by David Suzuki
It was an astounding achievement, because it was accomplished in less than a decade and because the United States was the first—and so far the only—country to land people on the moon. But even more impressive are all the unexpected benefits of the space race. Since 1976, nasa has published Spinoff, listing hundreds of technologies that have resulted from space efforts, ranging from laptop computers and gPs to twenty-four-hour news networks to freeze-dried food, space blankets, cordless vacuums, cochlear implants, and ear thermometers. And Americans still feature prominently every year when Nobel Prize winners are announced—all because in 1957, the United States made the commitment to catch up to and pass the Soviet Union in space. I tell my American friends, “It’s un-American to say ‘meeting the challenge of climate change is too great’ or ‘will cost too much.’ That’s not the American way. The America I knew and admire would seize on this opportunity and commit to solving it in the knowledge that enormous unpredictable benefits will fall out along the way.” The most important thing in meeting any challenge is, as Murray said, to make the commitment.
So here we are, my dears. My generation and the boomers who followed have partied as if there is no tomorrow. We didn’t see that we were leaving you a world depleted of diversity and opportunity and heavy with impending ecological crises. Given the enormous growth in the scientific community and the tools it has to assess the state of the world, we, uniquely among all animals, have the potential to act on our foresight. We know we can affect the future by what we do today. But we have all kinds of cultural and social blinders, such as religion and economics, that make it difficult to recognize the hazards we face.
Youth today are relatively uninvolved in politics, and that’s understandable; without an ability to vote, young people cannot directly affect an election outcome. But you have everything at stake in what is or is not done by politicians today. I believe that the warriors on behalf of your future have to be parents and grandparents. That’s our job—that’s what we commit to when we have children. Parents have to make your future a political issue and demand that politicians act to move along a different path. History informs us that the most important step is to make the commitment to change, to move toward a different future, one that will be richer in opportunity and that will inflict fewer challenges on you and your children. Once a commitment is made, as W.H. Murray says, “all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance” will pop out, and the important thing is, he says, quoting Goethe, to “begin it.”
{eleven}
GRASSROOTS CHANGE
MY DARLING GRANDCHILDREN,
Tamo and Midori, I am so proud of the activist commitment you’ve made to the Tahltan people to help in their fight to protect their land in the Sacred Headwaters of northern British Columbia. You both are ready to step up and put your-selves on the line for issues. Jonathan, the needs of disabled people in society are something that you have encountered all your life, and I hope you will speak up about your rights and needs as you take your place in society with other disabled people. And, Ganhi and Tiis, the role of First Nations in our society continues to evolve, and I know you will be ready to fight for your just place in Canada. Ryo, my latest grand-son, welcome to the world. I can only imagine what state the world will be in and what kinds of issues you will face when you are older, but I hope you will be as engaged as your parents and your cousins have been. It’s so important for us all to try to make this a better place for all people.
People often come up to me and say, “Thank you for the work you are doing,” as if my public visibility on different issues somehow relieves them of being actively involved themselves. Many people have supported the David Suzuki Foundation because they like what I am doing, but if I ask someone what they are going to do about it, a typical response is “You’re on television, so you have a big influence, but what difference does it make what I do? I’m a drop in the bucket.” I’ve been lucky to have had a platform, The Nature of Things, that has enabled me to present important issues to the public. But I’m still just one person too, a drop in that bucket. If we recruit a lot of drops, however, we can fill any bucket there is.
This is what a grassroots movement is. I don’t believe a grassroots movement depends on one person, no matter how inspirational or charismatic that person might be. He or she can motivate people, galvanize action, and influence behaviour or beliefs, but no one is indispensable; nor should they try to be. Many others preceded them, and although the civil rights movements in the United States and South Africa would have taken a different and perhaps longer course had there been no King or Mandela, I believe that others could have made a significant contribution also. So thank goodness, no one is indispensable.
In the end, few people can hope to achieve what Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Wangari Maathai (Nobel Peace Prize winner and originator of the Green Belt Movement in Africa), or Nelson Mandela did. But we can all be a part of something that can grow into a movement. What matters most is that we try. I’ve been on the losing side of a lot of issues, but I don’t think I’ve wasted my time; it’s the striving for positive change that matters. If we don’t try, how can we ever achieve change for the better? I hope that when my life is coming to an end, I will be able to look each of you in the eye and tell you that I have loved you with my entire being and that I tried to do the best I could for you. My greatest joy would be for you to know I tried to make this a better world for you. It is so important for you to act on what you believe.
