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"Hope for a Troubled Planet: The Good News Story"

Mr David Suzuki

ASIALINK-READINGS-MIALS SEMINAR
MELBOURNE - 7 February 2002

Welcome and Introduction:
Jenny McGregor, Executive Director, Asialink

Welcome, ladies and gentleman, to this fantastic event tonight. My name is Jenny McGregor and I’m the Director of Asialink, Australia’s leading institution for increasing understanding and building partnerships between Australia and Asia. We’re privileged to share this wonderful Nation Fender Katsilidis building, the Sidney Myer Asia Centre, with the Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Societies. Together we work to bring a rich program of intellectual and cultural events about Asia to the Melbourne community. We have an amazing array of events happening, so please keep in touch with us and you’ll keep in the know about Asia.

Tonight on behalf of Readings, Asialink, MIALS and the University of Melbourne, it is my great honour to introduce the global superstar of the environmental movement, Dr David Suzuki. David’s going to discuss one of the most important issues confronting Asia and obviously all of the rest of the world as well: “Hope for a Troubled Planet”. It is a good news story for David.

An award winning researcher, teacher and broadcaster, Dr Suzuki has developed a worldwide reputation for his ability to explain the complexities of the natural world in a compelling and comprehensible way. He even does it, as many of you will know, in a fabulously engaging way to students and kids. An award winning person on many, many levels, he’s recognized as a world leader in sustainable ecology and is a recipient of the UNESCO Prize for Science, the United Nations’ Environment Program Medal and the Order of Canada. He’s written more than thirty books and has received fifteen honorary doctorates from universities in Canada, the US and Australia. Please welcome Dr David Suzuki.

Hope for a Troubled Planet: The Good News Story
David Suzuki

Thank you very much for that generous introduction.

I’m always absolutely delighted to come to Australia, which in my heart I’ve adopted as my second country, so I feel every time I arrive I’m coming home. But maybe there are a few Canadians in the audience? Are there any Canadians here? We’re number one in hockey, we rock!!

The book that I am talking about today is a good news story. Apparently I’m called the doctor of doom and gloom and I hope that this book will kind of counter that idea that it’s all about depressing news.

But before I get into the good news I think it is important to remind ourselves of where we've come from and where we are. This year is the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the modern environmental movement, 1962. My great hero, and the hero I’m sure for millions of people in the world, a woman named Rachel Carson, published the book called “Silent Spring”. Silent Spring was a great warning that told us that while our technologies are very powerful, our technologies also reverberate around the natural world and have unexpected consequences. She warned us that in nature everything is interconnected, and while spraying chemicals killed insects, the repercussions spread throughout the web of life, including human beings. Today, after fifty years of pesticide use we haven’t conquered insects, we haven’t conquered weeds, we haven’t conquered fungi, but we’ve poisoned the air, water and soil of the planet. So her book was a great warning. It was one of the early warnings that we have to think more deeply about the kind of technologies that we were releasing around the world. Because of her book, she raised the alarm with millions of people.

Only ten years later in 1972 the environmental movement had grown to such an extent that the United Nations held the first international conference on development and the environment in Stockholm. And at Stockholm there were eminent scientists: Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, Barbara Ward, Margaret Mead. They were all there to discuss the repercussions of population growth, of toxic pollution, of poverty, of species extinction.

In the years that followed the meetings in Stockholm we learned of further ecological problems that we didn’t know about in 1962 or 1972. We found out there was a thing called ozone depletion. We learned that globally tropical rainforests were coming down at a catastrophic rate; marine resources were collapsing; climate was undergoing a change. Toxic pollution in pristine areas ­ in the most pristine areas ­ like the Arctic, showed that the planet is a single system. And to me, one of the more frightening phenomenon that we’ve now found was from plastics, the so-called hormone mimics.

Ten years ago, because of all of these new ecological problems that were being found and the concern that was growing globally, in 1992, the largest gathering ever in human history of heads of state took place as the Earth Summit in Rio. I’m ashamed to say that the head of Australia, Mr Keating at that time, decided that it wasn’t important enough for him to go, but Australia was one of the few countries that didn’t have their head of state present. Rio was meant to signal a shift in human activity from that point on. After Rio it was believed we would never ignore the environment in any decision that was made. Economic, political, any kind of business decision would have to consider the environmental consequences of that decision.

Out of Rio came this phrase ‘sustainable development’ ­ that we will have to try to get onto a path where human activity was sustainable. Of course we needed development, but we needed sustainable development. And out of Rio came a massive blueprint for how the entire planet ­ the developing and the developed world ­ could get onto that path of sustainable development. And it was called Agenda 21, a massive blueprint. Out of Rio came the Biodiversity Convention, a convention meant to preserve the biodiversity on the planet. And out of that meeting came a convention to deal with atmosphere and climate change.

