by David Suzuki
I only really came to appreciate Mom when she began to lose interest in doing the housework, the accounts, and the laundry and began to exhibit the memory loss characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. I didn’t believe she had Alzheimer’s, because she was always so pleasant and placid; I had assumed that people underwent severe personality change as they slipped into Alzheimer’s. After her death, an autopsy confirmed the presence of plaques characteristic of Alzheimer’s.
In the years of her dementia, I also came to appreciate my father more. He was a typical Japanese male, the guy out front who was made possible by the hard work performed by my mother. As she lost interest in doing things around the house, he took up the household tasks, which quickly became a burden. Finally I said, “Dad, I can afford it; you need help. Let’s hire someone to give you a hand.” I was stunned at his reply: “Your mother gave her life for me, and it’s my time to pay her back.” And he did. He was with her constantly, caring for her, dressing her, entertaining her.
One evening in 1984, they had gone out for a walk, eaten out, and watched a movie and were walking home arm in arm when Mom dropped to the sidewalk with a massive heart attack. As Dad said, “She had a good death.” I came to love my father all the more because of the heroic way he responded to my mother’s needs.
The memory of my mother will disappear when my sisters and I and our children pass on. The wonderful human being who was my mother will be remembered for only two generations and then will vanish forever. Why would I, who must constantly struggle to be like her, aspire for any more? And I think of the millions of people who have lived, loved, worked, suffered, celebrated, and, like my mother, vanished from our consciousness in a mere two generations. They were heroic in their humanity, and I can hope for nothing else.
One of the most moving and profound statements about fame and power is from “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the same,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear—
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
Some people do gain fame that is deserved because they are shining examples of what is possible. For me, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Wangari Maathai, Mother Teresa, and Nelson Mandela stand out as people to emulate—even though I know they were profoundly human, with all the foibles and weaknesses of the rest of humanity. But Gandhi and Mandela were special. I am old enough to remember when Gandhi was assassinated, but I was too focused on my own life to have thought very deeply about him. He inspired the people of India to resist British rule nonviolently, and for doing so they were beaten and even slaughtered. But the British couldn’t defeat them, and India gained its independence.
Mandela, who died in 2013, stands out as an amazing human being. Please read his remarkable autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. As a result of his beliefs and his actions, he spent twenty-seven years in prison. Twenty-seven years! Can you imagine sacrificing more than a quarter of a century of the best years of your life (that’s more than any of you has yet lived), not just locked away in a cell (although that may have been the hardest part), but out doing hard, useless labour, just pounding rocks into dust, and completely isolated from the rest of the world? I cannot imagine surviving such an ordeal with my sanity, let alone with the capacity to embrace those who tormented me, as Mandela did.
On Robben Island, Mandela was forced to dig his own grave then stand in the hole while guards pissed on him. The steady barrage of indignities meant to break his will served only to strengthen him and to turn his ordeal into something positive. He recognized the humanity of his oppressors and realized that if he were freed, to wreak revenge on them would only make him them—an incredible insight but a terribly difficult one to put into action. I know I couldn’t. I’d be filled with too much hate and bitterness. I wonder how he kept a lid on anger, the desire for vengeance, and bitterness, whether he suppressed these feelings or actually eliminated them.
But Mandela understood that for South Africa to make a peaceful transition to democracy after the end of apart-heid, the white oppressors had to be embraced as fellow citizens of the same country as the newly liberated South African blacks. He elevated the traditional white sport of rugby to a game supported by white and black, an act of pure genius. The crowning moment of his success was being elected president of the government that had so oppressed his people. But in my view, his most incredible act was to limit himself to one term then give way to and support his successors without criticizing them, even when they couldn’t live up to his example. It is amazing that a man like Mandela actually lived and succeeded, but what a high bar he set for the rest of us!
To me, heroism doesn’t have to be accompanied by recognition and honours. The daily challenge of meeting one’s needs, supporting friends, being honest and sharing, standing up for what one believes—this is life, and to do it without compromising one’s deepest principles is truly heroic. As you enter the grown-up world, who inspires you? Who are your heroes? You are already mine.
{eight}
BIOPHILIA
MY PRECIOUS GRANDCHILDREN,
I am so pleased that your parents all treasure being active— camping and fishing in wild areas. I know how challenging it is to get outside, Jonathan, but your parents have made sure you’ve canoed and floated down rivers and fished and looked for treasures in forests. But not that long ago people didn’t think it was important for us to get outside. It may be hard to believe, but think about how science taught us to focus on one object and ignore everything else around it.
The great strength of modern science has been in concentrating on a part of nature—an ecosystem, a plant or an animal, an organ, a cell, or a molecule. This is called “reductionism,” and it is built on the belief that as with a machine, the glimpses we get into the workings of the parts of something can be fitted together to reconstruct the whole. This approach has provided huge insights into the workings of parts of nature—subatomic particles, atoms, genes, and cells.
