by David Suzuki
That’s why I decided to take one last stab at bringing about change by g etting back onto a bus. People at the Foundation developed a program to make sure that the excitement we generated around the idea would carry on after the bus had gone by. They did this using the work of Harvard’s Marshall Ganz, who said that social movements could be created based on three factors: motivation, knowledge, and learning.
The idea is that people go into a community and recruit a highly motivated person who believes in the cause, is well informed, and is willing to work flat out to raise money, recruit support, and so on. That person finds six other people who are also highly motivated and willing to commit their time. The first person is responsible for those six, who report to him or her. Each of those six recruits six more and is responsible for them. Every person involved is only responsible for shepherding six people. This technique has proved to be very powerful; U.S. president Barack Obama used it to raise support and huge amounts of money and, as we know, was successfully elected twice.
In his last campaign, one of the critical states Obama had to win was Florida. Michiah Prull, an American who had come to the University of British Columbia for his education, was hired to work for the Foundation but was then recruited by the Obama team to go to Florida to head the outreach campaign there. The campaign was highly successful, and he was thinking of moving to Washington, DC, after Obama won again, but Peter Robinson, the CEO of the David Suzuki Foundation, offered him a position, which he accepted. At twenty-five, Michiah, already a seasoned campaigner, headed up the Blue Dot Tour.
The basic idea of the tour was to ignite a movement to eventually get a constitutional amendment in which the right to a healthy environment was guaranteed by Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The strategy was to focus first on getting local municipalities to adopt a declaration of a right to a healthy environment and local legislation to ensure it. As this was building, we would try to get support and eventually legislation at the provincial level. To make a change in the constitution, Canadian law requires support of seven provinces that include at least 50 percent of the nation’s population, so provinces that support an effort will themselves champion other provinces to work for the federal change in the constitution.
It is a big idea that has only been successful once in the past, but I loved the approach as it was developed by the Foundation. Will we succeed? I have no idea, but I wouldn’t have bothered if I didn’t think it could be done. Regardless, the discussion that will ensue will be a huge opportunity to ask what really matters to us as a country. Once we ask what a healthy environment would mean, we have to say clean air; clean water; clean soil and food; photosynthesis, which provides all the energy in our bodies; and biodiversity, which is the source of these critical elements.
The Blue Dot team also began to recruit performers to participate at our events so that we could appeal to a wider audience than just committed enviros. Earlier in the year I had accompanied Neil Young on the Honour the Treaties tour, which championed the First Nations of Fort Chipe-wyan, who were suffering from the downstream effects of the Alberta tar sands. Neil had packed houses for his performances and raised a million and a half for the Fort Chipewyan First Nations. I got to see firsthand how celebrity brings media, huge adoring crowds, and, especially in Alberta, apoplectic criticism. Some of the questions were “You’re just a musician—what do you know about the issues?” “You’re riding around in a big polluting bus. Aren’t you a hypocrite?” “Is it true that you fly around in private jets?” Watching Neil let the criticisms roll off his back was a great learning experience for me. His most pointed answer was “I’m not saying what should happen to the tar sands. I’m just asking Canada to live up to the promises that were made in the treaties with the First Nations.”
When Neil agreed to play for the Blue Dot Tour, we jumped with joy, first, because he’s a terrific performer, and second, because we knew that he would draw not only a large crowd but other performers as well. From that point on, as we let it be known he was coming, excitement began to build. Jim Cuddy, lead singer of the popular Canadian band Blue Rodeo, had indicated he wanted to support us even before Neil had agreed. Fred Penner, the much-loved children’s singer, offered to perform, as did Bruce Cockburn, Feist, Barenaked Ladies, the folk-rock band Whitehorse, Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, the legendary Québécois singer Gilles Vigneault, and many more. Wow, what a lineup!
We wanted to emphasize that this tour wasn’t about an “environmental” issue but about how we will live together on this planet. Issues of social justice, hunger and poverty, gender equity, security, genocide, war, and terror are all relevant to a sustainable future. So we were delighted when writers Silver Donald Cameron and Margaret Atwood, human rights activist Stephen Lewis, spoken-word poet Shane Koyczan, artist Robert Bateman, doctor and under-water expert Joe MacInnis, First Nations leader Ovide Mercredi, and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet agreed to take part.
Ovide, a past head of the Assembly of First Nations, jumped on board to support us because, as he said, what the Blue Dot Tour was aiming for was a central part of what most First Nations sought in negotiations for their treaty rights. Many had been promised their traditional practices such as trapping, hunting, and fishing for “as long as the wind blows, the rivers flow, and the grass grows.”
I wrote to First Nations leaders in every community we would visit on the tour, explaining our goals and asking to meet with them so that I could thank them for what all indigenous people had taught me. That’s why we made a long trip to Miawpukek (Conne River), a Mi’kmaq community in Newfoundland, on the first leg of our tour. Along the way, we met with Mohawks in Quebec, Six Nations peoples in Ontario, and Cree on the prairies. We ended on the Musqueam Reserve in the city of Vancouver. As we travelled, we collected vials of water in each community so that we could combine them all and pour the water into the Fraser River as a ritual.
