the people that I spoke to in Darayya were locals whose fathers and relatives had been killed in this battle that went on for several days.

AMT: And as you followed these stories, first of all, the government argued then that that it was a prisoner exchange gone wrong, but what were the consequences, what did the place look like?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: When I went in, the first thing I noticed was the smell of rotting bodies. Which is a terrible thing. I wish I didn't know what that smells like, but unfortunately, I do. And I could sense that something had happened over those days. But now today, I mean, Darayya is basically leveled and people are starving. There's shelling, there is war planes in the sky, as my contacts describe to me, they say war planes are in the sky. It's a besieged city, a kind of mini Sarajevo, which we both worked in in the early '90s.

AMT: Before this became a war it was a revolution, and a lot of young people were very much a part of what they thought was a push for democracy. Early in your stories, you introduce us to a woman named Nada. Who is she?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Nada is a young woman who was an activist, a revolutionary, a student, who basically was working in her hometown Latakia, which is in the Alawite area. And she'd been working for the media there, basically. You know, taking YouTube videos, writing blogs, sometimes bringing food to soldiers. She was not a terrorist in the sense of she wasn't making bombs, she wasn't fighting. She was captured-- well not captured, she was taken from her home in the early morning, which is-- the title of the book comes from her, basically. Because when I met her and she told me her story, she kept saying the morning they came for me, the morning they came for me. And for me, that line very clearly distinguished what life was like before and after for so many people, and how war destroys any kind of normality. So before the morning they came for her, she had a normal life. War was going on, but she lived a normal life. She was an average student, studying, friends, dreams, hopes. Afterwards, she was taken to prison. She was tortured. She was raped. She was held for months in solitary confinement. And basically, her spirit broken. So this is her story, but it could be the story of many, many, many people. Except hers has a happier ending. She was released, she went to Turkey, she got out. There are so many people who not only have never gotten out, but those who just disappeared. Disappeared into the darkness, really. They were taken away by security services and they become victims of state terror. We don't know where they are. And for their families, who just have no idea. Are they dead? Are they alive? Are they suffering? Are they hungry? Are they cold? Imagine if it's your child or your husband or your brother or your father. You have no closure. You just, you have no idea, and for some of these people whose family members were taken away in the beginning of the revolution, they still have no idea. And that's five years of living in a kind of limbo. So in a sense, Nada's story as horrific as it is, and if you read it, you'll be shocked at how human beings could torture another human being. Because she's a very tiny woman, and to think that grown, big men would beat her with clubs and force her to drink urine and all kinds of horrific things, it almost makes you ashamed to be human.

AMT: She also was forced to witness the rape and torture of others.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Yes, she was. I mean, from what I hear from torture victims and people who've been incarcerated for long periods under state regimes, it's a tactic. It's a tactic for you to hear the screams and cries of other people because, of course, it frightens you. I've documented cases where women are raped in front of their brothers or their fathers or their mothers. And, you know, the sheer kind of powerlessness, which is what rape and torture is about. It's about taking power from people. I documented a few cases which are very brutal and very vivid. And I could've gotten even more graphic, but I want people to read it. And I want them to read it not because I want them to be horrified, but because I want them to be shook up out of their complacency. My own mother said to me, you know, it's just so painful to read this. And I said, but you have to. You have to because how can you live your life, in a comfortable life, knowing that there's, you know, our fellow human beings suffering to this extent. And most people have no idea, that's the point of this book.

