Dr. Roberta Bondar's space flight inspires environmentalism

Dr. Roberta Bondar’s historic space flight 30 years ago inspired her commitment to protect the planet Earth. She talks about the connection between a healthy planet and a healthy population in this podcast in advance of the next OMA Talks on climate change scheduled for April 21, the eve of Earth Day.

Transcript

Spotlight on Health  – Historic space flight inspires environmentalism

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Georgia Balogiannis: In this podcast the Ontario Medical Association looks at current issues of interest in health care. Spotlight on Health gives you all the straight talk. We’re Ontario's doctors and your health matters to us. I'm Georgia Balogiannis for the Ontario Medical Association.

Dr. Roberta Bondar’s historic spaceflight inspired her commitment to protect the planet Earth. In this first of a two-part series, she talks about the connection between a healthy planet and a healthy population.

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Dr. Roberta Bondar: Being the first female Canadian astronaut was a big thing, I believe, in those days. I mean when I grew up, it was a genderless thing for me. It was, "we're having human beings here being trained, they're going off the planet and someday I'm hoping to do the same thing.” I didn't really, early on — because I was born back in the mid 1940s — that it became that much of an issue for me. 

When it started building up towards the flight, I had a lot of people quite interested in two main things. One was that, yes, I was the first female Canadian astronaut. The other one was that I was the first Canadian astronaut after the Challenger accident. I think all of that was very precious to me and the fact that people saw me as “gosh, this could be our mother or our sister or our daughter,” it's something that, “now a woman is doing it, for gosh sakes, and it's dangerous.” So, I think there was a lot of, of interest in that perspective. For me it was, “I’d better, I better do this right, because I’ve got the weight of a lot of the world on my shoulders here and it's going to be an international flight, so I better do it well.” 

So, the international part about being the first neurologist in space remains very important to me because a lot of the changes that we see in spaceflight really have their basis in understanding the nervous system and not understanding the nervous system. That is the thing that we studied a lot on my particular flight and people continue to study it. So, to be the first one to actually describe these things in a knowledgeable way and an informed way made me feel that I was contributing a great deal to inspiring the whole field of space medicine and researchers and astronauts who’d follow me.

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I think it was the second day, or the third day, when the commander called me up to the flight deck and he actually said “Roberta, you've got to look out the window”. So, you can imagine not being able to see the earth, having the expectations growing inside me. When I was finally up on the flight deck and looked at the earth. I must say that — we were over Hawaii at the time and I was looking straight down and — it was, it was fascinating to be that high and see things the way I saw them in a book on geography when I was in grade 10. 

I did start looking out beyond the islands of Hawaii, because we're traveling very fast — 25 times the speed of sound — so looking beyond it I was able to see the edge of the Earth and that's what really grabbed my attention. 

It was the ability to see that the Earth was a real planet. All the pictures in the world don't do it justice. It's the emotional connection that one has to make, in real time. It becomes something, or it can become something that is akin to an epiphany. So, when I talk about my epiphany, it's the ability to be able to emotionally know that this is a planet and to go back to when I was young and thinking about being like Flash Gordon and exploring other planets. This is a planet. This is something that we search for in the Solar System and we're sitting right on one. 

So, it was that reality that made me start looking at Earth and all its beauty and thinking about what was on the surface. And I know the kinds of things that are on the surface, but they became very, very precious because there's nothing else out there. There's no Star Trek ship bringing in a whale, for example. All the things that we read in science fiction, and sometimes believe them. Some come true. That is the premise for my wanting to come back and explore the planet and trying to share with people the need to protect the natural world so that it doesn't disappear; that all the life forms that are on it have a purpose and a big ecosystem that helps us live and thrive. 

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The AMASS itself stands for Avian Migration Aerial Surface Space. Now, it's an acronym that I came up with because, during one of our trips up to Wood Buffalo National Park to this really remote area. And they took me over the nesting area of the whooping crane. I had heard about whooping cranes and, like most Canadians, had never seen one. You see these pairs of these white birds and they're few and far between. You know when I was born, there were only about 15 left. And so, it got me thinking about how I can use photography to not only bring people's attention to this species of bird, but what if I could get different species of birds worldwide and photograph them from three different perspectives? So, that's why it's called Aerial, Surface and Space because those are the three perspectives that I'm looking at with these different species of birds.

I have become a principal investigator with NASA. It allows our foundation to partner with NASA to give them coordinates of all the areas that we're interested in along a migratory corridor for one of these birds. So, for example, the whooping crane flies from Northwest Territories where they nest, all the way down to the Texas Gulf, and it's fraught with danger. Even last Fall, four whooping cranes were shot in Oklahoma, and there only are about 500 in the wild population. What can we do to educate people and protect the habitat more? 

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When I was asked if I'd be interested in lending my name to an environment education foundation that used photography as a means of conveying what we feel emotionally when we look at the natural world, I felt that it would be a great opportunity for me to continue to participate in sharing with others the types of emotion, the view that I had from space. To be able to try to understand more about the nervous system and how we see and view the world around us, because I had trained not just in neurology but I'd sub-specialized in a field called neuro-ophthalmology — to be able to understand how we bring visual information in and how we best can try to create something to allow someone else to see and feel what we see and feel. Because you can't do it otherwise and cameras are a perfect way of doing it. 

So, I thought this would be a great opportunity to try to move people into the natural world, looking at environment education in a way to help people love the natural world and then want to protect it. So, there are a number of reasons why I felt that it was good for me to lend my name to a group of individuals who felt that this would be a good environment education opportunity.

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Climate change affects everyone. The health-care system in Canada is now extremely challenged by climate change and if we don't try to address it and try to tease out and parse out some of the areas that we can solve, we would fail as physicians. The objective in life is “to do no harm” and sitting and watching things happen is actually harmful. One has to understand what harm means. 

When we look at climate change, I look at not just human lives, I look at every life form that's on the planet and some of those life forms can do us great injury and they can become greater in numbers, whether it's viruses or whether it's bacteria or whether it's some type of parasite. Just looking at straight clinical medicine that way. 

More than even that is, what are the tools that we're using and how are they affecting the environment? What are the environmental impacts of our practice of medicine? There's a wide range of things that, if physicians actually stopped long enough to start thinking about it, it would probably be overwhelming. That's why one has to rely on a team approach. We need to really have somebody that's an environmental committee that looks at these things that have impact on the environment.

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There's a very important message and that is “have hope”. It's too easy to get into the dark side of the environment. Now, we have to have the reality of what it is in order to deal with it. But in medicine, we should be about hope. 

There are environment groups who look at the environment as a very dark place and their ability to create change is through dire messaging. And I understand that, but I do think a message that I would like to give as a message of what the reality is, but what we can do as human beings,  what are the positive things that we have done already, small steps, but that we are capable of doing so much more.

It really is a lot about political will. It's a lot about human behavior and identifying things. It's about having a followership that will continue to give that energy that people need to try new things. I do believe as a lifeform; we are capable of so much. Maybe we shouldn't be in a place where we say, “maybe we could have done it differently”. Maybe we should be in a place to say, “we can do it differently now and have a good outcome”.

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Georgia Balogiannis: This podcast is brought to you by the Ontario Medical Association and is edited and produced by Jodi Crawford Productions. To learn more about the Ontario Medical Association please visit OMA.org.