by David Suzuki
I once appeared on a program in Vancouver with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nht Hnh. When we met, he suggested that before we begin a conversation we take a walk outside. I have to admit, I had been anxious to meet and talk to him and was annoyed at his suggestion. I was in a hurry. He was accompanied by a group of monks who trailed after us as we walked in silence around the large grounds beside the building we were meeting in. Soon I began to think about my breath and then reflected on all the green leaves around us. We can’t see air, so we seldom think about it, but as we slowly ambled along, I began to sense the air being refreshed by photosynthesis, the plants sucking in carbon-laden air from my every breath and exhaling oxygen in return. By the time we had circled the field, I was completely absorbed in thoughts of gratitude to the rest of nature for the air we depend upon. As we prepared to enter the building, Nht Hnh remarked, “Wasn’t that refreshing? And we didn’t have to spend a cent!”
That little walk powerfully reminded me that nature is our touchstone. However sophisticated and techno-logically advanced we may be, we are biological creatures, utterly dependent on her beneficence for clean air, water, and food. But we will only value and fight to protect what we know and love. I know how much each of you has valued nature as you grew up, from dinosaurs to rocks and frogs and creeks. That’s why you will all be warriors for things that matter.
{nine}
THE STATE OF THE WORLD
MY DEAR GRANDCHILDREN,
You are living in a unique and critical period in the history of Earth. Human beings have grown so powerful that we have become a new kind of force on the planet. We are shaping its physical, chemical, and biological properties on a geological scale. That’s why scientists now refer to this as the Anthropocene epoch, or the Age of Man—the period in Earth’s history when we are the major factor affecting its properties.
Although we have powerful technologies to explore every nook and cranny of the planet in search of resources and opportunity, and a global economy that makes use of what is found, we know so little about the interconnectedness of everything on Earth that we can’t anticipate the consequences of all we do. So we often end up under-mining the very things that keep us alive—air, water, soil, and biodiversity. The disastrous effects of our actions are appearing very suddenly, so it is urgent that we act to curb our negative impact on the biosphere.
I have long maintained that one of our species’ unique attributes is foresight, the ability to use our acquired knowledge and experience to look ahead, anticipate opportunities and hazards, and then deliberately choose a path to minimize danger and maximize benefits. Although I’m an atheist, I have read parts of the Bible and learned its lessons, and I find it interesting that some of the stories in it reinforce the importance of foresight.
One of them is the story of Joseph, whose jealous siblings pushed him into slavery at the hands of the Egyptians. Because Joseph could interpret dreams, he came to the attention of the pharaoh, or king. Joseph foresaw years of famine and recommended that the pharaoh prepare for it by storing grain. The pharaoh took his advice, and Egypt survived seven years of drought and famine because of Joseph’s ability to see the future.
Another biblical character, Noah, a carpenter, was instructed by God to build an immense ark and place plants and animals in it two by two. Rains and flood came, and Noah, his family, and the plants and animals survived because he had prepared in anticipation of what was to come.
These stories, whether mythical or not, reinforce the importance of looking ahead and planning accordingly. Today, scientists, engineers, and supercomputers have given us an amplified ability to look ahead; and for decades, they have been warning that the collective impact of human activity is threatening the survival of our species. The most recent study, which came out as this book was being completed, is an urgent call to change our ways because human beings are passing planetary boundaries.1 Your parents are my children, so they know and will have taught you about the global ecological problems we are facing, from deforestation and toxic pollution to climate change and the acidification of the ocean.
At the heart of the crisis is the rapid degradation of the very source of our lives and livelihood—namely, nature itself. I’m often asked by people why it’s so important to protect wilderness when most Canadians live in big cities. That people even ask that question reveals a world so shattered that in the city we can’t see how our lives depend on nature.
TWO EMINENT ECOLOGISTS have spoken about the dangers of the loss of nature for decades, and I have been honoured to know and be considered a friend and colleague by both of them. In 1968 Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, a butterfly expert, wrote The Population Bomb, a bestseller that warned of the catastrophic impact of exploding human numbers on nature. The book created a sensation, and also controversy. Ehrlich proposed an all-out effort to stabilize population using family planning, contraception, and abortion, the last of which— abortion—riled the right-to-life advocates. He also suggested that food sent to developing countries might be laced with sterilizing compounds, a recommendation that raised accusations of racism and genocide. Even the environmental community has been reluctant to tackle overpopulation for fear of being labelled racist or invoking genocide against certain groups.
Our effect on the biosphere is not just a matter of how many of us there are. Our consumption habits also have an impact, because everything that we consume, from food and clothes to cars and energy, comes from the earth and goes back to it when we are done with it. When per capita consumption is calculated for a population, we can see that we in the industrialized world are “overpopulated” in our use of resources and generation of waste. But the economies of industrialized countries are tied directly to consumption; the more people, the more growth there is in the economy. Consumption is an integral part of the economies of the industrialized countries, so those countries do not want to address hyperconsumption among the wealthy nations. That’s why at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, instead of addressing the issues of consumption and population directly, delegates simply dropped them from the agenda.