As if to punctuate the importance of Rio, in that same year after the Earth Summit took place the Canadian Government declared that there would be a moratorium for fishing for all Northern Cod of the east coast of Canada. I remind you that the Northern Cod were found in such abundance off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland when Europeans first arrived in North America that they reported the cod were so thick in the bays that when they tried to take their ships into the bays, they were impeded, they were stopped by the physical mass of the cod in the bay. You could take wicker baskets and just drop them over and bring the basket up filled with cod. For over 500 years, those great shoals of Northern Cod attracted fishers all over the planet. In 1992 the Canadian Government finally recognized that they were essentially commercially extinct. Overnight, 45,000 thousand people lost their jobs in Newfoundland and a 500 year old way of life vanished at that spot. The moratorium was called for two years. It was expected by then the fish would bounce back and fishing would start again. It is now ten years later and there is absolutely no sign that those fish will bounce back. So, essentially after 500 years of fishing we extirpated that mass, that great population of fish. The people of Newfoundland then are one of the obvious environmental victims of that great ecological disaster of the East Coast.

Now we’re preparing on the tenth anniversary of Rio for another international conference on the environment and development. It’s to be held in August in Johannesburg. What is the consequence of that great gathering in 1992 in Rio? Agenda 21 was forgotten virtually the minute it was born. After Agenda 21 was announced the cost was going to be tens of billions of dollars, most of it to be borne by the developed world. The rich countries said we can’t afford to support Agenda 21. The Biodiversity Convention has been derailed because it got into genetically modified organisms and the possibility of exploiting the genes of species yet to be discovered. The United States wants to capitalize on that and so they essentially derailed any kind of agreement on protecting biodiversity on the planet. And of course we know that the atmosphere convention, which was developed further in 1997 in Kyoto, is now derailed, although the European Union announced today that they are going to ratify Kyoto. You know very well that the major polluter on the planet, the United States, thumbed its nose at the rest of the world, and of course good old Australia, Mr Howard with his nose right up Mr Bush’s backside, was saying there’s no way Australia’s going to do anything until the Americans do first. So the Johannesburg Conference I think is going to be a very sad meeting. When you look back over that 40 year history of rising public concern and expectation, of a recognition of more and more ecological problems on the planet, and yet a 40 year period in which has really seen us rushing down the same path of undercutting the life support systems of the planet.

I first visited this country in 1985. I remember that year at one of the events at which I was talking I encountered an economist. This economist said: “Listen Suzuki, you better understand that if we don’t have a growing, strong economy we can’t afford to protect the environment”. So, now I come back to this country in the year 2002 and what I hear economists saying is: “We can’t afford to implement any kind of Kyoto convention because it will wreck the economy.” But we’ve just gone through a ten year period of absolutely unprecedented growth in the economy, so I don’t get it. We have to have a growing economy in order to protect the environment, but when we get a growing economy, we can’t wreck it by trying to protect the environment. We’re going to lose all the way around. So this says we’re never going to act, that were dashing towards a cliff and we’re going to go off the edge and we’re not going to do a damn thing to slow down or turn the wheel until we actually run off. I can see Mr Howard after we run over the cliff, even while he’s falling, he’s going to be looking around and saying “Listen, nothing bad’s happened, everything’s fine”.

Our failure to come to grips with the real consequences of what growing human population, growing human technology, growing human consumption and the global economy will do to us I think reflects the fact that we have become blinkered or blinded. We can no longer actually see the consequences of human activity. There are many reasons why we have been blinded, but two things leap out at me.

One is that we have become increasingly concerned with the bottom line, which is very, very short-term. If you think about political leaders in this country, long-term vision is two and a half years. You can’t do anything. You have to do something that will pay off before the next election, otherwise what’s the point of doing it. So, political vision in this country is of the order of two and a half years. In terms of the private sector, the business community, it’s not just the annual report they are worried about. They talk about the quarterly report, so they are focused on the very, very short-term payoff or deficit and nobody now has their eyes fixed on the much longer term goal.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of the First Nations. They are the aboriginal people of North America who talk about the ‘seven generation rule’. When you are going to make a major decision among aboriginal people in North America, the first thing they do is think back on seven generations of their ancestors and then they think ahead on seven generations of their children. They say there is no way we want to do anything to destroy the memory of our elders and what our past ancestors have done and there is no way we want to destroy a world for our children seven generations into the future. Now that’s called long-term thinking. We don’t do that anymore. We act today on an issue by issue basis and we respond immediately trying to bandage each little crisis that we have without any kind of long term vision of what the consequences of that tinkering will do.

