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	Environmentalist Dr David Suzuki says world growth is unsustainable by David Suzuki Foundation Canada   Oct 2010   Dr David Suzuki has spent a lifetime engaged in scientific and environmental research. He"s one of the best-known nature advocates in the world. In his new book, "The Legacy", he"s tried to distil his experiences about how he sees the state of the planet and its future. Margaret Attwood writes in the foreword to your book that the term legacy has an ominous ring to it - a hint of departure. Are you going somewhere?   DAVID SUZUKI: In our society, elders tend to be pushed aside, you know, they"re kind of a nuisance; but I think that we have a really important role. To speak out straight from the heart; speak the truth.   LEIGH SALES: What pressures - have you felt? Did you feel that you were constrained in speaking out on what you want?   DAVID SUZUKI: I"ve been very fortunate in having a platform for my ideas with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. But there have been a lot of pressures, certainly within the university; constant pressure from the corporate community on the board of governors saying, "What"s this guy speaking out and criticising the forest industry?" and so on. There has always been that kind of pressure there.   I"ve worked a lot with what we call the First Nations people. These are the native Canadians. And what"s most impressive is even in the most difficult communities that, you know, have - beset with poverty and housing problems and so on - when you come into the community, elders are really the focus and the centre of their community. So you meet a young person and within minutes they will be saying, "Well the elders tell us," or." Elders really hold a big central place.   But in the dominant society, elders tend to be people that you want to shuffle off, you know. The emphasis is on youth and so if they want to go to retirement homes, the sooner the better.   And I think that this is very unfortunate, because elders, especially at this time now, remember what it was like before we got caught up in this kind of frenzy of disposability and constant desire for new things and new stuff. Elders should be really kind of centring us on recognising the enormous changes and the unsustainability of what"s going on.   LEIGH SALES: Well you were born in 1936, so of course there have been enormous changes since then. People talk about the pace of change speeding up. Is that something that you see and what do you think is the effect of that?   DAVID SUZUKI: Well I think most of the speed up to now has to do with the drive for greater economic growth. And this is something I talk about a lot in the book - that growth is just the description of a system. Growth by itself is nothing. And yet we"ve come to feel that growth is the very definition of progress. So if you talk to a businessman or someone in government, "How well did you do last year?" within a few seconds they"ll be talking about whether the GDP grew or the share of market or profits or jobs.   Growth has become the definition of whether or not they did well. And it"s very clear that that growth is now in the industrialised world having an enormous impact on forests, on fish, on the oceans and certainly on climate, with our skyrocketing rates of use of fossil fuels. Growth has become a driving part of the destruction of the life support systems of the planet. It just can"t continue.   LEIGH SALES: People would argue though - the counter-argument to that would be that growth has delivered people all around the world a better standard of living.   DAVID SUZUKI: Well, that"s always been the promise; that"s always been the thought that growth in the economy is what raises people up. But there comes a certain level, and certainly we"ve achieved that long ago in Canada, where growth really isn"t improving the quality of your life.   We"re not asking the important question: how much is enough? Because with all of this profusion of stuff, there"s certainly no correlation with the improvement in whether we"re happy; whether it"s helped the poorest people in our society. There"s always been the argument, "Well you"ve got to have growth so that the wealth trickles down." This is absolutely not true.   The gap between the wealthy nations and the poor nations has simply increased, so we"ve had huge growth in the industrialised world but the poorer nations have remained poor. And even within our society, the disparity between the very wealthy and the poorest - and the poorest is growing in proportion - has only increased.   So Clive Hamilton, a prominent Australian philosopher, has been pointing out that we"ve got a growth fetish, but the benefits certainly have not accrued as is promised.   LEIGH SALES: So you said before that growth should not be the definition of progress. What should be then, in your view?   