THE NEW SONG OF DAVID
The supreme prophet of Canada's environmental movement seems to be lowering his sights with a self-help book on how to reduce, reuse and recycle - even though 'I know we're heading straight over the cliff.' John Allemang asks David Suzuki what he's thinking.
JOHN ALLEMANG // September 6, 2008
David Suzuki is frustrated. For more than four decades, we have been listening to his warnings - and not listening. Gas prices go up, the economy stumbles and the environment slips off the government's agenda. We are a practical people, it seems, and we like our crises to be both affordable and convenient. "I think it's a crazy time for the country to take risks," says the Prime Minister, convinced that sanity is about playing it safe and determined to undermine Stéphane Dion's "green shift" carbon tax.
Still crazy after all these years, Mr. Suzuki can't believe what he is hearing from those whose vision of the world to come stops at the nearest election date. "We have to realize that the crisis is very, very serious," he says with that familiar, gentle voice of unwelcome prophecy. "My concern today is that we've had 40 years of warning that there's a problem, and yet we still seem to be dream-walking our way toward the future."
For someone fixed on the grim certainty of a future that seems so much more real than the slumbering contentment of the present, frustration is a way of life.
Yes, he has the awards from the United Nations and celebrity status among environmental fashionistas to rival that of Al Gore, the 65-member research foundation with offices across Canada and the long-running CBC science show, the do-good books that issue forth in his name (including the latest, David Suzuki's Green Guide) and the hundreds of requests he gets to speak to corporations that want to feed off the Suzuki image.
It's not like David Suzuki, the man, has been ignored. In some quarters, he is hailed as the green messiah. But his message? That's another matter.
"I can get totally depressed," the 72-year-old former fruit-fly researcher says, even though he is renowned in the enviro-movement for his passion and persistence in the face of belittling opposition. Ask him what all those years of warnings have accomplished, and he is remarkably ambivalent.
"In 1962, when I was starting my scientific career and Rachel Carson had just published Silent Spring, there wasn't a single department of the environment on the planet. So you could say, 'Jesus, we've come a hell of a long way from there, you can't talk about government policies without raising the environment at some point.' There have been changes, and certainly kids are now more aware, and we have recycling programs and all that. But at the same time, think of our destructiveness, the Alberta tar sands and big companies like Wal-Mart taking too much out of the planet. We're still going in the wrong direction."
His critics seize on comments like that and deride him as a naysayer and a merchant of doom, as if the only responses to climate change were sunny optimism or complete disavowal. But one of the interesting things about David Suzuki, at least when he strays off message, is that he himself will admit that he and his people have belaboured the negativity over the years, to the detriment of his mission.
"I believe that one has to keep warning, the signs are there, the science is in. But I realized years ago that you can get people to respond to fear, but you can't sustain it, because it's too soul-destroying.
"We were doing The Nature of Things and I saw that it was becoming very predictable - beautiful pictures of nature, cue the oohing and aahing, then along come the humans and they destroy it. And I kept saying to my bosses, we can't just depress people with how nature is being trashed if you don't tell them what to do to get out of this mess. ... You have to inculcate a strong sense of hope."
Or, as Alan MacEachern, a professor of environmental history at the University of Western Ontario, puts it: "There's a bad strain of environmentalism that sees the Earth as good and people as bad." But in his opinion, Mr. Suzuki has risen above the temptation to go negative. "I've never seen a misanthropic side in him. He's always been good at figuring out how humans can live in nature."
This kind of thinking was the genesis of David Suzuki's Green Guide, a book (co-written with environmental lawyer David R. Boyd) that provides life-coaching on shopping, eating, home-buying, travelling and other activities for those who want to tread lightly on the Earth, Suzuki-style - the environmentalist version of Martha Stewart Living.
Do we really need a handbook to live right? Mr. Suzuki thinks so. "We've just been very profligate and the problem now is, how the hell do you change from that profligacy? The way you live and act and purchase by itself might seem trivial. But collectively the impact is immense. And if we're going to start to turn this ship around, then we have to have millions and millions of us making all these very small changes. There's no point in going around saying the sky is falling if you don't also say there are all kinds of opportunities and possibilities."
In part, this lifestyle approach to planet-saving reflects his disappointment with the political process and the lethargic official agencies of environmental change - perhaps, he hopes, a book that extols the virtues of smaller houses, biodegradable carpeting, dual-flush toilets, energy-efficient appliances and the happiness that comes from bicycle-riding will "energize" consumers and make people see how their daily choices affect the wider world.
