David Suzuki was interviewed on the sidelines of this summit by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and spoke of his concerns about how world leaders continue to avoid making the tough decisions needed to deal with threats to the planet.
The following is an edited transcript of the interview.
Amy Goodman – Democracy Now
The U.N. conference on sustainable development known as the Rio+20 Earth Summit has concluded with few successes to report. Negotiators unveiled an agreement that sets new development goals and lays the groundwork for future talks. Many groups working on environmental and poverty issues have criticized it for being too weak. Greenpeace called it “An epic failure.” Has anything changed since your daughter delivered her famous address at the first Rio meeting, 20 years ago?
Suzuki
Absolutely not. We’re going backwards. My country, Canada, said that it was playing a leadership role at Rio ’92. Here, no question, Canada is a laggard, a global outlaw, a renegade country. But, overall, the science is in, the planet is in terrible shape. The difficulty is that meetings like this are doomed to fail because we see ourselves at the center of everything. And our political and our economic priorities dominate everything else.
We need to start by agreeing we are biological creatures. If we don’t have air for more than four minutes we die. If we don’t have clean air, we get sick. So the atmosphere that provides us with the seasons, the weather, the climate, has to be our highest priority… above anything economic or political. But what we get is a huge gathering, like Copenhagen two years ago, of countries trying to negotiate something that does not belong to anyone, through the lenses of political boundaries and economic priorities. We try to shoehorn Nature into our agenda. A meeting like this is doomed to fail because we haven’t left our vested interests outside the door, and come together as a single species to agree what the fundamental needs are for all of humanity. So we sacrifice the air, the water and the biodiversity for the sake of human political and economic interest.
Goodman
In 2008, you urged McGill University students to speak out against politicians who fail to act on climate change and said “What I would challenge you to do is put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there is a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act.” Do you still feel the same way today?
Suzuki
Absolutely. You can charge people who are at a scene where someone is being murdered. If you do not do anything to try to help that, you can be charged with criminal negligence. If something is going on that you should know about and you ignore it deliberately, then that is called willful blindness. It’s a legal category answerable in a court of law. We have to also find a mechanism to judge people and make them accountable for the implications of what they do or don’t do for future generations. There should be a category of inter-generational crime. Nobody holds politicians accountable because they go out of office and go on to become very wealthy or whatever.
Obama signalled a sea-change in the American politics. Unfortunately, he’s held hostage. He made some fundamental appointments at the outset that were fantastic–really top-notch scientists heading NOAA and Energy. A Nobel Prize winner appointed secretary of energy. The reality though, is he is held hostage by an absolutely dysfunctional congress and the corporate agenda, even though he has been very successful at getting that grassroots support. The fact is that corporations hold a huge hammer over the heads of our elected representatives and call the shots. The economic system is the driving force destroying the planet, but now it is corporations that are setting the direction. It is not that Mr. Obama is like George Bush–he definitely is not–but he is held hostage by the same system within which Bush operated.
Goodman
Just two months after President Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline after mass protests, he allowed TransCanada to build the southern leg of the pipeline from Oklahoma to Texas. TransCanada has reapplied for a permit to build the 1,200 mile segment from Alberta to Nebraska. Republicans in Congress say Obama is stopping people from getting jobs to build the pipeline. Your view on “jobs versus the environment”?
Suzuki
That dichotomy is always thrown up. But we have not looked at the real job opportunities that lie in taking a completely different direction. Obama’s statement shows that he is captain of the oil industry, as are most governments on this planet. He had an opportunity to offer Americans the real job creator, which is in renewable, sustainable energy, greater energy efficiency, and getting us off our oil addiction. It is going to run out. We are moving to more and more extreme sources of energy. This is the moment that we should create the opportunity to go down a different path.
I just came back from Japan where they had an absolute disaster that also turned into an opportunity. They have shut down every single one of the 54 nuclear plants they have. Japanese people cut their energy use by 25% immediately after Fukushima. They showed what a huge opportunity was there. But the government wants to get nuclear plants up and running again. The nuclear industry and the fossil fuel industry have an enormous hammer over our elected representatives. It really is up to civil society now.
The U.S. is in deep trouble right now because of huge support for parties that want to take us back to the past. We are really in a crisis when Sir Martin Rees, one of the leading scientists in Britain, the Royal Astronomer, was asked on BBC, what are the chances that human beings will survive to the end of this century? In other words, whether we will still be around. His answer was 50/50. A 50/50 chance that human beings will avoid extinction? Surely to goodness we ought to be in absolute crisis mode! We ought to be getting off all this rhetoric fostered by the fossil fuel and nuclear industries, on to a truly sustainable path.
Goodman
French President Francois Hollande held a brief news conference and said he saw in green economy a path to overcome the economic crisis.
Suzuki
Sure, the green economy is about being more efficient, being less polluting, being less energy intensive. But it’s still a system built on the need to continue to expand and grow. A sane economy has got to come back into balance with the very biosphere that sustains us. I think a lot of people just see a “green economy” as a different way of allowing the corporate agenda to continue flourishing.
