I will do my utmost in making this email concise in eight (8) summary sections without sacrificing the scientific credibility and will also provide certain support documentation via web links visible as underlined words. The Cc’d, i.e., visible, recipients are those who have shown varied interest in this subject over the years and/or those that have a jurisdictional mandate at the Legislature and at the HRM. There are over three hundred (300) Bcc’d, i.e., invisible, recipients of this email several of whom are published scientists in Canada, USA, and Western Europe, some of whom are also associated with me!

 

 

(1)   Cultural eutrophication and what it entails in a nutshell; your Department has done absolutely nothing to date to reverse this trend although my international (acclaimed) scientific team has made over fifty (50) detailed submissions with peer reviewed scientific evidence on biotic integrity and biodiversity dating back to the time of the Hon. JOHN LEEFE BEd; the Minister had also appeared in a television show as one of my valued guests back in 1989!

The negatives effects of cultural eutrophication are best summarized in the following two scans, EUTRO1, and EUTRO2!

(2)   There has been no pragmatic follow-up to the intense one-hour semi-scientific discussions that I had with a recent deputy minister of your department, Mr. RON L’ESPERANCE, who was kind enough to visit me at my humble abode in Dartmouth (see his handwritten note to me which he sent immediately). No amount of reminder emails and/or written letters to your department have elicited any pragmatic action!

(3)   Kindly read an important commitment-letter from a recent Premier, the Rt. Hon. Dr. John Hamm MD, but nothing pragmatic transpired either, alas!

(4)   See the tremendous leadership that the State of Florida is taking and an appeals court upheld the stiff standard that their DEP enacted; the State of Florida had declared that TEN (10) micrograms/litre is the maximum acceptable value for total phosphorus (TP), the principal limiting nutrient.

Important note: This was inspite of the fact that Florida is sub-tropical and even the `natural background concentrations’ are expected to be higher there than in north temperate regions, e.g., in Nova Scotia. In our beloved province, the natural background concentrations are in the range of 2-5 micrograms/litre in clear-water lakes based on extensive predictive modelling (using several international models) that we have completed at a massive scale, one thousand (1,000) lakes/ponds, and are continuing with another select 500-1,000 lakes/ponds all across the Province of Nova Scotia! In coloured water lakes, it is higher due to the humic acids/compounds originating from marshes and bogs, mostly.

I had also made several formal presentations to your department showing scientific proofs which select present/former professional staff of your department had attended during the entire 1990s inclusive of a present MLA, Mr. Howard Epstein LLB, when he was a Halifax City alderman!

(5)   Leadership taken by SWEDEN!

(6)   The total failure in the case of an undisturbed lake in HRM, SANDY LAKE, in Glen Arbour and kindly see how rapidly cultural eutrophication set in! I had `forewarned’ several senior staff at your Department and even provided scientific modelling, all pro bono, but they did absolutely nothing about it.

They pass the buck incessantly to the municipalities and thus are confessing that they are incapable of making things happen at a pragmatic level!

(7)   There is little point in relying on perpetual consultant studies since they may have varied conflicts-of-interest; their first duty is to serve their major clients who are mostly the `proponents’.

More importantly, the vast majority of consultants as well as senior level BUREAUCRATS at all levels of Government are not extensively published scientists, and most are not even accredited in the relevant domain, APPLIED LIMNOLOGY, which is the application of theoretical limnology to practical lake management science.

(8)   And last but not least, the recent highly touted Regional Plan of HRM shows minimal leadership in the professional lake management domain inspite of the fact that we made massive amount of submissions and even provided science based extensive DVD+R disks which staff never even digested based on their `unscientific comments’ to the Regional Planning Committee, alas!

 

 

 

Shalom Murti Mandaville Post-Grad Dip., Professional Lake Manage.

Chair & Scientific Director

Soil & Water Conservation Society of Metro Halifax-SWCSMH, a multi-discipline scientific/technical stakeholder group

 

Tel: 902-463-7777

• Include professional limnologists, especially applied limnologists (i.e., lake managers), in any scientific appraisal and/or decision making w.r.t lakes and rivers!

"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein." (H. Jackson Brown in Chronicle Herald; June 12, 2006)

 

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