The second thing I think that’s changed very much is that throughout human history people understood that we were deeply imbedded in the natural world and dependant on that world. They understood that, and they gave service to that. They affirmed that understanding by their ceremonies, their rituals, their prayers, their traditions. There was a constant reaffirmation that we were part of the natural world, dependant on it, and we had a responsibility. If everything is interlinked then every action has consequences. People understood that we had a role to act a proper way in order to keep it all together and going. But we don’t recognize that any longer. Our world has been shattered, fragmented. We aren’t aware of the connectivity of everything.

One of the reasons this is, I think, is because most of us now live in large cities. You take a child today in Melbourne or Sydney and you ask that child when you turn on the tap where does the water come from, when you flick the switch where does the electricity come from, when you flush the toilet where does it go, or put the garbage on the curb where does it end up, and children don’t know. If you ask them where their food comes from they’ll say the supermarket. There are a lot of kids who don’t really understand that hamburgers and wieners are the muscles of an animal, or that vegetables are actually grown in the soil. I laughed when I first heard this idea too, but that certainly has been my experience. And if we don’t understand that those things have come from the earth and will go back to the earth, then it becomes easy to believe people when they say, “No, it’s the economy. The economy delivers all those services, all those wonderful things. That’s what we depend on for the quality of our lives.” But it’s not the economy that delivers that. Everything in this room, first from the invisible air to the energy heating or cooling it, to the plastic, the wood, the glass, everything in this room has come from the earth. It is the earth that is the source of our wealth and that makes an economy possible. But because we no longer see where we are - how we’re embedded - we no longer see the connections which inform us of our place in the natural world.

Ever since I first began to come to Australia, I’ve been grateful that there has been a tremendous receptivity to the ideas I have been spreading. You know, every time I come I keep saying, “God it’s the same old message, why do they keep coming along to listen to this?” The message is very simple: the message is first and foremost, we are animals and we forget that we are animals at our own peril. You know there are parts of the United States, especially in the south, when I get up and say, “Don’t forget we are animals”, people get pissed off at me. “Don’t tell me I’m an animal, I’m a human being.” We don’t like that and we show that in the way that we use language: if you call someone a worm, or a snake, or a pig, or a chicken, or an ape, you’re insulting them because we think that we are superior to these creatures. We look down on them. And I always laugh when I go into a store or a shopping centre and I see a big sign saying ‘No animals allowed’. If you enforced that you wouldn’t have much shopping going on because we are biological creatures.

As animals we have not escaped the reality that we need clean air, like every other animal. We need clean water, clean soil, and clean energy that’s captured by the sun by plants. As animals those are our fundamental needs. We always boast how intelligent we are; what intelligent creature, knowing that air, water and soil are absolutely critical to our survival, will then use those things as a toxic dump to put the most poisonous chemicals ever known to human kind into them as if somehow it’s going to go away and not affect us? We’ve forgotten that we are animals and those are our most fundamental needs.

The second point that I’d like to make is really a miraculous insight. For me it was when I recognized the reality of the fact that what delivers our most basic needs of clean air, clean water, clean soil that gives us our food, and clean energy, is the web of living things on the planet. Biodiversity ­ all of the complex species around the planet ­ are what cleanse, replenish, renew, create clean air, clean soil and clean energy. We have no idea how biodiversity does it but the miracle to me is that it all works. Life creates the very basic needs that all life requires. Yet, again as an intelligent creature knowing that biodiversity delivers these services, we are tearing at the web of biodiversity. Because of human activity we have entered into what biologists call the sixth great extinction crisis. We are extinguishing species at a rate that’s anywhere from a hundred to ten thousand times faster than normally occurs during evolution. So, the second point is that we should remember that we are as dependent as any other creature on the flourishing of biodiversity on the planet, because that’s the source of our basic needs of animals.

My third point is that we are more than just animals that require eating and mating and breathing and drinking. We are social creatures, and, like our orangutan and gorilla and chimpanzee cousins we need other human beings. Indeed, we need human beings in the most profound way. The greatest need we have as social animals is love. Love is the force that makes us fully human. Now before you think I’ve gone off the edge and into the new age and all that stuff, I mean this in the most profound scientifically demonstrably way. What I’ve done is looked through the literature on children who’ve grown up during the reign of terror in Cambodia, on children who’ve grown up in Rwanda during that terrible period of genocide, of children who grew up in Bosnia, in Romania under Ceausescu. What you find is that when children grow up fed, clothed and sheltered but are never held and kissed and loved and talked to, children grow up fundamentally crippled ­ physically and psychologically. They die. They die faster than children who grow up with love. Love is the force that makes us fully human.

