By Leslie Morgenson
Published in March 2005
With the fiery passion one typically associates with youth, environmentalist David Suzuki, stood before a rapt audience on a cold January night and delivered his message. The strong words were nothing new, but what was striking was Suzuki’s continued enthusiastic hope. Hope, he said, is an essential ingredient to this work. Without sustainable activism we will not break the cycle of consumption that has become a way of life in the western world. People need to be “lifers” in their pursuit to save our sacred Earth. Giving up is just not an option.
Suzuki railed at the unjustified worship of the economy. It’s the Earth that makes our lives and the economy possible, he said, and not the other way around as many are persuaded. Over his lifetime, Suzuki has been influenced by Aboriginal people who believe that we are the Earth and that what we do to the Earth we do to ourselves. We are inextricably linked to the air, the water, and the land. What we do to our environment, we do to ourselves. If we lived this inter-connectedness, we would be mindful of how we eat, where we live and how we move around. “The underlying cause of our problems is the human mind.” And this is the challenge of our federal government’s “One Tonne Challenge” and the David Suzuki Foundation’s “Nature Challenge”. Both have guidelines to help shift people’s thinking from our present lifestyle of consumption towards a sustainable future. Sustainability means living within the Earth’s limits. It is lamentable that presently Canada and the U.S. share a deplorable environmental record.
While most Canadians would say that they love nature, our environmental record does not bear that out. In a recent study conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Canada placed 28th out of 29 developed countries in the categories of air, water, waste and climate change. We are an incredibly wasteful nation because we live “in a land of plenty”, having more fresh water than any other country in the world. And we erroneously assume this cornucopia will flow forever.
Suzuki proposes “sustainability within a generation.” In other words, by 2030 our focus needs to be on “genuine wealth”, an inclusive expression of our dearest assets: human, natural, social, manufactured and financial capital.
With a mere ten kilometres of atmosphere available to us and beyond that a vacuum, and a finite amount of natural resources, one would think we’d be smart enough to realize the jeopardy in which we regularly place ourselves. After all, we are intelligent beings. But when it comes to the environment, our track record has been undistinguished. Wisdom, it would seem, is our only salvation.
