Environment: Defining Our Environmental Bottom Lines

August-September 1996

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.

by David Suzuki

A few weeks ago, I was asked for a list of the top five things people can do to save the environment. It would be easy to trot out the 3-R slogan-reduce, reuse and recycle-to advise people to walk more and drive less, reduce garbage output, to avoid disposable products when reusables exist, and so on.

But when we attempt to grapple with the unprecedented explosion in human numbers, technology and consumption that are negatively altering the planet, it's not that simple.

The real changes need have to do with our personal values and beliefs and they are hard to change. Perhaps the most important requirement is the recognition that the ecological crisis is real, global and getting worse. The easiest way to corroborate this is to talk to people over 50 years old about the kind of environment he/she remembers as a child.

Night skies over cities once glittered with stars, there were local woods, marshes or creeks to play in, neighbourhoods were stable, disposability was not a consumer option, and the Amazon rain forest and Serengeti Plain were still intact.

Once convinced of the reality of the crisis, we must define what our bottom lines really are. Let me suggest three categories of non-negotiable needs: biophysical, social, and spiritual.

Absolute Requirement

The first group of necessities is vital to our physical survival and security as biological beings. The includes an absolute requirement for clean air, pure water and uncontaminated soil. And the sum total of all living things is what maintains the purity and fecundity of those critical physical features of the Earth. Protection of air, water, soil and biodiversity should be vital in everything we do.

We have evolved as gregarious animals and so we have social needs. It is crucial to maintain stable communities with which we identify and belong and that requires the opportunity for full employment, guarantees of justice and a sense of security for ourselves and future generations.

Finally, we have a spiritual dimension that is critical to our sense of well-being. I believe humans were not made to live in a world devoid of diversity and companionship of other species.

Our evolutionary history records our emergence from a world teeming with plants and animals on which our survival depended. As more and more of the world's human population occupies a landscape we have created and dominate, we are increasingly estranged from our biological relatives, the other living creatures with whom we share so much of genetic material and the Earth.

Is there a correlation between increasing violence, drugs, mental breakdown and other social problems, and the disappearance of other species in our surroundings?

Built-in Need

Pets are now routinely taken to hospital wards for people who are critically ill and to mental institutions and old age homes because people seem to have a built-in need for and response to another species. The great Harvard biologist, E.O. Wilson, has called it biophilia, a genetically-based requirement to love living things, including our own species.

The opportunity to experience the vastness of nature, to know that there are forces beyond human comprehension and control, are further dimensions of our spiritual requirements.

If these are the bottom lines for whatever kind of society we want to live in, then we must try to identify the impediments to their protection and enhancement.

What are the personal beliefs and values that blind us to the consequences of what we are doing and deflect from protecting the real necessities? Is the difficulty in comprehending the scope and scale of our problems (such as depletion of the ozone layer or toxic pollution) a physical barrier? And what are the institutional obstacles built into politics and economics?

When we have identified the barriers, then it is essential to learn what makes people changes their values and behaviour in a deep way. I'm afraid there is no simple prescription of five easy things to do. But then, no one said it was going to be easy.

David Suzuki is taking a break from writing this syndicated column, after many years.

The David Suzuki Foundation, Suite 219, 2211 W. 4th Ave, Vancouver, BC V6K 4S2