daniel j. lavigne

On last night's NOW program there was an interview that I found very
interesting. It
gave me new insight into "earth, air, fire, and water" and some other things
as well.
I hope some of you find it as interesting as I did.

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_suzuki.html

MOYERS: We get so many reports of what we're doing to our air, our soil and our
water. But I ask you as a scientist, is the diagnosis lethal?

SUZUKI: I don't think anyone can say at what point it will be lethal to us as
a species.
I like to say that in Canada not long ago, Cape Brettan coalminers took
canaries in the
coal mine. When the canary keeled over, they didn't say, "Hey, Jack, come on over
here. This bird just fell over. What do you think? Do you think it's…"

They hauled their backsides outta there as fast as they could go. Birds are, especially
canaries are super sensitive to hydrogen sulfide, and sour gas. So, they give
you an
early warning.

Well, canaries have been falling all around the planet for decades now. Plants and
animals that no longer are able to survive in the plan… in the conditions that we've
created. And what have we done? We've ignored this. We've always said, "Oh, well,
there's plenty more where that came from."

There aren't plenty more where that came from. And now our own children have
become the canaries. One out of five children in Canada will now have asthma. When
you and I were boys, asthma was a rare disease.

MOYERS: And that's as recent as the 1930's, right?

SUZUKI: Exactly. Exactly. So, our own children are now telling us we're doing something
fundamentally wrong.

And all you have to do is every time you have a smog alert, go down to the emergency
room in the hospital, and sit there for a day. You will see that room, those emergency
rooms jammed with people in deep respiratory distress.

Well, you don't have to be a genius to say, "Maybe it's got something to do
with what
we're taking into our lungs." And the point of the sacred balance that I did
was to say,
"Look, people, we can't continue to act as if air is something out there. And
we are
here. And we manage our interaction with the air."

"We are the air." At our ages, I reckon we've taken about 350 million breathes.
We've taken one to four liters of air, breathed it deep into our bodies, and
fused to the
air, and filtered whatever was in that air into our bodies. The idea that we
use air as a
toxic dump, and somehow it goes away and doesn't affect us is absurd.

MOYERS: Or water.

SUZUKI: Or water. We are over 60 percent water by weight. We're just a big ball
of… blob of water, with enough organic thickener added so we don't dribble
away on
the floor.

MOYERS: That is interesting. You're changing the metaphor. You're saying that air,
water, soil, are not outside of us. They are us.

SUZUKI: We are made of those things. And this isn't rocket science. This is ancient,
ancient understanding.

I apologize to my aboriginal friends when I talk about this. Because I am a
Johnny-come-lately. They all look at me, and go, "Where the heck have you
been? It's
taken you a long time to figure this out."

MOYERS: I can hear people in the audience saying, "Oh, no, here we go again.
Back to
that kind of romantic idea of human beings living in the Garden of Eden, in an innocence
that." You know, it just doesn't apply…

SUZUKI: Uh-huh.

MOYERS: …in this 21st century world.

SUZUKI: The whole problem with modernity today is we think anything new is good.
Anything that's old is bad. You know? So, even old timers like us gotta get
those old guys
out of the way, so the young, hot-shots can come in there.

MOYERS: The fact of the matter is you and I are living longer because of modern
technology. I had heart trouble nine years ago. And I've had a productive nine years,
whereas 100 years ago, I would probably have died…

SUZUKI: Absolutely.

MOYERS: …at 60.

SUZUKI: Absolutely.

MOYERS: So, there's a tradeoff…

SUZUKI: Oh, of course. There have been huge, huge advances. I mean, what are we
doing right now? We're sitting in a studio.

And this miracle of modern television, global telecommunications, computers,
we can't
imagine existing without it. I would hope that with all of this so-called technological
progress, there would be enormous benefits. And there have been. But I think it's
important to put it all into perspective.

We have to put it into a perspective of are human beings now so intelligent
that we've
now escaped the physical, biological constraints of the planet? I think most people
today believe that, that we're somehow special, and different. What again, to refer
back to aboriginal people tell us is the Earth is our mother.