AMT: I have warned our listeners, but again, some of the stuff we're talking about is very graphic because it is what you have witnessed and talk to people in war. The brutality that you document, Janine, and the people you speak to. At times you wonder, who does that? Who even can think of doing that to another human being? Who comes up with the idea?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Well, you know, the nature of evil is very complicated. And I think that in the case of torturers, what they do is dehumanize the victim completely. I mean, you do get cases of people who are forced in some way to work in torture centre. And in fact, one of the stories I highlight is the story of Hussain, who is a young man from Homs who was taken from his home. Brutally, brutally tortured in a fashion that I in my 25 years of reporting war, human rights, torture, have never heard. So shocking. But he was saved by someone. He was actually saved by a regime doctor who was sent to take his pulse, which is something during very vigorous torture sessions, there are physicians that have to come take the pulse of the victim to see how much more they can sustain before killing them. Because they don't want to kill them, they don't want to kill them. Killing them would be a way out. They want to keep them alive so that they can undergo more torture, give more information, or break them. To completely break them. In this case, Hussain, after he was brutally tortured, was left to die. And a doctor came and took his pulse and said look, I work for the regime. I believe in Assad, but I'm also a doctor and I can't stand this anymore. So you're dead. Do you understand me? I'm closing your file. You're dead. And by closing Hussain's file, he basically was letting him escape. And that story to me is extraordinary because several things: the risk the doctor took; the fact that within war there is no good guys and bad guys, because there's always grey areas. There's always people that are conflicted, and there are also people to do things that they don't want to do, or have to do, or are forced to do for keeping their families alive. You know, there's always these moral grey zones. And then the other thing is that you can really see that there are times when these acts are so horrific that human beings just cannot stand to do this to each other. So I think that's what that whole section is really, why I wrote it, and why I tried to give his voice.

AMT: Because the doctor lets him live, and a nurse comes and actually has them dressed in an army uniform and helps him out of that facility, and somebody drives him away. So it was actually a group of people who risked their lives to get him out after, as you point out, horrific torture.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Yes, yes It's one of the most extraordinary escape stories I've ever heard in my life. It's just so incredible that I couldn't believe it. And in fact, his torture was so brutal and so almost mind-boggling in that I walked away from my sessions with him and said, could this have actually happened? I need to check this out. So I actually checked with several doctors about it. Could this have happened? One person I interviewed said it reminded me of Mengele, and the medical experiments done during the holocaust. Another doctor who is Syrian American had told me that it probably didn't happen and that Hussain had appendicitis and that there was no anesthetic, so they operated on him like that. Several other human rights doctors told me that absolutely, unfortunately, it could have happened. And I saw his scars.

AMT: Just for our listeners, without getting into too much detail, we're talking about a man who was tortured through surgery without anesthesia, surgical torture.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Yes.

AMT: It was doctors doing something to his body.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Which is beyond almost comprehension, you know. That doctors take a Hippocratic Oath to heal people, and yet, what they did to him was the most harmful thing you can do to a human being. But then again, Assad himself is an ophthalmologist, so he is also a doctor. And he has blood on his hands. So I think that writing this book for me just was a way of really discovering characters and human nature. Every torture victim I've ever spoken to always says that you choose. You know, at one moment, you really wish you were dead because the pain is so agonizing. But you choose to live and you make a choice and you stay on this Earth.

AMT: Talk to us a little bit about-- at one point, you go into Aleppo and you're living with people in Aleppo in the middle of this. Talk to us about the way you report, Janine. Why is it so important for you to go and literally live with people going through this?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: I like to tell stories. I like people. Actually, I correct myself. I don't like to tell the stories. I want them to tell me stories and then I just record them. And to do that, you need to be there for a long time and you need to gain people's trust. You can't just cruise in and out and expect people to open up and tell you things like Hussain told me about his torture, or Nada, or the people I met in Aleppo. You need to really be with them and give them time to unfold and to talk. Because they are very traumatised. The other thing is that I don't think I'd actually know a news story if it hit me over the head. I'm not-- I don't look at things that way, I'm very detail oriented. So I might spend two days working in a bakery to see what people eat during wartime. I mean, something like that would really interest me. Like, how do they eat? How do you actually make bread when you don't have flour? How do you actually get the fire going in the oven when you don't have a generator? How do people actually send their kids to school when there are no schools? How do you do this? I'm very curious, and I want to know how they live. Because again, this is part of resilience, this is part of human resilience. I'm amazed, I'm amazed at how people respond during wartime. And I first saw this in Sarajevo, as you did, Anna Maria, of how people can do the most extraordinary things. In Sarajevo, they were making rice. They were using rice to make cheese, to make wine, to make bread, to make cake, birthday cake for their kids-- out of a single packet of humanitarian aid rice. And I think I learned then about the incredible lengths the human spirit could go to survive.

