In 2007, The McGill Tribune conducted an interview with David Suzuki:
Environmentalist insists on immediate action

 

"Some things in the world we have to live with – entropy, gravity, the speed of light and the Laws of Thermodynamics. Other things such as the economy, market or currency were created by us and if they don’t work, we should change or replace them with something that does. Economics and ecology are based on the same Greek root, oikos, meaning household or domain. Ecology is the study of home, economics is its management. Ecologists seek the conditions and principles underlying any species survival and well being. One would think any group in society would first look to these condtions and principles before beginning a major program or activity. When we are told we need a strong growing economy to afford to protect the environment or that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be too expensive, we elevate economics above ecology. This is suicidal. Let’s put the eco back into economics.

In 1900 most people in the world lived in rural village communities. We were a farming species. A century later, most people in the industrialized world lived in big cities and in a city, it becomes easy to assume we are different from any other species because our intelligence enables us to create our habitat, so we don’t need nature. This is our greatest challenge. We fail to see that everything in our stores, electricity, food and water come from the earth and sewage and garbage go back into it. We are no longer aware of “nature’s services” – cleansing air, filtering water, pollinating flowering plants, nitrogen cycle, carbon cycle, and so on – as we mistakenly focus on economic activity as the source of our well being."