David Suzuki

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David Suzuki

Suzuki in 2009
Born David Takayoshi Suzuki
March 24, 1936 (age 78)
Vancouver, British Columbia
Residence Vancouver, British Columbia
Institutions University of British Columbia
Alma mater Amherst College, B.A. (1958)
University of Chicago, Ph.D. (1961)
Notable awards Order of Canada, (1976, 2006)
UNESCO‘s Kalinga Prize (1986)
Right Livelihood Award (2009)
Signature

Top 10 memorable David Suzuki quotes

By Erika Tucker  Global News

TORONTO – David Suzuki has reportedly left the board of his charitable foundation as he felt it was being targeted due to his personal views and actions.

At 76 years old, Canada’s most famous environmentalist is an award-winning scientist, broadcaster and writer, well-known for his personal views that are causing him to step down.

Global News looks at Suzuki’s top 10 most thought-provoking quotes.

On education

“Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism.”

“An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn’t teach them how to make a life.”

On social responsibility

“Now there are some things in the world we can’t change – gravity, entropy, the speed of light, the first and second Laws of Thermodynamics, and our biological nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and well being. Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere, for example.”

“Provinces have let the federal government take all the heat and all of the pressure about Kyoto, and they really have been sitting on their asses not doing anything.”

“My Prime Minister regards the economy as our highest priority and forgets that economics and ecology are derived from the same Greek word, oikos, meaning household or domain. Ecology is the study of home, while economics is its management. Ecologists try to define the conditions and principles that enable a species to survive and flourish. Yet in elevating the economy above those principles, we seem to think we are immune to the laws of nature. We have to put the ‘eco’ back into economics.”

On the environment

“Human use of fossil fuels is altering the chemistry of the atmosphere; oceans are polluted and depleted of fish; 80 per cent of Earth’s forests are heavily impacted or gone yet their destruction continues. An estimated 50,000 species are driven to extinction each year. We dump millions of tonnes of chemicals, most untested for their biological effects, and many highly toxic, into air, water and soil. We have created an ecological holocaust. Our very health and survival are at stake, yet we act as if we have plenty of time to respond.”

“We are upsetting the atmosphere upon which all life depends. In the late 80s when I began to take climate change seriously, we referred to global warming as a ‘slow motion catastrophe’ one we expected to kick in perhaps generations later. Instead, the signs of change have accelerated alarmingly.”

On the future

“We’re in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit.”

“People…especially people in positions of power…have invested a tremendous amount of effort and time to get to where they are. They really don’t want to hear that we’re on the wrong path, that we’ve got to shift gears and start thinking differently.”