Now people immediately think a Mother Earth, you know, that's a metaphor.
That's poetic
way of speaking. They mean it literally. And I, as a scientist have come to understand,
they are absolutely right in the most profound scientific way…

MOYERS: How so?

SUZUKI: …way. We are created out of the most important elements of the planet.

People don't even understand that every bit of our food was once alive. We take
another creature, plant, animal, microorganism, tear it apart in our mouths. And
incorporate those molecules into our own bodies. We are the Earth in the most
profound way.

And we are fire. Because every bit of the energy in our bodies that we need to move,
and grow and reproduce is sunlight. Sunlight captured by plants, converted into
chemical energy that we consume and store in our bodies. So, when they speak about
the Earth as our mother, and the four sacred elements: Earth, air, fire and
water, they
mean it literally. And they are right.

MOYERS: Uh-huh. I was touched in watching the Sacred Balance. The first
program in the
series begins with you and your grandson in an arcade.

[VIDEO EXCERPT]

SUZUKI: And that swamp, because me, was my magical place. I grew up in central
Ontario after the war, as a ****ager. And those are terrible times, at the
best of times,
when your hormones are raging through your body, and you look at the world in a
different way.

But I would go to that swamp. And forget all of my problems. And there was a
world of
enchantment. I was very interested as a boy, in insects. And I could just go
and look in
that pond, and spend the whole day there.

Because there was diversity and wonder and surprise, that will never be
duplicated by
human ingenuity. So, my grandson's world is a very impressive world. You know, when
you see him in that arcade, boy, he just beat me at every game. But when I
took him out
into a swamp, I was so delighted to see that the enchantment was still there.

And when I asked him at the end of the shoot, "Which would you prefer?" he said,
"Grandpa, let's go back to the swamp." So, it's still there.

MOYERS: What does it say to you as a scientist that in the last 200 years, the United
States has lost 50 percent of its swamps, its wetland?

SUZUKI: Well, you see we've regarded nature as an enemy. As an enemy to be made
over into our image. And we continue that process, draining swamps.

I thought that the Everglade National Park was an attempt to suddenly realize
that the
terrible, smelly swamp in fact, was a national treasure. But as you know, the
Army Corp
of Engineers would like to dig c****s right across the neck of Florida, and
drain it. And
change that whole area.

We haven't learned to respect and treasure these wild areas. We consider wild
something that we don't like. We want to make it over so that we understand
it. So,
we're doing the same thing in Canada.

We're draining our potholes, and our wetlands. And we wanna clear cut our
forests, so
that we can make a managed forest, a plantation. And we can control it, and
grow what
we want. That's not a recognition, I think, of where we belong. Or that we
don't know
enough to be able to manage the Earth.

MOYERS: You say in the series, and in the book that we have become a super
species.

SUZUKI: Uh-huh. I don't… never in the four billion years that life has existed
on this
planet has a single species been able to transform the physical, chemical and biological
makeup of the planet as we are doing now. We have become a new kind of force,
what I
call the super species. Now, human beings have never had to worry about what
are all of
the humans on the planet doing to the Earth.

We were a local, tribal species. We aggregated within very small areas. You
know? I've
gone down into Brazil many times in the Amazon. And you go into a native community.
There's plastic everywhere. And you say, "What's wrong with these people?" Well,
they've never lived with material that persists over time. They eat a banana,
they throw
the peel around, it biodegrades in a matter of weeks. That's been the way
we've always
existed.

For the first time in human history we now have to ask what are all six
billion people on
the planet doing? What is the collective impact of humanity? And because we've never
had to do that we're not used to thinking this way. And it's taking time for
us to catch up
and adjust to this new collectivity.

MOYERS: How much weight do you think the earth can bear?

SUZUKI: That's the big question. We brought an aboriginal Kayapo from the Amazon
to Vancouver and I thought, "Boy, is he gonna be impressed with Vancouver. You
know, sparkling city, cars." And he looked out and he said, "All of this has
come from
the earth. How long can the earth keep doing this?"

