The Sacred Balance:
David Suzuki weighs in on the connections
between modern science and ancient wisdom

Interview by Christian Martin; October 2003

Peoples and Places l Sacredness, Love & Spirit l Good News for a Change

Like the infamous Lorax, David Suzuki speaks for the trees. He speaks for the fish, the birds, and for clean air, clean water, and healthy ecosystems. Though he would be loathe to admit it, there is no single figure that better represents the natural world for the general public in North America. Suzuki investigates, reveals and celebrates the many-wondered story of the world around us through his books, TV shows, world-wide speaking engagements and non-profit foundation. Through 30-years of hosting public television’s The Nature of Things, as well as the popular documentary series Planet for the Taking, The Secret of Life and most recently, The Sacred Balance, Suzuki has become a well-recognized and widely-admired authority on the environment. When Suzuki speaks, many tend to listen.

A third-generation Canadian, Suzuki was born in Vancouver in 1936. At the age of 6, he and his family were interned during World War II in a remote BC camp. From this decidedly low point in his life, Suzuki went on to graduate with honors from Amherst College in 1958 and earned his PhD in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961. He began his professional career as a geneticist, but his involvement in the birth of the environmental movement lead him beyond the laboratory and out into the world as both teacher and advocate. Suzuki’s talents are wide-ranging and have garnered the scientist-broadcaster-author much acclaim: he was a Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from 1969 until his retirement in 2001 and currently serves as Professor Emeritus with UBC's Sustainable Development Research Institute; among the numerous awards for his work are a UNESCO prize for science, a United Nations Environment Program medal and the Order of Canada, and Suzuki has been awarded no less than 15 honorary doctorates from universities in Canada, the US and Australia; and he is the author of over 30 books, most recently Good News for A Change, The Sacred Balance Visual Companion and the forthcoming children’s book Salmon Forest.

On a sun-drenched Sunday morning in September, as I motored towards Suzuki’s home on English Bay in Vancouver B.C. from my home in Bellingham, I passed Peach Arch Park at the international border crossing in Blaine. The giant white monument had a motto, or maybe a prayer, inscribed across it: “Children of a Common Mother.” And so the tone was set for the ensuing conversation on modern science, ancient wisdom and good news for Planet Earth.


Christian Martin: You started your professional career as a geneticist, deeply ensconced in the laboratory culture, and then transformed into a passionate advocate for the environment. Can you discuss that shift?

David Suzuki: I’m the product of 1957. I was a senior in college and that was the time when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. It was absolutely electrifying when that happened because nobody even knew there was a space program, but we very quickly came to understand that the Soviet Union was very advanced in engineering and science, and so the Americans began to pour huge amounts of money into science, building up universities. Even though I was a Canadian in the States, if you said you were interested in science, there was money for you. So I was brought up to believe that science was the greatest activity that was going to make everything better and better.

But when I started in a faculty position in ’62, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book that really said “look, you can study things in the lab, and you can invent things like DDT, but in the real world everything is connected to everything else. When you spray DDT to kill insects, you end up affecting fish, birds and human beings.” After Rachel Carson, I don’t see how any scientist could’ve just stayed focused in the lab without seeing that there were enormous repercussions of what you did in the lab out in the real world. That really for me was what began my involvement in the environmental movement.

CM: So you had a philosophical shift, a new understanding of science, but what turned your awareness into action?

DS: I never understood the distinction—if you care enough about anything that matters, surely you have no choice but to act on that. That’s the way it’s always been in my life. There was no big epiphany. It just seems to me that if you believe that something has to be changed, you have no choice but to do something about it.

When I was in college at Amherst in the ‘50s, we were involved in protesting the segregation in the south, doing sit-ins and such. I then got involved in the environmental movement during this huge protest against the American plan to blow up nuclear weapons on Amchitka in the Aleutian Islands. America did then what they do now, which is to say ‘Fuck the world, we’ll do what we want,’ and so they blew it up. But out of the protests, Greenpeace was born.

CM: One of the premises of The Sacred Balance is that “we’ve been trapped in a series of false premises” that cause humans to feel separate from nature. How science has contributed to this?

