Pushing the Limits Interview with David Suzuki

“I certainly think that the current economic paradigm we are in is absolute lunacy. The economy is predicated on the notion that there are no limits…not only do these economists think it can grow, but it must grow forever. Well…when you live within a finite world…any system that thinks it can grow forever is like cancer…It’s suicidal.”

David Takayoshi Suzuki is to the Canadian environment what Wayne Gretzky is to hockey—when he was a player, not an owner. Suzuki has authored more than 30 books and is the long-time host of the CBC programme, The Nature of Things. At nearly 70 years old, Suzuki reportedly sports six-pack abs and is full of an inherited spirit he describes as “cantankerous, opinionated and narrow-minded.” Late this past year, Corporate Knights caught up with Dr. Suzuki at the CBC studios in Toronto.

JG:
What have been the greatest successes of the environmental movement during the past 50 years?

DS:
I guess the biggest thing was getting the environment on the political agenda. For me it began with [ecologist] Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring in 1962. Before that time, there wasn’t a single minister of the environment—the environment was not an issue that anyone understood. Carson sounded the first alarm that our “great progress” had a cost, which really started the whole environmental movement.
   
In terms of what was done, the Montreal Protocol in ’89 [year it came into effect] was significant. There was a clear cause and effect shown between CFCs and ozone depletion, and at the same time there were clear alternatives to the cause of the problem. The ozone accord was really quite an achievement, and there are a lot of small battles that have been won too. We stopped clear-cut logging in Canada; we won the battle against logging in Haida Gwaii and the Queen Charlotte Islands.
   
But in terms of the overall direction we are going, we are losing big time. The image I use is that it is like we are in a giant car going 100 kilometres an hour at a brick wall and we are arguing over who wants to drive. Someone has got to put the brakes on and turn the wheel. There are little successes here and there, but basically we are driving toward a brick wall.

JG:
Do you feel capitalism in its current form will be sustainable over the long-term? 

DS:
In 1990 the World Watch Institute said the 1990s would be the turnaround decade—they said if we didn’t turn things around in the 1990s we’d be toast. So I got swept up with this idea. Well, the decade came and went. I think it is dangerous to use actual time limits because nobody knows. We’ve already hit limits! We’re going beyond the limits now, and the way we are doing it is by the illusion that everything is fine. We’re logging forests and damming rivers and polluting the air, water and soil as if this is all fine, as if the environment can absorb it and this is sustainable. Well, it is absolutely not.
   
You only have to go to Newfoundland now to see what happens when you hit limits. In 1992 John Crosbie, the Minister for Fisheries and Oceans, declared a moratorium on northern cod fishing. It was supposed to be a two-year moratorium. That moratorium came long after it should have been imposed, and fishermen knew the fish were gone. Here we are 14 years later with every indication that the fish are in worse shape now than they were in 1992. So as far as I am concerned the province of Newfoundland hit the wall decades ago, and it is not going to come back. All over the world we are doing this and we think everything is fine, but the reality is that you cannot use up your biological capital and not ultimately have a downfall. We have the illusion that things can carry on, but we have already passed the limits. 

If you ask a traditional economist where in their economic system they put things like the ozone layer or topsoil or biodiversity or underground aquifers of fossil water, they call those externalities. An externality is apparently something that is not in the economic system. There have been some attempts by ecological economists to estimate what it would cost us to replace what nature is doing for nothing. Now a lot of services nature performs, we could never replace with our technology. But you can make a crude estimate, and this was done back in the 1990s by Robert Constanza and his group of ecological economists. What they found is that nature performs services that would cost a minimum of $33-trillion a year if we tried to do them. Now to put that in perspective, if you add up all the annual GDPs of all of the countries in the world it comes to about $18-trillion [figures are for 1997]. So nature is performing twice as much service as all the economies in the world—and economists call this an externality!
   
I certainly think that the current economic paradigm we are in is absolute lunacy. The economy is predicated on the notion that there are no limits, nature is an externality, and not only do these economists think it can grow, but it must grow forever. Well, as Paul Ehrlich says, when you live within a finite world—and we do within the biosphere—any system that thinks it can grow forever is like cancer. And the result of cancer—attempting to grow indefinitely—is the same as death. So what we have is an economic system that has disconnected itself from the real world, and it thinks humans are so great that we can grow forever. Well that is death as far as I’m concerned. It’s suicidal.

JG:
Do you think we are growing right now or is it just a figment of our imagination?