We were suggesting adoption of a Declaration for a Healthy Environment that, alongside grand words about the importance of air, water, soil, and biodiversity for our survival and well-being, contained a commitment to pass legislation protecting those elements within two years.
It was our hope that perhaps five or six months after the tour ended, we might get the first community to adopt the Declaration. But DSFer Sophika Kostyniuk had done the preparatory work well, and as our tour began in Newfoundland, we heard that a subcommittee of the city council of Richmond had considered the declaration and unanimously agreed to submit it to the full council.
Then, two weeks after our tour had begun, we heard that Sophika and a teenager had made statements supporting the Declaration. The boy, Gavin Li, had been born in China and gave a moving talk about how he had never experienced air so clear you could see the stars, or water so clean it could be drunk without worry, until he came to Canada. He urged that these things be recognized and protected. People were moved to tears, and the council passed the Declaration unanimously. Our tour wasn’t half over and we already had a positive result. And more followed. I met Denis Coderre, newly elected mayor of Montreal, and urged him to make Montreal the first large city to pass it, and he agreed to try. He succeeded in getting it passed, but not before Vancouver did.
Most inspirational was a story of a small town (population 5,500) called The Pas, in northern Manitoba. A grade 6 teacher spotted the Blue Dot website and watched the video we had prepared for the tour. She was intrigued and showed it to her students, who called the mayor to come watch the video. He came to the class, watched it, and urged the kids to come to a city council meeting and suggest adoption of the declaration. They did and were so persuasive that the council unanimously adopted it, becoming the second municipality to do so. One ten-year-old boy who attended the Blue Dot event in Victoria was so inspired that he wrote to all of the city’s councillors urging them to adopt the declaration, which they did unanimously. As of March 3, 2015, twenty-five municipal councils have adopted it, including Yellowknife, a resource-depe
ndent northern city.
The Blue Dot Tour ended at the Musqueam Reserve on November 10, 2014. By the end of that year, more than 11,500 people, representing more than half of Canada’s municipalities, had registered to become spokespeople in their communities for the right to a healthy environment. This is what a grassroots movement should be: action from the bottom up. As I say to people, “We elect people to serve us; they are our servants, and it’s up to us to tell them what we want them to do.”
The challenge is still great. We have to keep people excited and engaged as we press for more and more communities to come on board, and as they do, we will begin to discuss the need for provincial adoption of the declaration. Even if the declaration does flounder, the discussion of the idea is important. Too often, environmental issues are constrained by the need to ensure that their cost is not too much for the economy to support. But the demand to keep the economy growing is itself unsustainable, and a healthy environment, which we depend on for our lives, and indeed for all of life, should take precedence over economic and political considerations.
Tamo, you already are deeply involved in grassroots activity, so you know very well what the challenges are in mobilizing support at that level, but you also know how individually empowering it can be. It was so great that you happened to be in Prince George, in northern British Columbia, when we came through and you could contribute your personal experiences and priorities. You were awesome, and now your sister, Midori, is part of your activity. Soon, I know, you will be joined by your cousins; after all, Ganhi is already five! And all of you have far more at stake in these issues than old guys like me. This is about the kind of world you will grow up in, and I believe at the grassroots level, people know this and that’s why the Blue Dot Tour was so successful.
{twelve}
AGING AND DEATH
MY DARLINGS,
I hope this isn’t too depressing, but I think it is important to talk to you about my getting older and dying.
When Severn was about three, Nana found her stomp-ing on ants and then looking up to ask, “Dead?” As she grappled with the notion of death, she turned to her mom and asked, “Am I going to die too?” It was that horrible moment every parent dreads, when a child first becomes aware of her own mortality. When Nana answered, “Yes, darling, we will all die, but that’s way ahead in the future,” Severn wailed inconsolably. We wished we could have carried that painful burden for her.
Self-awareness—the recognition of our individuality and our separateness from our mother—is the great bless-ing and curse of our species. Although we revel in who we are, the awareness that our individual existence is fleeting and that we will disappear forever has haunted humanity since the dawn of consciousness. Why are we here when it is so soon over? Where did we come from, and where do we go? These are the big questions. Did we each emerge simply because our atoms were in the proper configuration? Are we each just a lump of matter that springs to life because it is organized properly, or is there something more? I’m afraid these are questions I’m not qualified to answer.
Throughout time, humans have struggled with the terror and mystery of death and have carried out incredible acts to try to live at least in memory beyond death. Human lives have been sacrificed; great monuments, such as the pyramids, constructed; works of art, music, and literature created; and religions formed—all to provide a comforting sense that something greater cares for us and may enable us to live past our mortal lives. As you know, I am an atheist. I have not studied religion extensively or been tempted by religion’s promises, the most ludicrous of which is martyrs being awarded seventy-two virgins in a paradise after death. And, really, eternity is a helluva long time; seventy-two will not go very far. Is virginity even one of the great sought-after goals to die for? Actually, when I was young, making love for eternity might have had some appeal, but now I think it would pale pretty quickly.