DS: Science’s great boast is that as a way of knowing, it is the best, because we look at things from a distance, we try to be objective. You don’t want to be emotional about something, you want to be able to quantify it and report it in a way that can be reproduced. But how can you remove yourself from the world of which you are a part? It’s such an artificial way of looking at things. Reductionist science, ever since Isaac Newton’s time, has tended to look at the world as a big mechanical construct— he called it a “clockwork mechanism.” The idea is that you can dismantle it by focusing on the parts of it, and as you come to understand how the parts work, then eventually you’ll fit it together like a big machine and explain everything.

The reality is that the world isn’t at all like that. By removing something, you completely alter it, and you have no idea what the context is within which it functions. Up until the 20th century, biologists actually believed that if you looked at a chimpanzee in the zoo, you could learn everything there is to know about chimpanzees. If that’s kind of focusing in and removing everything else that is science’s great boast to its power, as well as its weakness.

Sure you can understand genes and sequence them and you can find atoms and liberate energy by splitting them, but in the real world you have no ideas what the repercussions are going to be. That is the problem: Science teaches us to look at the world in a fragmented way without any notion of the context, and that’s what Rachel Carson was saying. You can make DDT and kill insects, but if you don’t realize that there’s a bigger world out there, then you’re never going to see what the consequences of your actions are. Science has played a big role in that fragmenting of the world.

CM: Science provides the ideas, but it is technology which turns the abstractions into real tools. How does our technology play into the split?

DS: It’s very difficult to separate science and technology these days. They’re very intermeshed. Science fragments by looking at nature in bits and pieces and so we can’t recognize the rhythms, the patterns, the contexts within which that fragment exists. That is science’s great flaw: it no longer sees the big picture. But through those insights we acquire give us an enormous power. Once you understand that locked within an atom is an enormous amount of potential energy that can be released by splitting or fusing it, the potential of that is enormous. We can create enormous power through technology by the application of scientific ideas, but the problem is that once we liberate that idea or incorporate that idea into technology, we have no idea what the repercussions are going to be.

CM: How has environmentalism addressed the shortcomings of science?

DS: Well, I could see that the way environmentalism was going in the ‘60s and ‘70s wasn’t going to work. I got swept up here in the protest against the nuclear explosions in Amchitka, off-shore drilling for oil, damming the Peace River, clearcut logging and pulp mills, but I soon realized that beneath all of these problems was the fact that people are taking too much stuff out of the environment and putting too much toxic materials and garbage back in. The solution then seemed to be to regulate how much and what people are allowed to remove and how much and what we are allowed to put back in, and then enforcing those regulations.

Before Rachel Carson, there were no Ministries of the Environment anywhere in the world. At the time, we were lobbying governments saying “we need environmental departments, we need Clean Air acts and Clean Water acts and we need enforcement of the legislation,” but by the early 70’s, it became crystal clear to me this can’t work because, ultimately, we don’t know enough about how the world works.

For example, DDT was synthesized in the late 1800s, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that scientist Paul Mueller discovered that it killed insects—he won a Nobel Prize for that in 1948—and we went for it in a big way. It was only years later when bird watchers began to notice birds were disappearing that biologists tracked it down and discovered biomagnification. How could we have managed DDT through regulation when we didn’t even know there was a phenomenon of biomagnification until the eagles began to disappear?

It wasn’t until after World War II that scientists discovered radioactive fallout. They blew the bloody weapons off at Bikini and then suddenly found out “Holy Christ! There’s all this radioactivity raining down!”

Same thing with CFCs— they were hailed as being these great molecules: very stable, chemically non-reactive, perfect for using in aerosol spray cans. Years later, we discover that they don’t break down, but instead persist and build up in the upper atmosphere, where ultraviolet light from the sun breaks chlorine-free radicals off the CFCs and breaks down the ozone layer. I mean, when they started announcing that, I didn’t even know there was an ozone layer! How could we have even managed CFCs when we didn’t know the big picture?

CM: “Not knowing the big picture” sounds a lot like the warnings against genetic engineering.

DS: The problem over and over again is that we just don’t know enough to anticipate what the long-term effects of our technology will be. As a geneticist, I keep saying to my colleagues, “You know damn well that we don’t know enough to predict what the effects of manipulating genes will be” and yet, they’re rushing out to make money on it. We’ve got a real dilemma on our hands here.

CM: The Sacred Balance suggests that science, which has encouraged us to see ourselves as separate from nature, is also the path that will lead us back to recognizing our connectivity. Isn’t that contradictory?