DS:
Are we growing right now? Well, the economy is growing.

JG:
But Earth doesn’t weigh any more than it did yesterday. 

DS:
No, but the economy isn’t connected to the real world. The economy is like the dot-com bubble: it is based on nothing. You can buy money today. You sell money tomorrow and make money. And you haven’t done a fucking thing to improve the state of the world. We have all of this, over $2-trillion a day in currency speculation that’s got nothing to do with reality. 

JG:
Seems like somebody is making bad decisions.
 
DS:
The problem is that the economy is based on something that has nothing to do with the environment, so what the environmentalists do seems trivial. Why should this juggernaut, this immense global economy, pay any attention to environmentalists?

JG:
Can economic growth jibe with sustainability?

DS:
I don’t think we can have economic growth forever. The economy has to shrink, but this is anathema to anybody in conventional economic practice. The economy is far too big. I think the Dow Jones thing is just crazy. Do you know that in 1990 the Dow Jones was below 2000, and it is now 10,000? It went up to over 11,000 before we had the dot-com crash. Do we think that in a decade the economy can grow five-fold? That is based on nothing in the real world. So, if the Dow Jones is any indication of the state of the economy, then the economy has got to shrink.
   
The problem is that there will be a huge displacement of jobs and all kinds of things. And the difficulty is that we’ve got an economy, I believe, that was deliberately designed to make consumption a major part of it. And the reason for this is that in 1929 we had the stock market crash. We had this horrific world depression through the early 30s, and then the war brought on economic recovery. War is good at that. The American economy responded quite well and just blazed white hot, and because of that it became the bastion of the free world.
   
And it was producing tanks and planes, and by the end of the war the American president said, “Holy shit, what do we do about a peacetime economy? How do you transform a war-time economy into a peacetime economy?” And his economic council of advisors came up with a solution: consumption. We have got to make consumption an American way of life. We have got to get Americans to buy stuff, use it up, throw it away and buy more stuff. The problem with that is that if you make a good car that you can drive for 30 years, you’ll eventually saturate your market.
   
But if you incorporate disposability and obsolescence [into the products you sell], you’ve got a market forever. You can never run out of people to sell stuff to. So we built this economy based on consumption and disposability and it worked. And the economy [and consumption] kept growing. And the vast bulk of it is shit stuff that we don’t need. And the question is, are we going to go for quality of life and are we going to reduce our energy and material throughput? How do you make that transition? I have no idea.

JG:
Do we have to sacrifice quality of life to make things more sustainable?

DS:
I think that how we define quality has certainly got to change and I think that we have to ask ourselves, what is life all about? Is having stuff, lots and lots of stuff, is that an integral part of the quality of my life? Quality of life has to do with relationships, it has to do with family, it has to do with community. I tell people, imagine you are 85 years old. You’ve lived a rich, full life. You are on your deathbed. You are not in pain. You are ready for it. You’ve run out of time and you are prepared and you are surrounded by family. You think back on the things in your life that have filled you with joy and happiness. You don’t think about a big sports-utility vehicle. It’s family, neighbours and community. That’s quality of life. We’ve got off on a really stupid idea that stuff is what brings us joy and happiness and it is not. 

JG:
What is the greatest environmental threat to Canada or the world over the next 25 years?

DS:
People always ask me that question and I have no idea. It could be some obscure algae in the Antarctic Ocean that we haven’t even discovered that goes extinct—I have no idea. Climate change certainly is one of the huge issues right now and the repercussions are immense. I always answer that to me the greatest challenge of our time is the human mind. It is what humans think and believe that is shaping the world. If we think we are so smart that we know enough to take over the planet and manage it, which we don’t, we are in big trouble.
   
The biggest change that has happened in the past 100 years, I think, is that traditionally people have always understood that we are a part of nature, that everything in nature is connected to everything else, and so we have responsibilities to treat it the right way. Today we don’t see that at all. We live in a world in which everything is broken into bits and pieces and we no longer see the way everything is interconnected. And if you don’t see that everything is interconnected, then you don’t see that there is cause and effect. And when you lose any sense of causal connection, then you lose all sense of responsibility. Because you no longer see how we are affecting the rest of the world.
   