And I thought, "My God, here's a guy right out of the Brazilian rain forest
and he sees
it immediately." I don't know. Who can tell? We have now become the most numerous
mammal on the planet. I was just in Australia a few months ago and I said
there are
more humans than all of the rabbits on the planet. And they got it right away…

SUZUKI: That is a hell of a lot of human beings. There are more humans than
all of the
rabbits on earth. There are more of us than all the wildebeests, than all the
rats, than all
the mice. We are the most numerous mammal on the planet.

But because we're not like rabbits or rats or mice we have technology, we have a
consumptive appetite, we have a global economy. We are now like no other mammal
that has ever existed. And it's time for us to sit back and start saying,
"Wait a minute.
Now, yes, we've got a very productive economy. But what are we doing in terms of
our grandchildren and their grandchildren?"

I thought that the responsibility of every generation was to receive the earth
from our
ancestors and to pass it on to future generations as we receive that. This
hasn't been
going on for many generations now.

The places that I remember as a child in British Columbia where we went
fishing for
halibut and sturgeon and salmon I can't take my grandchildren to because there
are no
fish left. Well, you know, what are we to assume? That the fish that we
destroyed are
somehow somewhere else? They're not anywhere.

MOYERS: But once you start talking like this immediately you raise in people's
minds the
fears, "oh, well here's another environmentalist, another eco freak who wants
to take
away my comfort and my security. And that if this consumption that you talk about
doesn't expend the economy, well go to hell."

SUZUKI: Well…

MOYERS: You've heard that…

SUZUKI: …there is no question now that our economy is going to be in deep trouble
either way. If it doesn't come… if we don't come to grips with the fact that
we live in a
world that's finite, the biosphere, the zone of air, water and land that life
exists is fixed.
It can't grow anymore than it already is.

This is our home. This is where we live and where we will always live and it's
fixed. And
we have now become a major user of that biosphere. And the economy has now bumped
into all kinds of limits and it can't keep growing indefinitely.

MOYERS: So, how do you assure people that protecting the environment is not ruining
the economy that provides jobs, income, food, clothing, shelter, entertainment,
television? How can you assure people that David Suzuki doesn't want to stop
everything?

SUZUKI: I don't want to stop progress if progress is about improving the
quality of
our lives. If life is all about more stuff, if it's about quantity, if bigger
is better, more is
better then yes, David Suzuki is against that.

MOYERS: As a scientist do you take seriously something you never even thought of
when you first went on television: global warming?

SUZUKI: Absolutely. And the thing that hurts me today is that the scientific community
overwhelmingly has warned us that global warming is real and that humans are a major
contributor to it and that we should do something.

The fact that it is still regarded as a theory that is highly controversial
has been
maintained by the media. The media, aided by huge amounts of funding from
corporations, have actively perpetuated the notion this is still a
controversial scientific
notion.

MOYERS: How do you explain the different views on global warming?

SUZUKI: Oh, it's very easy. In Canada — I can't speak for the United States,
but in
Canada — it costs more and more money now to run for office. And much of that money
comes from the corporate sector.

In British Columbia where I live, the forest sector, which is now responsible
for less than
five cents of every dollar in our economy, perpetuates the notion that it's 50
percent of
the economy of British Columbia.

And that you get far more revenue cutting the trees down than say having eco-tourism
or, you know, hiking and camping and all of the things that are bringing in
far more
revenue. They still fund our politicians, our candidates for political office disproportionately
so they have direct access to the pillars of power.

MOYERS: What do you think when you read that the White House recently ordered our
Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, to leave global warming off it's
report because
it's such a political hot potato?

SUZUKI: It's absolutely scandalous. It's shocking. Increasingly, I am very distressed
when I come and visit the United States. I spent eight years getting my
education in
this country. I love this country.

And Americans have been incredibly generous to me and my family. In November of
2001 just a couple of months after September 11th I was invited to an environmental
meeting in Buffalo, New York. And of course people were still very, very raw after
the Twin Towers.