AMT: You talk about the time you spent living amongst the civilians of Aleppo. There was a point where people are so used to the war, they're not even reacting. They're waiting in line for food, they're not even reacting to the scream and the thud of artillery.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: That's really horrible, when people become immune to the sights and sounds of war. And when you take away all normality for people and they have to wait in line six, seven, eight hours to get a loaf of bread. What they're reduced to is their very basic needs, which is to eat, to sleep, to be safe. And that's all they're trying to do. Basically, people will spend an entire day trying to find a loaf of bread to feed their families. You're reduced to very, very little. And you know, when I ask people what they miss the most, they say things like, I miss my family getting together to watch football. It's not-- they don't miss huge things, they miss the everyday mundane things that we take for granted.

AMT: So as we hear about people on the inside who are trapped, we also see efforts for peace talks. Western diplomats, they go to Vienna, they go to Geneva. What should we think?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Not much. I'm afraid to say that, I'm afraid to be cynical. I think they're trying, but I think their interests are not with the civilians of Syria, because if they were, they would be putting a hell of a lot more pressure on Russia to end sieges, to have more humanitarian intervention. And I mean, I'm not saying boots on the ground and Canadian soldiers and British soldiers and American soldiers, but I'm saying let's say, opening humanitarian corridors to get food in, no fly zones protecting civilians over chemical attacks. The UN has consistently tried to do something, to hold peace talks, to try to hold inter-Syria talks. But they've been fruitless so far. I'm afraid they've lost a lot of credibility, and especially they've lost credibility with the people on the ground. I mean, going to Aleppo, U.N. is a dirty word. I mean, they would kill a U.N. convoy that went through there. I was chased down a corridor by a doctor-- literally chased, because he thought I worked for the U.N. I think they're a symbol of failure now.

AMT: Well, you know, at the same time, the international community is preoccupied with ISIS. Where do we risk losing perspective on what's happening?

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Well, we've utterly lost perspective, because the only thing that people are concerned about is ISIS, ISIS, ISIS. And yes, this is a concern and this is something we should act on, we must. But it was no surprise to me in 2014 when I was in Baghdad and Mosul fell. It was absolutely no surprise that ISIS had taken over in Mosul. Now, if I knew that and I saw them on the ground in Syria, then why the hell didn't the Western powers see that earlier? Why didn't they act on that earlier? Why did they let it get to that stage? And why now have we lost all interest in the civilian people in Syria and what they're going through, rather than concentrating entirely on this war against terror? Because the war against terror has turned Putin and Assad into heroes, because they're allegedly fighting against the bad guys. There are no bad guys, there are no good guys in this war. To me, it's right now about the Syrian people. That this suffering-- five years of suffering, of starvation, of killing, of maiming, of wounding-- has got to stop. Because these are our fellow human beings. We can't look away, we can't forget them. We can't push it away because it's painful. Of course it's painful. But it'd be a lot more painful if you were living there and if you were in the midst of it. So I think that's what I was trying to do.

AMT: Well, we have to leave it there. Janine di Giovanni, thank you for your work.

JANINE DI GIOVANNI: Thank you so much, Anna Maria. It's great to talk to you.

AMT: Janine di Giovanni, her book is called The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria. She is also the Middle East editor of Newsweek, and she joined us from Paris. Let us know what you think of what she's saying. You can tweet us, we are @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the Contact link. This is The Current.

Nature soundscapes reveal environmental devastation

Guest: Bernie Krause

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Water lapping]

[Bubbling sounds]

AMT: What you just heard was the sound of a healthy thriving coral reef off the coast of Fiji in the South Pacific teeming with all manner of underwater flora and fauna. The tape was recorded by soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause who used an underwater microphone to capture the natural sounds of the reef. Just a few hundred meters away at a different section of the reef the sound is very different.

SOUNDCLIP

[Mostly silent, very few bubbling sounds]

AMT: That part of the reef is dying. Bernie Krause has dedicated his life to recording the sounds of the natural world. He is a soundscape ecologist and the author of several books, including Voices of the Wild: Animal Songs, Human Din, and the Call to Save Natural Soundscapes. Bernie Krause joins us from Glen Ellen, California. Hello.

BERNIE KRAUSE: Hi. How are you, Anna Maria?