Another famous ecologist, Edward O. Wilson of Harvard, has expressed his great concern about habitat destruction and species extinction. He grew up in the southern United States, where he wandered the swamps and forests and fell in love with nature. But when he was a boy, he caught a fish that pierced his eye with a spine on its fin, ultimately damaging his vision. So he decided it was better to study smaller animals that could be examined close up, and he became a world expert on ants.
Wilson’s great gift, aside from his writing skills, was his ability to see the big picture, extrapolating from his work to higher levels of complexity. Wilson has tried to show how little we know about life’s diversity by estimating the number of species on Earth. He freely admits that we haven’t a clue how many there really are, but he has made crude estimates by looking at the total number of species of plants and animals that have been identified. If we assume that the proportional representation of different groups among identified species reflects a similar proportion throughout life on Earth, then estimates can be made about how many there might be. We probably know most species of big plants and animals, but if we add ones that might live in difficult places for us to explore, like the deep ocean, boiling vents, beneath the polar ice, and far underground, there may be 10 million species of animals and plants. If we add the estimated number of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms, the number comes to 100 million possible species.
One of the early attempts to make an estimate was that of Terry Erwin in 1983,2 when he was working for the Smithsonian Institution. He laid plastic sheets on the floor of a stretch of Panamanian forest, then sent a fog of pesticide into the forest canopy. Insects rained down, and when Erwin examined them, he found that most were unknown to science. In one species of tree, he found 160 beetles that appeared to be adapted to that specific tree species. Since beetles make up about two-fifths of insects, he calculate
s that there are four hundred species of insects specialized to that species of tree. Since there are estimated to be fifty thousand species of tropical trees, then, extrapolating from his study, Erwin suggests that the total number of species in the world is grossly underestimated: there may be 30 million species. We simply don’t know, but it is acknowledged that the identified species are a fraction of the total number that exist, and as habitat is destroyed by clear-cut logging, burning, and flooding, species we don’t even know about are being lost.
Among animals, the most recent number of known vertebrate species is:
mammals—5,487
birds—9,990
reptiles—8,734
amphibians—6,515
fish—31,153
In contrast, the number of identified insect species is more than a million.3
Scouring the literature, Wilson calculated that about 1.5 million species have actually been identified—that is, given a name. Being named, however, merely means that someone in a lab has classified or “keyed out” the species in the taxonomic system by following along a series of branches in traits such as kinds of organs, colour, and shape until distinct characteristics of that species have been reached. But that does not indicate that anything is known about that species’ basic biology, like its geographic distribution, its population size, how it interacts with other species, what it eats, how it reproduces, or where it lives. So even though we may have identified close to 2 million species, we know next to nothing about the web of living things on Earth; yet we claim to be able to “manage” forests, air, water, and species like salmon and halibut, grizzlies, wolves, and caribou. It’s absurd.
Of 40,168 known species, scientists in the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimate that extinction threatens one in four mammalian species, one in eight birds, one in three amphibians and conifers, half of all reptiles and insects, and 73 percent of flowering plants. That represents a rate of extinction thought to be a thousand to ten thousand times the normal extinction rate (one species for every million species a year). It would mean that between 2.7 and 270 species disappear every day!
We have entered another major extinction episode, the sixth in the past 439 million years. The first five involved the sudden (in a geological sense) loss of 50 to 95 percent of all species in the fossil record, including the last episode, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared. The current extinction wave differs from the others in that human beings are causing it, not geology—through habitat destruction or degradation, agriculture, overexploitation, and the introduction of invasive species. Species diversity has recovered after past spasms of species loss, but recovery takes about 10 million years. We think of dinosaurs as losers because they suddenly went extinct, but they flourished for more than 150 million years before disappearing. We’ve been around as a species for only 150,000 years!
In October 2014, the World Wildlife Fund released the 2014 Living Planet Report, which concludes that between 1970 and 2010, 52 percent of animals among known vertebrate species had disappeared.4 This is a catastrophic decline in Earth’s richness and tears holes in the web of diversity that keeps the planet habitable for animals like us. Our concern is no longer just about protecting the charismatic or cute and cuddly animals and trees. Although large animals like rhinos, tigers, whales, and pandas are endangered, it is the loss of the collective role that the disappearing plants and animals play within the biosphere that is of greatest concern. Their loss threatens survival of animals at the top of the food chain—animals like us.
What we do or do not do in the coming years to address issues of climate change, habitat destruction and species extinction, overexploitation of resources, toxic pollution, invasive species, and ocean degradation will have little impact on the lives of elders like me, who are in our last years. But what is or is not done will reverberate through your entire lives. You have everything at stake, yet little power to affect decisions being made at the political and corporate levels.