“The human brain now holds the key to our future. We have to recall the image of the planet from outer space: a single entity in which air, water, and continents are interconnected. That is our home.”

~~~~~~~~

David Suzuki

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Takayoshi Suzuki, CC OBC (born March 24, 1936) is a Canadian academic, science broadcaster and environmental activist. Suzuki earned a Ph.D in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961, and was a professor in the genetics department at the University of British Columbia from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. Since the mid-1970s, Suzuki has been known for his TV and radio series and books about nature and the environment. He is best known as host of the popular and long-running CBC Television science magazine, The Nature of Things, seen in over forty nations. He is also well known for criticizing governments for their lack of action to protect the environment.

A long time activist to reverse global climate change, Suzuki co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990, to work “to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world that does sustain us.” The Foundation’s priorities are: oceans and sustainable fishing, climate change and clean energy, sustainability, and Suzuki’s Nature Challenge. He also served as a director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association from 1982 to 1987.

Suzuki was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2009. His 2011 book, The Legacy, won the Nautilus Book Award. He is a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2004, David Suzuki was selected as the greatest living Canadian in a CBC poll.

Early life

Suzuki has a twin sister named Marcia, as well as two other siblings, Geraldine (now known as Aiko) and Dawn. They were born to Setsu Nakamura and Kaoru Carr Suzuki in Vancouver, Canada. Suzuki’s maternal and paternal grandparents had emigrated to Canada at the beginning of the 20th century from Hiroshima and Aichi Prefecture respectively.[1]

A third-generation Japanese-Canadian (“Canadian Sansei“), Suzuki and his family suffered internment in British Columbia from early during the Second World War until after the war ended in 1945. In June 1942, the government sold the Suzuki family’s dry-cleaning business, then interned Suzuki, his mother, and two sisters in a camp at Slocan in the British Columbia Interior.[2] His father had been sent to a labour camp in Solsqua two months earlier. Suzuki’s sister, Jenny,[citation needed] was born in the internment camp.

After the war, Suzuki’s family, like other Japanese Canadian families, were forced to move east of the Rockies. The Suzukis moved to Islington, Leamington, and London, Ontario. Suzuki, in interviews, has many times credited his father for having interested him in and sensitized him to nature.

Suzuki attended Mill Street Elementary School and Grade 9 at Leamington Secondary School before moving to London, Ontario, where he attended London Central Secondary School, eventually winning the election to become Students’ Council President in his last year there by more votes than all of the other candidates combined.[3]

Academic career

Suzuki received his B.A. in Biology in 1958 from Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he first discovered genetics study,[4] and his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961.

Early in his research career he studied genetics using the popular model organism Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies). To be able to use his initials in naming any new genes he found, he studied dominant temperature-sensitive (DTS) phenotypes. (As he jokingly noted at a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, the only alternative subject was “(damn) tough skin”.) He was a professor in the genetics department (stated in his book Genethics: The Ethics of Engineering Life, 1988) at the University of British Columbia for almost forty years, from 1963 until his retirement in 2001, and has since been professor emeritus at a university research institute.[5]

Broadcasting career

Suzuki in 2006

Suzuki began in television in 1970 with the weekly children’s show Suzuki on Science. In 1974, he founded the radio program Quirks and Quarks, which he also hosted on CBC AM radio (the forerunner of CBC Radio One) from 1975 to 1979. Throughout the 1970s, he also hosted Science Magazine, a weekly program geared towards an adult audience.

Since 1979, Suzuki has hosted The Nature of Things, a CBC television series that has aired in nearly fifty countries worldwide.[6] In this program, Suzuki’s aim is to stimulate interest in the natural world, to point out threats to human well-being and wildlife habitat, and to present alternatives for achieving a more sustainable society. Suzuki has been a prominent proponent of renewable energy sources and the soft energy path.

Suzuki was the host of the critically acclaimed 1993 PBS series The Secret of Life.[7] His 1985 hit series, A Planet for the Taking, averaged more than 1.8 million viewers per episode and earned him a United Nations Environment Programme Medal. His perspective in this series is summed up in his statement: “We have both a sense of the importance of the wilderness and space in our culture and an attitude that it is limitless and therefore we needn’t worry.” He concludes with a call for a major “perceptual shift” in our relationship with nature and the wild.

Suzuki’s The Sacred Balance, a book first published in 1997 and later made into a five-hour mini-series on Canadian public television, was broadcast in 2002.[8][9] Suzuki is now taking part in an advertisement campaign with the tagline “You have the power”, promoting energy conservation through various household alternatives, such as the use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