DS: The important thing is not to think that science is an enemy or this terrible activity; we just have to put science in its place. Science’s great strength is description. We look around and discover all kinds of things, because we know squat about what’s out there, right? Tom Eisner, a leading insect expert at Cornell, told me that he could go to Central Park in New York City anytime and discover a brand new species of insects. When we look into a forest canopy, we discover whole new communities. I think one of most beautiful examples of science’s potential is the way that they have developed the techniques to look at what the climate was like up to 4000,000 years ago. Very, very powerful analytic tools to describe the atmosphere for 400,000 years. That description is science’s great strength.

Where science falls down is in telling us what we should do, prescribing. So what I do is find the best science we’ve got describing the state of the world, and search for congruencies with native perspectives. What science does for me is to provide corroboration for what Aboriginal people have been telling us all along.

The native communities up and down the coast here have a clan system, with clans built on cedar, on frogs, on killer whales. They call these things their ‘relatives.’ Well, if you look at the Human Genome Project, to me the exciting thing about completing the human genome is not that we’re going to discover the cure for cancer and all that stuff but that in the human genome we find genes identical to genes found in frogs, insects, bacteria, fungi and trees. What the Human Genome Project does is it confirms what native people have always known: they’re our relatives. And if you look out at the world and you see a world filled with relatives, surely you’ll treat your relatives different than the way we treat the planet’s inhabitants.

I love science. I’m very proud of my record in science. But I think that we’ve got to put it into proper perspective: science isn’t the source of everything. It doesn’t define everything that’s real. It’s just one way of looking at the world. But we’ve elevated science to this position of dictating to us.

CM: So what is the missing element in modern science?

DS: Scientists get PhDs without ever taking a course in philosophy. Why do we get a “Doctor in Philosophy” if we never even take a course in philosophy? We’re not taught the history of our science. I was never taught that Josef Mengele was a geneticist; I was never taught that genetics had anything to do with the Holocaust. We graduate scientist who have a very limited understanding of what the nature of their activity is and how it fits in with the rest of society. The thing about scientists that is so wonderful and yet so terrible is their ability to be carried away by an idea. The joys and exuberance in the sense of discovery, in how clever we are in teasing out a bit of nature, is the very same exuberance led catastrophically in the early part of the century to our extrapolating way beyond the science dictated.

CM: Sounds like science can be used, not only as a method of discovery and description, but also as a means for validating one’s beliefs.

DS: A drastic result of this over-extrapolating is having an eminent American geneticist, a Harvard professor, saying that “in reality, the Negro is inferior to the white man.” That’s not his speculation or supposition, but a crude statement disguised as “scientific fact,” and that’s what he wrote into his textbook. Wait a minute—inferior? How do you judge inferior? That has nothing to do with science; it’s a value judgment! This is an upper-middle class white man confusing what he was learning by studying plants and animals with some kind of corroboration of his own prejudices. He was using science to validate his own prejudices, and not even seeing that.

I find that the ignorance among geneticists today is every bit as bad. The statements by James Watson are absolutely outrageous: “We should be getting rid of ugly people and getting rid of stupidity and we’re going to do that through genetic engineering.” How do you define “beauty?” Or “ugly?” Surely that a value system that’s got nothing to do with genes! “There are ugly genes, there are beauty genes”: this is absurd! Eminent scientists are confusing all their little discoveries with corroboration of their own bigotries.

CM: Is it something within the structure of the scientific method that leads to these gross misinterpretations?

DS: Well, another part of science’s problem is that we have this very simple-minded, linear model of the way science works. It's evident in the way that scientists apply for research grants. Let’s say you’re studying the rectal temperature of penguins, so what you say is “I need a big grant to get me down to Antarctica to take the rectal temperature of 2,000 penguins, and once I do that it will show us about temperature regulation in birds, and that will show x, and then we’re going to solve global warming!”

That’s the game, and all scientists have to play that game. I studied genes in fruit flies and my grants all said that it is going to go from here to here to here and then we’re going to cure cancer. But really, when you do an experiment, you never go from a to b. You do the experiment because you don’t know where it’s going. How then can you say, “If you give me the money to do this research, I’m going to go a to b to c to cure for cancer?” How can you say that?

In reality, you start with a, the experiment, and you end way up here, then way over there, then way down here, and then maybe there is somebody way over there, and the two of you meet in a bar and you say ‘Hey, you know, that’s interesting. Maybe we should put out discoveries together, and…” That’s how you lead to application.