When the great Haida artist Bill Reid died, people gathered around to remember him, and someone said, “Oh, Bill is looking down on us and will be so happy listening to us.” Your nana’s reaction was “If Bill really is out there, he’ll have the whole universe to explore, and I doubt whether he’d be very interested in what we are saying about him.”
I don’t mean to be disrespectful of religions; most provide excellent guidelines for human behaviour, and I applaud that. But the incredible tales that are spun to pull people in have to be looked at with some humour and perspective. Life—all life, not just ours—is a miracle. I wrote an entire book about one tree to illustrate how miraculous that one life is. Some people feel diminished to think that we are simply expressions of DNA’S determination to perpetuate itself, but I am blown away by the thought. Death is a critical part of dna’s search for immortality, because without death, there can be no change, no evolution, and evolution is necessary to adapt to the constantly changing conditions of Earth. Life has flourished through tremendous geophysical change because it has been able to change and adapt to new conditions. It has been resilient because of enormous biological diversity, which allows those best suited to new conditions to thrive over time. Without death to provide space for other, better-adapted forms to take over, life would have been locked into a losing condition. This applies both within and between species. Extinction—the disappearance of species over time—is as critical for life to evolve as death, and 99.9999 percent of all species since life began are extinct.
But knowing the role that death and extinction play in life’s survival over the ages doesn’t offer me much comfort for my own insignificant and short-lived existence. I find it a miracle that you and I have each come into existence and have grown up knowing joy and pain and happiness and grief and hope and fear and excitement. It’s been amazing. I have never dwelled upon the process of dying, though I have watched many loved ones die. Not many ways of dying are pleasant to think about. I suppose one might hope for a very quick death, a painless dying, but I don’t think about it much except to know that we’re all going to go through it and that it will be a very lonely trip.
What I find impossible to grasp is infinity—endless time and space. I get freaked out at the thought of how totally insignificant Earth is in the cosmos. And when I think of how long the universe—our sun, our planet, and life on it—existed before we were each born, of how brief our existence will be, and then of the immensity of not being anywhere forever after, well, I break off thinking about it or I end up screaming with sadness that David Suzuki, this thinking entity, will vanish, leaving no trace except the atoms that made up my body, forever and ever. It doesn’t get any sadder than that.
If accident or infectious disease doesn’t kill us, dying usually involves three interlinked parts: aging, dying proper, and death. Aging is not a disease, however, that can be conquered by drugs, better living, or genetic engineering. It isn’t a defect.
The minute we define something as a “defect” or a “breakdown of systems,” it’s the great conceit of “experts” that they can defeat it. The war metaphor serves such experts well, but it is tragic because it is a battle against our own nature. I have heard doctors refer to the “disease of aging,” so immediately one’s impulse is to demand that it be cured.
A similar attitude can be seen in the medical treatment of very short people. There is a class of extremely short people called dwarfs, whose stature reflects the lack of or abnormally low levels of a hormone called human growth hormone, or HGH. This condition had been treated with hgh extracted from the pituitary glands of cadavers, and as you can imagine, hgh in this form has been in limited supply and is very expensive. Biotechnology has enabled the production of hgh by microorganisms, however, and the molecule can be harvested in such huge quantities that much more hgh is available than there are dwarfs to treat. As a result, hgh has been marketed to athletes, who use it to enhance their performance, even though it is unknown how effective hgh is or what it does. In addition, a new class of potential recipients has been identified: completely n
ormal people who happen to be on the short end of a normal distribution curve. These people are now labelled as having idiopathic (meaning the cause is unknown) short stature, a name that sounds like a scientifically validated defect, and voilà, there is a whole new group of people to treat with the drug. Just as short people within the range of normal height are considered to have a defect, so aging is looked on as a disease to be treated.
Let me reiterate: Aging is not a disease or a defect. It is a normal process, and to be frank, thank god for aging. If I were just as vigorous as I was thirty or forty years ago, the thought of death would have been far more horrifying than it is now, when I’m feeling the impact of aging. I am grateful that advances have been made in the treatment of organs that tend to break down as one ages—Great-Grand-dad Harry was treated for heart disease for over thirty years and had a very good quality of life, and kidney trans-plants have been a big success, too—but the final impact of a gradual diminishing of function of parts of the body cannot be stopped by such heroic intervention.
What is considered old and even what looks old can vary according to culture and conditions. I was fifty-two years old in 1988 when I was filming in the Amazon and met Paulinho Paiakan, a chief of the Kaiapo people who was leading a fight against the proposal to build a dam at Altamira that would have flooded Kaiapo land. He introduced me to his father, who was older than I was but still had black hair. After he told me how old he was, I asked him how old he thought I was. He looked at me with my grey hair and replied in Kaiapo, “Seventy?” I was stunned until I learned that white hair is rare in his tribe, so it is assumed that anyone with white or greying hair must be really old.