AMT: Well, I'm very excited to be talking to you about the kind of work you're doing and I know you've got lots to share, so let's begin. You can really hear the difference in those two clips. What are we hearing in that first clip that is absent in the second?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Well, in the first clip, what you're hearing is about 11 different species of fish and it sounds like a lot of static but it's really it's their individual voices. They each sound very different and they're establishing acoustic territory around that reef. And it's extremely vital, it's still alive. It's productive. But if we move just 400 metres away, the reef is dying. It's beginning to bleach and all of that creature life doesn't exist anymore in that part of the reef. It's all gone except for a few snapping shrimp and those are still existing, but the other fish and all the other creatures are gone.

AMT: And are you able to see that with the reef as well? Did you did you see the reef?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Yes, of course, we saw the reef and that's why we decided to record there. It's very easy to do that from the surface of the water because from the surface of the ocean to the reef itself is just a few metres.

AMT: And so you're saying like this there's no fish on one side and no other life, like little Christmas tree worms, things that usually pop out of coral - not there?

BERNIE KRAUSE: No. No, no, it's all gone in the in the dying reef. When it's bleached like that it's gone and it's happening at a tremendous rate all over the world now.

AMT: What can we learn about habitats from listening to side by side comparisons such as that one?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Well, we're talking about the soundscape here and we're talking about a different way of experiencing the living world around us. And the soundscape is a narrative of place. It involves all of the sound that reaches the human ear from any source and it's a language that conveys where we are whether that place is urban or rural or a wild habitat, whether the wild habitat is terrestrial or marine. It doesn't really matter. And the soundscape itself is comprised of three basic sources. The first of those is the geophony. Geo meaning earth sounds that are non-biological, like the effect of wind in the trees or water in a stream, waves at the ocean shore, the movement of the earth, that kind of thing. And these, by the way, the geophony is the first sound that was ever heard on earth, if you can imagine that, before living organisms were around to actually hear it. And then came the biophony, and the biophony is comprised of all the sounds that living organisms make collectively in a given habitat. And the third is the anthropophony. That’s the human noise that we make and some of it is controlled, like music or theatre, and some of it is very chaotic and incoherent. It's what we call noise and most of that coming from the technology that we can't seem to live without.

AMT: And so how do habitats that are under stress sound different from a healthy habitat?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Well, let me explain it this way. When I first began there was no way to see what sound was, because you just can't see it. But now through graphic illustrations of sound, called spectrograms, we're able to visualize how the sounds the structured. So, in other words, in most healthy habitats we can not only hear but we can see how species, such as insects and amphibians, and birds, and mammals, in a given location find acoustic bandwidth for their own voices. And this bandwidth – and this is really cool - this bandwidth or channel selection, also known as the acoustic niche hypothesis, is free of other voices so that the transmission and reception of each creature's signal can be performed unimpeded by others. That's so important to think about. In healthy habitats these distinctions between all the species are quite obvious. However, when habitat is under stress, like we just heard, the biophony will always and immediately tell the truth. The spectrograms illustrating the soundscapes will tend to show little or no discrimination between the voices or there will be little or no biophonic information being transmitted in that habitat at all. And that's how we tell the difference between a healthy habitat and a stressed habitat.

AMT: Now, you've been recording natural soundscapes for almost 50 years. Why have you spent your life working on this?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Well, there are couple of reasons. The personal reason is that I suffer from a terrible case of ADHD, I have from the time I was a child even well into my adulthood and the only thing that seems to have made a difference to help mitigate that issue was going out into the field and listening to natural sounds. It's the only thing that worked for me. I tried medication. I tried therapies. I tried all kinds of stuff, but this is the major thing that kind of calms me down and focuses me and cuts out the levels of stress and anxiety that I normally feel when I'm not doing this. So it really has an analgesic effect. And then as I got into this more and more and ranged further into the wild I found that there was a scientific component to this as well and began to see things like the three basic components of the soundscape, which, by the way, was established by two researchers in Canada -Murray Schafer, a famous composer and naturalist who lives not far from Toronto, and Barry Truax, who is now emeritus who was a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. What I've come up with, I took their idea and developed a little bit further into that geophony, biophony, and anthropophony idea and also the acoustic niche hypothesis, which is all original work. Because I spent so much time out there I began to see the relationships between these voices and it became very clear to me that there was a much larger story here and that this narrative, that we call the biophony, has a lot of information in it that informs so many subjects that we're just beginning to grasp the meaning of it. I mean, subjects like religion and biology and architecture and natural history, philosophy, literature, all of these are informed by the natural soundscape.