But someone at the end of this my talk got up and said, "What do Canadians think
about what's going on in the United States?" And I said, "You know, I… when Mr.
Bush was elected the first thing he did was he said no to the nuclear weapons test
ban. He said no to global warming Kyoto Accord. He said no to a world court.
He said
no to land mines banning."

And then when September 11th happened he said the world must join behind us in
fighting terrorism. And I don't think you could have it both ways. You can't
say we're
going our way and to hell with the rest of the world and then say, oops,
sorry, you've
gotta come and now join me. You can't, well, I thought I wasn't gonna get out
of that
room alive. It really shocked me to see the response to that.

And I think, in a time of crisis it's when you need as much dissent, question, criticism
as possible and yet that seems to be a time when there is no toleration for
that. And
that's frightening to me.

MOYERS: You were a kid in Canada when World War II broke out. I didn't know
until I
read about you that Japanese-Canadians were interred like American-Japanese. What
did that experience teach you?

SUZUKI: Well, it was the definitive event of my life. It shaped my persona and
my drive,
my priorities. I, to this day, when I look in the mirror, I cannot… I don't
like to look in the
mirror at myself. I hate…

MOYERS: Why?

SUZUKI: …watching programs with me in it. Because when I look at myself, I see
the slit
eyes. And I see the face that was, for four years during World War II,
depicted as the
enemy. And it was my enemy too. That face was my enemy because I was a Canadian.
And we wanted to go out and kill Japs.

Except that my country had put us into a prison, in my case. My father was
sent away to
a road camp he was working in the mountains for a year. He was separated. And my
mother and father were born and raised in Canada. Never been to Japan. But we were
called enemy aliens… considered enemy aliens. Deprived of everything we had.
Given 70
pounds of luggage each and shipped to camps in the Rocky Mountains.

We landed in a place that is now Valhalla Park. It's this wonderful area. And
as a boy,
there were no teachers in the village for a year and a half. So I was seven
years old.

I was roaming the mountains fishing and meeting bears and wolves. And that was where
I bonded to nature. But in the camp there were all these children whose
parents had
come from Japan who spoke Japanese. And I couldn't speak Japanese and they
beat me
up. And the white kids, of course, had nothing to do with us. So I grew up
with a
tremendous sense of self-hate.

MOYERS: Were you bitter? Were your parents bitter?

SUZUKI: I think if one broods on this and becomes bitter and hateful then
ultimately the
bigots win. You become them.

And what I learned is that democracy sounds great on paper. But democracy is only
as good as the people who try to live up to it.

And you always have to fight to get more of it. It's not perfect. I don't know anything
that's better. But you have to fight all the time to make it better.

When times are good you can guarantee anything. "Yeah, you can go anywhere you
want. You can say anything you want." Times are good. It's only when times are tough
that those rights become most precious.

When society is threatened, that's when you need to be able to speak out
without fear
of intimidation or fear of losing rights or being imprisoned.

And if you can't guarantee those rights when times are tough then what the
hell's the
point of saying that we are a democracy, blah, blah, blah. People go to war
and die for
those rights. And in order to make those rights real in times of crisis,
that's when we
have to speak out and defend them.

MOYERS: Spoken like a grandfather.

SUZUKI: It is.

MOYERS: Those pictures of you and your grandson around the world.

SUZUKI: That's everything, Bill. That's everything. At our age what have we
got except a
legacy for our children and grandchildren. I want to be able to look at them
and say, "I
did the best I could." And that's all anybody can do.

MOYERS: The book, the series is THE SACRED BALANCE. Thank you very much, David
Suzuki.

SUZUKI: Thanks for having me.
***********************************************
Add your voice to reason's call. Join the Tax Refusal.
REFUSE TO PAY TAXES to nations / societies that would
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"Never doubt that a small group of committed individuals can change
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patroness

Wow - enough to keep you awake nights wondering how so much could have gone
so wrong
in such a short period of time. T.G. for scientists like Dr Susuki that may
be able to get through
to enough people who will themselves get through to others .........


