The British Columbia hamlet of New Denver sits in the shadow of the Selkirks, alongside beautiful Slocan Lake. Its heritage is that this is where Canadians of Japanese ancestry were interned during World War II. Among them was a little boy who grew up to be a notable geneticist and his country’s leading environmental activist.
David Suzuki is now 90 years old. The renowned geneticist, who studied the fruit fly, has grown increasingly pessimistic about the fate of the earth. He speaks to the climate extremes afflicting his country, and ours, and we need to hear him out.
On global warming, the climate consequences of carbon emissions, Suzuki is the ultimate pessimist. He subscribes to the notion of a “tipping point,” from which we have damaged the planet beyond repair. “It is true that we are now headed in a catastrophic way, and it’s unavoidable,” Suzuki lamented on CBC this past weekend. The founder of a namesake foundation confessed to not doing enough to rescue Mother Earth.
Were Suzuki to have looked up when I ran into him on a hiking trip, he would have seen that the New Denver Glacier was rapidly melting, that the Athabasca Glacier in the Canadian Rockies has pulled back rapidly. The dawn of Canadian mountaineering, late in the 19th century, took place in the Selkirks. Pictures show the sprawling size of the Illecilleway Glacier. Now, a Revelstoke-based friend, in his mid-20s, wonders it the glacier will melt in his lifetime.
And in Antarctica, the mammoth Thwaites Glacier threatens to calve into the Southern Ocean. If that happens, the Earth’s sea level will rise, inundating coastal cities. The increase of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere, now running 427-429 parts per million, is higher than any point in 2,000 years. It has reached levels once predicted for the end of this century.
Who could deny the mountain of evidence? Donald Trump, that’s who, even as his coastal golf courses take measures to hold back rising sea levels. He has described climate change, in Trumpian terms , as “a hoax, as fake news, a sham.” Trump has acted to revive the coal industry, including his order that the Centralia Coal Plant remain in operation.
David Suzuki has remained deeply engaged and is penning a memoir entitled Lessons from a Lifetime. He is still full of fight, telling CBC: “If you want to be liked by everybody, you’re not going to stand for a goddamned thing.”
This article also appears in Cascadia Advocate.
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Another fine article. Thanks, but I wish you would expand on “consequences of carbon emissions” to mention that almost all of those “carbon emissions” are the result of the exhuming and incinerating dead animal and plant life. Not content with simply killing ourselves in wars and hunting, we are returning the rotted corpses of lives from millions of years ago to power our so-called modern civilization.
Thanks Joel. ‘Multiple abuse’ of the Earth continues. The word “ecocide” is also accurate.
Unfortunately, there is very little credible evidence to counter Suzuki’s pessimism. For those who are interested, there is a great body of work, both academic and journalistic, that summarizes the situation quite well.
Two books that focus on core causes of ecocide—oil and capitalism—include Canadian author/journalist Andrew Nikiforuk’s “The Energy of Slaves” (2012) and Swedish academics Wim Carton and Andreas Malm’s “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown” (2024).
For those who like cartoon versions, I think this piece is great (by an Australian):
https://stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/