A Conversation with Dr. Suzuki

Dr. Suzuki speaking in Comox BC during his Coastal Connections tour

Dr. Suzuki speaking in Comox, BCWhen David Suzuki came to Comox, BC in June as a stop on his Celebrating Coastal Connection tour, greeted by enthusiasts of all ages, the Watershed Sentinel took the opportunity to sit down for a chat about the economy and the state of the world.

I heard you say once something to the effect that “we invented this economy, we can invent a different one.”
What I say is that we face the reality that we live in a world defined by the laws of nature; in physics we know that you can’t travel faster than the speed of light, we know about gravity, and the second law of thermodynamics. We live in the world, we don’t complain, we can’t change it. Laws of chemistry, laws of biology … these are all things that dictate the reality of the world around us, but other things, for example, like borders that we draw around property or territory, we will go and die to defend those borders. But do you think salmon care whether they’re going through BC or Alaskan Waters? They don’t care!
The borders that we draw mean nothing to nature and yet we try to impose them. We say we’re going to control the salmon through some international treaty. We’re not looking at it the right way, and then we invent ideas like capitalism, economics, markets, corporations, and we act as if they are forces of nature. Just read the paper! “Oh oh, market’s not looking too good today.”   
We invented the damn things [markets] and if they don’t work we can change them. We can’t change nature, but we can change what we invent.
Naomi Klein nails it in her book, This Changes Everything. She says, it is capitalism itself that’s at the heart of it. I have spent decades fighting with forestry or fighting with fisheries saying “well, there are economic opportunities if we do things in another way.” Why do we let them [capitalists] shape the frame? As long as we let the discussion stay within the economic realm, we’re screwed.

Yes, that’s the one thing I wanted to say to you when you first started the David Suzuki Foundation, that it was still trying to, as we used to say, “make capitalism nice.”
Yeah, exactly, and that’s what the green economy is all about, but it’s still an economy based on growth. It’s just, oh we gotta be more efficient and less polluting, but basically it’s still about creating stuff and growing. We can’t grow forever in a finite world.

Exactly. We know that; how do we teach that to others?
Unfortunately, in Naomi’s book, she doesn’t take the next step. If capitalism is at the heart of our problem, then, how do we go about destroying it?
We’ve got to build something else, and she avoids that.

It’s a tough answer.
It’s very tough. But I just spent four weeks in France, in French immersion, and the guy in my class – there was only twelve of us – was an economist who’s written a book about why the economy has to be destroyed. I said, Why isn’t Naomi Klein citing you – he has many books out – and he said, “because the minute you start taking the position that I, Richard Smith take, you’re accused of being a Marxist.” And right away it makes it impossible to have the conversation.

I’ve been thinking about how local musicians are now making a living in their own regions and I see that as part of some kind of way forward.
Local economies have got to be the way. You know there was this LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) thing that came up. They’ve grown up in lots of communities and they kind of die out, and I think part of the problem is that lots of people, local merchants, will buy into it but the big multinationals will not accept local currencies.

They wanted us to do that with the Watershed Sentinel – use a local currency – but my printer and the post office will not take that money.
Yes, we’ve got both feet in these two worlds and it’s really difficult.
We’ve got to take much more pride in being local and supporting our local producers and keep our money in the community.

That’s interesting because I asked all of our people what I should ask you, and what Joyce Nelson wanted to know, was whether you think the local food movements are a model for going forward.
Yes, they’re a part of it. They’re huge, and the thing that excites me is that when you look at the urban agriculture movement, a lot of it is being driven by young people.
That’s astonishing because we’ve got a generation of kids that have no idea that Kentucky Fried Chicken is a bird, that are so disconnected from the roots of their food. So I find this very exciting.

I find it very strange too because these are kids who have rarely been hungry, they’ve always had all the junk food they want, and yet these are the ones driving the food co-ops and the farms, and all that – they are all in their twenties and thirties.
Yes, but they are the ones I think who understand that we can’t go on the way we have been and who really see this as an opportunity.
When Severn, my elder daughter was born, Tara and I decided that we wanted to show our kids that food was seasonal, so we decided on just a ritual of going to the Okanagan every year and picking cherries so for 35 years we’ve been going every year. This year I called the organic orchard where we pick and I said, “We’re coming for the first of July [as usual],” and he said, “Sorry but the cherries are three weeks early and they’ll be finished.”
And then I hear about the chinook in the Puntledge River and the drought, and they are going to carry those fish into the hatchery.
This is the world that we have created.

And the worst part is that in another ten or twenty years it will seem normal.
I say to the Japanese, “Can you imagine Japan without fish? Why isn’t Japan leading the fight to protect the ocean?” They say, but there’s lots of fish [at the market] and I say, fifty years ago those fish would have come from Japanese waters. Today they are coming from halfway around the world! But to them it’s the same fish.
That’s why the movement to local is so important.

We reached out to the activist group, Beyond Boarding, which your grandson co-founded, and when people talk to us about young people we say that there’s people doing it, they are just doing it in a different way.
They are connected to social media in a way that boggles my mind. Some of the youth are quite upset about the state of the world.

So, David, that brings me to my last question: How do you feel about the state of the world?
I think it’s very dire, and I’m going to cite three people today who say it’s too late, and then say, You can’t say it’s too late because we don’t know enough to say that.
It is very late, but you always have to have hope. The hope is, we don’t know enough to be able to say the end is here.

***

Photo by Ron Pogue Photography

Watershed Sentinel Original Content

Can we ask for a little of your time, and some money?

We can’t do this without you. Support independent media and donate a little or a lot – every bit makes a difference. And when you give those precious extra dollars, we treat them as the honour it is and use them carefully to pay for more stories, more distribution of information, and bonus copies to colleges and libraries. Donate $50 or more, and we will publicly thank you in our magazine. And we always thank you from the bottom of our hearts.