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Life Stories

World-Renowned Scientists Reflect on their Lives and the Future of Life on Earth

Heather Newbold, editor

The Nature of Things

DAVID SUZUKI

MY GRANDPARENTS IMMIGRATED TO CANADA at the turn of the century. They left their homeland reluctantly to come to a foreign place with an alien culture and an unknown language. As immigrants, they expected their children to be successful. Success, of course, was defined by making a lot of money. Being the eldest of six sons, my father was expected to be the first son to succeed. Yet, unlike his parents, he was born here, and his real love was for the land. He worked hard, but he loved gardening, fishing, and camping, which were absolutely alien to his parents. He was always a bitter disappointment to them because he wasted his time on such worthless activities instead of making money.

Most of my early memories are of camping and fishing with my dad. We bought our first tent when I was four, a little pup tent that I loved. Vancouver was surrounded with nature, so on weekends we would drive to a favorite place. Dad would put his pack on his back and me on his shoulders, and off we would go to camp in the woods. Sometimes we went to a river where dad borrowed a friend's horse, which we rode along the bank upstream. Then we let the horse go home, pitched our tent, and spent the weekend fishing our way back downstream.

We also went fishing during the week after work. One night when we were hiking around Loon Lake in the dark, we spotted large eyes staring at us, silently sizing us up. Fortunately, Dad had taught me to love and respect nature rather than to fear it, so encountering a bear was exciting rather than frightening. Those early experiences camping and fishing influenced the rest of my life. They were such an important part of my childhood that I began camping with my own children right after they were born.

We lived in Vancouver until I was six. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the American and Canadian governments decided that people of Japanese descent were enemy aliens and constituted a danger. So they confiscated our property and moved us from the West Coast inland to a ghost town left from the gold rush. Unlike our American counterparts, we were not fenced in by barbed wire or armed guards; we were totally free. People cannot believe it when I tell them I was unaware of how bad the situation was. For me it was paradise because we lived in a cabin in the midst of nature. It was like living in a giant park; in fact, Valhalla now is a provincial park. It was an amazing setting in the Slocan Valley between the spectacular mountains of the Selkirk Range. The mountains were home to countless animals, including deer, coyotes, and bears, while the lakes and rivers overflowed with fish.

I did not have to go to school for a while because of a lack of teachers, so I was free to spend my time exploring the wonders around me, and I learned far more than I ever could have in school. My sisters and I wandered the hillsides gathering flowers and unusual rocks and discovering all kinds of fascinating creatures. For me the war years were a wonderful time of enjoying wildlife and wilderness.

As the war was coming to an end, the provincial government could not solve its "yellow peril" problem, so it offered us two choices. We could go to Japan, which for us meant going to a foreign country; or, if we remained in Canada, we had to go east of the Rockies. Exiled from our beloved British Columbia, we sought refuge in southern Ontario.

My dad and mom found work as laborers on a farm, and I worked along with them in the summers. My father made less than $1,000 a year (of course, inflation has increased values since then). Although we were very poor, we did not feel poor because we always had enough to live on and plenty to eat. Children today would regard the way we lived as primitive; for us it was an invigorating lifestyle that filled more than our stomachs.

My mother bottled fruits and vegetables in the summer for us to live on in the winter. We foraged for food everywhere, finding mushrooms in the orchards, nutritious roots underground, and edible weeds growing along the railway tracks. After work Dad and I went out on our bikes to catch fish. With a little net he made for me, we dipped in the ditches, creeks, and ponds, catching dinner and fascinating creatures to keep. Scrounged glass jars were filled with sunfish, catfish, and turtles, then carefully carried home to be my magical aquariums.

My parents also made me a butterfly net. Dad bent wire into a hoop that he attached to a wooden handle; then Mom sewed mosquito netting around it. Immediately I started insect collecting, which soon became an avid passion. I wanted my children to share my enjoyment of insects, but they do not want to kill them. My daughters have a different kind of sensitivity toward the environment.