William Tamblyn <wmtamblyn@yahoo.com> wrote:

On last night's NOW program there was an interview that I found very
interesting. It
gave me new insight into "earth, air, fire, and water" and some other things
as well.
I hope some of you find it as interesting as I did.

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_suzuki.html

MOYERS: We get so many reports of what we're doing to our air, our soil and
our
water. But I ask you as a scientist, is the diagnosis lethal?

SUZUKI: I don't think anyone can say at what point it will be lethal to us
as
a species.
I like to say that in Canada not long ago, Cape Brettan coalminers took
canaries in the
coal mine. When the canary keeled over, they didn't say, "Hey, Jack, come on
over
here. This bird just fell over. What do you think? Do you think it's."

They hauled their backsides outta there as fast as they could go. Birds are,
especially
canaries are super sensitive to hydrogen sulfide, and sour gas. So, they
give
you an
early warning.

Well, canaries have been falling all around the planet for decades now.
Plants and
animals that no longer are able to survive in the plan. in the conditions
that we've
created. And what have we done? We've ignored this. We've always said, "Oh,
well,
there's plenty more where that came from."

There aren't plenty more where that came from. And now our own children have
become the canaries. One out of five children in Canada will now have
asthma. When
you and I were boys, asthma was a rare disease.

MOYERS: And that's as recent as the 1930's, right?

SUZUKI: Exactly. Exactly. So, our own children are now telling us we're
doing something
fundamentally wrong.

And all you have to do is every time you have a smog alert, go down to the
emergency
room in the hospital, and sit there for a day. You will see that room, those
emergency
rooms jammed with people in deep respiratory distress.

Well, you don't have to be a genius to say, "Maybe it's got something to do
with what
we're taking into our lungs." And the point of the sacred balance that I did
was to say,
"Look, people, we can't continue to act as if air is something out there.
And
we are
here. And we manage our interaction with the air."

"We are the air." At our ages, I reckon we've taken about 350 million
breathes.
We've taken one to four liters of air, breathed it deep into our bodies, and
fused to the
air, and filtered whatever was in that air into our bodies. The idea that we
use air as a
toxic dump, and somehow it goes away and doesn't affect us is absurd.

MOYERS: Or water.

SUZUKI: Or water. We are over 60 percent water by weight. We're just a big
ball
of. blob of water, with enough organic thickener added so we don't dribble
away on
the floor.

MOYERS: That is interesting. You're changing the metaphor. You're saying
that air,
water, soil, are not outside of us. They are us.

SUZUKI: We are made of those things. And this isn't rocket science. This is
ancient,
ancient understanding.

I apologize to my aboriginal friends when I talk about this. Because I am a
Johnny-come-lately. They all look at me, and go, "Where the heck have you
been? It's
taken you a long time to figure this out."

MOYERS: I can hear people in the audience saying, "Oh, no, here we go again.
Back to
that kind of romantic idea of human beings living in the Garden of Eden, in
an innocence
that." You know, it just doesn't apply.

SUZUKI: Uh-huh.

MOYERS: .in this 21st century world.

SUZUKI: The whole problem with modernity today is we think anything new is
good.
Anything that's old is bad. You know? So, even old timers like us gotta get
those old guys
out of the way, so the young, hot-shots can come in there.

MOYERS: The fact of the matter is you and I are living longer because of
modern
technology. I had heart trouble nine years ago. And I've had a productive
nine years,
whereas 100 years ago, I would probably have died.

SUZUKI: Absolutely.

MOYERS: .at 60.

SUZUKI: Absolutely.

MOYERS: So, there's a tradeoff.

SUZUKI: Oh, of course. There have been huge, huge advances. I mean, what are
we
doing right now? We're sitting in a studio.

And this miracle of modern television, global telecommunications, computers,
we can't
imagine existing without it. I would hope that with all of this so-called
technological
progress, there would be enormous benefits. And there have been. But I think
it's
important to put it all into perspective.

