by David Suzuki
The Earth Summit was meant to signal a profound shift, the realization that henceforth humankind couldn't make important political, social, and economic decisions without considering the environmental consequences. But by the time of the meetings, environmental concerns were already giving way to economic priorities.
The period between Silent Spring and Rio reflected the evolution of a remarkable grassroots movement. Greenpeace had been born in 1970 in Vancouver as a result of protest against an American plan to test nuclear weapons underground on Amchitka Island in the Aleutian Islands, off the Alaska Peninsula.
In 1962, there wasn't a single department or ministry of the environment on the planet. Carson's book put the word “environment” on everyone's lips, and the movement had grown so explosively that by 1972 the United Nations was persuaded by Canadian businessman and international environmentalist Maurice Strong to hold a major conference on the environment in Stockholm. The American scientists and educators Paul Ehrlich, Margaret Mead, and Barry Commoner were there, as was the English economist and conservationalist Barbara Ward, along with Greenpeace and thousands of environmentalists concerned about species extinction, pollution, and disappearing habitat.
The United Nations Environment Program was established as an outcome of the Stockholm meetings, and environmentalists took up causes from whales and seals to polluted air and vanishing forests and rivers. The spectacular postwar economic growth had come at a cost that people recognized only after Carson's warning shot. Technology and human activity have consequences for our surroundings, and we had ignored them for too long.
For most of our species' existence, we have been profoundly local and tribal, spending most of our individual lives within a few tens of square miles and coming into contact with perhaps a couple of hundred others in a lifetime. But now we were emerging as a global force. Now we had to consider the collective impact of all of humanity, and it was a difficult perspective to grasp and accept.
When Tara and I had visited the village of Aucre deep in the Amazon rain forest in 1989, we had left a small plastic bag of garbage in our hut, assuming it would be buried after we left. When I returned a decade later, that bag was still there. Throughout their existence, the Kaiapo had lived with materials that were totally biodegradable and so could be left where they were or tossed into the forest to eventually decompose. When plastics and metals began to appear in the Amazon as the Kaiapo made contact with the outside world, those materials were strewn around just like the banana skins of old.
In the twentieth century, human beings had become so numerous and our technological prowess so powerful that we were affecting the biophysical features of the planet on a massive scale. Yet we still thought as local animals. It was almost impossible for the average person to grasp the idea of millions of acres of forest being destroyed, billions of tons of topsoil being lost, toxic pollution of the entire atmosphere, and a massive spasm of extinction. The environmental movement had to come up with catchy ways of representing the bigger picture so people could relate to it—the Amazon as the “lungs of the planet,” cute and cuddly baby seals, charismatic animals like whales or gorillas.
The movement grew as local communities began to grasp the consequences of using air, water, and soil as toxic dumps and belatedly recognized the value of wilderness and of other species. By the late '80s, grassroots concern had pushed the environment to the top of the list of public concerns to such an extent that Margaret Thatcher, the ultra-right-wing Conservative prime minister of Britain, was filmed picking up litter and declaring to the camera, “I'm a greenie too.” In Canada, newly reelected Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney demonstrated a sudden commitment to the environment by appointing his brightest star, the mesmerizing political novice Lucien Bouchard, as minister of the environment and raising the portfolio to the inner cabinet.
In the United States in 1988, Republican political candidate George Bush Sr. promised that, if elected, he would be “an environmental president.” Australia's Labor government was led by Bob Hawke and then by Paul Keating during this period, neither of whom had any record of interest in the environment. But the public was concerned, and Keating was forced to appoint as minister a champion of the environment, Ros Kelly, whom I met and admired over the years.
As their records in office demonstrated, it was public concern about the environment that generated the declared environmental commitments by politicians, not any deeply felt understanding of why the issue was important. When economic difficulties set in, the environment disappeared as a high priority and the environmental movement was forced to struggle to keep matters on the political agenda. To the jaded media, the environment was an old story. Indeed, some revisionists, such as the American writer Gregg Easterbrook, the Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg, and former Greenpeace president Patrick Moore, began to argue that the environmental movement was beating a dead horse, that it had been so successful that it was time to move on to other issues such as the economy.
If 1988 was the peak of public concern, interest continued to be high enough in 1991 to make the Earth Summit a highly anticipated event. It would be the largest gathering of heads of state in history, but I was skeptical that such a huge meeting would accomplish much. My daughter, Severn, had other ideas.
When we had returned from our trip to the Amazon in 1989, Severn had been so upset after seeing the rain forest under assault by farmers and gold miners that she had started a club made up of her grade 5 friends who shared her concern about forests. They would gather at our house to have tea and talk about what they might do. They called their club the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO) and soon were giving talks at their school and then at other schools as word of their existence spread. They began to make little salamanders and earrings out of Fimo clay and sold them to raise money.