How do we then ensure that as social animals we can maximize the opportunity to experience love? If you live under conditions of chronic major unemployment as you see in native communities throughout North America you find a tremendous degree of upset in those communities and dysfunction in those communities. If you don’t have meaningful work for people, your community and family suffer. If you don’t have the opportunity for an equitable distribution of the wealth of a community, you suffer. If you don’t have the opportunity for justice or security, or if you are constantly under the threat of terrorism or oppression or war, you have other priorities than worrying about the environment. So in order to ensure a full flowering of our human potential as social animals we have to look to enriching our cultures and our communities that allow families to flourish. We have to fight against injustice, insecurity. We have to fight for full employment. We have to fight against oppression and war and terror. I remind my environmental brothers and sisters that if a starving man encounters a plant or animal that can be eaten, he’s not going to say “Gee I wonder if they are on the endangered list”. They’re going to kill it and eat it. I certainly would and I’d bet that most of you would to. For anyone who wouldn’t on principle, I admire you, you’re great. If we don’t deal with hunger and poverty, forget the environment. These issues then have to be dealt with as central issues to the environmental crisis. So that’s my third point.

My fourth and last point is that we are more than just biological beings and social animals. We are also spiritual creatures. And I don’t think there has ever been a time when we’ve needed spirit more. We need to learn some humility to understand that there are forces impinging on our lives that are beyond understanding or control. We need to know that we come out of the web of living things and that when we die we go back to that web, and that nature will persist after we, each individual, die. We need to know that there are sacred places on the planet; that people come with respect and reverence; that we don’t just see an opportunity for development. We need spirit as well. Those simple insights that I offer you have to be at the base or the foundation of the way that we are going to live in the coming years, in a sustainable way.

We have a guy in the largest province in Canada, Ontario, the richest province. The Premier announced he was going to resign a few months ago and now there is a big leadership race going on. The man who’s probably going to become the next Premier of Ontario, a man named Ernie Eves, in the first all candidates debate for this position got up and said: “There’s only one thing you have to know about me ­ my whole platform is based on it - I’m against taxes.” And I thought, what a bankrupt society we have become. If this is a man that aspires to be the leader of the richest, biggest province in Canada, and his whole thrust, his whole signal to us is that he is against taxes. People want more than that. They want a vision. They want to believe in a society that stand to support the most disadvantaged person; that offers medical care to everyone; that gives you a support system in case you have an accident or you become sick for a while or you get fired from your job. We want to share ­ the haves will share with the have-nots. We want a society that stands for more than just the accumulation of money. But that seems now to be the agenda that is driving so many of our governments.

It’s become clear that in the years that I have been coming here there has been a constant flow of people willing to listen to my ideas and to respond to them. I’ve been gratified that there has been such generosity of spirit here in Australia to the ideas that I have tried to share with you. And I began to realize there is enough of a base, enough of an understanding on the part of people that we are in trouble. But the difficulty for many people is to find out: “What can I do? Are there any real options out there, or are we on a path that is simply going to sweep us along because there is nothing that can be done?” Over and over again I get people come up and say, “Suzuki, I’ve got the message. I know we’re in trouble, but what can I do?” That’s why a couple of years ago I said to Holly Dressel, my co-author and researcher, “We’ve got to throw a lifeline out there to people who understand that the planet is being degraded. We’ve got to show that there are options, that there are solutions, that we can get off the destructive path.” And that’s what led to the book I am going to talk about tonight, “Good News for a Change”.

We took the advance we got to write the book and used it to travel through South America, North America (Canada and the United States), Europe and we went to India. We didn’t cover Australia. That’s not to say there aren’t all kinds of good news stories in Australia ­ believe me there are. This is not an exhaustive or definitive look at all of the sustainable ways that are being developed. It’s just taking little insights here and there. When we started, I wasn’t at all convinced that we could fill a book. But by the time we were halfway through the research it became very clear that we could have filled volumes because there are unbelievable things going on. And we’re talking about more than just picking up litter and recycling plastic bottles. I’m talking about fundamental shifts that show a different kind of mindset, that show that there are fundamental things which can be done which deviate from the destructive activities we have participated in. We looked in a broad number of areas. We looked at sustainable forestry, and I was amazed at the examples we could get, both tropical as well as temperate forests. There are very, very good methods that have been developed over hundreds of years. We looked at flourishing businesses that put the environment above profit, and yet do very well. We looked at whether or not there are significant methods to reduce greenhouse gases. We looked at whether there are ways to try and deviate from the tremendous destruction that is going on in the oceans. We looked at ecological ranching of cattle. At the level of government we see all kinds of initiatives for using taxation creatively to discourage those things that we know about and to encourage those that are beneficial. There are example after example in all of these areas.

