Dr David Suzuki, award-winning scientist and environmentalist, talks to WWF-Australia about why humans are the real reason our planet is degrading at such a fast rate and how we can turn this around.
Greg Bourne, CEO WWF-Australia: David Suzuki, thank you for coming here to WWF-Australia today.
For more than fifty years, you've been telling us about the state of the planet. What is it you're actually seeing?
Dr David Suzuki: I think the evidence of degradation is all around us. It wasn't 50 years, by the way, it was 40 years, but the evidence is so stunning.
I was born in Vancouver in 1936 and my early memories of childhood are all about camping and fishing with my father. We used to go out and troll around Stanley Park which is in Vancouver and catch sea run cut-throat trout. We would jig for halibut off Spanish Banks and catch sturgeon in the Fraser Esteel head up in the Vetta River. Today, my grandchildren call me all the time, begging me to take them fishing where I went as a child and of course, I can't.
And the Americans are fond of saying: well, that's the price of progress. I don't think it's progress to use up the rightful legacy of future generations. Americans say, well, there's plenty more where that came from. There isn't plenty more where that came from. So we've had these ways of excusing ourselves from the changes that are going on and I think any elder anywhere on the planet, someone who's 60 or 70 years old, ask what it was like in their area when they were children, and they'll all say the same thing. It used to be so different, there used to be trees as far as you could see. The rivers used to be jammed with fish. So the change has been absolutely dramatic in my lifetime. The fish I took for granted as a child are simply not there.
But more strikingly, I first came to Australia in 1988 and I fell in love with the country because as a biologist, I look at this place as an absolutely unique place and one of the first things I did was to go to the Barrier Reef off Port Douglas and I was just boggled. I was blown away by it and I saw an apartment for sale and my wife and I bought it because we said: this is paradise. Well, in the years that I've coming, I was there two years ago, we went out to the reef, I was shocked. In that short time, from '88 to 2004, there are very, very perceptible changes. The abundance ... and we went back to the same place that we went in 1988, the abundance of fish and the amount of dead coral was quite overwhelming. Now the people leading the tourists out, they're still raving: isn't it great. And I guess that's what they have to do, but having had that 20-year interval, I can see the reef is in trouble.
GB: A report released just last week with regard to the marine protected areas that have been set up under the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority [is showing that some areas the reef] seem to be coming back but not other areas.
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are just incredibly important. Do you see this elsewhere in the world?
DS: I'm thrilled that MPAs can actually allow the recovery because it looks pretty considerable. When you see stag coral all basically dead and there's nothing in there, you think: Oh my God, this has probably taken hundreds of years to build up. But if MPAs work, that's wonderful.
The problem of course is that humanity as a whole - even though oceans cover 70% of the planet - have set aside such tiny areas for MPAs and usually MPAs are decided once the fishermen have fished the whole area out and they say: OK, you can make it an MPA. And the remarkable thing is that often [the areas] come back to life. But we need huge areas.
We did an analysis of what we need to protect marine areas for salmon. Now salmon are not like the coral animals that you see down here [in Australia] which hang around. They migrate over vast distances. And what we found was that if we're going to protect salmon through MPAs, over 70% of the coast will have to be off limits for fishing. Well, I mean that's impossible.
So I think that we've got to hurry and really get involved in much larger areas that are no-fish zones and no-go zones, but we've got to get rid of this whole idea that dragging giant nets across the bottom of the ocean is allowable. I'm ashamed of the fact that the United Nations - which has a resolution to ban all deep sea bottom dragging - my country, along with Australia and New Zealand and the United States, is opposing this. I mean, drift nets and long lines, we've got to get rid of these technologies.
GB: Yes, this is a clear target with regard to high seas fishing and just recognising that the global commons is being eaten up and vacuum cleaned away.
DS: Our problem is that we're terrestrial, air-breathing animals. So we tend to look from that limited perspective and we think anything below the ocean, well I mean, it's just water, you know, it's just an endless treadmill with new fish coming out so just catch 'em and they'll replace themselves. But that's the attitude of our terrestrial bias and what I see now is the same thing happening underground.
We used to think that life only existed a few hundred metres down below the surface of the earth and there was a sterile area. And then oil drillers started discovering that bits were all contaminated way down under the ground. So now, as you know, we've begun to look deep underground and what do you know: there's life 11 kilometres below the surface of the earth. So now you say: wait a minute now, if we calculate how much life is there below ground compared to what there is above, there's more living material under the earth, under the surface than there is above it. That is all the whales and fishes and trees and wildebeest, all of that added together, weighs less than the protoplasm underground.