We have to put it into a perspective of are human beings now so intelligent
that we've
now escaped the physical, biological constraints of the planet? I think most
people
today believe that, that we're somehow special, and different. What again,
to refer
back to aboriginal people tell us is the Earth is our mother.

Now people immediately think a Mother Earth, you know, that's a metaphor.
That's poetic
way of speaking. They mean it literally. And I, as a scientist have come to
understand,
they are absolutely right in the most profound scientific way.

MOYERS: How so?

SUZUKI: .way. We are created out of the most important elements of the
planet.

People don't even understand that every bit of our food was once alive. We
take
another creature, plant, animal, microorganism, tear it apart in our mouths.
And
incorporate those molecules into our own bodies. We are the Earth in the
most
profound way.

And we are fire. Because every bit of the energy in our bodies that we need
to move,
and grow and reproduce is sunlight. Sunlight captured by plants, converted
into
chemical energy that we consume and store in our bodies. So, when they speak
about
the Earth as our mother, and the four sacred elements: Earth, air, fire and
water, they
mean it literally. And they are right.

MOYERS: Uh-huh. I was touched in watching the Sacred Balance. The first
program in the
series begins with you and your grandson in an arcade.

[VIDEO EXCERPT]

SUZUKI: And that swamp, because me, was my magical place. I grew up in
central
Ontario after the war, as a ****ager. And those are terrible times, at the
best of times,
when your hormones are raging through your body, and you look at the world
in a
different way.

But I would go to that swamp. And forget all of my problems. And there was a
world of
enchantment. I was very interested as a boy, in insects. And I could just go
and look in
that pond, and spend the whole day there.

Because there was diversity and wonder and surprise, that will never be
duplicated by
human ingenuity. So, my grandson's world is a very impressive world. You
know, when
you see him in that arcade, boy, he just beat me at every game. But when I
took him out
into a swamp, I was so delighted to see that the enchantment was still
there.

And when I asked him at the end of the shoot, "Which would you prefer?" he
said,
"Grandpa, let's go back to the swamp." So, it's still there.

MOYERS: What does it say to you as a scientist that in the last 200 years,
the United
States has lost 50 percent of its swamps, its wetland?

SUZUKI: Well, you see we've regarded nature as an enemy. As an enemy to be
made
over into our image. And we continue that process, draining swamps.

I thought that the Everglade National Park was an attempt to suddenly
realize
that the
terrible, smelly swamp in fact, was a national treasure. But as you know,
the
Army Corp
of Engineers would like to dig c****s right across the neck of Florida, and
drain it. And
change that whole area.

We haven't learned to respect and treasure these wild areas. We consider
wild
something that we don't like. We want to make it over so that we understand
it. So,
we're doing the same thing in Canada.

We're draining our potholes, and our wetlands. And we wanna clear cut our
forests, so
that we can make a managed forest, a plantation. And we can control it, and
grow what
we want. That's not a recognition, I think, of where we belong. Or that we
don't know
enough to be able to manage the Earth.

MOYERS: You say in the series, and in the book that we have become a super
species.

SUZUKI: Uh-huh. I don't. never in the four billion years that life has
existed
on this
planet has a single species been able to transform the physical, chemical
and biological
makeup of the planet as we are doing now. We have become a new kind of
force,
what I
call the super species. Now, human beings have never had to worry about what
are all of
the humans on the planet doing to the Earth.

We were a local, tribal species. We aggregated within very small areas. You
know? I've
gone down into Brazil many times in the Amazon. And you go into a native
community.
There's plastic everywhere. And you say, "What's wrong with these people?"
Well,
they've never lived with material that persists over time. They eat a
banana,
they throw
the peel around, it biodegrades in a matter of weeks. That's been the way
we've always
existed.

For the first time in human history we now have to ask what are all six
billion people on
the planet doing? What is the collective impact of humanity? And because
we've never
had to do that we're not used to thinking this way. And it's taking time for
us to catch up
and adjust to this new collectivity.

MOYERS: How much weight do you think the earth can bear?

