In the past few weeks, Conservative ministers in both the Canadian and Albertan governments have repeatedly stated that we must direct more of our country’s research funding and effort into science and technology to boost the country’s economy.

It’s heartening to see government appreciation of the potential economic benefits of science, but truly unfortunate that by “science and technology” these governments appear to mean only technology. Recent events would indicate that Conservative governments remain blind to all that scientific advances in non-technology have done to protect Canada’s bottom line, as well as to improve quality of life for Canadians.

A perfect case study is the federal government’s dealing with the Experimental Lakes Area, a world-leading freshwater research centre.

Take a recent statement in the House of Commons by Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for Science and Technology. In an attempt to justify closing the ELA, the minister declared that money could be saved by conducting small-scale experiments rather than using whole lakes, and that such approaches would also protect the lakes from harm.

That is not the case. The scientific record will show that whole-lake experiments have saved much more money than they have cost. One example is the control of rampant algal blooms in lakes. In the 1970s, experiments in small bottles suggested that to control such blooms would require controlling at least three elements: phosphorus, nitrogen and carbon. Whole-lake experiments at the Experimental Lakes Area showed that such blooms could be prevented by controlling phosphorus alone. This approach has been successful, and many of the world’s large lakes have been successfully recovered.

In contrast, policies based on small-scale experiments of the sort recently touted by Minister Goodyear would have been both more expensive and far less effective. For example, the EU has estimated that controlling two elements – phosphorus and nitrogen – in the Baltic Sea would cost 3.1 billion Euros. Controlling phosphates alone would cost only 210 to 430 million Euros, a savings of 86 to 93 percent. The ELA experiments have resulted in policies that have saved a tremendous amount of money in Canada, the US and throughout Europe.

Or take the case of acid rain. In the late 1970s, it was believed that damage to lakes began when they were acidified to pH 5. This belief was based on 96-hour experiments done with fish. But when acid was added to whole lakes at the ELA, it was found that whole food chains were much more sensitive to acid rain. When the pH of a lake decreased below pH 6 (ten times less acidic than pH 5), the aquatic ecosystem began to degrade. Lake trout populations began to decline, not because acid was directly toxic, but because key invertebrates and minnows in their food chains disappeared. Within a few years, trout were in a starving condition, so that they were unable to reproduce. By the time the lake had reached pH 5, half of the original species had disappeared.

According to a 1992 study sponsored by the Royal Society of Canada, if we had not regulated sulfur emissions in the early 1980s based on this information, an additional 111,000 fish populations would have been lost. Regulations also prevented the loss of 5.1 million populations of aquatic organisms in eastern Canada. The cost of the emissions controls to save these organisms were calculated to be $33,000 per fish population, and $700 per species for all aquatic organisms.

(It is noteworthy that the above lakes, and all others used for ELA experiments, have fully recovered from their experimental treatments. Designing successful remediations has always been an important part of ELA’s mandate.)

Small-scale experiments of the sort advocated by Goodyear frequently give erroneous results, because they do not include all components of an ecosystem and cannot be conducted for long enough periods to provide thorough testing. If such superficial tests are used as the sole basis for ecological policies, they can result in costly and fruitless environmental policies – that’s what forty-four years of comparing small-scale and ecosystem-scale experiments at the ELA has demonstrated.

This is why we must not lose the ELA. It’s why scientists, provincial governments, First Nations, and Canadians at large are opposing and working together to avert the closure of ELA. It is encouraging to see that many Canadians, if not their ministers, have considerable science literacy.

And there’s a larger lesson for Tory ministers here too. Not all non-technological research is simply “curiosity driven.” Some can improve the bottom line over the short term by reducing losses of key resources or preventing expensive reclamation, measures that increase profits just as surely as increasing sales. To focus on technology development to the exclusion of other sciences is to be both environmentally and economically short-sighted.

David Schindler OC. AOE, FRSC, FRS was the founding director of the Experimental Lakes Area. He is the Killam Memorial Professor of Ecology at the University of Alberta.

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