We lived for four years in Canada's southernmost town, where Heinz ketchup is made. Leamington was a great place for me because it was a fifteen-minute bike ride from Lake Erie, which was full of fish. Fish was our major food, so I went down there all the time and brought home strings of fish such as perch and catfish for dinner. Now the fish are poisonous because so many pollutants have been dumped into the Great Lakes. Back then Lake Erie was so prolific that when mayflies hatched out of the water, their tiny three-centimeter bodies piled up four feet high on the beach. It was one of the most amazing biological phenomena I have ever seen. Within a decade that entire hatch was gone because pesticides and washing detergents sterilized the lake, which was declared "dead."

Later we lived in another Ontario town named London. I biked to my grandparents' farm and often stopped in a swamp to find frogs, reptiles, skunks, and foxes. At my grandparents' place, there were a creek and woods nearby, where I played for hours. I also spent a lot of time on the Thames River, the major waterway running through town. I knew every pool and where to catch different fish throughout the year, such as silver bass and pike coming in the spring to spawn. Other animals fished with me; I remember seeing a raccoon pull out a crayfish and then wash it before eating.

Today, if I said, "Let's go down to the Thames River and catch a fish," a parent would recoil in horror at the thought of their child wading in that river, because now it is a toxic sewer. There are hardly any fish left, and even if you caught one you could not eat it. The creek that I dipped in to get freshwater clams and fish now runs through culverts underground. The farm where my grandparents lived is a huge high-rise complex. The swamp where I spent so much of my time playing is paved over and is now an enormous shopping mall.

When I compare my childhood to that of children in that modern city today, I am shocked by the difference. They do not have the woods, river, and swamp to play in, so they hang out in what is there-shopping malls and electronic game galleries. They grow up in a biological desert, a concrete maze of roads, buildings, machines, humans, and the few plants and animals that are allowed to survive. Anything we do not want in our artificial environment, we destroy. Insects, for instance, are invaders to be killed. We teach children in cities that nature is the enemy; it is dirty, disgusting, and dangerous. So, rather than being curious and fascinated, children often recoil in fear when they see a wild animal. Urban inhabitants become so distanced from nature that they forget they are still biological creatures.

A striking example of this is some friends who came from Japan to visit us. They told us that they love cities, and when we took them to our cottage on the island we realized they were comfortable only in artificial surroundings. Not only the children but the adults too were afraid to go outside, so they wanted to stay inside the whole time. The children were even afraid of the dog. When we did go outside, they felt so uncomfortable that they did not know what to do.

They were not used to seeing anything alive and were repulsed by such simple things as rolling over a rock and seeing crabs, finding a clam, or catching a fish. Of course, all the food they buy in Japan is packaged, without any traces of blood, fur, feathers, or scales. Later I met a teacher in Tokyo who told me that children in her class assume that everything brought home from the supermarket spends its entire existence in plastic wrap and Styrofoam.

I did not believe how common this notion was until I did a television series for children called The Nature Connection. One of the shows was about a farm, so I took two ten-year-old children from Toronto. We were there two days and had a wonderful time: we collected eggs from the chickens, milked cows, rode horses, and played with the animals. On the third day, I took them to a slaughterhouse. The boy burst into tears because it had never occurred to him that hot dogs and hamburgers are made from animals.

Such ignorance is not limited to children. A friend, a producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, took a woman out into the country and stopped at a pick-your-own vegetable farm. She had never been on a farm and was disturbed that the vegetables were growing in the dirt. She was a university graduate but did not know that vegetables grow in the ground. Like her, many people do not realize food is biological, because it seems so synthetic. Commercial food is processed to the point where ithas no life in it. We destroy all the vitality and eat what is left.

The teacher in Tokyo does something interesting with her class. She asks them to write down all the things you need for your nutrition that were not once living. The kids mention all kinds of things such as miso soup, but it turns out that everything you eat has been alive. So they understand that the food you eat was a living plant or animal that gave its life for you and now makes up your body. That is a very profound lesson.