But this focus on sustainable shopping, as trivial as it may sound coming from a man renowned for his sonorous sermons on global degradation, also reveals a narrowing in his own environmental perspective - the bigger picture, it turns out, is too discouraging to contemplate for the followers (and donors) he is trying to attract. If you start by thinking globally, you will be defeated by scale of the problem before you ever get around to buying fair-trade coffee locally or lobbying for helium-powered airships to replace the airplanes that carry the guilt-ridden Mr. Suzuki and his urgent message around the world.
"I justify it by saying, right now, nobody can be pure if we're trying to work our way toward a sustainable world."
But the paralyzing contradictions of his global wanderings don't escape him. "When I find people thinking globally," he says, "their immediate reaction is, 'Oh, shit. What's the point? We're toast.' The problem is so immense and we feel so minuscule, it disempowers us. So that's why I really think the line should be, think locally and act locally, because that's where you can see results. And if enough of us can do it locally, then globally it can be very, very powerful."
This is the optimistic, anti-moralizing David Suzuki, the one who is heartened by concerted community efforts that brought salmon back to a Vancouver creek, who rejoiced during a recent month in Europe over the highly punctual fast-train network in Spain and the widespread use of bicycles in Copenhagen. "Over 30 per cent of the trips people take in the city are by bike, and that's not because, 'Oh, we're going to save on greenhouse gases.' It's because it's more convenient, more fun and faster than taking a car."
He now describes himself mainly as a fundraiser for his foundation, and the art of drawing money out of an audience is as much New Testament evangelistic as Old Testament prophetic - if you're going to convert the heathens, you have to give them some good news. He and his foundation work with corporations now, trying to make business more sustainable.
Consistent with this softening-up approach, much of the David Suzuki Green Guide is about happiness, not a word that used to come up much among a previous generation of eco-warriors, but a concept that has considerable traction among a younger crowd, who can't see why they should suffer to save the planet.
He has persuaded himself that this is doing the right thing, for the Earth as well as himself, but he wouldn't be David Suzuki without some doubts and darker thoughts - the man's ability to question easy assumptions, after all, is what made him an icon.
"He's more sophisticated than many people who talk about the natural world," says Joseph E. Taylor, Canada Research Chair in history and geography at Simon Fraser University. "He's more willing than most to talk about the complexities where humans intersect with nature. ... I see him as understanding a more complicated reality."
MESSIAH COMPLEX?
Does that ability merit an exalted status? "I don't think he has a messiah complex himself," Prof. Taylor says. "But I think he knows how to indulge the needs other people might have for a messiah, and use it to his advantage."
And yet, in discussing his relation with business, Mr. Suzuki openly scrutinizes himself. "To a lot of 'enviros', when you start partnering with companies, it's a sellout, it's treachery. I worry about this all the time: Have I just been sucked into it so that I can no longer see I've been co-opted?
"I realize that, in the language of advertising, I have a brand, and now that being green is in, everybody wants my brand. And a lot of it is just 'greenwashing.' But if you're talking about working with people, you can't just bonk them on the head without giving them some kind of opening as well."
And even the unalloyed happiness promised by the Green Guide - where you can reduce your "ecological footprint" by 90 per cent without suffering any loss in your quality of life - becomes less secure when the great man himself is trying to balance the appeal of incremental lifestyle changes with the spectre of climate-change catastrophe. "We have to assume we've got the time, and yet it's very, very urgent. And this is the dilemma, it is urgent, because I know we're heading straight over the cliff."
Now, after more than 40 years of advancing the cause, he still can't admit he is happy about what he has accomplished. However much the Green Guide plays to the interests of young people, he doesn't see it as enough. "Ultimately they've got to become politically active and start making their needs felt. And right now they're not doing that because the current crop of politicians aren't focused on their needs. If there were a major event that shut down the roads at the tar sands, say, I'll bet you could get thousands of kids out for that."
Optimism works for politicians on the campaign trail, and a straightforward message of hope sells lifestyle books, but David Suzuki is more complicated than that.
"If the tape recorder stops, and you and I are in a dark corner of a pub, and I say, 'This is off the record?' It can get pretty bleak."
Bleakness is the environmentalists' occupational hazard, given the impossibility of finding perfection in an imperfect world. But it is also what drives them forward, generation by generation.
"My daughter's in marine biology," Mr. Suzuki says, "and what's going on in the oceans is a pretty bleak picture. Yet it's all the more reason why she has to get in there and do something. Because the alternative, which is to give up, just isn't bearable."
John Allemang is a Globe and Mail feature writer and frequent Focus contributor.
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