DAVID SUZUKI: Well I think it"s how - what the quality of our lives will be, and certainly our relationship with each other.. somehow we"ve got caught up in this idea that having more money and having more stuff is what makes us happy, and it"s clearly not. But we were hung up on that, and in Canada in the last 40 years the size of an average Canadian home has increased by more than 50 per cent. At the same time, the number of people living in those homes has decreased by almost half. And so we"ve got bigger stuff, but I don"t see the corresponding increase in happiness with all that stuff.   LEIGH SALES: You mentioned fewer people living in the houses, but if you - in a country like Canada, but if you look all around the world, of course, over-population is a huge problem. You point out in "The Legacy" that it took all of human existence to the 19th century to reach two billion in population, and then it took less than two centuries to reach seven billion. What is the effect of that?   DAVID SUZUKI: Well of course all of that is pressure on the planet. You see, there"s a rule in biology that - we call it the inverse law of size and population. And that simply says the smaller you are the more of you there can be. And so that mice can number in the tens of millions. The bigger you get - by the time you get to whales or elephants you"re numbering in the tens or maybe hundreds of thousands.   Humans have broken that law in the sense that we are now the most numerous mammal on the planet, and we"ve done that because of trade and technology and so on. But it means then with seven billion people - well we"re almost at seven billion - just the act of living - we"ve got to breathe air, drink water, eat food, clothe, shelter ourselves - with so many people all of that stuff that we use comes out of the Earth. And so just the act of living means we have a huge ecological footprint. Takes a lot of land, space, water and air to support us. But of course we"re not like rats or mice or rabbits. We have a huge amount of technology that delivers our clothes and our cars and TVs, and all of that comes out of the Earth.   LEIGH SALES: Economists argue though that human enterprise and resourcefulness will allow us to deal with those challenges. Do you accept that?   DAVID SUZUKI: Absolutely not. I mean we - economists think that we"re so bright we"re not wedded to the fact that we live in a finite world. And any organism living within limited boundaries is going to ultimately hit limits. Economists think, "Oh, we"re so bright. When we hit a shortage we"re either going to find an alternative or we"re going to invent new ways of doing the same thing." And we have been unbelievably resourceful in that, you know. But they think, "Well, we could go to the moon and start mining that and pick up asteroids." I mean this is absolute nonsense.   LEIGH SALES: You write in the book I think about exponential graphs, where you see slow growth then a really big one and it hits a limit. In terms of talking about population growth now, is the limit that we"re likely to hit shortages in these things you"re talking about?   DAVID SUZUKI: Well, it"s shortages I think in everything, as well as the fact that we"ve used air, water and soil as a dump for our most toxic chemicals, so that each of us, even in Australia - each of us is now carrying dozens of toxic chemicals in our bodies.   In North America it"s claimed that we carry over a pound of plastic dissolved in our bodies. So why are we surprised then that 15 per cent of our kids have asthma; that the rates of breast cancer in women are sky rocketing? You can"t have a healthy population when you"re treating the very things that keep us alive - air, water and the land - as a garbage can. You can"t expect that we"re going to be healthy.   So I think that with the huge increase in numbers, I"ve now said I"ll never go back to China or India. Why? Because every time I"ve gone I get very, very sick, because the air is - for me is toxic now.   And I think we"re clearly seeing the impact of the limits of the biosphere. We forget that the biosphere - the zone of air, water and land - it"s not infinite. It doesn"t go all the way to the stars. Carl Sagan, the astronomer, used to say, "If you shrink the Earth to the size of basketball, the biosphere will be thinner than a layer of varnish that you paint on it." And that"s it. It can"t grow. And human beings are now hitting limits all over the place. Because we"ve used the entire planet as a source of raw materials, we still have the illusion that everything is fine.   (Leigh Sales is a reporter for ABC News) Visit the related web page