We are nourished by nature, but we are so disconnected from life that most adults do not even realize that. Living in artificial, manmade environments makes us forget our biological nature. We think our greatest achievement is independence from nature, but we are still as dependent on air, water, and soil as any other living organism. It is not technology that cleanses the air for us or manages the water cycle or gives us our food. It is the biodiversity of nature. We live in a finite world where matter is endlessly recycled through biological action. The variety of living things on this planet is what keeps it livable.

The more urban our environment, the more ignorant we are of how our world actually works. In Toronto, if you ask someone, "Where does your food grow?" or "Where does your water come from?" or "Where does your toilet water go?" they do not know. If you tell them that their toilet flushes into Lake Ontario, half a kilometer from the intake pipe for their drinking water, they are absolutely shocked.

We are under the illusion that technology controls the world around us and that therefore we are in control of the world. The farther we remove ourselves from nature, the more dependent we become on technology, and the more vulnerable we are to its failure. We can become victimized by the technological monster we depend on, just as we are already run by the speeded-up demands of our high-tech treadmill.

Trying to escape reality, we live in an increasingly illusory world. We are losing the ability to sense the real world. Being unaware of our biological nature leads to being out of touch with our own bodies, as well as those of others. We reject our animality, even though being with animals makes us more human. As the prevalence of pets attests, we have a natural bond with animals. Children are fascinated by animals from birth. The programs on my television series, The Nature of Things, that generate the greatest response from viewers are reports on natural history, particularly shows on animals.

When my family lived in Ontario, Dad borrowed a car so we could go to the Detroit Zoo, which was regarded as one of the great zoos. That was an amazing experience for me; I was overwhelmed by the sense of variety and abundance of living things. Actually seeing creatures such as a rhinoceros and a duck-billed platypus was unbelievable. Desiring to see the animals living freely in their natural habitat, I dreamed all my life of going to the Serengeti plain, Australia, and the Amazon. Essentially the Detroit Zoo aroused those dreams and stimulated my interest in studying zoology.

After I became an adult, I did travel to all those places. It is truly sad what has happened to them in my lifetime. When I was a child, the Amazon was an isolated place where outsiders had seldom gone. By the time I got there in 1988, there was no place foreigners had not invaded. The tribes had experienced extermination at the rate of about one a year since 1900. When I visited the Serengeti in 1985, there were more black rhinos in the Cincinnati Zoo than on the entire Serengeti plain. When I made it to Australia, there were still some duck-billed platypuses, but the remaining animals there were under siege.

We may not care about the deaths of millions of our fellow creatures, but they affect us anyway. These creatures not only share our home with us, they are our relatives. Ninety-nine percent of our genetic information is identical with that of our closest relatives, the great apes. Geneticists are realizing that all life forms evolved from the same original cell-which means that all living creatures are descended from the same parent cell, and we are all related.

In my lifetime the planet has changed from being incredibly abundant to being barely able to sustain life in many places. A few years ago, when my daughter was nine, I took her to the Toronto Zoo, thinking she would have the same response that I had as a child. When we got there, the first thing she asked was, "Daddy, are there many of these left?" At every exhibit she was worried that the animals were rare or endangered. For her, "extinction" is a constant word. It is tragic that whereas in my childhood the zoo was a chance to see what potential lies in nature, for children today, zoos are a reminder of the fact that creatures are disappearing and perhaps the animals in the zoo are the only ones left.

My father told me that when he was young, there was only forest where my house is now. Fishing right here, he caught sea-run cutthroats and sturgeon, things we would not imagine swimming around Vancouver today. My daughter and I used to go fishing out here and caught little flounders, which we ate. A few years ago we caught one that had lumps on its fins. I thought it was a parasite, so I cut it open, expecting to see a worm, but it was cancer. So we stopped fishing here.

