Excerpt:
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.
FULL STORY here
Posted by John Ray
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