SUZUKI: That's the big question. We brought an aboriginal Kayapo from the
Amazon
to Vancouver and I thought, "Boy, is he gonna be impressed with Vancouver.
You
know, sparkling city, cars." And he looked out and he said, "All of this has
come from
the earth. How long can the earth keep doing this?"

And I thought, "My God, here's a guy right out of the Brazilian rain forest
and he sees
it immediately." I don't know. Who can tell? We have now become the most
numerous
mammal on the planet. I was just in Australia a few months ago and I said
there are
more humans than all of the rabbits on the planet. And they got it right
away.

SUZUKI: That is a hell of a lot of human beings. There are more humans than
all of the
rabbits on earth. There are more of us than all the wildebeests, than all
the
rats, than all
the mice. We are the most numerous mammal on the planet.

But because we're not like rabbits or rats or mice we have technology, we
have a
consumptive appetite, we have a global economy. We are now like no other
mammal
that has ever existed. And it's time for us to sit back and start saying,
"Wait a minute.
Now, yes, we've got a very productive economy. But what are we doing in
terms of
our grandchildren and their grandchildren?"

I thought that the responsibility of every generation was to receive the
earth
from our
ancestors and to pass it on to future generations as we receive that. This
hasn't been
going on for many generations now.

The places that I remember as a child in British Columbia where we went
fishing for
halibut and sturgeon and salmon I can't take my grandchildren to because
there
are no
fish left. Well, you know, what are we to assume? That the fish that we
destroyed are
somehow somewhere else? They're not anywhere.

MOYERS: But once you start talking like this immediately you raise in
people's
minds the
fears, "oh, well here's another environmentalist, another eco freak who
wants
to take
away my comfort and my security. And that if this consumption that you talk
about
doesn't expend the economy, well go to hell."

SUZUKI: Well.

MOYERS: You've heard that.

SUZUKI: .there is no question now that our economy is going to be in deep
trouble
either way. If it doesn't come. if we don't come to grips with the fact that
we live in a
world that's finite, the biosphere, the zone of air, water and land that
life
exists is fixed.
It can't grow anymore than it already is.

This is our home. This is where we live and where we will always live and
it's
fixed. And
we have now become a major user of that biosphere. And the economy has now
bumped
into all kinds of limits and it can't keep growing indefinitely.

MOYERS: So, how do you assure people that protecting the environment is not
ruining
the economy that provides jobs, income, food, clothing, shelter,
entertainment,
television? How can you assure people that David Suzuki doesn't want to stop
everything?

SUZUKI: I don't want to stop progress if progress is about improving the
quality of
our lives. If life is all about more stuff, if it's about quantity, if
bigger
is better, more is
better then yes, David Suzuki is against that.

MOYERS: As a scientist do you take seriously something you never even
thought of
when you first went on television: global warming?

SUZUKI: Absolutely. And the thing that hurts me today is that the scientific
community
overwhelmingly has warned us that global warming is real and that humans are
a major
contributor to it and that we should do something.

The fact that it is still regarded as a theory that is highly controversial
has been
maintained by the media. The media, aided by huge amounts of funding from
corporations, have actively perpetuated the notion this is still a
controversial scientific
notion.

MOYERS: How do you explain the different views on global warming?

SUZUKI: Oh, it's very easy. In Canada - I can't speak for the United States,
but in
Canada - it costs more and more money now to run for office. And much of
that money
comes from the corporate sector.

In British Columbia where I live, the forest sector, which is now
responsible
for less than
five cents of every dollar in our economy, perpetuates the notion that it's
50
percent of
the economy of British Columbia.

And that you get far more revenue cutting the trees down than say having
eco-tourism
or, you know, hiking and camping and all of the things that are bringing in
far more
revenue. They still fund our politicians, our candidates for political
office disproportionately
so they have direct access to the pillars of power.

MOYERS: What do you think when you read that the White House recently
ordered our
Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, to leave global warming off it's
report because
it's such a political hot potato?

