David Suzuki

David Suzuki: Resources--Video

 

David Suzuki talks to World Wildlife--Australia about why humans are the real reason our planet is degrading at such a fast rate and how we can turn this around; 19 minutes.

 

 

The world in 2100.

 

  

David Suzuki and Al Gore 

 

David Suzuki: Resources--Books

 

Suzuki, David and Dave Robert Taylor.  The Big Picture: Reflections on Science, Humanity and a Quickly Changing Planet (Greystone Books, 2009). 

David Suzuki and co-author Dave Robert Taylor examine current issues facing the natural world such as suburban sprawl, sustainable transportation, food shortages, biodiversity, technology, and public policy. Most importantly, they provide solid, science-based solutions to the environmental challenges of the 21st century.

 

Suzuki, David and David R. Boyd.  David Suzuki's Green Guide (Greystone Books, 2008).

Everyone knows that human actions affect our natural environment. With this indispensable guide, readers will learn to consume fewer resources and become part of the solution as stewards of the planet. This book recommends actions for individuals to be more green in the homes where we live, the way we travel, the food we eat, and the things we buy. It also describes how all of us can ensure that governments support sustainable lifestyles. Suzuki and Boyd provide vital tips for readers to:

  • create a healthy indoor environment,
  • decrease energy and water use,
  • choose eco-friendly transportation,
  • make simple diet changes to eat fresher, healthier food

 

Suzuki, David and illustration by Eugenie Fernandes.  There's a Barnyard in My Bedroom (Greystone Press, 2008).

The three chapters in this book, based on previous titles by David Suzuki and Eugenie Fernandes, take Jamie and Megan on an exciting exploration of nature and its secrets. With the help of their parents and their imaginations, they discover that natural magic is all around them. Sheets and pillows, books and pens, fruits and furniture: all come from nature. They also discover that the air is not just empty space but is full of smells, sounds, water, and life-giving gases. And they discover that their backyard contains clues to the past and future: a nail from pioneer times, seeds that will grow into food, and a robin’s nest that will soon hold baby birds.

 

Lambert, Jill, with introduction by David Suzuki.  A Good Catch (Greystone Press, 2008).

One concern in culinary circles these days is sustainable seafood. There’s a limit to how much seafood the ocean can produce, and we know we have to fish responsibly and eat only abundant species.

A Good Catch explains which are the best, most responsible seafood choices—and features them in more than seventy mouth-watering recipes from celebrity chefs across Canada.

Guided by SeaChoice, an initiative of Sustainable Seafood Canada, a brief introduction outlines what questions informed consumers should be asking about seafood and provides a quick-reference guide to the recommended choices. Learn, for example, why pink salmon is a better choice than sockeye and why trap-caught prawns are preferable to net caught ones. The book also suggests substitutions for your favorite fish that may not fit into the SeaChoice guidelines, so you can still cook your stand-by recipes knowing you’ve made a responsible decision.

This easy-to-use book and accompanying website, www.seachoice.org, represents a sea change in the way we buy and consume seafood.

 

Suzuki, David, Amanda McConnell and Adrienne Mason.  The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature
(Greystone Books, Third Edition, 2007).

Every day we hear that the bottom line for society and governments must be the economy and global competitiveness. But what are the real needs that we must satisfy to live rich, fulfilling lives?  David Suzuki presents a radically different perspective on our basic needs and the real bottom line.

 

Dressel, Holly and David Suzuki.  Good News for a Change: How Everyday People are Helping the Planet (Greystone Press, 2003).

We all know the bad news. Every day, along with all the bulletins on social upheavals and terrorist attacks, we read reports of the damage that industrial development is wreaking on our soil, air and water. We seem intent on continuing to live this way, even though many scientific experts tell us our actions are suicidal. The good news is that thousands of individuals, groups and businesses are already changing their ways. A growing number of companies are still making money while benefiting their local communities. The authors have also uncovered hundreds of working solutions that can help all of us to imagine and achieve a new and happier future. There is a spontaneous, global quest for ways to survive sustainably that is opening up a very different planetary future from the one based on endless economic and industrial demands. And, say Suzuki and Dressel, many of the technologies we need to realize our goals—to save species, to conserve soil, to right social wrongs—are already within our grasp.

 

Suzuki, David.  The David Suzuki Reader (Greystone Books, 2003).

