Canada’s first woman to journey into space thinks a lot about the Earth.
          “It’s very hard for me as a physician not to want to talk about the health of the planet,” former astronaut Dr. Roberta Bondar said in a public talk in April 2013 at Mount Royal University in Calgary.
           Bondar, who is also a neurologist, environmentalist and photographer, discussed the importance of earth observation technologies for a sustainable future, speaking at the university’s new Institute for Environmental Sustainability inaugural public event in the lead up to Earth Day activities.  
          The Earth is such a dynamic, complex entity, it’s difficult to determine exactly the impact of human activity on it, she said.
          But as an astronaut who has orbited the planet, Bondar said that she – along with all those who’ve travelled into space – return with an intense realization of the Earth as a planet. “I just wanted to share that emotionally with you, and I don’t know how to do that,” she said.
          Bondar, the world’s first neurologist in space, led an international research team at NASA for more than a decade that explored new connections between astronauts recovering from the microgravity of space and neurological illnesses on earth.
          She co-founded The Roberta Bondar Foundation (http://www.therobertabondarfoundation.org/), a charitable organization that responds to the need within society to educate and improve knowledge of the environment.
          In an inspiring and riveting talk at Mount Royal University, Bondar informed and enthralled her audience of more than 500 people from a wide cross-section of society. 
          But amid the hero worship that one associates with celebrities, she delivered a serious message: Earth is a very small planet in relative cosmic terms, and every human endeavor leaves an impact on its surface.
          “We have to decide what that footprint should be (and) how much this planet can tolerate in terms of rejuvenating it,” Bondar said.
          An accomplished photographer, she complemented her talk with many compelling photographs, including one that showed a fishbone-like image of areas of the Amazon rain forest. Narrows rows of stranded and dying trees, no longer connected to the ecosystem, were all that remained between large swaths of logged trees.
          “This is to shows you a couple of things that happen when trees get cut down in favor of trying to raise crops or animals, and (for) tendering timber rights to try to make some money,” she said.
          Everyone who travels into space takes photographs of deserts on Earth because they’re easy to see, Bondar said.
          Showing photo taken from space of circular irrigation patterns in deserts, she noted that such irrigation is “digging up fossil water.
          “The fossil water is about 10,000 years old. It takes that long to filter down from the top into the aquifer. So that means if it rains tomorrow it’s not going to be an aquifer quite yet,” Bondar said with characteristic understated humor. 
          Human intervention involves tapping into the fossil water to try to make life better. But sometimes apparently simple, short-term solutions have long-term unintended consequences, she said.
          The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest lake. Its former area is bounded by Kazakhstan on the north and Uzbekistan on the south.
          During the 1960s, the Russians decided to turn the arid area surrounding the Aral Sea into an agricultural area for growing cotton. They diverted water from the two rivers feeding the Aral Sea with disastrous results, including salt problems that have changed the local climate in the area and produced dust storms that spread disease. 
          “The horrendous problem is that the winds pick up and they take this dust and transmit it downstream,” Bondar said.
          “There are pesticides (in the dust) because of course it’s very difficult to irrigate this land now . . . and all this gets into the water table (or) what’s left of it, and all this other stuff is just blown and all these people have terrible respiratory problems.”
          “This is a huge environmental problem,” Bondar said.
          The Russians, in looking at the sustainability of water in the area, “thought they were doing the right thing and this is what happened. So it’s very hard sometimes to look ahead and really know what you’re doing.”
          Bondar received a standing ovation after her talk, from an admiring audience that included elementary school students, post-secondary students, academics and Scout troops, many of whom thronged to her for a photo, a signature, or simply to ask a question. EnviroLine