For the Discovery Channel, Suzuki also produced “Yellowstone to Yukon: The Wildlands Project” in 1997. The conservation-biology based documentary focused on Dave Foreman‘s Wildlands Project, which considers how to create corridors between and buffer-zones around large wilderness reserves as a means to preserve biological diversity. Foreman developed this project after leaving Earth First! (which he co-founded) in 1990. The conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss were also directly involved.

Climate change activism

At the 2007 Global Day of Action event in Vancouver, B.C.. The sign in the background refers to the Greater Vancouver Gateway Program.

In recent years, Suzuki has been a forceful spokesperson on global climate change. In February 2008, he urged McGill University students to speak out against politicians who fail to act on climate change, stating “What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act.”[10][11]

Suzuki is unequivocal that climate change is a very real and pressing problem and that an “overwhelming majority of scientists” now agree that human activity is responsible. The David Suzuki Foundation website has a clear statement of this:

“ The debate is over about whether or not climate change is real. Irrefutable evidence from around the world – including extreme weather events, record temperatures, retreating glaciers, and rising sea levels – all point to the fact climate change is happening now and at rates much faster than previously thought.The overwhelming majority of scientists who study climate change agree that human activity is responsible for changing the climate. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is one of the largest bodies of international scientists ever assembled to study a scientific issue, involving more than 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries. The IPCC has concluded that most of the warming observed during the past 50 years is attributable to human activities. Its findings have been publicly endorsed by the National Academies of Science of all G8 nations, as well as those of China, India and Brazil.[12] ”

Suzuki says that despite this growing consensus, many in the public and the media seemed doubtful about the science for many years. The reason for the confusion about climate change, in Suzuki’s view, was due to a well-organized campaign of disinformation about the science involved. “A very small number of critics” denies that climate change exists and that humans are the cause. These climate change “skeptics” or “deniers”, Suzuki claims, tend not to be climate scientists and do not publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals but rather target the media, the general public, and policy makers. Their goal: “delaying action on climate change.” According to Suzuki, the skeptics have received significant funding from coal and oil companies, including ExxonMobil. They are linked to “industry-funded lobby groups”, such as the Information Council on the Environment (ICE),[13] whose aim is to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”[12]

In October 2012, referring to climate activism and reversal of human-induced climate change, Suzuki declared to Rebecca Tarbotton, “Becky, you know, we’ve lost.” [14]

Social commentary

Immigration

In L’Express, the French news magazine, Suzuki called Canada’s immigration policy “disgusting” (We “plunder southern countries to deprive them of their future leaders, and wish to increase our population to support economic growth”) and insisted that “Canada is full” (“Our useful area is reduced”).[15] This prompted Canada’s Immigration Minster, Jason Kenney, to denounce Suzuki as “xenophobic”, labelling his comments as “toxic”.[15][16]

Canadian Justice System

While interviewing with Tony Jones on Australia’s ABC TV network in September 2013, Suzuki alleged that the Harper government is building prisons even though crime rates are declining in Canada. He concluded that the prisons were being built so that Stephen Harper can incarcerate environmental activists.[17][18] Jean-Christophe De Le Rue, a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney, refuted the claims, emphasizing that the Canadian government is not building any prisons, nor do they have plans to build any.[17] There was, however, an increase in federal spending on prisons, which included expanding existing prisons, in order to accommodate the growing inmate population. This is thought to be due to legislation such as the Tackling Violent Crimes Act which increases the length of sentences. [19][20] In 2010-2011, $517-million was “spent on prison construction”. [21]

Carbon footprint

Suzuki himself laments that in traveling constantly to spread his message of climate responsibility, he has ended up “over his [carbon] limit by hundreds of tonnes.” He has stopped vacationing overseas and taken to “clustering” his speaking engagements together to reduce his carbon footprint. He would prefer, he says, to appear solely by video conference.[22]

Publications

Suzuki signing a copy of his work.

Suzuki is the author of 52 books (fifteen for children), including David Suzuki: The Autobiography, Tree: A Life Story, The Sacred Balance, Genethics, Wisdom of the Elders, Inventing the Future, and the best-selling Looking At Senses a series of children’s science books. This is a partial list of publications[23] by Suzuki:

Awards and honours

Suzuki receives the Right Livelihood Award from Jakob von Uexkull
  • In 2004, Suzuki was nominated as one of the top ten “Greatest Canadians” by viewers of the CBC. In the final vote he ranked fifth, making him the greatest living Canadian.[31] Suzuki said that his own vote was for Tommy Douglas who was the eventual winner.
  • In 2006, Suzuki was the recipient of the Bradford Washburn Award presented at the Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts.[32]
  • In 2007, Suzuki was honoured by Global Exchange, with the International Human Rights Award.
  • As of 2012, Suzuki had received 16 significant academic awards and over 100 other awards.[34]

See also

Portal icon Environment portal
Portal icon Global Warming portal
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