The question is: are there any general features of these examples that can describe what sustainable activities might be? There are a number of features that pop out again and again. For example, people involved in trying to find alternatives generally are based in a community ­ the initiatives come out of community. If a company comes from somewhere else and sets up a plant in Melbourne or Sydney but the head office is in Tokyo or New York, you know they don’t give a damn about the status of the community or the local ecosystem. The reason they invested in you is not because they cared about you as people or about your surrounding environment. They see an economic opportunity to make money and take it out of the country and take it somewhere else. So there is a fundamentally different attitude when a company arises out of a community than when it comes and pops in from somewhere else. Many of the initiatives show a great deal of concern about equity. The way that much of the private sector is going today is to build increasingly disparities between the executives at the top and those that are doing the scut work at the bottom, so you see a growing division even in the societies in North America. The rich are getting unbelievably wealthy. We’ve won the war on poverty ­ we’ve beaten the poor right into the ground, they’re out of sight. The middle class is going backwards. But man is there a small proportion of people that are getting unbelievably rich. If you are talking about sustainability you can’t tolerate that kind of inequity. We’ve got to be dealing with a broader distribution of resources.

And of course any initiative has got to be concerned with the issue of is it sustainable. Over and over again in the examples, people are constantly looking at the long-range effect. That’s because almost all of these examples don’t fix their eye on a very short-term bottom line. They define a vision or goal they want to work to twenty, thirty, forty years from now. That means then when you have a goal that you know you are working towards, when you have a crisis or some decision that has to be made, you no longer deal with it in the absence of any idea where that is going to take you. Once you have the vision you say “If I do or do not do this how will that affect our ability to get where we want to be in the future?”

You’ll find that the people involved in sustainable activity are humble. They don’t feel they’ve got all the answers. They’re flexible. They learn from things they do ­ those things that work, those things that don’t. They tolerate a great deal of diversity of opinion. They’re not monolithic and they come with respect for other people and for nature itself.

The change that’s implemented almost always comes from the bottom up. It’s not imposed from on high, it’s something that the grassroots understands and then educate their so-called ‘leaders’ to implement. Many of these initiatives are undertaken with an understanding that the payoff isn’t going to be in the next quarter or the next year, but is going to take decades. So the actual hope for change is not something that is going to be instantaneous, it’s going to be long term.

I think the great challenge that we still face, the obstacle to implementing more of these kinds of initiative, is that we continue to think of money as the goal and the be all and end all of what we want. Especially today in North America, two thirds of all economic activity is concerned with consumption. Consumption is what keeps the economy going. After September 11th, what was George Bush’s exhortation of his people? He concluded: “We’ve got to keep the American economy going, so I appeal to you as American people, as loyal Americans, do your civic duty. Go out and buy stuff!” And God damn it, it worked. They were going down the tube, and they bloody well have reversed that. Now I happen to think that it’s temporary, but consumption has become the major driver of this economy today. I want to remind you that in the 19th century, ‘consumption’ referred to a wasting away from tuberculosis. Today the planet is suffering from human consumption.

We don’t ask the question, what is wealth? I’d like to suggest a very simple thought exercise for you to understand what the real things of value are in your life. Imagine that you’re 85 or 90 years old. You’ve lived a rich full life. You’re now dying because you’ve worn your body out. You’re not in pain, you’re not suffering and you’re ready to die. You accept it. As you lie in bed surrounded by family preparing to die, and you reflect back on your life and the things which fill you with joy and happiness and pride, what will they be? It sure as hell isn’t going to be that huge four-wheeler that you’ve got in the garage. It’s not going to be this gigantic house, or your Gucci or Klein clothes. It’s not going to be the big Sony television set or entertainment centre. The things that you are going to value and the things which you will be proud of are family, friends, community and the things you did together that enriched your lives. It’s not about stuff. And yet somehow we’ve got fooled into this idea that money represents wealth. We’ve got to have more money because it buys the things which we think makes us happy ­ namely more stuff. One of the most humiliating statistics I know is that in the last 40 years, the average size of a Canadian family has decreased by 50 per cent. In that same period, the average size of a Canadian house has doubled. So we’ve got half as many people living in twice as much space, which means on average there is four times as much space for each of us living in the house. And why do we need all that space? Because we got so much stuff to put in it, that’s why! Do you think we’re four times happy today than when we were 40 years ago? The average Canadian house that is being built today has one bathroom per person that is going to live in the house. I grew up in the 1940s in London, Ontario. There were six of us in the family. The house was, I think, less than a thousand square feet and we had one bathroom. I don’t ever remember waiting and saying to my sisters, for God’s sake get out of there, I’ve got to go. But I guess today we’re so full of it we’ve got to have our own bathrooms so that we can head straight in and dump our load. We have to ask what is the real wealth? The wealth that we really treasure is our friends and the things we do. The wealth that we treasure is good health, clean air, clean water and opportunities for our children to lead rich, meaningful lives. That’s what out wealth is all about, but we’ve got focused on the wrong things.

