I was working full-time at the Sun when I got the call that Canadian environmentalist DAVID SUZUKI would be coming in for a chat with whoever wanted to listen. I nearly shit my load! He's one of my heroes and besides on TV, I'd seen him in the flesh twice before, crossing the street left to right in front of my aunt's car in Toronto when I was a kid, then crossing right to left in front of my friend's car a few years later in Vancouver. This Suzuki was everywhere, man ...

It's pretty long, but worth a read I hope.

FISH: You said in the new show (The Sacred Balance, airing on CBC) that you’ve shifted from being a hungry scientist looking at little bugs for secrets in the ‘60s to wanting to find more of a balance. Can you explain the personal shift you’ve gone through?
SUZUKI: You know the basis of modern science is what’s called reductionism. Ever since Newton’s time, we’ve regarded the universe as kind of a giant machine. So science could focus on a part of nature, try to bring it into the lab and control everything impinging on it, measure everything about it and discover a great deal about that piece of nature. The idea was if it’s a giant machine then eventually when you understand the pieces you’ll be able to fit it all together and explain the universe. Now physicists learned very quickly in the 20th century that doesn’t work.
But biologists and doctors continue to run on this idea, so you have lung specialists, brain specialists, and as a geneticist I was focused in on genes. And I didn’t give a shit whether it was a fruit fly or a fish or a mouse. I was interested in how genes worked.
And of course, that’s been very, very successful. You know, in physics they split the atom, in genetics we got to the human genome. For me the big change - actually, it happened in Edmonton. Edmonton was where everything happened.
I got my first grown-up job in Edmonton in ‘62. And that’s when I was an assistant professor in genetics here at the university. I started my television career here because they had a university program on a local channel, and in ‘62 a woman named Rachel Carson published Silent Spring.
And what she said in her book was about pesticides. You spray chemicals to kill a pest, but in nature, everything’s connected. So you spray to kill the bug but it ends up rippling through the chain of life and you affect fish and birds and people. And for me that was just a HUGE revelation that we can’t just stay focused on our tiny little bit of nature and think that we understand what’s going to happen out in the real world. Because by the very act of separating it and isolating it, you lose sight of the context, the rhythms in which it all belongs.
So that was the first insight I had: that there was a terrible weakness in science. Sure, you could look and diddle in that bit of nature. But to think that we had any idea what was going to happen in the real world was an illusion. That really began my whole process of getting more and more involved till to me the high spot of my life was being invited by the Ecological Society of America, and asked to give a speech at their annual meeting. Jesus Christ, you guys, I am the ultimate reductionist -- I’m thrilled! That’s my evolution.
FISH: Your show is pretty personal, biographical, you’re bringing in your grandson ...
SUZUKI: I wanted him in there because we tend to forget that what we’re doing now has enormous repercussions for future generations. Basically, my life is at its end. I’ve reached a point where it doesn’t really matter what goes on now. But whether it’s Kyoto or what, has got EVERYTHING to do with what my grandson is going to grow up in.
FISH: George Bush outright refused to back Kyoto, claiming no one else was going to follow the rules, so why should he? It’s so short-sighted it’s crazy, do you think it’s going to take a major environmental disaster to snap people out of it?
SUZUKI: We are a very reactive species. We’re great when you hit the wall, try to pick up the pieces, but it runs in a way counter to what our species history has been. We are the only species that has a sense of future. All other creatures, they just go and do their thing, we have abstracted. There is no such thing as a future. It’s an invention of the human mind. Because we’ve invented a future, we have, as no other species has, choice. We knew long ago, if I go this way there are some yummy things to eat. But if I go that way there are saber-tooth tigers and it’s dangerous. We can affect the future by deliberately choosing what we do now. That was the key to our survival. So today you get to the point where we have all the amplified brain power of computers and scientists and engineers and telecommunications and we no longer seem able to do what our ancestors did. That’s one of the great ironies is that we have the capacity of seeing what the impact is and we can’t act any more.
Now, George Bush, at least he doesn’t deny global warming. He admits it’s there, he doesn’t believe it’s in America’s interests to do anything about it. And yet the European Union has ratified and they say Kyoto is just the beginning of the whole process. So the idea that in order to compete globally, you can’t afford Kyoto is BULLSHIT! The EU has already done it.