IT’S IMPERATIVE THAT we recognize how much the world has been altered in a short time. When I was born, in 1936, the world held about 2.2 billion people, already a huge number for any species; but within my lifetime, that number has more than tripled. Every addition to the human population has to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, and that increases the amount of air, water, and land needed by our species (our ecological footprint), and it reverberates through the rest of nature. That’s what Paul Ehrlich warned about in 1968, when the world population was half what it is now.
We were living in Leamington, close to the American border, when I was about eleven and Dad took us to visit the Detroit Zoo. It had a huge impact on me. I was dumbstruck by the beauty and diversity of animals on display, and that inspired me to want to become a scientist to study them.
Fifty years later, in the 1990s, when she was about ten or eleven, I took Severn to the Toronto Zoo. Remembering my experience at the Detroit Zoo, I expected her to show the excitement and joy that I had felt when I was a child. How the world has changed! At each exhibit, Severn’s first question was “Are there many of these left, Daddy?” As a child, she was already aware of extinction, and it was uppermost in her child’s mind.
When I was a boy, Dad and I often drove through the countryside looking for new places to fish, and the car windshield would be spattered with insects. We’d have to stop every so often and wipe the window clean. Insects were abundant, and I took up a hobby of collecting them and pinning them in display boxes. Mom made me a net from cheesecloth, and Dad made a wire hoop to string the net onto and then secured it to a handle. I now had an insect net. Most people love the colour and splendour of butterflies, but I found beetles far more interesting because they had such an amazing profusion of sizes and shapes. This was underscored by a comment by one of the great geneticists and evolutionary biologists, Britain’s J.B.S. Haldane. He was a devout atheist who is said to have remarked, “The Creator, if He exists, has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
Not surprisingly, my children—your parents—share a passion for catching and eating fish and looking at insects. As they were growing up, I bought nets, killing bottles, pins, and display cases, but to my disappointment, the children refused to kill any insects for display. My children were happy to catch them, observe them in bottles, even film them, but insisted on releasing them back where we found them. And so that’s been the attitude each of you has held too.
Many young people today have such a different attitude to nature than mine was because they are aware of the changes to the planet. When Severn was about nine, I took her with me to northern British Columbia, near Alaska, to film the delta of the K’tsim-a-deen Valley, where grizzly bears came to feed in the spring. Environmentalists wanted to protect the area against logging and development. We went to the valley in a large sailboat and after we had finished filming headed back to Prince Rupert. Sev was down in the cabin of the boat when I spotted a killer whale. “Sev, come up quick! There’s a killer whale!” I yelled. She rushed up in time to see the animal close to the boat, and then it dove. We anxiously scanned the horizon waiting for it to come back up for air. The minutes ticked by, and then it emerged again. “There it is!” I shouted, pointing with excitement. When I didn’t hear Severn responding excitedly, I looked down to find her weeping. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?” I asked. “Look how far it went on one breath of air!” she wailed. “And they’re kept in such small pools at the aquarium!” She was a child, yet she was aware of how wrong it was to confine such a magnificent animal that had evolved to roam over vast distances.
When we lived in Leamington in the 1940s, there was a massive hatch of mayflies off the waters of Lake Erie every spring. I thought of them as “flying gonads” because as adults, their sole goal was to find a partner, mate, lay eggs, and die. There were so many mayflies that they would coat houses so that you couldn’t see inside; they would cover highways, causing cars to skid and crash; and their carcasses would pile
up on beaches a metre thick as fish gorged on the flies laying their eggs on the water. But as farmers increased their use of pesticides, these toxic compounds were carried into the lakes as runoff from the fields. In only a few years, the mayfly population had plummeted to almost nothing. The ecological impact of the loss of that biomass must have been huge as birds, fish, frogs, and bats all lost a major source of food.
Years later, I was on the train coming back home from my first year of college in New England, and as we travelled high above the Niagara River, I looked down the gorge and could see people with rods casting and pulling in twisting silvery fish with every cast. When I got home to London, I told Dad about it, and we drove to the river the next day to find that silver bass were migrating up the river to spawn. It was an incredible biomass, a huge population of fish, and we caught many that day. But within a few years, pesticide runoff from farmers’ fields and pollution from chemical dumps like the Love Canal had poisoned the waters and severely reduced the number of silver bass—another casualty of our thoughtless use of the environment as a toxic dump.
It’s important to remember the world as it was in the childhood of elders so that we have reference points against which to compare today’s world. uBc’s world-renowned fish biologist Daniel Pauly—with whom Sarika got her master’s degree—coined the phrase “shifting base-lines” to describe the phenomenon that over time, in the absence of input from elders, people forget what once was and readily accept the current or recent state of the world as if it’s the way it always was. And as we spend less and less time outside, we become less aware of change and don’t care if things do change.
The complexity and abundance of life in the world are being diminished by human demands. The human population has exploded, and the United Nations predicts that it will total 10 billion by 2050. That means, as of this writing, an additional 3 billion mouths to feed and bodies to clothe and shelter, and a huge addition to our ecological footprint.