| Who Cares Who’s Greener? Just Get On With It! |
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| Written by Sandy Kaye | ||||||||||
| Friday, 08 February 2008 | ||||||||||
Dr. David Suzuki. Image courtesy of Al Harvey (www.slidefarm.com)
Speaking exclusively with us, David Suzuki shows his growing impatience with competing ideologies Dr David Suzuki, famous since the mid-seventies for his outspoken stance on the environment and governments’ unwillingness to act, is growing tired of the ongoing ‘tit for tat’ exchanges between competing green ideologies. In this exclusive interview with Business Climate’s Editor, Sandy Kaye, Suzuki outlines his vision for the future of eco-politics. “I can’t wait for the day when there is no green party”, David Suzuki, the Canadian geneticist turned broadcaster and activist declares. “When there is no bragging about ‘My product is greener than yours’, or ‘Buy me because I’m so green’. I want all of that to disappear, because as long as we keep having these green parties and these green politics, it means the environment is still a political football.” Speaking from his home in Montreal, in between mouthfuls of a poached salmon and vegetable lunch, the impatience Suzuki feels is palpable, crackling down the line from 17-thousand kilometres away. While the rest of us may feel some delight at the rise of so many ‘green’ parties on the world’s political stage, Suzuki sees this as a passing phase in the process. And he can’t wait until it’s behind us. It’s a point that’s so obvious, it has probably escaped many of us entirely: the ‘green’ agenda has been effectively hijacked by anyone looking for a vote or a buck. A glance at the supermarket shelves and the many dubious products claiming green credentials demonstrates how much progress we still have to make. David Suzuki sees the B.S.-screen going all the way to the top. “We’ve got to fuse everything that we do, and then the green thing will just disappear and it will just be culture, and the way that we do things.” “Twenty years ago, when Bob Hawke was Australia’s Prime Minister, environmental issues had just rocketed to the number one position. George Bush (Snr) had just been elected President and said that he would be an ‘environmental President’. He didn’t have a green bone in his body, but already knew the value of the environment issues. “We’ve got to have everybody understand that these issues are not left or right of the political spectrum; they’re not issues that make one product better than another. We’ve got to fuse everything that we do, and then the green thing will just disappear and it will just be culture, and the way that we do things.” For the last 46 of his 71 years Suzuki has been a major figure in the campaign to reverse global climate change. But as this age-defying dynamo acknowledges that he’s seen more of life than he can look forward to, he’s beginning to express impatience with the glacial speed at which the rest of the world seems to be moving towards seriously tackling climate change. His dream of a world in which ecology has become a non-partisan issue is something David Suzuki has been trying to share with the world since 1962. But as the years tick away, for this man of vision it’s a frustrating battle.
“To be honest, we’re going backwards. Until it really becomes a non-partisan issue that affects all of us as human beings, then were going to continue to see the kind of bullshit that goes on in Bali right now.” “The Australians bellyached so much! I was at the Kyoto conference (in 1997) and it was really embarrassing to see Australia complaining and moaning and saying, ‘No, we’re a special country, we depend on coal and we can’t possibly meet these (emissions targets).’“(They) were given a soft target! Australia was the only industrialized country that was given a target above 1990 levels - and (then Prime Minister) Howard refused to sign that! Thank goodness that you’ve got a new government that’s signed on.” But Suzuki’s annoyance is not confined to Australia. His own countrymen come in for their share of his ire, along with the United States. “It never made sense to me how the Canadian and American and Australian governments say, ‘Kyoto is not fair – everybody is not in this agreement’. We made the agreement in 1997 because it was acknowledged that the industrialized world had created the problem, and we would give the poorer countries the chance to increase their economies until they’re brought into the next phase of the Kyoto process. If we abandon Kyoto, what else is left? What other mechanism is there to bring the world onto some kind of common mechanism?” For all his frustration and downright annoyance with politicians, however, Suzuki can see some light. The real change, he says, is happening in the streets, where the debate has moved on from its early support-base - the upper-middle-class, white, university-educated demographic. “This time, the concern about the environment and the climate goes through every socio-economic class. This isn’t just an elitist thing; this is something that people right across the board are worried about. I don’t think this is going to pass.” “People like David Bellamy are running around saying, ‘This is bullshit – 99 per cent of glaciers are growing.’ This guy makes a lot of inroads in Australia but he has no credibility at all, and I don’t know why a guy like that can be played up by the media.” Not all politicians are in Suzuki’s sights. Indeed, Al Gore gets full credit from him as the person who brokered an eleventh-hour deal in Kyoto. But neither is he uncritical of his fellow scientists. Britain’s celebrated environmental warrior, David Bellamy, who has been prominent in Australian environmental campaigns such as Tasmania’s Gordon-below-Franklin battles of the 1970s, collects a broadside from Suzuki for questioning Gore’s entire campaign on the basis of one discredited example of a shrinking glacier. “People like David Bellamy are running around saying, ‘This is bullshit – 99 per cent of glaciers are growing.’ This guy makes a lot of inroads in Australia but he has no credibility at all, and I don’t know why a guy like that can be played up by the media. I gather one of the glaciers that was used in Gore’s case – the reason why it’s shrinking has nothing to do with global warming - that may have been a mistake, but the overall thrust of the shrinking glaciers is absolutely bang on! As far as I’m concerned the facts are overwhelming.” But if politics and politicians – and their supporters and detractors – are critical to Suzuki’s way forward, so too is the main driver of the world economy: the business community. Suzuki sees conventional economics as a huge part of the problem. “There are two fundamental things that I feel the business community has got to face up to”, he observes. “One is that conventional economics externalizes the real world. “A tree, for example, as long as it’s growing and standing there is taking carbon dioxide out of the air and putting back oxygen – not a bad service for human beings. The tree roots hold the soil so it doesn’t erode and wash into rivers, the tree sucks up water and pumps it into the atmosphere affecting weather and climate, it provides habitat for insects, birds and mammals. All of those are services that one tree is performing in an ecosystem. We come along and say, ‘That tree is worthless, it isn’t doing anything,’ so someone cuts it down. Suddenly it enters the economic system, it has economic value. So the problem is that the tree will lose every time, because we don’t give it any credit in our economic system for ecological services that it is performing. “The ultimate lunacy is that economists think the economy can grow forever… GDP has been rising steadily over the last 20 years but I can guarantee people’s lives are not happier.” “The other thing we do is let economists determine and measure how well the economy is doing. Economists think that as long as money changes hands, then … it doesn’t matter why money is changing hands, as long as there is a currency transaction; that adds to the GDP. (But) if you live in a neighborhood where crime is getting worse, where you have to add locks to your doors and you have to buy a gun – all of that adds to the GDP, even when the quality of your life is going right down the chute. So what kind of an indicator is the GDP? It gives you no indication of how well society is doing. “The ultimate lunacy is that economists think the economy can grow forever. The very definition of progress is whether the economy grew last year. When do we ever ask, ‘How much is enough? Are we happier with all this growth?’ GDP has been rising steadily over the last 20 years but I can guarantee people’s lives are not happier. “The King of Bhutan has worked on a measurement of gross national happiness. We need a different set of priorities, because if we rely on just economic growth - it’s plain stupid!” “Any business should be sustainable. It’s got no business being in business if it isn’t sustainable. Sustainability ought to be built in to everything we do. Most businesses are built on a massive exploitation of the planet, and on constant growth. They are not sustainable.” “What ecologists do is try to find out the principles, the conditions that allow life on earth to flourish. You would have thought that any economic system would look to ecology to indicate what are the principles that you live under, in order to have an economic system that can go on forever. But what we’ve done is elevate the economy above ecology, so that we actually have environment ministers who say they can’t afford to do anything about the environment if they don’t have a strong economy. “It’s crazy! It should be the ecology that’s telling us what the limits are to the economy. We’ve got it 180 degrees rotated.” Paradoxically, Suzuki is overwhelmed by requests from businesses that ten years ago wouldn’t have let him in the door. “I don’t give a damn about what you say. Let’s see what your [business] track record is, and see what you’re doing. The proof is in the action - not in the words.” “There’s a lot of companies all wanting my support”, he says. “There’s a hell of a lot of ‘green-washing’ going on out there; they want to cover themselves with the label of being green. My thing is, let’s see what you do - I don’t give a damn about what you say. Let’s see what your track record is, and see what you’re doing. The proof is in the action - not in the words.” With so many millions of words being added to the environmental debate every year – and Suzuki is right up there with the biggest contributors – you’d think he might be cautious about inviting still more onto the wagon, but he’s philosophical. Enthusiastic, even. But, even here, his impatience shows. “The more the merrier”, he says. “You can achieve anything you want to - as long as you don’t care who gets credit. All kinds of people are rushing in saying, ‘I did this’, and ‘I did that’. The important thing is the issue, and let’s get some action!”
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