	Why is it so hard to save the Biosphere? by George Monbiot   December 2011   Nicholas Stern estimated that capping climate change would cost around 1% of global GDP, while sitting back and letting it hit us would cost between 5 and 20%. One per cent of GDP is, at the moment, $630bn. By March 2009, Bloomberg has revealed, the US Federal Reserve had committed $7.77 trillion to the banks. That is just one government"s contribution: yet it amounts to 12 times the annual global climate change bill. Add the bailouts in other countries, and it rises several more times.   This support was issued on demand: as soon as the banks said they wanted help, they got it. On just one day the Federal Reserve made $1.2tr available – more than the world has committed to tackling climate change in 20 years.   Much of this was done both unconditionally and secretly: it took journalists two years to winkle out the detail. The banks shouted "help" and the government just opened its wallet. This all took place, remember, under George W Bush, whose administration claimed to be fiscally conservative.   But getting the US government to commit to any form of bailout for the planet – even a couple of billion – is like pulling teeth. "Unaffordable!" the Republicans (and many of the Democrats) shriek. It will wreck the economy! We wll go back to living in caves!   I am often struck by the wildly inflated rhetoric of those who accuse environmentalists of scaremongering. "If those scaremongers have their way they"ll destroy the entire economy" is the kind of claim uttered almost daily, without any apparent irony.   No legislator, as far as I know, has yet been able to explain why making $7.7tr available to the banks is affordable, while investing far smaller sums in new technologies and energy saving is not.   The US and other nations began talking seriously about tackling climate change in 1988. Yet we still don"t have a legally binding global agreement, and we are unlikely to get one until 2020, if at all. Agreements to help the banks are struck at economic summits without breaking sweat, yet making progress at climate summits looks like using a donkey to tow a 44-tonne truck.   That said, the outcome at Durban, after some superhuman feats of traction, was better than most environmentalists expected. After Copenhagen and Cancϊn, it seemed implausible that rich and poor nations would ever agree that they would one day strike a legally binding treaty, but they have. That doesn"t mean that the outcome was good: even if everything happens as planned, we are still likely to end up with more than 2C of warming, which threatens great harm to many of the world"s people and places.   The clearest account of the negotiations and the outcome of the Durban meeting that I have read so far has been written by Mark Lynas, who attended as an adviser to the president of the Maldives. The byzantine complexity he documents (see link below) is the result of 20 years of foot-dragging and obstruction. When powerful countries want to do something, they do it swiftly and simply. When they don"t, their agreements with other nations turn into a cat"s cradle.   Here are some of the key points:   • The most important negotiations boiled down to a battle between two groups: the European Union, least developed countries (LDCs) and small island states on one side, which pressed for steeper, faster cuts, and the US, Brazil, South Africa, India and China on the other side, seeking to resist that pressure.   • The first group (EU + LDCs) succeeded in one respect: the other nations agreed to work towards a legally binding deal "applicable to all parties". In other words, unlike the Kyoto protocol, which governs only the greenhouse gas emissions of a group of rich nations, this will apply to everyone. (It doesn"t necessarily mean that all nations will have to reduce their emissions however).   • The first group failed in its attempt to get this done quickly. The poorest nations wanted a legally binding outcome by the end of next year. But the US-China group held out for 2020, and got it. Unless this changes, it makes limiting the global temperature rise to 2C or less much harder - perhaps impossible.   • The Kyoto protocol, though it will remain in force until either 2017 or 2020, is now a dead letter. In fact, Lynas suggests, unless the loopholes it contains are closed it could be worse than useless, as they could undermine the voluntary commitments that its signatory nations have made.   • The countries agreed to create a green climate fund to help developing nations limit their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of global warming. But, with three exceptions - South Korea, Germany and Denmark - they didn"t agree to put any money into it. The fund is supposed to receive $100bn a year: a lot of money, until you compare it to what the banks got.   • Between now and 2020, all we have to rely on are countries voluntary commitments. According to a UN study, these fall short of the cuts required to prevent more than 2C of global warming - by some 6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide.   • But as the Durban agreement conceded, 2C is still too high. It raised the possibility of pledging to keep the rise to no more than 1.5C. This would require a much faster programme of cuts than it envisages.   So why is it so easy to save the banks and so hard to save biosphere? If ever you needed evidence that our governments operate in the interests of the elite, rather than the world as a whole, here it is. Visit the related web page
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