David Suzuki
David Suzuki
David Takayoshi Suzuki, CC OBCis a Canadian academic, science broadcaster and environmental activist. Suzuki earned a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961, and was a professor in the genetics department at the University of British Columbia from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. Since the mid-1970s, Suzuki has been known for his television and radio series, documentaries and books about nature and the environment. He is best known as host of the popular and long-running CBC...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth24 March 1936
CityVancouver, Canada
CountryCanada
Some argue we should get coal, oil and gas out of the ground as quickly as possible, build more pipelines and make as much money as we can selling it here and abroad. Their priorities are the economy and meeting short-term energy needs so we can live the lives to which we've become accustomed.
For the sake of our health, our children and grandchildren and even our economic well-being, we must make protecting the planet our top priority.
Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die.
If we continue to set human borders and the economy as our highest priorities, we will never come to grips with the destructiveness of our activities and institutions.
You would have thought that our first priority would be to ask what the ecologists are finding out, because we have to live within the conditions and principles they define. Instead, we've elevated the economy above ecology.
Our beliefs, our values shape the way we look out at the world and the way we treat it. If we believe that we were here, placed here by God, that this - all of this creation is for us, it's for us to go and occupy, dominate and exploit, then we will proceed to do that.
Although they [light and medium trucks] have only 5% of the transportation market..., they account for fully 35% of greenhouse gas emissions from freight transportation.
Canada, more than any nation, will be affected by rising sea levels from global warming.
Economics and a reliance on science and technology to solve our problems has led to an unsustainable situation where continued growth in consumption is required for governments and business to be considered successful. This is a form of insanity. Economics is at the heart of our destructive ways and our faith in it has blinded us
Come on Canada, it's time to kick our bad habits and get into shape!
With an estimated population of nine billion people by 2050, we cannot continue to consume resources at the same rate and maintain our quality of life.
Over and over, we hear politicians say they can't spend our tax dollars on environmental protection when the economy is so fragile.
Environmentalism isn't a discipline or specialty. It's a way of seeing our place in the world. And we need everybody to see the world that way. Don't think 'In order to make a difference I have to become an environmentalist.'
It is clear that while science provides insights into the complexity of the world around us, those insights...present a fractured mosaic rather than a seamless whole. There are profound limits to science that must be recognized if we are to minimize the destructive consequences of using the powers provided by scientific discovery.