In a world of such rapid change, we have marginalized the very people who could provide us with the perspective to counter the whole thrust of this change: women, children, elders, and indigenous people. One of the first things I learned from the aboriginal peoples I have met around the world was to take your elders very seriously, respect them, and listen to what they have to say.

As I crossed Canada from one end to the other countless times, I talked to our elders. I asked fishermen in the Maritimes, "What was the fishing like when you were a kid?" I asked loggers in British Columbia, "What were the forests like years ago?" I asked farmers in the prairies, "What were the crops like then?" I asked them, "What were your neighborhoods and communities like then; how did you care for each other?"

Our elders tell us that all across Canada, the country has changed beyond description. In the span of a single human lifetime, we have radically altered our country. In North America, we have always said, "There's plenty more where that came from." But there is not plenty more anymore, and there will never be any more if we continue in the same way.

We are using up what rightly belongs to all generations. We have received this abundance from the past, and we have a sacred obligation to keep it intact for future generations. Just look at the change that has happened in the lifetime of our elders and project that rate of change into the future. What are we leaving for our children? Parents have always tried to ensure the security of their offspring, but the future fills us with fear for them. One of the reasons I do what I do is so I can look my children directly in the eye and say to them, "I'm doing the best I can." If we all do our best, we might be able to reassure them with more confidence that "everything is going to be all right."

The most frightening phrase I hear today is, "There used to be." I hear younger and younger people saying, "There used to be a creek here . . . there used to be woods over there . . . there used to be birds and animals around." We act as if all this is just lost somehow, and it is no big deal. We are passively observing this in our lifetime as though we could wipe these things out without any consequences. I do not think you can go on saying about the planet, "There used to be . . . ," or we are going to end up with, "There used to be people."

We have a seasonal ritual that our family celebrates. Every summer we go to the Okanagan Valley to pick ripe, luscious fruit off the trees. Visiting it annually, we have seen astounding changes over the years. A development binge has resulted in such rapid construction that the water supply is insufficient for the houses. Orchards have been buried under strip malls, destroying Canada's most fertile fruit-producing area. One of the country's loveliest and most productive places is now a concrete wasteland, just like everywhere else.

It does not matter where you go-it is the same boring uniformity all over the world. I travel a lot for my television programs, and when I get off an airplane in Nairobi, or Beijing, or Tokyo, it all looks the same. You might as well stay home. As we monoculture the planet into a global marketplace dominated by international economics, we diminish a tremendous amount of human and biological diversity.

We increasingly revel in what human beings do: our computers, our buildings, our transport. In our worship of human beings and achievements we have lost our inspiration from the natural world. The real inspiration, the wonders, the diversity, the life, are in nature. Without those, we will attempt to make the planet over and thereby lose it.

If you go to a place where we have done that, such as New York, and see how people exist, you notice that they not only breathe polluted smog; they also live under a cloud of fear. They cannot escape it even inside their apartments: they have multiple locks on the door, plus all kinds of alarms and security devices, in addition to the guards downstairs. People exist in a state of war with their surroundings. That is no way to live.

Can't we create communities where you know the people in your local area because you live, work, and play there? Places where, if you are in a jam, you can just call your neighbor up and say, "Can you help me out?" It is clear that we have lost a sense of community, place, and belonging. We need to re-create those kinds of communal values.

Unfortunately, the opposite is happening. Everything that governments and corporations are doing now, for example free trade-NAFTA and GATT-is hell-bent on globalizing the marketplace, which is ultimately destructive of local communities. If citizens here will not give up their societal benefits and sacrifice medical care, pensions, and social security to cut costs, then companies will go to Mexico or some other "undeveloped" country where they do not have to pay such expenses. You see it happening all across Canada and the United States: local communities are being trashed by the multinational corporations.