Now let me give you a few examples from the book that show the kind of thinking that is going on and the shift in the paradigm that’s being made. One of the interesting people in the book is a man named Bernard Lietaer who was involved in designing the Euro that now has been spread throughout Europe. He’s an economist and he wrote a book called “The Future of Money”. Here’s what he said:

“Today’s official monetary system has almost nothing to do with real wealth. Just to give you an idea: 1995 statistics indicate that the volume of currency exchanged on the global level is 1.3 million dollars US per day. That’s 30 times more than the daily gross domestic product (GDP) of all of the developed countries put together. Of all that volume, only two to three per cent has anything to do with real trade or investment. The remainder takes place in the speculative global cyber casino, currency trading and speculation for example. This means that the real economy has become relegated to a mere frosting on the speculative cake, an exact reversal of how it was a mere two decades ago.”

The amazing thing today is that you and I can go out and buy money, hold it for a day, two days or a week, sell money and make money. Can you imagine anything stupider than that, not doing a bloody thing to improve the quality of lives or the environment in the world, just buying and selling money. I could never understand why in Canada every day they read the value of the Canadian dollar today is point six two five one three of the American dollar, to the fourth decimal point. Who gives a damn if it’s sixty two one four or one five? The speculators do. It makes not a damn bit of difference to you or me, but speculators are speculating on the fourth decimal point and making enormous amounts of money by that kind of speculation. And Lietaer is pointing out that that has to change.

You all I’m sure know a woman named Anita Roddick who founded the Body Shop. Anita didn’t found the Body Shop to get super rich. She was a radical. She was an activist back in the 60s and 70s and she wanted to do things. She thought she could build a business which would enable her to give her the support that would allow her to do the things she wanted to do ­ to work for environmental causes, to work against violence against women, to work to improve the lot of aboriginal people. And she has done that with the kind of money that the Body Shop has brought in. And here’s what she says as a business person:

“Businesses are not found in nature, they are created. They are not preordained by the almighty, they are made by men and women, and therefore they can be subject to change. We have to redefine the notion of profit. Who should profit? Is it the small group of people who have invested in a company or is it the bigger society? Is it employees? Is it community? Is it suppliers, is it the environment?”

I think she’s absolutely right. We’ve got to ask these questions. What is an economy for? Is an economy just to service transnational organisations so that they can go around the world and use the planet as a potential resource and sell to six billion people around the world? We never ask how much is enough? Companies report increases in the amount of profits every year. Should there be no limits to how much profits you can make? There are 500 multi-billionaires in the world. Do you think that’s right? I happen to think a billion dollars is an inconceivable amount of money. I happen to think it’s obscene for any human being to aspire to possessing that amount of money. But nobody ever asks, what is an economy for and how much is enough? Anita Roddick raises that question for us.

One of the most inspiring stories we have in the book is a woman named Judy Wicks. She’s an American; a single mum who proudly says I’m a business woman and I believe in the business world and that it can do good things for this earth. She began a restaurant in Philadelphia called the “White Dog Café”. She wanted to use that restaurant as a means of acquiring a place in the community, so then she could not only make a living for herself and put her children through university, but that she could give something back to the community that made her business possible. She now does in her restaurant five million dollars a year in business. She employs full time 75 people. Their food is all completely organic and they’re constantly having teach-ins and lessons going on in the restaurant about organic food as compared to genetically modified food, about the global economy and why it is destructive of local communities. She employs local youth from the black community and tries to give them a leg up. Judy is contributing back to the community. Listen to what her attitude is as a business person:

“Socially responsible business was that way by nature in the old days, simply because business people were part of the community. They naturally wanted to do well within it. As corporations have gotten larger, their leaders and owners are no longer living in the same communities as their customers, so there are more opportunities to compartmentalize values. … I don’t want to be a wealthy person. I have no interest in that whatsoever, even if it were handed to me. But of course I don’t want to be poor. It’s just that you get to a point when you realize you don’t need any more stuff.”

How can we afford to help poor countries raise the level of concern about the environment, poverty and so on? I spoke to a man named Manoj Mishra who works and heads up one arm of the World Wildlife Fund in India. I said: “Don’t we need more development so that a country like India can afford to protect the environment?” Listen to what Mishra says:

“Oh right. The middle class all getting a car is what will save nature. Well that’s not how it works, and that’s not what Indians want. Even if we’re poor we have to save our animals ­ that’s the basis of life, that’s our identity, that’s morality, that’s our heritage and we know it. And that’s why these efforts find such popular support. Nature is so good here, we have no excuse not to save it.”