AMT: There's so much to talk about. I'm not going to let the ADHD explanation go, though, because you realize there are a whole bunch of parents are going to go out and get recording equipment for their children now.

BERNIE KRAUSE: Well, yes, of course. I hope they do.

AMT: I hope they do too. How have the natural landscapes you have recorded changed over that almost five decades of work that you've done?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Well, in a word, I've got a huge collection of natural sounds and I'm looking, by the way, for a home for this archive, much of it from North America and fully 50 per cent of my archive - I’ve got 5,000 dollars and over 15,000 creatures - fully half of this archive comes from habitats that are either altogether silent or the biophony has changed so radically they can no longer be heard in any of its original form.

AMT: So, are you telling me that 50 per cent would still sound the same? But half of what you have would be very different?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Half of what I have is gone.

AMT: Completely gone?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Unrecognizable or silent. There's a place nearby here, 20 minutes from where I live where I've been recording now since 1993 and last spring when I went out to record it was the first time in my 77 years that I've ever heard a silent spring. There was no birdsong in northern California at that spot, but because of the California drought and combined with the fact that the seasons are changing - spring is occurring now two weeks earlier than it did in 1993 - and that's a major change because when birds migrate through this area they need to find the vegetation that they expect in order to thrive on their journey and because the vegetation is leafing out much earlier, the birds are finding it really hard to find these resting places on their ways north and south. So it's having a real effect on everything around us and it's obvious. Let me just say, there were birds here. We saw all the species that are normally around but they weren't singing.

AMT: Are you talking about Sugarloaf State Park in California?

BERNIE KRAUSE: I am.

AMT: Okay, because I just happen to have some of your tape here that our listeners should hear as well then. We've got four clips that you recorded. The first one that we're going to play is from 2004, then 2009, then 2014, then 2015. They’re in 15-second bites, Bernie Krause, and there's a split second of silence between what we're going to hear. So let's listen to that and you can tell us a little more.

SOUNDCLIP

[Many different types of birds singing, high energy, high volume]

SOUNDCLIP

[Slightly calmer, many birds singing]

SOUNDCLIP

[Slightly more quiet, birds singing]

SOUNDCLIP

[Just a few birds singing]

AMT: That’s incredible.

BERNIE KRAUSE: Yeah.

AMT: It goes from that lush, rich sound to I'm thinking the volume is down by the time I hear the last one. I want to crank it up. I'm straining to hear.

BERNIE KRAUSE: No, the volume is not down. These are recorded using the same protocol, the same type of equipment over the same period, over this period of time, and it was recorded in exactly the same conditions on the same day, by the way, April 15th. And a lot of that is a result of a historic drought that's been occurring here. It's the worst drought in 1,200 years in our area.

AMT: And what else were you listening for in those four clips that I might have been missing?

BERNIE KRAUSE: When we measure habitat viability, we do that by analyzing both the density and diversity of the biophony. And the density refers to the total number of sound producing organisms. It doesn't matter whether they're insects or fogs of birds or whatever. And the diversity refers to the number of individual species represented in the biophony, so all of the species together. And so we look at those numbers in a raw state and we also look at how the biophonies are expressed, meaning that we look at the ways in which the signals are distinguished one from another in terms of the acoustic niche hypothesis or how they fit together in the frequency and time spectrum. And most of these details are revealed in the spectrograms mentioned earlier. And so when I look at these, I listen to the sounds from Sugarloaf, the obvious comparison is between 2004 and 2015, that 11-year period. And when you put the two together you see how much has been lost in terms of wildlife sound, mostly birds in this case, over that period of time. And 11 years is not a lot of time. 11 years is, what, 4,000 days. And in that period, 4,000 sunrises, it's become were really quiet.