Let me give you an example; Growing up in the 1930s and 40s nobody had ever heard the word asthma. My parents didn’t even know what the word asthma was. It was a rare, rare disease. The first time I met a person with asthma was in my last year of university. Then I saw a child in a full blown asthma attack and I was horrified because they are literally suffocating before your eyes. We once did a show on asthma. For one of the parts, we waited until there was a smog alert, then sent a crew down to the emergency ward. Parents would come roaring up and jump out of their car—scared shitless. If you said to that person: If you cut your arm off you will save your parent’s life or your kid’s life, they would have done it. And yet, many of those people drove up with their loved ones in a sports-utility vehicle. So that is when you realize they haven’t put it together. This is the crisis we face. We go down to the Gap and buy a cheap shirt, go buy fresh fruits in the middle of winter in Toronto, but never ask, “what is the real cost?” We live in a world where our actions don’t have any repercussions because we don’t think we are connected—that is the major crisis. 

JG:
If you had to pick one of two problems to deal with first, would you attempt to tackle the mass consumption of western society, or would you direct resources to deal with the growing human population? 

DS:
We are way overpopulated in both the industrialized and developing world. It is crystal clear from the experience in Kerala, India or Indonesia that we know what the critical contraceptive is: the empowerment of women. The problem is that we have got a Christian right-wing agenda that is determining a lot of the policy in the United States—”family planning is related to abortion so we are not going to support family planning.” We have got to put much more effort into empowering women in the developing world, but at the same time we have to deal with the other drivers: our hyper-consumption and health in the developing world.

JG:
What is the role of the government in creating a sustainable society and, more specifically, a sustainable economy?

DS:
Huge. I think what we need is leadership in terms of regulation. The problem now is that governments have come to accept this notion that the economy is sacrosanct, so they see themselves as dependent upon the economy. The private sector has been very effective at saying, “for us to flourish we need government to get off our back— don’t set targets, don’t regulate.” Well we know that voluntary compliance does not work. They say “We’ll comply.” Bullshit they will. We need governments to set the standards. The private sector will always say it is impossible and it will cost too much, that is always their automatic response. I do not see why they have any credibility because they always do this.
   
The funny thing is we think of industry as being the entrepreneurs and people looking out for frontiers and ready to try out new things. But that is total bullshit. The problem with industry is that they are like everybody else. They’re used to doing things one way and they are reluctant to change. I wrote a book called Good News For a Change and it is filled with examples. There are all kinds of role models out there for doing things a different way. We sent that book to the CEOs of the 100 largest companies in Canada with a note saying “thank you, read it and let me know what you think.” We got a few letters saying, “That is interesting.” But no response in the sense, “holy cow you have changed my life.”

JG:
How can a company, big or small, that wishes to truly become sustainable possibly engage if the playing field is not level?

DS:
That is an excellent question. I don’t know. First of all, I am not an economist. It just seems to me there should be incentives for companies to do the right thing. For example, Toyota brought out the Prius. I bought the first Prius sold in Canada. I paid the full amount. I said to the president of Toyota Canada, why is it when you have a wonderful car like Prius, that you are not phasing out your SUVs?  He said “look, we make too much money from selling our SUVs. They are a very profitable line. We can’t just phase out lines. But I can guarantee you that Toyota will do everything we can to have the most energy efficient SUVs and that’s pretty good.” But right now there is really no incentive for automakers to do the right thing.

JG:
What role does the re-distribution of wealth play in the sustainable economy? 

DS:
I certainly think that equity is a huge part of this global crisis. I do not see how we can say to countries like India and China, “Oh you better not do that, you’re going to destroy the world,” when we’re already serving as a template that everyone is trying to copy. The industrialized world is less than 20 per cent of the world’s population—how dare we say that China and India are the ones that have got to cut back when we’re not showing any indication of cutting back ourselves? Of course if China grows and meets its targets, we’re all going down with them. No question about that. It is one of the great ironies that the countries that are so impoverished are the ones that are ultimately going to determine our destiny. And that’s what Kyoto is all about. Kyoto is the industrialized world saying “We created the problem and we are still the major producers of carbon dioxide—we have got to begin to cut back.” And by 2010 or 2012 when we’ve cut back below 6 per cent below 1990 levels, then we can set the next round of cuts.
   
But then, Alberta and the United States are saying, “Well it is not fair that we are doing all of this and we are not including China and India.” Bullshit. We’re the ones who created the problem. Equity is about reducing our take and giving the others more of their share. It has got to be the industrialized world that leads by example.

Jordy Gold is a sustainability expert and columnist for Corporate Knights. You will find his work online at www.jordygold.com