Communities can be the counterforce to corporatization. In order to withstand corporate forces, they need to become independent and self-reliant. To avoid exploitation by the global economy for short-term profit, they must care for their own human and natural resources for the long term. Being locally based, they are the social sector that can best adapt to and protect the immediate environment.

Communities could be the survival unit of the future. This challenge has led me to establish a private foundation to create sustainable communities based on the grassroots support of ordinary people. We are trying to empower people by giving them a vision of a way of living that is sustainable. A sustainable society lives within the planet's productive capacity and protects the fundamental sources of life: air, water, soil, and biological diversity. We believe that when people understand that we are threatened with global environmental collapse, they will transform society from the bottom up. (Obviously it will never happen from the top down.) Our foundation is committed to that process of transformation.

Bioregions are fundamental to creating sustainable communities, so we have an expert bioregionalist, Doug Aberly, in our group. If you look at maps of counties and countries, you see that they are drawn in straight lines, ignoring topographic features. Bioregional areas follow natural boundaries along the tops of mountains and valley bottoms. British Columbia has about twenty bioregions, which follow major watersheds. The bioregions correspond almost exactly to the lands of the original native tribes throughout North America. Indigenous people lived bioregionally all over the world.

In contrast, our ecological "footprint" extends far beyond our local boundaries. In our crazy economy, rather than get food from farms a few miles away, we buy stuff that has crossed continents and oceans. We are using nonrenewable resources like oil to ship food over long distances. Wendell Berry told me that in North America food travels an average of about two thousand miles from where it is grown to where it is eaten. Food flows in from all over the world throughout the year, as though the planet were just one endless market. We have lost our sense of nature's rhythms and act as though the seasons no longer affect us. Our foundation encourages buying local, seasonal food because food that comes from where we live is the best for us. We should be aware of the rhythms of nature; we are of the earth and intimately connected to it through the food we consume.

I wrote a book called Wisdom of the Elders about native perspectives. When I did a book tour, I ended up at the Six Nations reserve in Ontario. The elders welcomed me into their longhouse, where they said, "Today's a holiday; we're celebrating the first day of the sap which is starting to run through the trees, and we are putting taps in for maple sugar. We take around thirty days a year as holidays to celebrate events: the first snowfall, the last day of ice, the first buds, the coming of the winds." Throughout the year, aboriginal people are celebrating the things that keep them alive and honoring their sense of connectedness to life. We do not do that. Like our ancestors, we need to create festivals to celebrate our relationship to nature and begin healing our souls.

Aboriginal people have lived on their land for thousands of years. Every rock, tree, river, and mountain is sacred in their culture because it is part of them; it is their identity. When natives struggle to preserve their land, they are protecting what it means to them. We just say, "Here's a million bucks; give us your land." We have overemphasized the material, economic things. We need to recognize that there are fundamental spiritual values that are important for us.

When I say this, people look at me as though I am weird: "What are you talking about? Are you a religious nut?" Yet when I tell them the story about my home, they can relate to what I mean. I bought our house when my wife was in graduate school. She was away when I found it, so I just went ahead and bought it, even though I was scared because we could not afford it.

We have had it now for more than twenty years, and during that time we have made it over. The garden was created by her father, who lives upstairs. The place has such a prime location, right on the water, that we get letters from real estate agents saying, "It's a hot market for foreign speculators, so sell your property!" Finally I got so mad that I assessed the personal value of my house. First, every aspect of this house has my wife in it. When she was away in graduate school, and when she taught at Harvard for five years, I could be anywhere in the house and feel that she was here. No one can see that, but I know it.

My dad is a cabinetmaker, and he made the kitchen cabinet for our apartment when we first got married. When I bought this house, I ripped out the existing cabinet and put dad's here. It looks odd because it does not fit, but every time I open the cabinet door, I think of my father. My best friend came from Toronto and helped me build the fence; then he carved a handle for the gate. Every time I open the gate, he is here too.