Many people who try to make a difference do fail, for many reasons, and many succeed without fanfare or broad recognition. I’m thinking about Tara, your nana, who was active all through your lives. She worked not just on environmental matters but on educational issues. When Severn and Sarika were in elementary school, Nana worked hard on a committee that replaced the concrete on the school playgrounds with grass and wild plants, built planter boxes and installed them around the school-yard, planted a vegetable garden and fruit and nut trees on the school grounds, created a butterfly garden, and installed birdhouses. And I’m sure you know of other people who volunteer, who become activists on issues like feeding the poor or raising money for victims of genocide, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and so on around the world. To me, these people are the heart of any grassroots movement: people who work to help others and to make a positive difference in their communities. People with passion that burns within them, with a vision to aim for and a willingness to devote time and energy and money to support it. They do it selflessly without worry about recognition or awards, and you know what? The rewards are in the satisfaction of acting on their beliefs and the joy of working with others who share the same goals.
Over the years, I’ve tried to get a movement started by travelling across the country on speaking tours. My inspiration was Terry Fox, the young man who in the 1980s lost his leg to cancer and set out to run across Canada to raise awareness of the disease. When he dipped his leg into the Atlantic at the start, it was with almost no press, but as he hopped across the Maritimes into Quebec, the media began to pay attention. By the time he arrived in Toronto, public interest was huge. Hobbling from there up the vast distance to northern Ontario, he was suddenly stricken with a return of the cancer that had taken his leg. I remember watching on television as he tear-fully announced he was abandoning his run but vowed to return to complete it. I am sure most people, like me, cried as he said these words and then wailed when he died a few short weeks later. He became a Canadian leg-end, and annual runs in his memory have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research. He made a massive contribution. But long before Terry, in the Freedom Rides of 1964, college students (most of them white) rode buses into Mississippi to persuade black people to register to vote. The violent response of Mississippians, the courage of the students and their black supporters, and the ultimate response of the federal government led to huge changes throughout the South as black people were registered to vote and changed the
political landscape.
I have never had hopes of duplicating Terry’s success or that of the Freedom Rides, but I hoped I might help trigger something that would grow far beyond me. So I agreed to travel to every city with a CPAWS (Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society) office to drum up more public interest in supporting parks across the country. I travelled to five cities across Canada with examples of green technologies (including a Prius, which wasn’t yet available in North America) to showcase the opportunities for developing new industries. I visited six cities across Canada with the Nature Challenge: Human Element tour in 2002, an attempt to get people to take concrete steps to reduce their ecological footprint and to spend more time outside in nature. And in 2007 I did a major bus tour, called If You Were Prime Minister, through more than twenty-four communities from St. John’s, Newfoundland, on the east coast to Vancouver on the west coast, trying to motivate people to urge the prime minister to act on climate change.
Each attempt was a lesson. We learned that it’s not good enough just to give an inspiring speech; there has to be an “ask,” a concrete request to do something. And after the tour ends, people who have responded have to be “fed”—supported with some money, ideas, and suggestions—in order to maintain their enthusiasm. The initial enthusiasm quickly gives way to the daily demands of living and so requires constant reinforcement.
In 2004, two former environmental activists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, presented a paper called “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-environmental World.”1 It hit like a bomb and served a very useful role in making activists rethink what they were doing.
I had come to a similar conclusion on my own, because many “victories” we had celebrated years before had come back to haunt us. For example, Alaskans were enjoying rich economic returns because of vast oil deposits and were anxious to drill for oil in new areas. One of those areas was the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which is the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd. The Gwitchin people depend on that herd for their culture and well-being, so Norma Kassi, a Gwitchin leader, asked me to help them protect the herd. I made a film for The Nature of Things about the herd and the fight to keep drilling out of anWr.
In one of the segments, we filmed at the Sierra Club in Washington, dc, where activists gathered because a “rider” enabling drilling in anWr had been attached to a piece of other legislation. One of the peculiar quirks in American politics is that a bill to, say, improve education might include a rider enabling bicyclists to ride on the sidewalk (I made this up to show that a rider doesn’t have to have anything to do with the bill). The idea is that legislators will want to pass the education bill, and the rider about bicycling will automatically be passed along with it. At the Sierra Club, the activists filed into a room filled with telephones and began to call senators across the country to pressure them to vote to defeat the bill. It was an amazing strategy of hardball politics. When the vote was to be taken, everyone gathered to watch the results on television. One by one, the senators stood up to vote. Everyone cheered when those who had been wavering voted against the bill, and a huge yell went up when the bill was defeated. It was an exhilarating exercise and the results were gratifying, but I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable because this was just hardball politics in its toughest form. The politicians who defeated the bill did not understand the deep reasons the rider was bad, and there was little movement toward an enlightened government. So, sure enough, years later pressure again built up to drill in anWr, and I made another film about the caribou herd. The bill was defeated again, but a Republican-dominated Congress promises to continue to press for drilling in anWr unless the spiritual and ecological value of the herd and the threat of drilling are acknowledged and understood by all—or until a bill is passed and wells are drilled.