Somehow Severn heard about the Earth Summit and asked whether Tara and I were going. I answered that we weren't and asked why she was curious. “Because I think all those grown-ups are going to meet and make decisions and they're not even going to think about us kids,” came the answer. “I think ECO should go to remind them to think about us.”
Tara and I had been involved in a number of international issues, but we had not worked with international organizations such as the United Nations, around whose official Conference on Environment and Development the broader Earth Summit had evolved. Without even reflecting on Severn's idea, I rejected it: “Sweetheart, it's going to be a huge circus with lots of people. Rio will be hot and polluted. Besides, it will cost a lot of money.” Then I promptly forgot about Sev's hope.
That summer, we had a visit from Doug Tompkins, an American who had started the clothing company Esprit with his wife, Susie Russell. When the marriage broke up, Susie bought him out and left him with a considerable chunk of money, reputed to be in the hundreds of millions. Flying his own plane, Doug travels the world looking for opportunities to invest in groups fighting to protect large areas of wilderness, and he personally buys large tracts of land to protect.
Somehow he had heard about Tara and me and the newly formed David Suzuki Foundation, so he flew to British Columbia with deep ecologist Bill Duvall and visited us at our cottage on Quadra Island for two days. During that time, unknown to Tara and me, Severn told Doug about her idea of taking ECO to Rio the following year. He was more enthusiastic than we had been and told her, “That's a good idea. Write to me about it.” She did, and one day a couple of months later, she said, “Hey, Dad, look,” and held up a check for US$1,000 from Doug Tompkins.
I was astonished. I was also pleased with her initiative in writing on her own, and for the first time, I reflected seriously about her idea; I realized she could be on to something. I talked it over with Tara, and we decided it might be worth going to the Earth Summit if children could call attention to the long-term implications of what was being decided by grown-ups. So we went back to Sev and told her we realized she had a good idea and that we
would support her by matching every dollar ECO could raise. That meant she already had $2,000.
Severn and Sarika and the other ECO girls plunged into projects to raise money, gathering and selling secondhand books, creating and selling their Fimo salamanders, and baking cookies. But all that brought in only small change. Jeff Gibbs of the Environmental Youth Alliance, that young man who had cut his teeth in environmental activism in high school, took ECO under his wing and helped the girls publish a series of ECO newspapers with articles the youngsters wrote about the environment. Jeff also suggested a major fund-raising event at which the kids could tell people what they wanted to do. It was scheduled for March 17, 1992. With a great deal of help from Jeff, Tara, and others, the girls booked the Vancouver Planetarium, made and distributed posters, and called members of the press and urged them to cover the event. Parents, relatives, and friends, of course, were recruited to attend.
The event was packed. Tara had the inspiration of including a blank check in the package of material left on every seat, thereby removing the excuse “I didn't bring a check with me.” The girls had all prepared talks to go along with a slide show about the environment. They said they wanted to go to Rio to be a conscience to adults, and they asked the audience to help them. It was a powerful presentation because the girls spoke from their hearts, and their very innocence and naïveté touched a chord. During the break, an older man leaped onto the stage, held up five checks for $200 each, and announced he was so inspired that he would donate them if others would match them. People began to fill in the blank checks. Dad anted up $200.
The girls ended up with over $4,700 from that one event, which they had hoped might raise $1,000. Raffi Cavoukian, the well-known children's troubadour, had moved to Vancouver; he had become very interested in environmental issues and wrote a check for another $4,000. Somehow a Toronto philanthropist who supports women's issues heard about the girls and sent another check for $4,000.
In all, the girls had raised more than $13,000, which Tara and I had to match—enough money to send five ECO members (including, of course, Severn and Sarika) and three parents (Tara, me, and Patricia Hernandez, the Spanish-speaking mother of one of the other girls) to Rio.
Although I was now planning to go to the summit, I remained skeptical about what the meeting itself would achieve. In December 1991, I interviewed conference coordinator Maurice Strong for The Nature of Things with David Suzuki and expressed my skepticism. He was irrepressibly optimistic, saying the conference couldn't fail because the future of the planet was at stake. When I pressed him, he responded, “If it does fail, it must not be allowed to be a quiet failure and recede unnoticed from memory.”
The Earth Summit was heralded by Carlo Ripa di Meana, environment commissioner of the European Union, as a chance “to make decisions, obtain precise and concrete commitments to counteract tendencies that are endangering life on the planet.” But in order to ensure U.S. president George Bush's participation, the proposed Treaty on Climate was watered down from a target of a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to merely “stabilizing 1990 levels of emissions by 2000.” This caused Ripa di Meana to boycott the meeting because, he said, “by opting for hypocrisy, we will not just fail to save the Earth, but we will fail you.” So things were not looking good.
Once it was known that Tara and I were going to Rio, we were asked to become involved in some of the deliberations leading up to the event. For years, hundreds of groups and thousands of people had been attending Prepcom (Preparatory Committee) meetings in different countries to draft documents to be presented to and signed by leaders at Rio. The signings would be merely formalities and photo ops, because all the wording would have been worked out beforehand.
