| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Captain Compassion" |
| Date: |
05 Feb 2008 10:42:50 AM |
| Object: |
Jail politicians who ignore science: Suzuki |
Jail politicians who ignore science: Suzuki
Environmentalist denounces economists’ obsession with GDP
By Sarah Babbage
The McGill Daily
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6970
Josh Chapman / The McGill Daily
David Suzuki delivered a scathing and powerful speech to a packed
house at McGill Thursday night, calling on young people and business
leaders to reverse the demise of ecology at the hand of shortsighted
economic theory.
Suzuki, an award-winning Canadian scientist, environmentalist, and
broadcaster, kicked off the McGill Business Conference on
Sustainability by addressing the conference’s theme of “looking
backward and moving forward.”
“The only guide for our future is our past, and we don’t look back,”
he said.
Suzuki underlined the importance of looking backward by explaining
that, because the past 50 years have seen a boom in technology and
population expansion, ideas of economic growth have been skewed.
“That means you have lived your entire lives in a completely
unsustainable period,” Suzuki said to the young audience. “You all
think [economic] growth and change is normal. It’s not.”
He said we need to do more to look forward, as well. He cited a
brochure from 1992 entitled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity”,
signed by over 600 of the world’s top scientists, that expressed the
seriousness of modern threats to the environment.
“No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert
the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for
humanity immeasurably diminished,” he read from the brochure.
He noted that no major news outlets deemed the story newsworthy at the
time.
“If that brochure was frightening, the response of the media was
terrifying,” Suzuki said, adding that the media was instead
preoccupied with celebrity figures.
He urged today’s youth to speak out against politicians complicit in
climate change, even suggesting they look for a legal way to throw our
current political leaders in jail for ignoring science – drawing
rounds of cheering and applause. Suzuki said that politicians, who
never see beyond the next election, are committing a criminal act by
ignoring science.
But in a nod to the hosts of his speech, Suzuki connected the
environment to the economy, explaining the trouble he sees in
mainstream economists’ call for unbridled economic growth.
“Ecology and economy have the same root word – eco, and it means
‘home’,” he said. “But what we have done is elevate the economy above
ecology.”
He described speaking to children in Toronto who could not explain
where water or food came from, only that it was supplied by the
economy.
“We think if the economy is doing well we can afford these basic
things.”
He criticized the short-sightedness of economists and their constant
need for increased growth, which will eventually be impossible. “We
live within the biosphere. It can’t grow, it’s fixed!” he exclaimed.
“We’ve been using up our biological capital for over 20 years. The
reason we maintain our illusion of biological plentitude is because we
are using up the rightful legacy of our children and grandchildren,”
he said.
Suzuki also faulted the use of the Gross Domestic Product – which
increases after oil spills and health crises – as a “nutty” indicator
of growth.
“[Using the GDP], an outrageous disaster becomes a phenomenal
success.”
He gave a scathing critique of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and
Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, chastising them for neglecting the
environment in favour of economic growth and development of the tar
sands.
“It is an intergenerational crime that in the face of the work of
scientists over the last 20 years, they keep dithering as they are,”
he said.
Suzuki also underlined the interconnectedness of humans with their
natural world – a point not often made by mainstream environment
critics.
“We are the environment. There is no distinction. What we do to the
earth we do to ourselves,” he said.
In using DDT to kill insects, he said, we harmed the environment as
well as human health before understanding effects of processes like
biomagnification – where a toxin increases in concentration at each
successive level in food chain – until years after DDT was introduced.
He said the same thing is happening with genetically modified
organisms.
“Mark my words, any scientist that tells you they are safe is either
ignorant or lying to you,” he said.
Conference co-organizer Sadaf Kashfi said Suzuki’s talk was an
inspiration.
“Suzuki’s talk gave business students the insight they need to thrive
in today’s world,” Kashfi said.
The conference, which ran from Thursday to Sunday, was put on by
students from the Faculty of Management to draw attention to the need
for sustainable practices in business.
--
If you disagree with the theories and dogmas of Marxism or Scientific Socialism
then you are a tool of Capitalist interests. If you disagree with the theories
or dogmas of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming then you are a tool of
Capitalistic interests. Notice a pattern here? -- Captain Compassion
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to
escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius
"...the whole world, including the United States, including all that
we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark
Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights
of perverted science." -- Sir Winston Churchill
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net
.
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| User: "Jerry Kraus" |
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| Title: Re: Jail politicians who ignore science: Suzuki |
05 Feb 2008 11:30:27 AM |
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On Feb 5, 10:42=A0am, Captain Compassion <dar...@NOSPAMcharter.net>
wrote:
Jail politicians who ignore science: Suzuki
Suziki is a Japanese-Canadian Journalist with a background in biology
who hasn't done any serious science in decades. He is more of an
entertainer than anything else, which makes him fit right in with the
current scientific establishment!
What exactly he's saying here, I couldn't say. Poverty is a good
thing? Professional scientists should run the economy from their
university offices? Politicians are stupid?
He is proposing nothing specific and is making astonishingly vague
critical remarks with no real practical implications. So, what does
this mean? That he's an academic.
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