But we’ve gotten confused with this idea that science proceeds in a linear fashion, which it does not. It cannot. The reason we do science is because we don’t know what the results of the experiment will be. We should be led by the results. But because we have this stupid idea of linearity in science then you get all this speculation: If I put this gene from this fish into this plant, because it does this in the fish, it’ll do this in the plant. What we’re doing is applying that linear model, which I find to be absolutely deadly and dangerous.

CM: How do your colleagues react to your urge for caution?

DS: The terrible thing is that if anybody says “But wait a minute, you don’t know enough to do that,” most scientists say, “What are you talking about? You’re against science. You’re a Luddite.” Jim Watson accused me of that because I asked him, “Do scientists have any social responsibility for what happens to their work, for how their work affects society?” He immediately attacked me for asking those questions, as anybody asking those kinds of questions is regarded as anti-science or neo-Luddite. There’s been a tremendous suppression of any questioning of the basic ideas underlying biotechnology or genetic engineering. It’s a terrible time; we have a kind-of collective McCarthyism that’s now being used to stifle any dissent.

“We are Where We Live”: Peoples and Places

CM: How did you come to a deeper understanding of the interconnections between humans and the world?

DS: I learned through my involvement with native people to look at the world in a very different way: there isn’t air out there or water out there or land out there. We are made up of the very same stuff. The idea that we’re using air to release our toxic materials so they’ll dilute away is absurd. We’re breathing 15 to 40 times a minute and filtering whatever’s in the air. At my age, I figure I’ve taken more than 350 million breaths and filtered all of the air that I’ve taken in. So the idea that we’re separate from air is ludicrous.

The new way of looking at it is to rediscover very ancient understandings. People have always known that we’re a part of the world; they’ve always referred to the earth as their mother. It’s a very recent phenomenon that we think of ourselves as cut off and existing separate from the natural world. The real change has got to be a recognition that whatever we do to the air, the water, the soil, we’re doing directly to ourselves. This is a very different perspective of what we call ‘the environment.’

CM: This is what you mean when you wrote that “we don’t end at our skins”?

DS: Exactly. If you go into the lungs where the air enters the alveolus, each alveolus is lined by a three-layered membrane that reduces surface tension, and when the air comes in, it literally fuses to the membrane. The carbon dioxide rushes out, oxygen and whatever else is in the atmosphere rushes in, is picked up by red blood cells and with every beat of your heart that air that is in your red blood cells circulates to every part of your body. How can you draw a line and say ‘the air ends here and I begin here?” There is no line. Sixty percent of our bodies, every one of our cells, is filled with water. That water is flowing out of us and coming back in. There is no distinction between the ocean and me. I am water. Every bit of our food was once alive, plants, animals and microorganisms that we consume and incorporate into our bodies, and the bulk of that comes from the soil. So we’re literally the earth. Yet, we’re using air, water and soil as a toxic dump. Unless we recognize that the state of the earth is a reflection of our state, we’ll never comes to grips with the crisis we’re in.

CM: “We are where we live”?

DS: I go into native communities in very isolated areas and at the end, I say, “I have breathed your air. I have drunk your water. I have eaten your food, a part of your place on this planet. It is now in me and I take it away with me.” We are created by where we are. The Inuit of the Arctic, for example, recognize in the deepest sense that they are born out of a place, created by that place.

The problem with global economics is we’ve globalized an idea: we can have the same fast food of McDonalds in Bangkok and Moscow and think that this is a great thing. But that severs our sense of who we are and where we belong. There isn’t any connectivity. One looks at the names and addresses in the New York phone book, and half of them change every year. We’ve become—especially in the industrialized world—very mobile creatures with no roots anywhere.

We go into a community here in Canada and say ‘OK, we’ve got this15-year logging plan for you’, and to the native community they say, “Wait a minute now— we’ve been here forever and our children our going to be here forever—give us a 500-year logging plan!” That’s a very different timeframe from the one we in the industrialized world have come to believe in.

Sacredness, Love & Spirit

CM: How have scientists responded to your Sacred Balance project?

DS: Scientists hated that I used the word “sacred” in the title of the book. They say, “You lose all credibility as a scientist when you start using this religious mumbo-jumbo.” Well, that’s because scientists have got themselves so puffed up they think that if it’s not demonstrable or testable scientifically, then it’s not real! That’s ridiculous!