To persuade all countries to sign on, the wording in the documents had to be fine-tuned to avoid offending signatories—oops, can't talk about overpopulation to the developing countries, don't mention family planning lest it scare off the Catholic countries, mustn't raise the issue of hyperconsumption in the industrialized countries. Documents on forests, water, air, and so on were drafted, passed through many hands, edited and reedited, rewritten many times.
By the time I was called in to one of the meetings in Vancouver to look at a forestry document, people were spending a great deal of time arguing over whether there should be a hyphen here or a comma there or whether it should be “the” or “a.” Maybe I'm being unfair, because I went to only one meeting and abandoned further attendance as a waste of my time. I know lots of people who invested huge amounts of energy in the process, and thank goodness there were people willing to do it.
For me, the important thing was not in all of the picky details but in an overarching vision that would establish the real bottom line: that we are biological beings, completely dependent for our good health and very survival on the health of the biosphere. At the David Suzuki Foundation, we felt one contribution we could make at Rio would be such a statement or vision, so I began to draft a declaration that would express an understanding of our place in the natural world. As I began to work on it with Tara, she suggested it should be like the American Declaration of Independence, a powerful document that would touch people's hearts. “How about calling it the Declaration of Interdependence?” she suggested, and it was instantly obvious that was what we were drafting.
Tara and I went back and forth with our efforts and then recruited Raffi, our Haida friend Guujaaw, and the Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis, to contribute. At one point I kept writing the cumbersome sentence, “We are made up of the air we breathe, we are inflated by water and created by earth through the food we consume.” That was what I wanted to express, but I wanted to do it in a way that was simple and inspiring. As I struggled with the lines, I suddenly cut through it all and wrote, “We are the earth.”
That was the first time I really understood the depth of what I had learned from Guujaaw and other aboriginal people. I knew we incorporate air, water, and earth into our bodies, but simply declaring that's what we are cut through all the boundaries. Now I understood that there is no line or border that separates us from the rest of the world.
There is no boundary—we are the earth and are created by the four sacred elements—earth, air, fire, and water. It follows that whatever we do to the planet Earth, we do directly to ourselves. I had been framing the “environmental” problem improperly—I thought we had to modify our interaction with our surroundings, regulating how much and what we remove from the environment and how much and what waste and toxic material we put back into it. Now I knew that wasn't the right perspective, because if we viewed ourselves as separate from our surroundings, we could always find ways to rationalize our activity (“too expensive to change,” “it's only a minuscule amount,” “that's the way we've always done it,” “it interferes with our competitiveness,” et cetera). But if we are the air, the water, the soil, the sunlight, then how can we rationalize using ourselves as toxic dumps?
This is what our final document was:
Declaration Of Interdependence
THIS WE KNOW
We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us.
We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins.
We are the breath of the forests of the land and the plants of the sea.
We are human animals, related to all other life as
descendants of the firstborn cell.
We share with these kin a common history, written in our genes.
We share a common present, filled with uncertainty.
And we share a common future as yet untold.
We humans are but one of thirty million species
weaving the thin layer of life enveloping the world.
The stability of communities of living things depends upon this diversity.
Linked in that web, we are interconnected—
using, cleansing, sharing and replenishing
the fundamental elements of life.
Our
home, planet Earth, is finite; all life shares its
resources and the energy from the Sun,
and therefore has limits to growth.
For the first time, we have touched those limits.
When we compromise the air, the water, the soil and the variety of life,
we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.
THIS WE BELIEVE
Humans have become so numerous and our tools so powerful
that we have driven fellow creatures to extinction,
dammed the great rivers,
torn down ancient forests, poisoned the earth, rain
and wind, and ripped holes in the sky.
Our science has brought pain as well as joy;
our comfort is paid for by the suffering of millions.
We are learning from our mistakes, we are mourning our vanished kin,
and we now build a new politics of hope.
We respect and uphold the absolute need for clean air, water and soil.
We see that economic activities that benefit the few
while shrinking the inheritance of many are wrong.
And since environmental degradation erodes biological capital forever,
full ecological and social cost must enter all equations of development.
We are one brief generation in the long march of time;
the future is not ours to erase.
So where knowledge is limited, we will remember
all those who will walk after us,
and err on the side of caution.
THIS WE RESOLVE
All this that we know and believe must now become
the foundation of the way we live.
At this Turning Point in our relationship with Earth,
we work for an evolution from dominance to partnership,
from fragmentation to connection, from insecurity to interdependence.
I believe the final Declaration of Interdependence is a powerful, moving document that sets forth the principles that should underlie all of our activities. We had the declaration translated into a number of languages including French, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, and Spanish, and took copies to give away in Rio, one of the first tangible products of the David Suzuki Foundation.