FISH: Prime Minister Chretien daringly backed Kyoto, and the open line shows went bananas out here. There are now calls for separating from Canada, all this talk of losing money, jobs! How do you explain to somebody who thinks they’re going to lose their job that the intangible future is more important.
SUZUKI: The first thing is it’s simply not true that there are going to be all these jobs lost. The number that the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association came up with was 450,000 jobs over ten years. That’s 45,000 jobs a year.
In one year alone last year, Canada says it created more than 400,000 jobs. OK? So then everyone’s freaked out about 450,000 jobs. Now, the Canadian Manufacturers admitted weeks later, ‘Well, we did the worst-case scenario. We didn’t say, well, what happens if we don’t do this, what is the cost of that?’ They didn’t calculate in any of the jobs that are created by doing retrofitting and energy efficiency, wind power and so on. All they did was focus in one tiny bit and say, what would happen in the oil industry? And they didn’t take into account the cost of air pollution on health -- and we’re going to save more than a billion dollars a year if we meet Kyoto, just in health.
This is a number, 450,000, that is so grotesquely skewed that it’s meaningless. Now my foundation chartered a company to do an analysis and they came out with 55,000 created -- NET. Let’s put it into perspective. At the time these jobs -- and there will be jobs lost, there’s no doubt about that -- the government is going to be creating a far larger number. Nobody is going to expect Alberta to carry the brunt of the cost. One of things that is going to have to be done is to start charging the consumer more for gasoline. We’ve got to start having people look in the mirror and start saying, ‘What kind of a car am I driving?’ I meet people who say, ‘I care passionately about the environment,’ and then jump into their SUV. And I just run over, I say, ‘Wait a minute now, haven’t you put it together?’ One of things people are going to have to do is start paying more for gas.
And some of that extra price is going to have to go to Alberta to compensate for what their hits are.
FISH: So, um, how do you get around?
SUZUKI: Well, I try to do my bike. We only live two blocks away from work. Unfortunately, it’s straight up a hill. And I hate arriving all sweaty. But I bought the first gas-electric hybrid sold in Canada. Unfortunately, the sales have just been terrible. And the reason is, it’s 30,000 bucks for a small car. We’ve been saying for years, the government should put a huge surtax on SUVs, $10,000, and it should be revenue neutral. And they should take that money as a rebate on those who get Echos or Honda Civics or whatever.
FISH: Why don’t we have a solar powered car yet?
SUZUKI: That’s one of those DUHHH questions a kid asks, it’s so obvious! That’s the right question! We’ve put all this effort into getting people to the moon, finding out the human genome. We put diddly into finding ways of living in balance. If we put the effort we put into bombing Afghanistan, if we put that money into building a solar car, for Christ’s sake, don’t tell me we can’t do it! It’s a matter of what your priorities are.
I don’t believe a business community that built the Internet, that’s built these incredible computers, cannot come up with some incredible technology.
FISH: It’s all about refitting costs, taking the bullet now. And cynical or not, you have a president whose friends and family are all making a living off the oil industry. There’s no conspiracy to those facts, they’re on the surface.
SUZUKI: Of course. The thing that had become very stunning to me is when I got into the environmental movement in ‘62, after Rachel Carson brought out her book, the first thing when she said pesticides were causing effects in fish and birds, the first thing the chemical industry did was to say, ‘Bullshit. It’s not true.’ Then they trotted out their scientists who were all working for them to say it’s not true. Then they got their PR people to say Rachel Carson doesn’t know what she’s talking about to discredit her. And then when it was clear it was true they started to delay, delay, delay, delay, delay.
Does that sound like a familiar pattern? When the tobacco industry first got accused, they first said, ‘Bullshit, it’s not true.’ They trotted out their doctors, they trotted out their PR people, and to this very day they have not admitted that smoking causes cancer!
And I remember doing a show on airbags. For ten years Ralph Nader showed them evidence it would save them thousands of lives. They said, ‘No way! Airbags are dangerous! They’ll explode in people’s faces! It’s going to cost too much, the industry will go belly up!’ Now they boast about their airbags.