But we are also recognizing that the sum of all the parts does not yield the whole because new properties called “emergent” result in a whole that can’t be predicted from the sum of properties of the parts. The reductionist approach tends to separate organisms from their surroundings—plants can be grown under the controlled conditions of a flask or growth chamber; animals can be reared in a cage or in a yard. But in the real world where they normally exist, plants and animals are subject to variations—seasons, weather and climate, wind, rain, and other organisms. When Jane Goodall set out to study chimpanzees in their natural settings, most of what we knew about them had come from studying the animals in zoos. Goodall observed animals that were totally different from what had been reported—they were highly social, cooperative, and aggressive, used tools, and waged war. One of the reasons I love wildlife artist Robert Bateman’s work is that often an animal like an owl or a wolf will make up a small part of a painting devoted mainly to the animal’s surroundings. To me, Bateman’s work emphasizes that without a recognition of its habitat, we can’t truly appreciate a wild animal.
Nonetheless, we tend to see ourselves in a reductionist way. When Nana was diagnosed with heart failure, I was struck by how cardiologists saw her heart in complete isolation from her psychological, physiological, or physical condition. To the heart specialist, the oppo
rtunities for treatment consisted of hitting the sick heart with drugs or operating on it. Other things didn’t factor into the equation—not the notion that extreme stress (from dealing with her father’s illness and death to worry about children and grandchildren); not a physiological imbalance from diet, obesity, or lack of exercise; not environmental conditions.
In the same way, psychologists focus on an individual with little regard to that person’s surroundings. Yet stimuli like noise, lights, pollution, or poverty can weigh heavily on a person’s psyche. It has been exciting to see that a new approach called “ecopsychology” recognizes how profoundly we are affected and shaped by our surroundings. Now people are realizing that our psychological and physical health both depend on being outside. Study after study shows that recovery from illness or surgery, well-being in old age, performance at work, and children’s behaviour are influenced by exposure to nature. To understand why this is so, we have to think about our evolutionary roots.
Our species evolved in the plains of Africa. We weren’t covered in fur like other mammals or in feathers like birds, and our nakedness was fine so long as we lived in warm places. Nights could be cold, though, and we had to learn to clothe and shelter ourselves. But basically, like all the other terrestrial mammals, we grazed in open plains, walked through forests, climbed mountains, forded rivers and lakes—we were outside all the time. For 95 percent of human existence, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers carrying all that we owned as we followed animals and plants through the seasons. Our senses of hearing, smelling, and seeing were finely honed for survival out in the open. And that continued after we settled down to become farmers.
The Agricultural Revolution that occurred ten to twelve thousand years ago marked a huge shift in the way we lived. But we still spent most of our time outside, and we were exquisitely aware of weather and climate, as well as other creatures.
In the twentieth century, we underwent a fundamental change in our relationship with the planet. When I was a boy growing up in London, Ontario, my parents, my three sisters, and I lived in a house with about a thousand square feet of living space. It had one bathroom. But I don’t ever, ever remember fighting with my sisters about using the bathroom. The constant refrain from my parents was “David, go outside and play.” If I pleaded “But Mommy, it’s raining outside,” I got no sympathy, only “You’ve got a rain-coat. Put it on and call Bobby to play with you.” And I did. I remember a puddle as a place of great delight, whether to jump and splash in or to divert through a system of canals and dams. We would toss in chunks of wood or twigs as boats. We had a wonderful trait called imagination, and today’s children are no different. I’ve watched each of you as children, with rooms piled high with plastic gizmos, delight in a simple set of blocks or scrap wood, or build a fort out of pillows on the couch.
What is different is that our houses have steadily gotten bigger to accommodate a decreasing number of occupants but an escalating volume of stuff. Now the average house being built has one bathroom per occupant, I guess because we don’t want to have to wait for someone else.
We prefer to keep our children in the house rather than shooing them outside because cars race down the streets and we worry about perverts lurking behind bushes. When I was a kid, we were always outside, but old people often sat on open or covered porches and were our eyes and ears on the lookout for danger. Winters were too cold for perverts to lurk outside in the bushes.
Today the average Canadian child spends only a few minutes a day outside and more than six hours a day in front of a television, computer, or cellphone screen. Even when we are outside, many of us are plugged in via earbuds to some source of sound and blithely unaware of our surroundings.
I was reading J.B. MacKinnon’s book The Once and Future World, in which he decides that every day for a month he will concentrate on the animals and plants around a small pond. On the very first day, he sees an eagle swoop down and capture a duck and then lose it in a battle with another eagle. While he stands there transfixed by this natural spectacle, people jog or walk by paying no attention to it, not even noticing it.
