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Nature's wake-up call
On the CBC this past weekend, there was a replay of a program called “A Force of Nature”, a combination of a tribute to Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki, and a lecture by him. The tribute showed some of the highlights of his career, and the lecture summarized his thoughts after almost 75 years of investigating “The Nature of Things”.
After ninety minutes of doom and gloom about the overwhelming negative impact our species has had on its home planet in such a brief span of time, Suzuki concluded his lecture on an optimistic note: that because we were unique among animals in the degree of our self-awareness and creativity, we would in fact get through this. On the brink of disaster, we would find a way to reverse our direction and safeguard our grandchildren’s lives on Mother Earth.
Before tuning in to the Suzuki program, viewers had the opportunity to watch, for hour upon hour, the scenes of destruction from Japan. The juxtaposition of that footage with the Suzuki documentary was powerful for a couple of reasons.
The first, of course, is that Suzuki is intensely aware, and fiercely proud, of his Japanese heritage. There were scenes of him visiting the internment camp in B.C.’s Slocan Valley where his family (all of them Canadian-born) lived during World War II. He was shown at the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, finding it hard to grasp what had happened that horrible day to the land of his forefathers. The Hiroshima bomb, he seemed to be saying, was just an extreme case of the destructive path we have been on for centuries. In all probability, Suzuki is already back in Japan, doing what he can to help heal the wounds of what happened last Friday.
The second reason that the recent events in Japan are all tied up with Suzuki’s television lecture, is that both of them are about the relationship between man and nature. In the lecture, man is inflicting seemingly thoughtless destruction on the forests, the oceans, the air, and all the animals that we share those things with. In the scenes from Japan, we see nature biting back, laughing at the nation’s supposed “preparedness”, wiping towns off the map, turning man’s most sophisticated engineering, a nuclear power station, against him.
The Victorian attitude that started our obsession with growth was the idea that our species could have dominion over nature, that it was for our use and pleasure, that we needn’t give anything back. That in a battle against our power and intelligence, nature was bound to lose. Well, the Japan experience shows, once again, how ridiculous that notion is. Nature has reared back and slapped us in the face for our arrogance.
In his lecture, Suzuki’s crowning argument was that our mistake over the last couple of millennia is in failing to realize that we’re not apart from the earth. It’s not us vs. Mother Nature. We are nature.
As painful as the lessons of Japan and similar disasters are, sooner or later, Suzuki is convinced we’re going to get it, we’ll realize that we’re not going to win; if we continue to wage war on our home, on the support systems that alloow our species to exist, our demise will be quick and ugly. We share Suzuki’s optimism, and we pray he’s right.