Drawing from Suzuki’s published and unpublished writings, this collection reveals the underlying themes that have informed his work over a lifetime. In these incisive and provocative essays, Suzuki looks unflinchingly at the destructive forces of globalization, political short-sightedness, and greed. Suzuki cautions against blind faith in science, technology, politics, and economics, and provides inspiring examples of how and where to make those changes that will matter to all of us and to future generations.

 

Suzuki, David, Editor.  When the Wild Comes Leaping Up: Personal Encounters with Nature (Greystone Press, 2002).

In this eloquent collection of original essays, award-winning writers from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia describe a personal encounter with the natural world that moved them and led to a new level of understanding or awareness. All are beautifully written and deeply felt, and all are testimonies to the transformative power of nature.

 

Suzuki, David and Kathy Vanderlinden. Eco-Fun (Greystone Press, 2001).

Television, video games, computers and other technologies are exciting inventions, but today they tend to dominate our lives – especially those of our children. Through interactive games and experiments, this book helps reconnect both children and adults to the natural world. It’s a great opportunity to bring families together, have fun and learn about ourselves and the world around us.

 

David Suzuki: Resources--Articles

 

David Suzuki

by Bill McKibben for Time magaine

In 2004, Canada's national broadcaster, the CBC, asked Canadians to rate their greatest countrymen. David Suzuki only came in fifth — but everyone ahead of him on the list was dead. Suzuki is very much alive; indeed, his remarkable career has been a celebration of life in all its diversity, and a crusade to protect it.

Born in British Columbia's Japanese-Canadian community, Suzuki was interned with his family as a young boy during World War II. Unjust, yes, but the camp was in beautiful territory, which Suzuki spent his days exploring. Nature's glory and mystery imprinted early on him; he grew up to become Canada's premier young geneticist, an award-winning bench scientist who became a professor at the age of 33.

But something — perhaps, he says, the memory of the role that genetics had played in his family's persecution — made him restless with his fruit flies, and before long he'd embarked on a second career, creating nature documentaries for television and radio. The best-loved of them, a TV series called The Nature of Things, began its run in 1979 and has aired in some 50 countries around the world, making Suzukia kind of terrestrial Jacques Cousteau, responsible for introducing tens of millions to the world Out There.

Of course, it's been a rough time to have the Planet Earth for your beat. Vanishing species, melting glaciers, choking pollution — for the last few decades, it's been more like covering crime than wandering through the wildflowers. And that has given Suzuki his third and greatest role — as an unflagging and highly effective environmental champion. His training in TV hadn't turned him into a happy-speak temporizer — instead, he'd figured out that his combination of scientific understanding and plainspoken truth-telling made him trusted in a way that few others were. He was among the earliest to raise a cry about climate change, for instance, and he's never relented. Though he's now in his seventies, he toured Canada earlier this year, giving a string of speeches about the need for an international agreement on CO2 emissions.

Ecological science holds that everything is connected. If so, Suzuki has become one of the crucial hubs in the cultural ecology of our strained earth. Biologists talk about keystone species essential for the proper function of an ecosystem; Suzuki is a keystone guy.

 

David Suzuki: In His Own Words

"Conventional economics is inevitably destructive and unsustainable because it ignores nature's services as 'externalities'. But nature maintains the biosphere as a healthy place for animals like us. Growth is just a description of the state of a system, yet economists equate growth with progress as if growth is the very purpose of economics. So we fail to ask 'how much is enough?', 'what is an economy for?', 'am I happier with all this stuff?'. Steady growth forever is an impossibility in a finite world and our world is defined by the biosphere, the zone of air, water and land where all life exists. Endless growth within the biosphere is like the goal of cancer within our body. We need to internalize the services of nature in an ecological economics system and work towards 'steady state economics.'"
“We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyones arguing over where they're going to sit.”
 
“In the environmental movement . . . every time you lose a battle it's for good, but our victories always seem to be temporary and we keep fighting them over and over again.”
 
"We must reinvent a future free of blinders so that we can choose from real options.”
 
"It's time we stopped ignoring the environment, ... Let's not let another election go by without making this a high priority."
 
“Our personal consumer choices have ecological, social, and spiritual consequences. It is time to re-examine some of our deeply held notions that underlie our lifestyles.”
 
