SEE Magazine
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
COVER STORY
BY DAVID DODGEConsumerism has replaced citizenship as the chief way we contribute to the health of society. So says David Suzuki in his new book The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering our Place in Nature. It's a sad but true commentary on life in western industrial civilization in 1997: we live in a culture of desire.
This desire, says Suzuki, is a product of a post Second World War plan by corporate America to preserve wartime productivity well into the future.
In 1945 "the (U.S.) president set up his economic council of advisers and said 'what do we do to keep things going?' and they came back with their answer: We must make consumption an American way of life. We must worship at the alter of consumption. We must induce people to buy, use, throw away and buy more."
I interviewed David Suzuki Tuesday, in the basement of prominent naturalist and environmentalist Jim Butler's home, while crickets sang from the weeping cracks in basement walls. It was a fitting tribute to a man who has been preaching the gospel of nature for more than three decades.
Suzuki wrote The Sacred Balance to get at "the root causes of our destructiveness," to serve as a manifesto for the David Suzuki Foundation, which he founded in 1990. The book is a gift to the foundation. It also represents a transition for Suzuki and his approach to environmentalism.
Suzuki has been ringing the alarm bells for so long, his passion is almost automatic. The Sacred Balance may signal a change in approach, in which he goes beyond the warnings, to offer hope and direction for those stirred by the environmental message.
"During the '60s, the '70s the '80s, environmentalists were totally preoccupied with stopping the destructive agents: with stopping the pollution, stopping the clear-cutting, stopping the nuclear plants and we didn't pay attention to the fact there were enormous human repercussions to that. That there were people, whose jobs were affected, that the economy would be affected because we have an economy that is based on destruction; that we had communities that would be very strongly impacted by those battles," said Suzuki, who suggests a win-win solution lies somewhere in between.
"We can't afford to have losers anymore."
This is where the 'Sacred' comes in, and why his new book reads like a course in ecology 101. In it, Suzuki covers air, water, soil and fire, the four basic elements of life according to the ancients.
And each of these discussions are full of analogies and information about how, despite the essential nature of air, water and soil to life on Earth, we treat them as garbage cans for the refuse of modern consumer society.
But Suzuki introduces a fifth element. He says life itself, the diversity of all living things, is the fifth element to add to those fundamental biological needs. Life is what creates soil and helps balance the level of oxygen in the air. It's the interaction of 30 million species that helps maintain this beautiful blue orb we call home.
Suzuki calls these five elements sacred and "non-negotiable needs that people have . . . we must build a world in the next millennium in which those five things are protected at all costs because they are the key to our survival."
Suzuki is trying to provoke people into developing their own land ethic, their own environmental ethic. And that probably has spiritual undercurrents.
"Theologians and ecologists are finding common ground as they explore the need to recognize the sacred in the here-and-now, rather than the hereafter, and try to help human beings return home to their place in creation," writes Suzuki.
This is where Suzuki delves into discussions on love, community, neighbors and family and jobs. Yes, jobs: real jobs, as tools of security and sustainability.
It is refreshing to move the environmental discussion forward, to also address issues of human physical and psychological health, and jobs. That is the essence of the idea of sustainable development. It can work.
But in Alberta, on the ground, sustainable development means $1-billion worth of oil sands development for each of the next 25 years, the biggest oil boom in years. And new coal mines are springing up like Aspen shoots in a clear-cut.
While Premier Ralph Klein, Environment Minister Ty Lund and The Edmonton Sun have decided sustainable development means no carbon tax, no restrictions on fossil fuel development, and that jobs today are the only things that matter, Suzuki is left making analogies with the southern United States and slavery.
"I'm sure that in the southern part of the United States before the civil war what you had were the southern states saying 'how dare the North try to impose the release of slavery on us. We are a slave economy, we depend on slaves, it will be an economic disaster to abolish slavery.' They went to war for God's sake to fight from giving up slavery. And I feel in many ways Alberta is the same way," a slave to fossil fuels and unsustainability.
"If he (Klein) continues to argue that global warming, that the parliamentary committee, an all-party committee on global warming said the dangers are second only to all-out nuclear war, so that's pretty bloody dangerous," said Suzuki.
Suzuki has a problem with the oil industry. "B.P. and Shell in Britain have said that global warming is a fact . . . Shell has committed $700-million to research alternative energy. For heaven's sake the oil industry is the energy sector. Why do they care whether it's oil or whether it's sunlight that they are going to get their energy from?" said Suzuki.
Suzuki says if the industry loses some of its markets a carbon tax could be used to offset the losses.
"Their profits will continue, for heaven's sake, it will simply prolong the life of their product. They're not going to run out of fuel as quickly then. They are going to make a lot more money," said Suzuki.
When it comes to alternative energy, Suzuki says Alberta's hands off, let-market-forces-do-what-they-may policy is a ridiculous position to take, especially considering the billions of dollars in subsidies the oil industry benefits from.
"They are what is called perverse incentives. We actually glorify, with these crazy incentives, the activity that is doing our planet in."
Suzuki is passionate and maybe he's a little preachy, but can you think of a better reason to be that way?
The book isn't entirely devoid of the old David Suzuki, where his voice rises in indignant protest over the many almost inconceivable things we've done to the planet. His passion reminds us again and again that despite the fact we have become besieged by "factoids of information," and are stricken with shallow consumer desires, there are important issues that slip by us everyday. We look down on dinosaurs because they didn't have the evolutionary smarts to survive, but dinosaurs were around for 175 million years. We humans have been here for about one million years and the prognosis isn't good.
"It took hundreds of millions of years for this energy to accumulate and cook into coal, oil and gas and all that time these substances kept carbon out of circulation, helping us to balance the proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
"Now, in the flicker of an eyelash, the work of the ages is being undone," Suzuki says in his book.
His next project is a son of the A Matter of Survival television series and, following that, he hopes to do another series on The Sacred Balance, "which I see as my final piece." David Suzuki retire? We'll have to wait and see.
(David Dodge is the host and producer of the Chevron EcoFile program on sustainable development and the environment. For more on his interview with Suzuki, tune in to the radio program this Saturday on CKUA Radio at 12:15 p.m. on 94.9 on your FM dial, 580 on AM.)