I like asparagus and raspberries, so my father-in-law planted them beside his beloved flower garden. When I eat them, I picture him in the garden he tends with such care. In the dogwood is a tree house I built and then enjoyed watching the children play in as they grew up. Underneath it, our dog is buried in his favorite digging hole, with the other family pets that followed. Along the back fence climbs a clematis where I scattered my mother's ashes when she died. After my sister's daughter died, we put some of Janice's ashesthere too. When the beautiful purple flowers of the clematis bloom, the pain of their loss is lightened because I feel that they are still here.

Family and friends are a palpable presence, intermingled with the experiences and memories of a lifetime. That is what I put on my list, and when I finished it, I realized that those are the things that make this place far more than a piece of property-that make it my home. To me they are priceless, but on the market they are totally worthless.

We all have memories and experiences that matter to us. We have sentimental things that we keep: a letter from a parent who is dead, or from a past love. When my children were born we made an album for each one and filled it with things like the little ID bracelet from the hospital, the baby shower gifts, and, as they got older, their first attempts at art and other such mementos. We have a record of our children's lives. I have often thought that if there were ever a fire in our house, the only thing I would rush to save would be those albums. Yet economically they have no value. There are many things that are beyond price, but they are so devalued by the economic system that we do not even recognize them. We need to rediscover them.

Since 1970, per capita consumption in the United States has increased by nearly 50 percent. During that time, the United Nations indicators of quality of life in the United States have dropped by over 50 percent. Americans have bought the idea that having things makes them happy, but look at the indicators. We are less and less happy, yet we are still in this frenzy of buying because we believe it makes us happy. Our addiction to consumption is like a drug, a need that we have to satisfy. We always need another fix because nothing fulfills us. We have this vacuum, this empty hole inside us, and we think stuffing things into it will fill it up, but it does not. We just go on and on trying to fill what is fundamentally a spiritual need.

Economists think they are going to manage the planet by assigning an economic value to everything. A Chicago economist who won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (the so-called Nobel Prize) claims that he can evaluate everything in the world. If you are married, that has an economic value. If you are divorced, there are economic consequences. (In their divorce settlement, an economist's wife demanded half the Nobel Prize money if her husband ever won it. He did, and she got it.) He has a factor for everything. There is no spiritual connection between you and another person, or between you and a place, only what can be factored in economically. I think that as long as we act on that basis, we will ensure the death of the planet.

The fundamental unreality of economics was clear to me from my initial exposure. When I was an undergraduate student at Amherst, I went to my first class in economics and left almost immediately. The professor began by stating: "Caring, sharing, and cooperating are emotional, irrational acts. Only acting in self-interest is rational. That is the basis on which modern economics is constructed." Personally, I cannot accept any system that is based on the assumption that selfishness is the way the world works and therefore is how we must construct our society. If that were true, none of us would exist, and neither would anything else.

I was ready to leave the class at that point, but then the professor started drawing graphs mapping it all out. I asked him, "Where in that diagram are air, water, soil, and the other living things that keep our planet livable?" He replied, "Those are externalities; they are not part of equations in economics." That is when I walked out; there was absolutely nothing to learn. You can make the diagram anything you want, because it is not grounded in the real world. Economists have "externalized" the very things that make the planet habitable and keep everything alive.

Economists give no value at all to natural capital. A tree left standing in a rich vibrant forest provides all kinds of natural services, including exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen, holding vast amounts of water and releasing it slowly by transpiration, maintaining soils to prevent erosion, and providing living space for countless organisms. All those services are performed by a living tree in the forest. Nevertheless, foresters claim that the tree has no value until you cut it down. That is the economic mentality at work; natural capital is totally devalued.

In British Columbia we have some of the richest forests on the planet. Investors say they add fiber, which means they grow, at the rate of about 2 or 3 percent a year. If you cut down fewer than 2 percent of your trees, you could have forests forever. The problem is that it does not make economic sense to do that. If you clearcut the forest and put the profits in something else, you can make even more money. When the forests are gone, you invest in fish. When the fish are gone, you put your money in whatever is left.