“The question is whether we're going to start taking the steps now to avoid the really big jumps that are in store if we don't do something now.”
 
“The human brain now holds the key to our future. We have to recall the image of the planet from outer space: a single entity in which air, water, and continents are interconnected. That is our home.”
 
 

David Suzuki: Role in Canadian Society



An important aspect of Suzuki's and DSF's work is his relationship with Canada's First Nations. He used many of his broadcasts to campaign for their rights of decision over their ancestral resources, and has been formally adopted by three tribes, and made an honorary chieftain of one.

David Suzuki: Biotechnology



In his own discipline of genetics, Suzuki has played a crucial role in informing and warning the public about the weak and risky scientific basis of many of today's commercial applications of genetic engineering.  With science writer, Peter Knudtson, he wrote of his concerns in Genethics: The Ethics of Engineering Life. In an article Biotechnology: Panacea or Hype? he writes: "Every scientist should understand that in any young, revolutionary discipline, most of the current ideas in the area are tentative and will fail to stand up to scrutiny over time. In other words, the bulk of the latest notions are wrong. The rush to exploit new products will be based on inaccurate hypotheses and questionable benefits and could be downright dangerous. The discipline is far from mature enough to leave the lab or find a niche in the market. The problem is that those pushing its benefits stand to gain enormously from it." 

 

Source: Right Livelihood Award

 

David Suzuki: Climate Control

David Suzuki: The Suzuki Foundation


In 1988, Suzuki's 5-part radio series about the global ecosystem crisis, It's a Matter of Survival, produced letters from 16,000 listeners asking what could be done. Suzuki's response was to set up, in 1990, with his wife, Dr. Tara Cullis, the David Suzuki Foundation (DSF). Since its inception, DSF has become a nationally recognized and trusted voice on issues of the environment, one that is increasingly asked to speak on matters of critical importance.

In 2008, the David Suzuki Foundation reviewed its progress over the first two decades of its existence, and decided to focus its future efforts on five key areas.

1. Reconnecting with nature - Helping Canadians to become aware of their profound interdependence with nature.
2. Protecting natural systems - Working to ensure that systems are in place to protect the diversity and resilience of Canada's marine, freshwater, terrestrial and atmospheric ecosystems.
3. Transforming the economy - Encouraging a transition of Canada's economy towards increased well-being, fairness and quality of life, while recognizing the finite limits of nature.
4. Living neighbourhoods - Empowering citizens to live healthier, more fulfilled and just lives.
5. Protecting our climate - Holding Canada to account for doing its fair share to avoid dangerous climate change.

In 2009, the David Suzuki Foundation had 58 staff members and an annual budget of nearly CND 7 million, which comes from numerous foundations, and tens of thousands of individual supporters.

 

Source: Right Livelihood Awards

 

 

David Suzuki: Life and Career

 

David Suzuki was born in Canada in March 1936 to parents of Japanese descent. Following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour, the family was interned, and later, after the war, settled in Ontario. With a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago, Suzuki went to the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1963, where he became Professor of Zoology six years later, specialising in genetics.

During his scientific work, Suzuki became more and more concerned about both the relationship between science and society, and the impacts of human activities on the natural world. He says: "After a great deal of soul-searching I concluded that all scientific insight has the potential to be applied for good or bad and the only way to minimise the misapplication of science is an informed public." While continuing his university professorships until 2001, Suzuki gave up his laboratory research in the late 70s to become one of the most important communicators of natural science in the world and "an environmental icon" as the 2005 Right Livelihood Award Recipient Tony Clarke has described him.

From 1979 until today, Suzuki has been the anchorman of "The Nature of Things with David Suzuki", a prime time science programme on Canadian television, which has been sold to more than 80 countries. He has produced numerous other TV shows and series, and has written 43 books, whereof 17 for children.

 

Source: Right Livelihood Award

 

Ngongo, Ware, Hamlin and Suzuki: Winners of the Right Livelihood Award

 

 

Ole von Uexkull, executive director of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. announced last week this year's winners at a news conference in Stockholm.  Swedish-German philanthropist von Uexkull founded the awards in 1980 to recognize the work he felt was being ignored by the Nobel Prizes.  The Right Livelihood Awards will be presented in a ceremony at the Swedish Parliament on December 4, six days before the Nobel Prizes are handed out.