We have got to do what we did in 1944 when governments came to Bretton Woods in Maine, and agreed to develop an economic system for a post-war world. They instituted the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade, the World Bank and the IMF. They tied world currency to the American greenback. But they left out the environment. It’s time for Bretton Woods II. You cannot change Nature, but you can change our inventions like corporations and the economy. Greening an economy that fundamentally exploits resources unsustainably and aims to grow forever will not work.
The sentiment “Oh my God, we can’t get off fossil fuels, it will destroy the economy” makes no sense. The American way has always been to meet the challenges and realize huge things will happen once we make the commitment. There are huge opportunities in solar PV and geothermal energy. The America I knew and loved would have said, this is a challenge: American know-how will lead the world and create jobs at the same time. I’m astounded at the position the United States is in today compared to what it was like when I graduated from Amherst.
Goodman
Among all the reports of extreme weather on every channel, the two words “global warming” rarely if ever appear. What will it take for people to understand, given all the money oil companies pour into denier groups whose agenda is to “debate” whether climate is even “real”.
Suzuki
In 1992, an American president claimed if you vote for me, I promise I will be an environmental President. That was George H.W. Bush. There wasn’t a green bone in his body but the American public had put the environment at the top of its agenda. He had to say that. George H.W. Bush was not going to come to Rio unless they watered down the climate convention. They were aiming at a 20% reduction in greenhouse emissions in 15 years. Bush said he was not going until he got a watered-down target of stabilization of 1990 levels by the year 2000. He signed that. But, his actions were predicated on American concern about the environment.
I think we haven’t recognized that we’ve got people like the Koch brothers and powerful right-wing think tanks like Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and Heritage Institute. They are all pushing a radical right-wing agenda, funded by the fossil fuel industry, to repeat that climate warming is “not true”. It is all undermining the credibility of genuine science.
The latest edition of the premier scientific journal, Nature, is filled with articles from scientists who have looked at the ecosystems of the planet. We are facing an absolute crisis now. But countries like Canada and the United States, endowed with huge resources, can float on the assumption that everything is OK. We don’t see the crunch coming. Poorer countries, or indeed Europe, can see it coming. They do not have the kind of plentiful resource we have in North America. So they are seeing it and leading the call for change. But, we have the illusion that the economy is the source of everything that matters and we must keep that growing. All costs can be left to the future for our children and grandchildren.
Over and over again, we hear that we need a paradigm shift. It has become a cliché. But, I absolutely believe this is critical: all the stuff that goes on will not achieve anything unless we ultimately see the world in a different way. You see, our beliefs and values shape the way we look at the world and the way we treat it. If we believe that we were placed here by God, and that all of this creation exists for us to occupy, dominate, and exploit, then we will proceed to do that. That is the paradigm we now exist within. We’re driven then by the sense that it’s all there for us. We need to shift that to an understanding that we are part of a vast web of interconnected species–the biosphere, the thin layer zone of air, water, and land, where all life exists.
This is our home. And it’s home to ten to thirty millions of other species that keep the planet habitable. If we don’t see that we are utterly imbedded in the natural world and dependent on Nature–not technology, economics, or science–our priorities will continue to be driven by man-made constructs like national borders, economies, corporations, markets. The exemplars in this should be the indigenous people who still have that sense that the Earth is truly our mother, that it gives birth to us. You don’t treat your mother the way we treat the planet or the biosphere today.
We have to reassess everything. I believe we have to start with the fundamental understanding that we are animals. Believe me, I have said that in many parts of the United States, and people get mighty pissed off when I tell children, don’t forget we’re animals. They say, don’t call my daughter an animal, we’re human beings. We don’t even want to accept it is our biological nature. But, as animals our absolutely highest need for survival and well being is clean air, clean water, clean soil that gives us our food, and energy from the sun that plants capture by photosynthesis. So, how can we, who claim to be intelligent, use air, water, and soil as a garbage can for the most toxic chemicals ever known on the planet? As if somehow that’s not going to have consequences. The minute you accept we are biological creatures, then our highest priorities become absolutely clear. It means stop all release of any kind of human-created material into our surroundings until we learn ways to recycle it as nature does.
As social animals, what is our most fundamental need? The most important thing we need is love. Children, to grow up to be fully developed human beings, need love at very critical times in development. If you look at children that grow up under conditions of war, genocide or terrorism, or who have been deprived of love, they are physically and psychically crippled. That means we need to work toward creating strong families and supportive communities. We need full employment, equity, justice and freedom from war, terror, and genocide. To me, those are my issues, because if you don’t have that kind of society, you cannot have a sustainable environment.
We’ve got to deal with these issues and then we address the fact that we are spiritual beings. As spiritual animals, we need to understand that we’re part of Nature. We emerge from Nature and we return to it when we die. There are forces out there that we will never understand or control. We need sacred places. These aspects are the true foundations for the way that we live. How can we create an economy that will allow these fundamental needs to be protected? How do we construct a way of living as a species that protects these values? If we don’t see what the primary needs are, then we’re just playing at the edges. We are not being serious about reaching a truly sustainable future.
(Transcript courtesy of www.ecobuddhism.org)