And yet what are we doing? Oh, coal is the energy of our future, and we can now take carbon dioxide produced by burning coal and sequester it into the ground, pump it into the earth. We know that if you pump carbon dioxide underground, it stays down there. We have no idea why it stays down there. Is it a chemical bond, what's it binding to, how long will it stay down there? But what's it going to do the life that exists below the surface?
We have no idea what these organisms under the ground do in terms of energy transfer from the core of the earth to the surface, nutrient flow through the soil, what about the water filtration. We know none of this. And yet we're all trumpeting clean coal and sequestration of carbon dioxide. This is insane. It's absolutely insane, but it all comes from chauvinism. We're a critter that stands on the ground, we don't give a damn what's under there, we think it's all uniform. We don't give a damn what's under the water that covers 70% of the earth.
GB: David, in some of your writing, you call human beings a super species. But clearly some of the things we are doing are not so super.
DS: Oh, well I don't say we're super species meaning we're super. I just mean that we are a new kind of force on the planet. There's never been, in the four billion years that life has existed, a single species able to alter the biological, chemical and physical features of the earth as we are doing now. Never a single species that did that. And now we are doing it with the power of our science and our technology and our absolutely insatiable, consumptive demand. We now are transforming the earth.
Now, we've always been a tribal, local species. We've never had to worry about what that tribe [is] doing on the other side of that lake, or the other side of the mountain or the ocean. We're a local animal. We may have known 200 people in a lifetime and travelled over a few dozens kilometres and if we trashed our areas, we just moved somewhere else. Well, it's different now. We've filled up the planet. We can't move somewhere else. And now for the first time in history, we have to consider what is the collective impact of 6.5 billion people?
Well, if you've been to Rio in '92 or Kyoto in '97 as I was, it's not easy. We've never had to do this before and it's so excruciatingly, painfully slow and all kinds of people are obfuscating the issues and saying: no, no, no, it's not happening. But the fact is we've got to do it. And we've got to do it faster than we're doing it.
GB: David, on climate change and global warming, the issue that is probably the most pressing on the planet, what is it that you're observing?
DS: For me, the most stunning observation I've made was flying in to a town called Smithers in Northern British Columbia [Canada] and for the last half hour of our plane flight, as far as I could see on both sides of the airplane, and this is quite high up, the forest has turned from green into a bright red. The forest has been trashed by the invasion of pine beetles that now turn the evergreens into dead needles which turn bright red. Why is that? Because the winters, the cold winters, have to get down below 20 below zero in order to kill the pine beetle and keep its range limited to the southern areas. We haven't had winters like that in many years. So what's happening is that the pine beetle is spreading catastrophically like a plague through the northern parts of our temperate forests and the big fear now is the last great intact forest on the planet is arboreal forest. And if the pine beetle actually extends its reign into the arboreal, this will be, I think, catastrophic.
So that's the most stunning visual observation of what's going on. There are so many other areas where you don't have the bias or human interpretation of what's going on. There have been very, very careful documents of when the appearance of migratory birds in the spring and when they leave, the last bird to leave in the fall, and there it's crystal clear that birds are now migrating to the Arctic through Canada, an average of more than two weeks before they have in the last hundred years, and they're leaving the arctic at least two to three weeks later than they normally did. So, there's nature telling us in ways that I think are incontrovertible.
Now, you know, the other piece of evidence that I think you have to be an absolute paid stooge of the fossil fuel industry if you don't agree, is to look at the record of carbon dioxide in the ice sheet in Antarctica. Every year as it snows, the snow captures bubbles of air. And as they're compressed into a thin layer, what you get is an annual record then of snowfall that is like the rings of a tree - so the deeper you drill, the older that record is.
And you can take micropipettes and take these samples, these bubbles of air and analyse the carbon dioxide content and there it's just absolutely striking. You see over 400,000 years, carbon dioxide wiggles up and down and then suddenly in the last 20 years, you see it curve up. And for a while it's not above background, and then it's now going straight up. It's above anything that we've seen in the last 400,000 years.
So, you know, unless you're very, very silly or you have pre-conceived notions that will not change, the evidence is very, very striking.
GB: My own view, David, is that we are at a particular point in time's history where we either decide to work together to solve these issues in a world which is going from six and half billion people up to nine billion people and we find a way to work in harmony with each other. Or we actually do what we've always done, so sort of business as usual takes us to conflict as usual. What's your view of the future?
DS: I've always used the metaphor of a car. I feel we're in a car heading at a brick wall at 100 miles an hour and everybody in the car is arguing about where they want to sit. It doesn't matter who's driving. Someone's got to say: For God's sake, put the brakes on and turn the wheel. A few of us are saying that, but we're locked in the trunk. Nobody listens to us. So we're faced with this dilemma that yes, if we hit the wall, we'll have no choice, we've got to pick up the pieces. It's a hell of a lot harder to pick up the pieces than to put the brakes on and start turning the wheel.