This from a country with a billion people. What per cent of your land-base do you think you protect in parks and reserves? Does anyone know? I’ll bet you in Australia it’s less than 4 per cent. Anyone know? Canada protects less than 6 per cent. Do you know how much land is protected in India, with its teeming masses of 1 billion people? 19 per cent. That’s a lesson that was a shock to me, and a great inspiration.

Let me tell you about another company in the United States called Interface. Interface manufactures carpets. They do a billion dollars of business a year. They’re a big company. A few years ago the executives of Interface realized that their carpets were off-gassing toxic chemicals. When you walk into a new building and you have that new-building smell that comes from the carpet - that’s poison! It’s coming from the stuff in the carpets. Not only that, but the glue which they glue the fibres to the base with and the glue that they put the base on the floor with are also toxic. They suddenly realized, “My God, we’re in the business of producing poisonous materials”. Not only that, when the company is finished with it they rip it up and they throw it into the dump. There it leaches into the air, the water and the soil. So they began an activity to see whether they could produce a product that was not toxic. Not only that: they said “We’re not going to sell it. We’re going to manufacture this stuff that’s not going to be toxic and we’re going to rent it to people. When the life of the carpet is finished we will come in, we will remove it, and then we will pull it apart and use every bit of that carpet and make more carpet.” So they sought to do this. And what kind of a product did they develop? Listen to this:

“It’s cheaper to make, it’s four times as durable, it requires 35 per cent less materials and if you couple that with all the other steps Interface takes you wind up with a carpet which needs 97-99 per cent fewer materials to manufacture and still delivers the service to the customer.”

That’s almost a hundred per cent increase in resource productivity, just because Interface asked the right questions in an honest and searching fashion coming out of a conversation with sustainability experts. Now the CEO of Interface is a man by the name of Ray Anderson. He’s become like an evangelist for what Interface has done because he believes that all businesses should be able to learn from their experience. This is what Ray says:

“Our goal is zero waste because waste is unmarketable production. If we make it we’re paying for it and we can’t sell it, so we’re trying not to make it in the first place.”

One of the great battles that I have been involved in for many, many years in British Columbia is over the fate of BC’s forests. Over and over again we hear from forest companies: “Suzuki, we can‘t do it the way you want. We can’t do selective cutting, because in order to be globally competitive we have to clear cut. That’s the only way we can compete with Malaysia or Papau New Guinea. We have to mechanise and knock out a lot of loggers’ jobs and let machines take over in order to be efficient and profitable in the global economy.” So over and over I hear this argument that it can’t be done. Oh, really? Well what about Merv Wilkinson on Vancouver Island who has owned 150 acres since the early 1950s. He’s logged it seven or eight times in that period. He has removed the equivalent of the entire forest; that is, the volume of wood that he has removed over that period of time is equivalent to what he had when he bought it. And yet he’s got more wood on his property that he had in 1950 when he bought the forest, because he does it by selective logging. Well, you could say, “Yeah, but Merv Wilkinson is a small operation. You can’t do that on the scale of these large companies like MacMillan Bloedel.” Well how about the Yakama Indians in Washington State. They have a quarter of the entire state, and they log their forest. They do over 85 million dollars worth of business per year. That forest gives everything the tribe needs to support its several thousand members. It educates them. It clothes them. It feeds them and shelters them and gives them their medical care. The forest is the source of the income they need to survive, but they are driven by the bottom line which is that the forest is the goose which lays the golden eggs. The protection of the forest and its integrity is the first priority of the Yakama Indians because they know as long as you just collect a few of the golden eggs every year you can have the goose and it will do that indefinitely forever.

But you could say “Those are just Indians; they’re special cases”. Well then, how about Collins Pine? This is a family held business that’s been in operation for 150 years. They operate out of Oregon. They employ 7,500 people every year. They do a quarter of a billion dollars worth of business, and their forest is among the most pristine and rich forests anywhere along the West Coast of North America. They do it because their priority is to maintain that forest’s integrity because it’s the goose that lays the golden egg. They don’t make as much money as the companies that clear-cut, it’s true. You can clear-cut, take the money and put it in the bank, but that’s a one-time profit. You do it when you cut the forest down. Then you have to sit around and wait and hope that in a hundred and fifty years you’ll have a second crop to take. Collins Pine cuts every year and supports seventy five hundred people doing that and will do it forever. The added benefit is that a job is more than just a way to get paid. A job is something that fulfils you, that gives you satisfaction. This is what one of the employees of Collins Pine, who is the Chief Forester in Almanor Forest, one of the forests owned by the company, says:

“Going to work feels real good. We may not have made as much money, but we’ve changed a whole industry. Money is not everything. The satisfaction of knowing you’ve improved things is pretty good too. Four generations of my family worked in the woods. I saw my dad clear-cutting these forests, destroying the places that he loved, that he depended on for a future. I waited for years for a chance to work for Collins Pine. That’s typical for many of the people who live here, and, you know, we’re still learning all the time.”