In big cities, we are focused on each other or the machines we’ve created, like cars, television sets, computers, and phones. Nature has become alien to us. Even when we go camping, it is often in huge buses towing small cars or motorcycles, complete with a television set and computers, a home away from home. But could we have a physiological as well as a psychic need to be with other species—or “biophilia,” as my friend Ed Wilson calls it? Numerous studies are now suggesting just that. Without more exposure to nature, educator Richard Louv suggests, we suffer from “nature deficit disorder,” which is expressed as hyperactivity, bullying, or attention deficit disorder. And there is no question that people benefit when animals or plants are brought into hospitals or old age homes.
We need nature in order to be healthy, but we also need to be in nature to observe changes like those in climate.
In a big city, where 85 percent of North Americans now live, it’s often possible to go for days without spend-ing time outside. A friend of mine lives in a high-rise apartment in the north end of Toronto. The building is completely air-conditioned. In the morning, he goes down to the basement, gets into his air-conditioned car, and drives down the Don Valley Parkway to his air-conditioned office building, which is connected by tunnels to whole shopping areas. “I don’t have to go outside for weeks!” he once told me.
To sense something as subtle as climate change, though, day-to-day differences in weather mean nothing. It takes trends over years to indicate changes in great cycles that affect our lives. Here there is plenty of testimony from people whose lives and livelihood depend on being outside in nature.
Fishers on the west coast of Canada tell us that Hum-boldt squid, a southern species, are now appearing in abundance in northern oceans. For the first time salmon can be found in arctic rivers. Farmers know they can plant earlier in the year and harrow the fields for winter later. Hunters tell stories of bears that once would have been hibernating wandering about in the winter because temperatures are so warm that they wake up, and birders record earlier arrival of birds on their way north and later departure to the south.
Years ago, I asked Matthew Coon Come, Grand Chief of the Quebec Cree, whether he noticed any changes in climate, and he told me that by September, beavers are usually in a frantic level of activity preparing their dens for winter. “Now,” he went on, “in October, they’re lying around drinking martinis and smoking cigars as if they’ve got lots of time.” He was joking, of course, but he was telling me the animals know winter is coming later in the year. Inuit people have been warning us for years that winter ice is thinner, that the properties of spring ice are changing, that there’s more open water earlier and it lasts longer than in the past.
Ski resort operators and professional skiers tell us that seasons are shorter and so resorts are moving lifts higher up mountains. Meets in Europe are being cancelled for lack of snow. Canadian hockey icon Wayne Gretzky’s childhood is well known—he developed and honed his skills each winter on a backyard rink his father, Walter, built each year. Today there’s no such opportunity for a young Gretzky because the temperature is too warm to make a rink where he grew up.
Foresters know that an insect the size of a grain of rice, the mountain pine beetle, has been kept under control for millennia by five or six days of temperatures below –30°C every winter. But with rising global temperatures, mountain pine beetle populations have exploded in British Columbia, transforming pine forests from green to the red of dead leaves, a loss of billions of dollars’ worth of trees. The insurance industry was one of the first private-sector areas to warn that climate change is real and that its consequences are rising costs from weather-related problems (hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, floods, drought).
Mayors of oceanside villages tell us that higher tides and storm surges are destroying wharves and seawalls at costs that are crippling for small commun
ities. The most sought-after oceanfront properties are now threatened by the encroachment of rising waters. In Calgary and Toronto in 2014, extreme floods caused tens of millions in property damage, while water experts warn of faltering water levels in lakes and dams. When I was in Kuala Lumpur recently, I casually asked the taxi driver on the way to the airport whether he noted any change in climate in Malaysia and was surprised by his animated response. “In the past,” he said, “summer temperatures might reach 33 or 34°C three or four days. But now, the temperature is that high for weeks or even more than a month!” I had thought the tropical areas were warming more slowly than northern and temperate regions, although I remember attending an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (iPcc) meeting in the 1990s at which a Kenyan farmer told me he had always decided when to plant and harvest his fields based on the sequence in which wild plants appeared but they were now coming up at different times, thus messing up his decisions. These are all anecdotal stories from people who are not climate scientists or experts. They have no axe to grind or vested interest in fossil fuels, but they depend on nature’s cycles and regularities for their survival and well-being.
Today much of our food is packaged, and we buy it with little evidence remaining of blood, fur, scales, or feathers of animals or inedible roots, stems, and leaves of plants. So we forget or fail to recognize that every bit of the food we eat for our nutrition was once alive. I remember the ten-year-old son of a cBc producer laughing at his sister because “she thinks Kentucky Fried chicken is a bird!” What keeps the planet habitable and healthy for animals like us are the “services” performed by nature—pollination of flowering plants, decay of vegetation and meat, capture of energy from the sun by plants to fuel all life, filtration of water as it percolates through the soil, exchange of carbon dioxide for oxygen.