There are sacred things. And science has nothing to say about sacredness. But just because of that, should we therefore say we’re not going to take sacredness seriously? That’s absurd.

CM: I wasn’t surprised by The Sacred Balance’s elemental explorations of “Earth,” “Water,” “Fire” and “Air” in discussing the balance of the biosphere, but I was by the chapter on “Love.” Why did you include it?

DS: Abraham Madloch, one of the giants in psychology, said that we have a nested series of basic needs. The first needs are dictated absolutely by the fact that you’re an animal: if you are deprived of oxygen for two minutes, you’re dead; if you don’t have water for a few days, you’re dead; if you don’t have food for several weeks, you’re dead. These are absolutely your most basic, primal, fundamental needs. And as I thought about that, I said ‘OK, we’re animals and I understand we need air, water, soil, those things. But once you’ve satisfied them then what happens?’ Well, in order to be fully developed as a human being— look at Madloch’s work—we need love. This thought blew me away.

A study looked at children who grew up in Romania under Ceausescu, including a girl who, for the first three years of her life, was raised in an orphanage. She had never been held, been kissed, or told that she was loved. She couldn’t walk, she weighed 18 pounds, she had a vocabulary of five or six words, and her whole thing was just food. When this girl was adopted and brought to Victoria, she would just eat and eat until she would throw up. And then she would just keep on eating. These Romanian kids die like flies.

The literature indicates that love, especially in that window of the first six years, is absolutely crucial to all of the things that make us fully human, a social creature. To empathize with others, to love and be loved, to care: these are all things that you learn as a child. Deprived of them, we not only suffer psychically, we suffer physically too.

What do you do then to ensure love? How do you ensure that children grow up in families and communities that can maximize that love?

CM: You’ve included a chapter on ‘Spirit’ too.

DS: To me, being fully human means fulfilling our social needs, which is to maximize love. Spirit emerges after that.

See, we’ve actually come to believe that we are the dominant creatures on the planet and that we alone are made in God’s image. We’re only one species coexisting with 10 to 30 million other species on the planet, but we will only grudgingly try to set aside 10 to 12 percent of our land base as parks and protected areas for the other 10 to 30 million species. One species, out of 30 million, wants to take over 90 percent of the land for themselves. This is absolute madness!

We also believe that we know enough to manage the rest. Well, we don’t. We don’t know enough to manage fish or trees or air quality or water quality—we have to rely on nature’s capacity to fulfill these roles. What we do have is the ability to apply our one power: to say “no,” to show restraint. But I think that in order to recognize and respect limits, we need spirit.

CM: Does it feel risky talking about “love” and “spirit”?

DS: Not to me. I’m an atheist. I’m not a religious person, and I don’t mean this in a religious sense, just the sense that we are a part of nature— we emerged from it, and when we die, every one of us will go back into it. We need to have sacred places where don’t just see opportunities or resources. We need to understand that we’re not the top of the heap. We need to know there are forces impinging on us that lie beyond our understanding and control. To me, that is what spirit is. And unless we talk about these things, then we will continue on what I believe is a suicidal course.

CM: Your Sacred Balance project has several recurrent themes—“the web of life,” “we’re all interconnected,” “what we do to the world we do to ourselves”—that don’t sound like new ideas to anybody who has ever read a speech by Chief Seattle, or read Thoreau, Rachel Carson or E.O Wilson, or looked into the great religions of Taoism and Buddhism. All of these things have been known a long time.

DS: Oh, definitely.

CM: What makes your presentation of these ideas unique?

DS: They say there is no such thing as an original idea. We rehash them over and over again. I certainly make no claims of originality. The guy that opened my eyes was a Haida—a chief by the name of Gujaaw. Guj and I go out on these speaking tours together, and when I talk about this stuff, Guj always has a little mischievous grin, like ‘Boy, what took you guys so long? Everybody knows this.’

This is not rocket science; this is ancient, ancient knowledge and wisdom. Folks have written about these concepts eloquently before me-- E.O. Wilson, Wade Davis, Rachel Carson (my great hero), Aldo Leopold-- I’m just adding whatever my two cents is. What I’ve always tried to do is to give greater credibility to aboriginal perspectives. I wrote a book called Wisdom of the Elders to show that aboriginal knowledge is corroborated completely by modern science. I know a lot of natives talk about wanting to teach “aboriginal science” and I keep saying “don’t do that, don’t do that” because science to me is very constrained, a very specialized way of looking at the world, whereas aboriginal or traditional knowledge is all-inclusive, it takes in everything. Calling it a “science” diminishes it. But science has become an area with such a high esteem that people want to apply that word to everything they do. Natives who think science is so great—well, it’s just showing them what they already knew.

