Right Action

WE SHOULD ACT LIKE THE ANIMALS WE ARE

Jo Marchant of New Scientist interviews David Suzuki

By Jo Marchant

Is anything more important than the environment?

I can't imagine anything more important than air, water, soil, energy and biodiversity. These are the things that keep us alive.

So why do we put the economy first, and use it to define progress?

You would have thought that our first priority would be to ask what the ecologists are finding out; because we have to live within the conditions and principles they define. Instead, we've elevated the economy above ecology. After all, ecology and economics have the same root -- "eco", from the Greek oikos, for "home". Ecology is the study of home, economics is the management of home, and of course, our home is the biosphere.

How do the economists answer you?

They believe humans are so creative and productive that the sky's the limit, that if we run out of resources, we'll find substitutes. If the substitutes run out, we'll go to the moon, mine asteroids or harvest sunlight in space and microwave it to Earth. They think the whole universe is there as a potential resource.

Isn't space a potential resource?

The option of going into space allows you to pretend that technology will get our asses out of any problem so we don't have to worry, which is just not true. Limitless resources are a fool's dream that we can never achieve. The reality is we are biological beings dependent on the biosphere. What kind of intelligent creature, knowing that these are our crucial limitations, would act as if we can use Earth as a garbage can and not pay a price for that?

Has any human society ever lived sustainably?

When we were hunter-gatherers we had a very small ecological footprint because all we had was what we could carry from one place to another. But as technology increased, we began to live in large aggregates of villages, and people started to use more than the surroundings could supply. As a result, civilizations collapsed again and again, as Jared Diamond described in Collapse. In the past, though, when conditions got more difficult, people were able to move. That's why we spread out from Africa. Well, we filled the world up. Now we're the most numerous mammals on the planet and causing an unprecedented extinction crisis.

Our future is very much at stake. So what can we do now?

We can't go back to scrounging a living off the land -- we wouldn't be able to do it. Also, the land wouldn't be able to tolerate that kind of assault from so many people. For example, 85 per cent of Canadians live in large cities. We're stuck with those urban places, so they have to be made much more benign in terms of energy and resource throughput. We've never had to do this in our history.

Will we need to lower our standard of living?

Yes, if you determine your standard of living by how much money you've got or what material goods you have. But if you judge standard of living by quality of life, by your relationships with other people and your community, then I say that truly sustainable communities offer a far preferable way to live.

What would a sustainable society look like to you?

First, we must acknowledge that we are animals. If you give a speech to children in North America and say: "Don't forget that we're animals," their parents get very angry and reply: "Don't call my daughter an animal, we're human beings." We like to think of ourselves as elevated above other creatures. But the human body evolved to be active, so denying we are biological creatures has taken us in the opposite direction: we stuff ourselves with more than we need, sit on our asses and drive 10 blocks instead of walking! Sustainable living would be much healthier: we would go out and walk around because there would be shops, musicians and people out on the street that we'd want to meet. That's what community is all about.

Plus we have to stop this crazy stuff where cell phones are turning over every six to eight months, where people rush to get the latest iPod, and then it all goes into landfill.

What about population growth?

We're way overpopulated. But it's not just a function of numbers; it also has to do with per capita consumption. The industrialized world has only 20 per cent of Earth's population but uses more than 80 per cent of the resources and produces more than 80 per cent of the toxic waste. I asked a top ecologist at Harvard University how many humans Earth could sustainably support, and he said 200 million if you want to live like North Americans. Even if you only look at industrialized countries, there are way too many of us. When I say this, people get angry. They say the stores are filled with food, we're living longer than ever, we're better off. Well, the reason we have the illusion that everything is OK is because we're using up what our children and grandchildren should expect to inherit.

How do you hope to persuade governments and businesses to make fundamental changes?

When you talk to politicians, they're just focused on the next election. When you talk to business people, they're just focused on the next quarterly report. At the Suzuki Foundation we say to them, let's look ahead a generation. Let's imagine a Canada where the air is clean, and fewer than 15 per cent of kids develop asthma. Let's imagine a Canada covered in forest we can log forever because we're doing it the right way; a Canada where you can drink water from any river or lake, or catch a fish and eat it without worrying about what chemicals are in it. When you define a vision for the future that way, everybody agrees. That's very powerful because you've done two things: we're no longer fighting because we're all on the same side, and we've got a target.

Can you achieve that target?

We have divided foundation activities into nine areas, such as energy, waste, water and food, with targets we believe are achievable in 25 years. We call it "sustainability within a generation". And our parliament just passed a bill mandating that government activities be filtered through the lens of sustainability within a generation. I'm very proud of that.

We also ought to be pulling back on taxes on good things that we want to encourage, and tax the hell out of bad things. We pay CAN$99 a tonne to put garbage into a landfill but we don't pay to put pollutants into the air! Our corporate community screams and yells at the very suggestion of a carbon tax but I'm sure one is coming, it's only a matter of time.

You're clearly very passionate about this.

I have grandchildren. Anybody that's not passionate about this doesn't give a shit about their grandchildren. I'm 72. I would love to be retired and doing some painting and the other things that I've left off doing all these years, but I don't ever want my grandchild to look at me and say: "Grandpa, you could have done more."

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David Suzuki received a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago. He hosts CBC's long-running science show The Nature of Things, syndicated in more than 40 countries. He co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990, to work "to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world that sustains us". Visit www.davidsuzuki.org.