I have always believed that humans have this capacity to look ahead, to see where dangers lie and where opportunities are, and to make a choice. But there are such powerful forces to carry on with business-as-usual and there is a deliberate attempt on the part of the automobile sector, the fossil fuel sector, to create doubt in the public's mind. And the fossil fuel sector has poured millions of dollars into a campaign supporting a few sceptics that are saying: no, no, no, the evidence is 'blah' and climate change isn't happening, humans aren't responsible.
And what that does is it creates confusion in the public's mind. They [think]: oh, well wait a minute now, I just saw a scientist that said it's not a problem. So to the public, it [seems that]: if those damn scientists haven't settled it, why should I worry about it. And I must say that the fossil fuel industry has been very, very successful. We - and I consider myself a part of the media - have just been duped into 'balanced' journalism. [Journalists are saying]: Well if we're going to get someone here representing 99% of the climatologists saying global warming is happening, we have to balance that, it's not right to just give it as if it's a known fact, put a dissident on. Even though a dissident may be one of a handful of 10 or 15 people, we balance the thousands of scientists here with the one from the sceptics. And to the public [it seems that] scientists haven't settled it, it's still a debate.
So I think the terrible aspect now is that we don't have people coming together, as you say, all working for the same objective, because apparently profit and greed trump the future for our children and grandchildren.
GB: David, with all of the issues, all of the books, you still seem to be optimistic. You still seem to have passion, you still seem to have hope. This is a complex world. What is the message that you would give to WWF's Futuremakers?
DS: One has no right to say it's too late. A lot of my environmental friends are saying: look, Suzuki, if you look at the facts and the curves, we're not going to make it, and we're going to hit walls. I think that if you feel that it is hopeless, then my answer is always: then shut the bloody hell up and get out of here because you've given up, that's your decision, but get out of here. There's no point in telling people there's nothing that can be done. So, I'm not interested in people that say it's too late.
Now, having said that, am I an optimist? I'm not an optimist or a pessimist. Optimists believe that good things are going to happen. Pessimists believe that bad things are going to happen. I just have hope. That's the critical thing.
I'm inspired by a guy named Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela sat in prison in the prime of his life. He knew [that at] any moment he could get out of jail. All he had to do was renounce violence and quit the ANC [African National Congress] and they would have let him out of jail. So here he is in the prime of his life, rotting in that prison, and he must have had moments after 10, 15, 20 years when he said: what the hell are you doing, Nelson, you're a fool, you could be in bed with your wife and getting on with life! And he never did.
He could never have known that in his lifetime, apartheid would be dead and he would be Prime Minister or President of South Africa. So if Nelson Mandela could hang in there all of those years, I don't think anyone's got the right to say it's too late and nothing can be done.
Having said that, the curves and the way we're going are taking us into very, very perilous territory. When you lose 50 to 55,000 species a year - and that's what Klaus Topfer of UNEP [United Nations Environment Program] says we're losing - that is tearing at the web of biodiversity with consequences we can't even begin to understand. We can't stop the fact that we've added more than 30% more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The experiment's already in motion. There is nothing we can do about that and the [consequences] of what we've already done to the atmosphere are going to reverberate over hundreds of years. So we have no idea what's already been done.
But scientists are now saying we can't recall the greenhouse gases we've added to the atmosphere, but we must try to limit our additions so that we don't rise above 2 degrees [Celsius] in the coming century. That's going to take a heroic effort to do that, but if we rise above two degrees [Celsius], then all hell breaks loose and we just don't know whether we'll have the resilience then for the biosphere to take that and be livable for human beings.
People say: well, I'm afraid for the future of the planet. I don't care for the future of the planet at all. The planet will do very well without us. It got along for billions of years without human beings. The planet will be here after we go. I don't fear for life on the planet. I believe life is incredible resilient. When you can find life living at 100 degrees Celsius, when you can find life living in highly radioactive pools, in sulphuric acid, life is very, very resilient.
We, as predators at the very top of the food chain however, are unbelievably vulnerable because we depend on that pyramid of all of the diversity of life below us. And I would say if there is a species at risk, it's humanity, even though we're the most numerous mammal on earth, we are at a very perilous moment.
And so the question now I think is not will life continue to exist, but what are we talking about? About the near future for our great grandchildren. What kind of a planet are we leaving them? And I think it's a very perilous one. Are we going to avoid hitting the wall? I don't think so.
GB: David Suzuki - from WWF-Australia - thank you so much for coming and talking to us.
DS: Thanks a lot.