Recently, I spent the afternoon talking with David Suzuki, a man whose brilliance is matched only by his humility. Overlooking the St. Lawrence River in downtown old Montreal, we sat for several hours. David Suzuki is a rock star of the environmental movement in Canada, perhaps the US equivalent of Al Gore. His diversity of friends –from Anita Roddick and Richard Branson to Amory Lovins and Sir Isaac Stern — shows he’s a magnet for other extraordinary people.
David’s eponymous foundation works to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world. By focusing on four program areas — oceans and sustainable fishing, climate change and clean energy, sustainability, and the “Nature Challenge” — the David Suzuki Foundation aims to use science and education to promote solutions that conserve nature and help achieve sustainability within a generation.
David is of Japanese descent and was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1936. During World War II, at the age of six, he was interned with his family in a camp in BC. After the war, he went to high school in London, Ontario. He graduated with honors from Amherst College in 1958 and went on to earn his PhD in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961. Amazingly, he is the author of 43 books and countless television series, but he is largely unknown in the US. He recently turned down an opportunity to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
We spoke about the most important and pressing challenges facing the business community. How the ability of business to externalize so many of its true social and environmental costs (like pollution) has sent us off on a path that today has us “subsidizing polluting industries,” as David puts it, “and dissuading clean ones.” How our consumption-based culture, which in the aftermath of World War II actually strengthened the economy, now sometimes leaves us acting like addicts. We sometimes crave the rush of acquiring new things, and for a moment or two the object of our desire makes us happy. But inevitably the thrill wears off, and we are left feeling dulled and unfulfilled. How badly do most of us really need another t-shirt or another pair of sneakers? Sunsets and visits with old friends are free and don’t leave any lasting damage. But we don’t like to talk about how we might need to change our lifestyles to accommodate a planet in peril.
David Suzuki actually thinks that things will be better. He speaks of a world where communities are stronger — “efficient, modern, and thoughtful” — and there’s more time for relationships, a deeper connection with nature, less stress, and a renewed focus on “genuine wealth, like health, education, and the state of our environment.”
Most businesses must evolve to a point where the concept of sustainability underlies all that they do. Otherwise, they will have to be content with very limited growth — or worse. The planet’s resources, as much as we hate to admit it, are not free and boundless. There is only so much clean air, fertile land, and potable water. We are at a tipping point. Every minute matters, if we are to leave a better world for future generations. We have a vast capacity to both harm and heal the environment. David worries, but he has no doubt that our hopes and dreams for a cleaner, healthier planet will prevail.