Interview with Dr. David Suzuki

Sotokoto Magazine, Tokyo, November 2004

JT:  So, you’ve just come back from teaching the Dalai Lama’s monks in India...

DS: Yeah, I haven’t really put it all into perspective.  I find when you go on a big trip it takes you literally months to figure out what it all means.  But it was very interesting to meet people used to thinking of the world in totally spiritual terms.

I find we all look at the world through our own experience. If you’re a carpenter, everywhere you look you see construction jobs, or if you’re a doctor, you see medical problems.  Well, these guys are interested in spirit - so everything they hear is immediately funnelled or filtered through all of their learnings and thoughts about the world around.  So when you talk to them about the science of air, this invisible substance that gives life to all terrestrial beings, that it’s embedded in us, that it’s inseparable from us, and without it we die.   Well, they get it immediately! 

I think a lot of the ideas that we have in science are congruent with the thinkings and teachings of indigenous people.  But the thing that always shames me is that I feel I’ve just suddenly realized how important earth, air, fire, and wind are.  But I talk to aboriginal people and it’s like, ‘What the hell took you so long!?’ They learn it from they time they’re kids!

JT: As a scientist, when did you start making this revelation?

DS: For me it was Rachel Carson.  She published Silent Spring in 1962, just as I was beginning my career.  I thought I was this hotshot scientist, going out to make my name in genetics.  We called fruitflies “bags of chromosomes”!  So I was focussing on my genes and chromosomes when Rachel Carson comes along and publishes Silent Spring. 

To me, her message was “you scientists are very clever, you can invent things like DDT, but studying them in the lab doesn’t tell you anything about the real world.  You come up with DDT, spray and kill insects, but because everything is connected, you end up affecting fish and bird and human beings.” 

That was the big mind-shift.  It said science is very powerful when we focus it, but we don’t really have any idea what happens in the real world.  After that, I kind of led a schizophrenic career.  I was good at genetics, and I think I did some things that were very good.  But I was always aware of the bigger picture, always screaming at my colleagues, “Wait a minute! How can you rush ahead in such a revolutionary area and try to apply ideas, when we don’t really know what the hell is going on!?”

JT: You met with the Dalai Lama...

DS: At first I didn’t think it was going to be such a big deal!  My family really pushed me into it! (Laughs.)  But as the time got closer, I began to realize this is not just a Gorbachev or somebody like that.  To Buddhists, he is the Buddha.  He is as Jesus Christ would be to a Christian.  So when you think about it that way, it’s really pretty mind boggling. 

But he’s a human being.  He’s a man.  And he doesn’t make any pretence at being godly or anything other than what we are - fallible.

I’m always amazed that every person I’ve met who I consider to be great is overwhelmingly humble.  They’re not all puffed up, thinking they are so great.  He’s just like that.  And yet if you know his history, it’s breathtaking.  The whole future of Tibet is riding on his shoulders.  It’s a pretty overwhelming thought.

But we asked a lot of questions, and he listened and answered very thoughtfully, often with a tremendous amount of humour. 

JT: Are there other people you’d like to meet?

DS: The only person I would love to meet, to say how much I’ve admired and been inspired by him, is Nelson Mandela.  Mandela did something that was so heroic: the government of South Africa said, ‘We’ll let you out.  All you have to do is renounce the ANC and the use of violence and we’ll let you out”.  I know there must have been times in 27 years when he thought ‘Jesus Christ, my whole life, the best time of my life is going down the drain.  What’s the point? This is ridiculous!’  But he hung in there.  I think that’s amazing.  

I think one of the problems in Canada is our lack of heroes.  Terry Fox was a hero.  To me, Percy Schmeiser, the guy fighting Monsanto on GMOs, is a hero.  Nelson Mandela is a hero.  Vaclav Havel is a hero.  We need more people to inspire...

JT: Do you have hope for the future? 

DS: Well, there’s only hope!  If you give up hope, I feel you have no right to say anything in public - because you’ve basically given up.   I think people have no right speak in the public and say there’s no hope.  But that said... I certainly think that it’s very, very late and we’re going in the wrong direction.

The major predator on the planet is us - the 1.2 billion people living in the industrialized world.  We’re using over 80% of the planet’s resources and producing most of the planets waste and toxic material.  Yet we continually point to the developing world and say, “it’s overpopulation, those brown black and yellow people are breeding like flies!”  But they’re 80% of the planet’s population and they’re using less than 20% of the planet’s resources - and we’re saying it’s them!?  It’s us!  And we continue to say we want more!  While China and India, 2/5ths of the world’s population, are saying ‘We're damn well gonna get what the west has got!”  Well, if they reach our level, the planet is done for!

My hope is that we’ll begin to recognize what the real bottom line is.  We’ve made the bottom line economics; growth and profit and jobs are what matter most.  I think we’d better start recognizing that we’re biological creatures, and as animals, we have an absolute requirement for clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy, and a web of living things around us.  If we don’t have those living things around us we die.  Period. 

JT: Science and technology is not going to save us?

DS: Science and technology will be part of the solution as we begin to try and find alternatives.  There’s no question that we’ve got to find alternative energy sources. It’s a real challenge, and it’s exciting! It’s an opportunity.  Science and technology is very good at describing what’s going on - they can tell us if the climate’s heating up, or that the ocean’s polluted.  But they’re not so good at giving us real solutions. 

I think the real solutions reside in our attitudes and values and beliefs.  Those are what ultimately have got to change.  We’ve gotta start thinking about our children, and about what it is it that really matters.  We equate consumption with progress and happiness.  And we’re in this terrible bind where we think having more and more stuff is what life is all about.  People better start questioning and asking, “Just because I’ve got a Wal-Mart around, is that what life is really all about?