It makes no difference how necessary anything is for life or how much you destroy, because all that matters is money. Economics ensures that we trash the planet because currency is not based on anything real. The economy fundamentally disconnects us from the things that sustain us and give us our quality of life. The belief that progress is to be measured in how much money we make, and how fast our economy grows, is the root of the problem. We showed that self-destructive cycle in our television program A Planet for the Taking.

There is nothing rational about economics; it is not science. The market has never been rational, and it is becoming increasingly irrational. There was a time when currency represented something tangible, things that were taken out of the earth. Money represented a real transaction. Now that money represents only itself, we can print as much as we want without it having any relationship to anything else.

We have reached the state of absurdity when you can buy and sell money and make money doing that. Every day over $1 trillion is exchanged in currency speculation around the world. The spiral is out of control, and nothing can stop it, because it is more powerful than governments. When the French franc dropped, the French government bought back billions of francs, but the franc kept falling, because speculators are stronger than governments. We saw the same happen recently with the Mexican peso and the American dollar, and then in the Asian financial markets. It is frightening.

We distort this unreal construct even further by creating measures of so-called economic health, economic indicators such as gross national product (GNP). Governments will turn somersaults to try and keep GNP going up. GNP only adds; it never subtracts. If you pollute the water, then, when people downstream drink it and get sick, GNP increases because they need hospitals, doctors, and lawyers. In 1992, America's GNP rose by $2 billion because it cost that much to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill. By the criterion of increasing GNP we should pollute everything and all get sick. What kind of an indicator is that? GNP is rising, but the quality of life is falling.

One of the really destructive aspects of our economic structure is its demand for steady growth. Growth is an absolute necessity. If you come to a plateau in business, you are finished. Economic growth in our society is equated with progress, and nobody wants to stop progress. So if growth is progress, we can never admit that we have enough. We always need to have more. The destructive impulse of the economy is immense, and its appetite is insatiable. This monster is intent on consuming the world. As Paul Ehrlich points out, there are only two systems on the planet that aspire to endless growth: cancer cells and economists. In both cases, the inevitable result of unstoppable growth is the same-death.

Our denial is so total that we completely ignore all warnings about our situation. The Union of Concerned Scientists, including over one thousand scientific experts around the world, signed and released a document after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 giving an urgent warning to humanity. It stated that we are on a destructive path that has to be changed immediately, or within ten years we will no longer be able to make the necessary changes. It was a very stark warning from the world's leading scientists.

The major newspapers and television stations did not even bother to cover it. The New York Times and Washington Post rejected it because it was not "newsworthy." Two years later, in 1994, the collective academies of sciences in the world, representing the leading scientists in every country, released simultaneously a document in nearly sixty countries, timed for the United Nations meeting on population. Essentially that document reiterated the concerns of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and again it was ignored.

Scientists, the experts who have the highest credibility in our society, claim that we have a crisis of monumental proportions and a very limited window of opportunity in which to act on it. Although we are dependent on the products created by science and technology, we are not willing to take seriously the warnings of scientists themselves.

There is an unwillingness to face up to the magnitude of the problem. In part this denial is understandable: nobody likes bad news. If there is a way of not having to confront it, we would all like to avoid it. So we blame the messengers and discount the credibility of people-scientists and environmentalists-who are facing our problems. I know this from personal experience because strangers grab me and say, "Who the hell are you? What do you want?" They are full of fear because they do not know what lies ahead, and they do not want to know.

My greatest difficulty has been in trying to convince people that there is a real crisis affecting all of us. The longer we ignore it, the worse it will get, and the more difficult it will be to change and survive. Humans have never had to face the collapse of the whole system that keeps us all alive. The planet is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off, with precious little time left.

It is hard to gain perspective on this brief moment in human existence. As a scientist, I feel that scientific activity is exacerbating the difficulty of realizing what is going on. Foremost are the problems of lack of accountability for the consequences of science, interlinked with its financial relationship to private industry, its dependence on military support, and its control by political powers.