AMT: You mentioned that it's the drought. Can you tie that to climate change then?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Not directly. But it's certainly implied in the ways in which the seasons are changing. I mean, we're not getting the precipitation here. This was supposed to be a normal year. We had an El Niño, which was supposed to be the strongest El Niño in many, many years. We got hardly any rain. We're still below normal.

AMT: I have some more clips that I'm going to play and ask you about. This one comes from 1988 and I do believe it's one of the first you've done when you realized you could hear changes over time. This is Lincoln Meadow, California, 1988. Here we go with the first one.

SOUNDCLIP

[High volume, many types of birds singing, water lapping]

AMT: Okay, Bernie Krause, tell me what I'm hearing. I heard birdsong. I also think I heard running water?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Yes, there's a stream running through the meadow. This is a meadow that's a little over 2,000 metres in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. That's a mountain range that runs along the eastern border of California. And it's a really beautiful spot. And I'd been recording there for many years before 1988. There was a logging company that wanted to do selective logging, a new process that they said was going to have no environmental impact. And I said, well, fine, okay. How's about letting me record before and after you do this selective logging thing? They said, fine, go ahead. Because, of course, nobody knows what sound does and how it expresses itself, so they had no problem with that. If I had gone out there photographing specific stuff, maybe they would have not liked that. So, I set up my gear on June 21st, the solstice of ’88, and recorded. And they logged that summer following my recording, just taking out a tree here and there. And to the eye it looks as if nothing has changed, but in 1989 when I went back at the same time and there had been the same kind of precipitation and same conditions and so on and I recorded in 1989, the changes were really obvious.

SOUNDCLIP

[Running water, few birds singing, tapping sound]

BERNIE KRAUSE: Yeah, the only sound the only sound we heard there was a Williamson sapsucker. But it's really changed a lot.

AMT: What’s a Williamson—is that the woodpecker sound I heard at the end?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Yeah. That’s a woodpecker, yeah. And what’s really noticeable here is that over time - I've been back there 15 times in the last 27 years or so - and over time it hasn't changed. The biophony has not come back. And to the human eye, if you take a look at that place, it looks as if there's been no impact and if you just gauge it by the eye, then the logging company would have had a point. There was nothing that changed. But the ear tells a very different story. It tells us the truth.

AMT: Have you done recordings in Canada?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Yes. I’ve recorded in Algonquin Park.

AMT: And you saw the same kind of thing or you heard the same kind of thing? The changes?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Well, I haven't done a comparison. I was up there a few years ago with Murray Schaffer, when we're doing a conference in just the southern border of Algonquin Park, and I managed to capture an early morning recording with two packs of wolves, one in front of me and one in back of me. And it was at the end of March and it was, oh, it was a gorgeous moment. And I happened to capture that. And I've also recorded off of Vancouver Island – a lot of killer whale activity.

AMT: You’re going back to Vancouver Island this summer, are you not?

BERNIE KRAUSE: I am.

AMT: To go to the same place to try to see what's there now? Hear what’s there now?

BERNIE KRAUSE: When I was working on my doctorate I was working on the different vocalizations of killer whales. So, I was working in a marine environment then. I'm going to go try to record on the island in some few patches of forests that are still left from incessant logging.

AMT: Had you done any recording around the boreal forest around Fort McMurray before this fire?

BERNIE KRAUSE: No. I wish I had. We were actually working on, hoping to work on a project. There was a new museum going up in Saskatchewan, but they wanted to do something from the tar sands area and I didn't get there in time.

AMT: Because then we would obviously see a very difference in sound now.

BERNIE KRAUSE: You bet.

AMT: Yeah.

BERNIE KRAUSE: It's almost like the Gulf oil spill. A friend of mine—I’ve recorded down in that area and then after the spill my colleague of mine went down to record and he said it was absolutely devastating. It was so sad because the sound of the water when it's laden with oil sounds kind of like weird and mushy, almost science fiction-like and it kind of slops on the on the shore rather than crashes with that vital marine energy. And he said it was really, really sad. It really changed.

AMT: And of course in a boreal forest that has been set alight, obviously all the animals have left. The smoke would still be in the air.

BERNIE KRAUSE: Sure. I’ve recorded in the boreal forest. Now, the Canadian boreal—that boreal forest stretch goes all the way from the Maritimes into Alaska and I have recorded the boreal forest in Alaska, the western end of it, but not in Canada.

