Back in the early 2000s, Dutch chemist Paul Crützen suggested that humans have pushed Planet Earth into a brand new age, terminating the one geologists say we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene.

The Anthropocene, Crützen called his proposed, human-engineered Epoch.

This past spring, a scientific panel presented its own geological definition of the Anthropocene.  The core of that definition — the Anthropocene’s ‘Golden Spike’, the one spot on Earth where the start of Earth’s proposed new Epoch is best observed in surface sediments.

The panel’s choice — Crawford Lake, in southern Ontario.

Crawford Lake is meromictic, so its waters don’t turn over and its bottom sediments remain perfectly preserved.

Those sediments have been recording human activities for 12,000 years, beginning with First Nations activities dating back to the late 13th century. Sedimentary layers laid down in the mid-19th century record the logging activities of European settlers along the lake’s shores. Layers dating to the mid-20th century — the proposed time base of the Anthropocene — contain the chemical signatures of fossil fuel burning and atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. 

The Anthropocene Working Group’s proposed geological definition of the Anthropocene – with Crawford Lake as the new Epoch’s Golden Spike – will be submitted to its parent body, a subcommission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, later this Fall. A final decision, rejecting or adopting the Anthropocene as a new Epoch in Earth’s history, could be announced in August 2024, at the 37th congress of the International Union of Geological Sciences, in South Korea.

I visited Crawford Lake in the company of some of its greatest fans. The first one you’ll hear is Brenna Bartley, Manager of Education & Outreach with Halton Region Conservation Authority.

Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Coring Crawford Lake sediments. Mike Pisaric (standing), Tim Patterson (kneeling) and Chelsi McNeill-Jewer (laying down). (Courtesy Patterson Lab)

Videoed sessions of the Canadian House of Commons don’t usually go viral. Late last month, a seemingly innocent act of courtesy by the Commons Speaker sparked national furor and global media coverage.

Moments after a speech by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, House Speaker Anthony Rota called on MPs to stand up and applaud an elderly man sitting in the visitors’ balcony. Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian veteran, had valiantly fought the Russians in World War Two, Rota declared.

Everyone rose and clapped, with great emotion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland among them.

As it turns out, Yaroslav Hunka was a veteran of one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious divisions, the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician). Under the command of Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, one of Nazi Germany’s most powerful leaders and Holocaust architects, the Galician Division committed atrocious crimes across western Ukraine and Poland.

Hunka was eighteen years-old when he volunteered. His political beliefs at that time are unknown, and there’s no evidence he participated in atrocities. Some time in the mid-1950s, Hunka emigrated to Canada. So did hundreds of other veterans of Nazi units, as documented by the 1985-86 Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada (Deschênes Commission).

Monuments would be erected across Canada, commemorating their ‘courageous’ struggles.

In more recent years, that sentiment has been shared by Chrystia Freeland. Freeland’s own grandfather was the senior editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland, something she has been circumspect about in public.

The GPM spoke with Dimitri Lascaris about Yaroslav Hunka, and Canada’s reputation as a place where old Nazis went to pasture. Lascaris is a lawyer, human rights activist and journalist.

Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Dimitri Lascaris

Back in 2019, in the midst of another Canadian scandal, Chrystia Freeland, Foreign Minister at the time, declared that international law wasn’t a “smorgasbord to pick and choose from.”

Freeland was being coy. When it comes to China or Russia or Iran or Syria or Venezuela or other countries of that sort, Canada calls for international law to be strictly enforced, and even gets involved.

On the other hand, when it comes to Israel, Canada calls for international law to be waived. Late last December, along with two dozen other Israeli allies, Canada voted against a UN resolution requesting the International Court of Justice to render an Advisory Opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s half-century-long occupation of Palestine.

The resolution passed by a wide margin, and the ICJ is now preparing to render that opinion.

This past July, in a letter to the Court, Canada urged it to step back. Rendering a legal opinion would only harden positions, a senior government lawyer argued. The Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ must be resolved through negotiation, untethered from international law.

I spoke about Canada’s equivocal positions on the enforcement of international law with Canadian scholar William Schabas. Schabas is a professor of international law at Middlesex University in the UK, and professor of human rights law and international criminal law at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.