I don’t think there is anyway you can replace that kind of attitude ­ the sense of pride, the sense that they are doing something that is worthwhile for themselves and for future generations. That’s what happens when you work doing the right things.

In one of the interviews I had in Australia yesterday, the interviewer said “Yeah, but they’ve taken polls in Australia which show that the environment is down around 5 or 6. Australians are much more worried about jobs, about the state of the economy. They’re worried about medical care and education.” Well of course they are ­ these are very important issues ­ but I don’t believe for a minute the kinds of issues environmentalists are concerned about are low down in the polls for Australians. If you ask the right questions, you will find that the priorities of Australians are the same as the priorities of environmentalists. We’ve gone into forest communities, communities that depend on pulp mills and lumbar yards in British Columbia, and done polls and asked people: “What are your long term goals? What do you want 15 or 20 years down the line? And you know what they say? The first thing that comes up is: “I want respect. I want respect for what I do. I want security. I don’t want to have to worry that the resources are going to run out and I’m going to have to change occupations. I want opportunities for myself and for my children to be there so that I can make choices in the future. I worry about the health of my children especially through the air and the water. And I want a strong community. The reason why I live in this community is because I love it, and I want it to be this way.” Those are the things environmentalists want. Those are the priorities that we all want: respect, security, opportunity, good health and community.

I’ll tell you a secret: I’ve often been called a radical, even in Australia where I’ve had a very friendly reception. Indeed, I’ve heard some people call me an eco-terrorist. But I want to tell you something: they got it all wrong. I am a conservative. Conservatives say: “Oh my God, we don’t know everything. We don’t know where we’re going so we better be very careful because we want to save things for future generations. We want to protect things, to leave something for later generations.” That’s being a conservative. And my bet is every one of you in this room is a conservative like me. The radicals are the ones who say: “Hell no, go on in and clear-cut the forest. We don’t know a God damn thing about how this forest grows, but we’ll clear-cut it and we’ll try and do something later. We’ll continue to pour out carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and we’ll worry about global warming later.” Those are radicals. And you know what, they’re eco-terrorists as well, because it is terrifying about what they are doing to future generations.

Our destructiveness has its roots in the industrial revolution 150 years ago. When we first began to make machines, people didn’t worry about the environment. So the industrial revolution and technology developed helter skelter until we ended up where we are now, with something not by design but by chance turned out to be a very destructive system. One of the exciting visionaries today is a man named William McDonough who is the Dean of Architecture at the University of Virginia. And he says:

“If 150 years ago I had a school of architecture, and I had a class ­ this is before the industrial revolution ­ and I said to the class I want you to design a system that will come out the way it did after 150 years.”

So he said, how would a class have to be constructed to design the industries that we have today. And this is what he thinks you would have to tell them:

“Please design a system that pollutes the soil, air and water; that measures productivity by how few people are working; that measures prosperity by how much natural capital you can dig up, bury, burn or otherwise destroy; that measures progress by the number of smoke stacks that you have; that requires thousands of complex regulations to keep people from killing themselves too quickly; that destroys biodiversity and cultural diversity; and, that produces things that are so highly toxic they require thousands of generations maintaining constant vigil while working in terror.”

He says that’s a description of what we’ve got from the industrial revolution today. It’s high time that we said that’s at an end, we’re starting the second revolution, the new industrial revolution. And listen to what the design of the new industrial revolution is:

“The new industrial revolution introduces no hazardous materials into the ecosystem. It measures prosperity by how much natural capital is being accrued in productive ways. It measures productivity by how many people are gainfully and meaningfully employed. It measures progress by how many buildings have no smokestacks or dangerous effluents. It does not require regulations whose purpose is to prevent us from killing ourselves. It produces nothing that will require the vigilance of future generations and it celebrates biological and cultural diversity and solar not paper income.”

Those, he says, are the roots of the new industrial revolution that is coming. And believe me, McDonough is doing it on a massive scale. He’s working with the City of Chicago to make it the greenest city in North America. He’s working with William Clay Ford of Ford Motors to transform the nature of production and profits in the Ford Company.

These then, are the kinds of changes that we’re trying to document. The challenge then we face is not a lack of ideas or materials or techniques. The challenge we face is the human mindset that immediately responds “It can’t be done, we can’t afford it, or we’ve always done it this way so I’m not going to change”. We have to recognize and accept that out current path is simply not sustainable. We have to think clearly about what we want to protect and where we want to be decades from now. And we have to look for alternatives, especially those that appear to work: they are sustainable, they support people, they protect communities. And then we have to put them into action in anyway we can.

Thank you.