Thirty to thirty-five years ago, environmentalists celebrated many victories. I had supported west coast First Nations in Canada who opposed a proposal to drill for oil in the treacherous waters of Hecate Strait, a shallow water-way rich in fish between the mainland and the islands of Haida Gwaii. We stopped it. We prevented oil supertankers from Alaska from travelling through Bc coastal waters, and stopped dams at Altamira, Brazil, and at site C on the Peace River in British Columbia. But three decades later, just as with the issue of the Porcupine herd and anWr, we are fighting the very same battles again. These battles are symptoms of deep, underlying assumptions and values that haven’t changed. Our victories failed to change the way we see ourselves in the world.
That’s why, in the fall of 2014, I began my last cross-Canada bus trip, called the Blue Dot Tour. The tour got its name from an essay by Carl Sagan, an astronomer who was a fantastic communicator in the media. In 1990, a space probe, Voyager 1, approached the edge of our solar system, six billion kilometres from Earth. Sagan asked nasa to turn the satellite’s camera around to take a picture of Earth. The resulting picture showed a backdrop of black with dots of light, which are distant stars. And taking up 0.12 of a pixel was a pale blue dot that was Earth, a mere speck in the vastness of space! That prompted Sagan to write Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, including these lines:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives . . . The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this... The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate... the Earth is where we make our stand... There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.2
I feel so fortunate to have known Carl; I met him when he was a guest on a series I created and hosted called Inter-face: Science and Society. Way back in the 1970s and ’80s, there was a very famous late-night talk show host named Johnny Carson, who had an interest in astronomy. Carl was a professor at Cornell University who had written a book called Cosmos, which had sold a few copies but was not a bestseller. Johnny had either heard about it or read it, and he invited Carl to be on his show. Carl was like no scientist who had ever appeared before on American Tv— good-looking, bright, articulate, and passionate about science, with a terrific sense of humour. It was a dynamite combination, and he was an instant hit: his book skyrocketed into bestseller status, and he was invited repeatedly to be on Carson’s show. He went on to write and host the series Cosmos for PBS, and by PBS standards, it was a block-buster. Sadly, Carl died when he was still relatively young.
As he implied in his essay, our planet is an insignificant speck of dust in the cosmos; yet within that thin membrane of air, water, and land we call the biosphere, all of life and human history has taken place. From space, we see the fundamental oneness of the planet—air, water, and land are all interconnected, and no boundaries or borders are visible. For this reason, we chose the title of Sagan’s essay as the title of our tour.
The Haida have seen our world this way for millennia. During the 1970s and ’80s, the Haida fought against the practices of the forest industry, which for years had clear-cut vast swaths of forest, leaving the thin soil exposed to desiccation by the sun and erosion by rain. It took millennia of change and adaptation for those forests to evolve to w
hat they were, and once they were cut down, it would take many centuries to recover anything like the produc-tivity that they once had. Creeks and streams that once supported salmon runs were choked with debris from logging that took place right to the water’s edge.
In 1985, the Haida drew a line across a logging road above Windy Bay on Lyell Island, determined to stop the loggers and logging trucks from entering the area. They succeeded and eventually negotiated the creation of Gwaii Hanaas National Park Reserve, which covers almost 1,500 square kilometres. It was a stunning achievement, the protection of a vast area not just for the Haida but for all Canadians.
But that wasn’t enough. The Haida continued to press for an extension of the park boundaries into the water, contending that the land, air, and water are part of a single system. Try to imagine “managing” salmon only in the ocean or only once they entered rivers—it’s absurd. In 2010, the Haida were successful, and the boundaries of the park were extended ten kilometres out to the sea floor. Even then, the boundary was a human construct; nevertheless, it recognized the interconnectedness of land and ocean.
A good friend of the David Suzuki Foundation, environmental lawyer David Boyd, wrote a book analyzing the environmental commitments of countries around the world and noted that 110 nations include some kind of environmental commitments in their constitutions.3 But not Canada. He proposed that the Foundation press for a constitutional amendment to enshrine the right to a healthy environment. I was electrified by the idea because it seemed to offer a way to get out of the battles over specific issues. Recognizing that our health and well-being depend on clean air, clean water, clean soil and food, clean energy from photosynthesis, and biodiversity would form the foundation for the way we would live. Now logging companies, mining companies, and other such entities would have to show whether or not an activity harmed the environment—the responsibility would no longer fall on the people who would be affected by the activities.