SUZUKI: It's absolutely scandalous. It's shocking. Increasingly, I am very
distressed
when I come and visit the United States. I spent eight years getting my
education in
this country. I love this country.

And Americans have been incredibly generous to me and my family. In November
of
2001 just a couple of months after September 11th I was invited to an
environmental
meeting in Buffalo, New York. And of course people were still very, very raw
after
the Twin Towers.

But someone at the end of this my talk got up and said, "What do Canadians
think
about what's going on in the United States?" And I said, "You know, I. when
Mr.
Bush was elected the first thing he did was he said no to the nuclear
weapons test
ban. He said no to global warming Kyoto Accord. He said no to a world court.
He said
no to land mines banning."

And then when September 11th happened he said the world must join behind us
in
fighting terrorism. And I don't think you could have it both ways. You can't
say we're
going our way and to hell with the rest of the world and then say, oops,
sorry, you've
gotta come and now join me. You can't, well, I thought I wasn't gonna get
out
of that
room alive. It really shocked me to see the response to that.

And I think, in a time of crisis it's when you need as much dissent,
question, criticism
as possible and yet that seems to be a time when there is no toleration for
that. And
that's frightening to me.

MOYERS: You were a kid in Canada when World War II broke out. I didn't know
until I
read about you that Japanese-Canadians were interred like American-Japanese.
What
did that experience teach you?

SUZUKI: Well, it was the definitive event of my life. It shaped my persona
and
my drive,
my priorities. I, to this day, when I look in the mirror, I cannot. I don't
like to look in the
mirror at myself. I hate.

MOYERS: Why?

SUZUKI: .watching programs with me in it. Because when I look at myself, I
see
the slit
eyes. And I see the face that was, for four years during World War II,
depicted as the
enemy. And it was my enemy too. That face was my enemy because I was a
Canadian.
And we wanted to go out and kill Japs.

Except that my country had put us into a prison, in my case. My father was
sent away to
a road camp he was working in the mountains for a year. He was separated.
And my
mother and father were born and raised in Canada. Never been to Japan. But
we were
called enemy aliens. considered enemy aliens. Deprived of everything we had.
Given 70
pounds of luggage each and shipped to camps in the Rocky Mountains.

We landed in a place that is now Valhalla Park. It's this wonderful area.
And
as a boy,
there were no teachers in the village for a year and a half. So I was seven
years old.

I was roaming the mountains fishing and meeting bears and wolves. And that
was where
I bonded to nature. But in the camp there were all these children whose
parents had
come from Japan who spoke Japanese. And I couldn't speak Japanese and they
beat me
up. And the white kids, of course, had nothing to do with us. So I grew up
with a
tremendous sense of self-hate.

MOYERS: Were you bitter? Were your parents bitter?

SUZUKI: I think if one broods on this and becomes bitter and hateful then
ultimately the
bigots win. You become them.

And what I learned is that democracy sounds great on paper. But democracy is
only
as good as the people who try to live up to it.

And you always have to fight to get more of it. It's not perfect. I don't
know anything
that's better. But you have to fight all the time to make it better.

When times are good you can guarantee anything. "Yeah, you can go anywhere
you
want. You can say anything you want." Times are good. It's only when times
are tough
that those rights become most precious.

When society is threatened, that's when you need to be able to speak out
without fear
of intimidation or fear of losing rights or being imprisoned.

And if you can't guarantee those rights when times are tough then what the
hell's the
point of saying that we are a democracy, blah, blah, blah. People go to war
and die for
those rights. And in order to make those rights real in times of crisis,
that's when we
have to speak out and defend them.

MOYERS: Spoken like a grandfather.

SUZUKI: It is.

MOYERS: Those pictures of you and your grandson around the world.

SUZUKI: That's everything, Bill. That's everything. At our age what have we
got except a
legacy for our children and grandchildren. I want to be able to look at them
and say, "I
did the best I could." And that's all anybody can do.

MOYERS: The book, the series is THE SACRED BALANCE. Thank you very much,
David
Suzuki.

SUZUKI: Thanks for having me.
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