Who do we hear from in the oil industry? Always the experts, who are paid for by the industry. It’s automatic: we’ve got the experts, it’s not true, you’re full of shit. And it’s going to cost too much and the economy’s going to collapse.
Before the American Civil War, plantation owners in the South said there’s no way we can give up slavery, it’ll ruin the economy. Some things should be done because they’re RIGHT.
FISH: It seems like the government is involved in the same tactics.
SUZUKI: It’s clear it costs money now to run for election. And where is most of that money coming from? And once you take that money to run that election, you’re in the pocket of that industry. Industry has an immediate access to those people that are elected. Clearly what we’ve got in Alberta is a situation that I think is extremely unhealthy. You’re a one industry province. And we’ve learned in British Columbia that communities that depend on Alcan, if you have a town that’s completely dependent on your pulp mill or your forest company or your mining company, you’re in deep shit! Because when that industry encounters trouble, the whole community then goes belly up.
This province is dependent on oil in a very unhealthy way. And Mr. Klein, his success is dependent on how well the industry is doing, so he hasn’t even put together that fact that maybe global warming, which he admits is happening, maybe it’s also got to do with drought. Maybe it’s also got to do with forest fires. And if he did that, then all of this cost of doing something against Kyoto would be very different.
These people in the oil industry only know a few things, it seems. There’s oil in the ground, you dig it out, you pump it out and then you sell it. But the oil community is beginning to break apart. You’ve got Shell now investing hundreds of millions of dollars in solar energy. The most progressive one is BP, which used to be British Petroleum, now it’s Beyond Petroleum. They’re saying, we’re an energy company, not an oil company.
The classic example is right here in Alberta. You ever hear of a guy named Jack Gallagher, the great oil guy? His son Fred was a vice-president of AMOCO, rising star, everybody expected him to head AMOCO in a few years. I talked to him about this, he said, ‘I want to be in a business that’s growing and that’s got a future. And I realized that the oil industry is a dying industry. And I don’t want to invest my life in that.’ So he set up a company and he is the biggest wind-power guy in Canada. And Jack, before he died, was very proud of Fred.
The oil industry -- the writing is on the wall.
But the private sector, has an automatic, immediate response, which is always the same. First they say, ‘Bullshit.’ Then they say, ‘We’ve got proof.’ Then they say, ‘You’re full of shit and you’ve got no credibility.’ Then they just fight, all the way along the line. I don’t know why the media pay attention to these guys! It’s COMPLETELY predictable. So why doesn’t one industry, for the first time, say, ‘Oh -- Jesus Christ, what if it’s true? If it’s true, that’s terrible. We better do what we can!’
If they said that, everybody would jump on the bandwagon and say, ‘Great, let’s work on this together.’ But it’s always the same thing.
FISH: So where do you muster the optimism?
SUZUKI: I wrote a book last called Good News for a Change. One chapter is devoted to global warming, there’s just example after example after example of things that can be done. Kyoto is a piece of cake. Toronto, Regina, are cities trying to reduce their Greenhouse gas emissions. And they’re making millions of dollars doing it. Companies are reducing their energy bills hugely, and they’re making money doing it. So, what’s the problem here? I don’t get it.
FISH: I was talking to a musician in the states who said one of the things he noticed is that at least up here you can hear about culpability over environmental issues on TV, whereas even on public TV down there, no one’s talking about it. Especially right now. Because people are afraid to rock the boat, to be seen as anti-business, which can get called anti-American pretty quickly. It’s nuts.
SUZUKI: It’s nuts. If you look at the cost that Afghanistan already has been, and now what Iraq’s going to cost them ... And it’s all about oil! It’s all about securing their supplies in the Middle East! If they were much more energy independent, they wouldn’t have to do that, you know? So, you’re right, it’s crazy.
But having said that, Bush doesn’t deny global warming, he thinks reacting now will impede the American economy. But in the states, on a per capita basis, they spend much more on wind and solar power development than we do. So Canada is really being left behind. We’d better pull up our socks and get on with it.
FISH: Well, we’ve had a good chat, I think. Thank you so much. Can I get a photo with you, sorry to be such a fan.
SUZUKI: Oh, I love it! Just promise me you’ll make me look exactly like Paul Newman.

- 2002.10.02

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