When Milan Chvostek, a prominent TV producer of the 1960s, passed away in November of 2018, he left behind a range of climate change research he conducted before it was even recognized as a global emergency.
Chvostek’s wife Isobel Warren, a retired journalist herself, says when she recently started looking through boxes of her late husband’s belongings, she found extensive research materials and files on a variety of scientific topics that she was ready to give away.
“He intended to rework it to do more films or to write more articles and stuff,” says Warren.
“There are boxes and boxes of stuff that had to be sorted and discarded. When I came across this particularly rich treasure trove of science files, I knew I couldn't throw them out,” says Warren who moved to Guelph two and a half years ago with Chvostek.
Filled with shock and awe at the material, she put up a post on Facebook asking individuals around Guelph if they wanted the files and ended up giving them to two individuals who shared her husband’s enthusiasm – they wanted to read the files and perhaps, even act on it.
“They were very pleased to get ahold of it because the very fact that it's not current gives it a certain element of educational interest that you might not find in the current stuff. A lot of stuff is taken for granted nowadays. People don't understand it whereas, when you go back to the original research of climate change, you understand where it's coming from,” says Warren.
She says one of the individuals reached out to her within 30 minutes of picking up the research files and said he hasn't been able to stop reading it.
“For me, it was enough that someone was thrilled with it and excited by it and I know my husband Milan really would be tickled to death that the material was in the hands of a person intelligent enough to understand its significance,” says Warren.
Chvostek was a director and producer of the show The Nature of Things for approximately 20 years, which is said to be one of the most successful TV series on Canadian television history currently running in its sixtieth season.
“He did some very remarkable shows for The Nature of Things. He was very frustrated by the lack of foresight in a field in which foresight is everything in science, and he was desperately trying to do climate change back in the 70s and got nowhere,” said Warren.
“People said the climate is not changing, what are you talking about? He had extensive research on Nikola Tesla, and nobody would touch that, now Tesla is all over the news.”
Warren says this kind of material so concentrated on subjects like climate change that dates back to the 1960s is not going to surface readily.
“There was everything from paranormal to particle physics and everything in between and there probably was nothing added to those files in the last 10 years,” says Warren.
“Climate change was a big thing with him and so were a lot of other subjects. He was really on the cutting edge of where science could take us and he was constantly frustrated that his superiors at CBC didn't share his passion.”
Chvostek received the Monte Carlo Television Festival award in 1975 and the Bell Northern Research Communications Award for science programming for two consecutive years in 1974 and 1975 from the Canadian Science Writers' Association.
“When I was going through his papers, I came across awards from various science film festivals in the states, things I didn't even know about,” says Warren.
Very passionate about the climate and his work, Warren says Chvostek would get so involved in his subjects that he always had a researcher and a writer on his show, plus a production assistant on each show and he would turn in his own personal research material to the researcher.
Warren says Chvostek's hard work and passion allowed him to climb his way up in CBC as a producer.
She says she met him at Ryerson University where he studied electronics because his parents wanted to put him in school to learn how to be a ‘repairman,’ but determined to be a producer, he started working in CBC as a technician, worked his way up to a cameraman and eventually became a producer.
Warren says Chvostek’s principal concerns were music and science and when he left CBC, he went to Seneca College as a professor in radio and television.
“He was inspiring, both at CBC and Seneca because of the way in which he tackled his jobs, his research, he was not shy to call up some of the best scientists that he could think of in the world,” says Warren.
Warren says both her children, IT specialist Paul Chvostek and musician Annabelle Chvostek share Chvostek’s passion about the environment and music. She says both her kids are proponents of change and are very much like their father who she says was a fine role model.
“We were best friends for 65 years, married couple for 62 and when that ends there's a bit of a vacuum in ones life,” says Warren.
“He was really a remarkable and very modest man,” says Warren.