But there are also problems intrinsic to scientific methodology. Scientists aspire to look at nature "objectively" in an attempt to erase any kind of emotional attachment, because it can influence the way they look at things and interpret their results. But when you objectify and distance yourself from things, you eliminate emotional value and no longer care. And you lose any sense of why this really matters.

Furthermore, scientists operate on the assumption that if you concentrate on a minuscule part, eventually you will understand the whole. In my area of genetics, that is certainly the assumption. Geneticists manipulate a single gene without having any idea what it will do to the entire organism and its environment. Presumptuously, they think that if they can know the three million letters in the genetic blueprint, they will understand everything there is to know about what it means to be human. But the rest of us are not convinced that we are just genes.

The scientific method fragments nature. Scientists take an object out of its natural environment, isolate it in a laboratory, and control the conditions around it in order to make observations that are not connected in time or space to anything else. The purpose of science is to discover universal principles that apply anywhere, anytime, and are therefore predictable. But in disconnecting a fragment from nature, we lose its historical and ecological context.

Outside the artificial conditions of the laboratory, everything interacts synergistically. Natural interactions among complex systems produce new phenomena tha t cannot be predicted from the existing properties of the parts. It was certainly unpredictable that we would evolve from a tiny tree shrew. Emergent properties evolve from synergy within the whole. This evolutionary process has created the amazing variety of life on Earth.

Rather than study interconnected systems, science has fragmented the whole into unrelated, disconnected pieces. Science's focus on the part and lack of perspective on the whole system is the reason why neither scientists nor the public recognize science's ultimate discovery-that everything is interconnected.

Our interconnection really hit home as I watched the reports come into the television newsroom after the nuclear reaction in Chernobyl. It was Swedish scientists who announced that something had happened in Russia. Within minutes after Chernobyl, radiation started falling over Sweden. Within hours, Canadian scientists detected radiation over the Arctic. Within days, the world was blanketed with radiation. It was a striking demonstration of the fact that air does not remain within national boundaries. There is no Russian air, Swedish air, or North American air. Air is a single system that goes around quickly. The notion that we can spew stuff into the air and the wind will blow it away, so that we do not have to worry about it, is nonsense.

Recently, when we were filming in Banff, I picked up the newspaper and saw the headline, "Fishermen in Jasper warned not to eat fish." Fish in the Rockies had been contaminated by pesticides that had blown over from Russia. When we look at smog in Los Angeles and say, "I'm glad I don't live in L.A.," we forget that L.A.'s air goes everywhere, including into our lungs.

Everything is a part of the same whole system. The cycle of life was taught to me by aboriginal people. I keep trying to remind everyone that the most fundamental things connecting us to all other living beings are air, water, and soil.

Air is not empty space. It is a substance that comes out of my nose and goes into yours. What I have contributed to that air goes into your lungs, and some of those atoms become part of you. People are astonished to realize that we are linked by this common body of air. You and I have absorbed atoms that were breathed by dinosaurs one hundred million years ago, along with all the plants and trees, creatures and people that have existed throughout history.

Like air, water is a matrix that connects us together through time and space. Water, which makes up over 70 percent of our bodies, evaporates off the oceans and transpires off the forests. Similarly, the food we consume depends on the circulation of air and water, is grounded in the soil, and needs the assistance of living creatures to grow. Air, water, soil, and life are not separate; they are all part of the same system.

We are part of them, just as they are part of us. We do not end at the edges of our bodies; we are intermixed with everything else. When you realize that you are part of this living skin of life, it is very comforting, because it means you have this kinship with all other living things. When Lovelock came up with "Gaia," we knew it was right. It makes sense that there is something bigger than us and that we are part of it. Our spirituality comes from the realization that there are things beyond our comprehension greater than us. Our lives unfold in life's endless process of creation.