AMT: That's worth making a point of because you're very careful to always record in the same places when you're doing those sound comparisons, are you not?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Yes, but I only have five comparisons because it never occurred to me that that would be an important thing to do. So, I only have five in my entire archive, but they are very good ones.

AMT: And it never occurred to you because you didn't realize that sound could tell us so much until—

BERNIE KRAUSE: Yes.

AMT: --it kind of hit you in the ears.

BERNIE KRAUSE: Exactly the point.

AMT: Well, tell us more about how-- Because your soundscapes are incorporated into a ballet and a symphony, tell us more about how sound lends itself to musical performance.

BERNIE KRAUSE: Well, natural soundscapes are the origins of human music. It was the animals who taught us to dance and sing. And that's the whole thesis of the book The Great Animal Orchestra. As a matter of fact, July 1st, I’m opening an exhibit at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, where they're doing a retrospective of my work, which includes many of the things that we've just heard today and more, literally hours of material, and also several other artists from China, from Japan, Mexico, Latin America, and Africa who are contributing to this exhibit from the perspective of sound and the soundscape. It's the first major art exhibit and science collaboration that’s ever been done about natural sound.

AMT: It's so interesting. At a time when natural sound - that we can now see that it's disappearing.

BERNIE KRAUSE: Yeah.

AMT: That's when we’ve begun to appreciate it.

BERNIE KRAUSE: Well, that's why this library is so important. It's a collection of sound over a long period of time, almost 50 years now and it really points to the ways in which that voice of the natural world is changing so radically.

AMT: What do you think about when you realize that these sounds are disappearing? How does that affect you?

BERNIE KRAUSE: Well, I'll tell you, it's very sad on the one hand, and if I can get people, certainly young students, to get involved in this process of soundscape ecology and get involved in it and use the tools that they've got - the smartphones and the rest of the stuff - in a way that's really productive to our lives and meaningful by getting out there and trying to record natural sound, they'll quickly learn how noisy the world is with human endeavour and how important it is to quiet it down a little bit and just listen to the sounds of living organisms around us. It's the sound of life.

AMT: And what do you want us to understand then from listening to the recordings that you make?

BERNIE KRAUSE: We better be very careful not to still that voice of the divine.

AMT: Bernie Krause, it's fascinating to talk to you. Thank you.

BERNIE KRAUSE: You're very welcome and I hope you guys enjoy some really great soundscapes where you are.

AMT: Bernie Krause. He's a soundscape ecologist. We reached him at his home in Glen Ellen, California. What do you think of what he's saying and what he's hearing and what he can't hear anymore? Let us know. Tweet us. We're @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website, cbc.ca/thcurreent. Later this week we're going to introduce you to a woman named Khadija Ismayilova. She's a - and I'm mangling that name, I’ll learn it soon - she's an award-winning journalist in Azerbaijan. She just got out of prison. She's fearless in exposing government corruption and she talks about some of her investigations ina documentary called Amazing Azerbaijan.

SOUNDCLIP

I'm working right now on a story about the President. I have documents showing that the President’s family is involved in the construction of the flag square, which was an enormously expensive project and the government was presenting it as a patriotic project. Well, it turns out that the President's family made money on patriotic feelings of the people of Azerbaijan. I sent inquiries to the government about ownership of the company, so they know that I'm doing this. And I think they have other tools to know what I’m doing, actually. If they are spending more than they should or they are stealing money, well, of course, I'm writing about it. I'm a journalist. And if they are not happy with that, well, stop stealing.

AMT: Well, there you go. A story of power and corruption, sex tapes, and high stakes. Hear our conversation with Azerbaijani Khadija Ismayilova later this week, right her on The Current. And this is today’s edition of The Current. We’re going to leave you with another recording by Bernie Krause, the soundscape ecologist who was just in conversation with me. He has done a lot of work around the world recording animals in the wild and so from an earlier project of his, we’ll leave you with a bit of the Great Animal Orchestra. Enjoy it while you can. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[water running, birds singing]

[loud, rapid tapping]

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June 7, 2016 full episode transcript

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