Tim Flannery - Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future

VII

NOW OR NEVER

RESPONSES

REPLY

by David Suzuki

Human beings are an infant species, appearing in the last o.ooi percent of the time that life has existed on Earth. For most of the i5o,ooo years of our species' existence, we were hunter-gatherers, carrying all our possessions in a constant search for food and materials. Even after the agricultural revolution ten millennia ago, we lived within limited confines in the company of a few dozen people. We have been local, tribal animals for almost all our time on Earth.

But suddenly we have become a geological force, altering the physical, chemical, and biological makeup of the planet as no other species has ever done. We have embraced the benefits of our newly acquired powers with little regard for the consequences within the biosphere. But now we have to ask, "What is the collective impact of all 6.7 billion human beings?"and it is very difficult to assess. Even when we do consider how we are all affecting our surroundings, we find there are no mechanisms to respond as a single species for our own benefit.

It has long been my contention that at the time of our emergence as a species on the plains of Africa, we gave no hint of our explosive development into a dominant force in only 150 millennia. That's because our evolutionary advantage was hidden in our skulls. The human brain conferred an enormous memory, insatiable curiosity, and impressive creativity that more than compensated for our lack of physical and sensory capacities. Accumulating knowledge through experience and imagination, we invented the notion of a future; and in so doing, we found we could influence that future. Using our knowledge and memory, we could look ahead, anticipate dangers and opportunities, and thus deliberately choose to take actions that avoided the dangers and exploited the opportunities. Foresight was our great advantage and was a key part of our enormous success as we spread across the planet.

Today, we are the most numerous mammal on Earth, and our huge ecological footprint (that is, the amount of land and water needed to meet our de mands) has been amplified beyond that of any other species by our technological muscle power, voracious appetite, and global economy. It has only been fortyseven years since Rachel Carson told of the costs of our technological prowess in her influential book Silent Spring. Despite her prescient warnings, pesticides are used today in far greater amounts and many are far more toxic than those used in 1962.

Our capacity to look ahead has been greatly amplified today, with scientists, supercomputers, and telecommunications; and ever since Silent Spring, the warnings of scientists have become more urgent. But now we are turning our backs on the very way that so successfully got tis to our current position of dominance.

In 1988, the environment was the number one concern of people around the world. That year, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom declared, "I'm a greenie," and George H. W. Bush promised, if elected, to be "an environmental president." In 1988, Brian Mulroney was reelected prime minister in Canada and, to show he cared about the environment, he appointed his brightest star, Lucien Bouchard, as minister of the environment. I interviewed Bouchard three months later and asked what he felt was the most urgent environmental issue for Canadians. His instant response was, "Global warming." When I asked how serious it was, he replied, "It threatens the survival of our species. We have to act now.

That year, 300 scientists met in Toronto to discuss the atmosphere. They were convinced there was evidence that global warming was occurring and that people were causing it. In a press release, they declared that global warming represented a threat to human survival second only to nuclear war, and they called for a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1988 levels in fifteen years. Scientists had spoken, the public was concerned, and politicians had gotten the message. Had we acted accordingly, we would be far beyond the Kyoto target and well on our way to the deep reductions we now know we have to make.

But we didn't respond by taking on the challenge. Politicians didn't have the stomach to take the criticism for spending big bucks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when they wouldn't even be around to take credit for it fifteen years later. Many environmentalists, including me, felt it was a "slow-motion catastro phe" and there was time to focus on more urgent issues like clear-cut logging. But most egregiously, corporations began to spend millions on a campaign to confuse the public, calling climate change "junk science," supporting articles and Web sites to dispute the evidence, and funding a few "skeptics" to spread disinformation. And it worked. (See Climate Cover-Up by James Hoggan.)

Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers was a wakeup call. A best-selling book, it made the impact of climate change real and personal and, like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, moved a wide audience to take the issue seriously. But as countries moved with glacial reluctance to make big reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions, glaciers themselves were melting with unprecedented speed. The most authoritative voice on climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has issued updates that have become more and more urgent, even as scientists announce unanticipated rapidity of change.