Good News for a Change

CM: You mentioned earlier how environmentalists are accused of being “against progress” or “against science.” They are also criticized as being pessimistic doomsayers. A recent book of yours, Good News for a Change, bucks that trend, saying that there are plenty of positive things happening out there.

DS: I’ve been doing this now since now since 1962 and everybody in Canada thinks, ‘Oh God, here comes David “the sky is falling” Suzuki, Doctor of Doom and Gloom.’ It’s a terrible position to be the guy who is giving the warnings. Fifteen years ago, my wife said, ‘David, enough people have heard you warning, but they feel desperate because they want to know if there are any answers out there. Are there solutions? Or are we just saying ‘it’s too late and the planet is going to hell’?”

That’s when we started (the David Suzuki) Foundation, seeking out solutions to our destructive ways. About five years ago, I wanted to see, at the level of individuals, governments, and companies, if there are positive things that can and are being done to minimize our impact on the planet. Quite frankly, I did not expect that it would be a very thick book, but to my amazement, we probably could’ve written six books with all the good stuff that we uncovered.

CM: Has the book had a good reception?

The good news is that there are lots of great things happening out there in the world. This book just scratches the surface. The bad news is that even though the book has been a number one bestseller in Canada and Australia (it was just released in America), our politicians and business people haven’t wanted to hear what the book has to say. They would rather just keep on with business as usual. Maybe they’ll put a bandage on the problem here and there, but they don’t want to make the necessary fundamental shifts.

Good News for a Change was written to try and show people “Look you can log a forest forever, make your money, and you never have to clear-cut.” We know this, but people keep adhering to their same old ways, repeating the same old arguments.

CM: Is your goal to change people’s minds then?

DS: I just read a study by the Rockefeller Foundation on American attitudes, and what they found is that the vast majority of Americans think their country is the largest supporter of foreign aid to the world. On a per capita basis, America is actually down around number thirty, down around Spain and Portugal. The study tested these people who think America gives more money to the rest of the world then anybody else, and then showed them the actual data—the people are shocked, just shocked. Then, 15 minutes later, they asked the same question and the people still believed America was number one!

So it is very, very difficult to get people to change. We create a world-view, and when information comes along that doesn’t fit, we either say, “Bullshit! You’re just an asshole and I don’t believe you,” or we modify it in some way so it supports the position that you already believe in and we carry on as before. That’s the trend that is really overwhelming.

CM: How does one combat this belligerence?

DS: The Foundation figured out, “OK, people’s values and beliefs don’t change first, so we’ve got to get people actually doing something.” You start recycling not because you think of recycling in the bigger scheme of things but because it makes a bit of sense. But as you get involved in recycling, you start to think about garbage and waste and consumption, and then your values begin to shift.

The Foundation got together with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a very eminent group in the States, and asked them, “Where do ordinary people have the biggest impacts?” They came up with three areas: your food, your housing and your transportation. Focusing on those three areas, together we came up with a list of ten simple steps that people can take. We’ve called it the Nature Challenge and we’re challenging Canadians to do at least three of the ten steps in the next year. The suggestions in the Nature Challenge—you can look them up on our website (www.sacredbalance.com)— are deceptively simple. In fact, the first time the Union of Concerned Scientists came to me with their list I said, “You can’t be serious.” But when you add them up, it turns out you can create significant positive impact.

If we can get a million Canadians over the next two years to agree to that, not only will it be a very significant lightening of the load on the earth, politically it will be irresistible. No politician on the right or left end of the spectrum will be able to resist signing and supporting the challenge.

It’s clear that this is how we’re going to bring about change. We’re not going to bring about political change by putting out a book showing you that it can be done. It’s going to be done when people care enough to say, “Look! There are alternatives dammit! I want to do something about the problem.” If enough people do that, politicians will have to pay attention.

CM: What is the single most important thing an individual can do to lessen their impact on the environment?

DS: The real challenge is changing our beliefs and value systems, but the obvious place for the industrialized world to start is with consumption. We are on a consumptive binge that is absolutely overwhelming. And if we don’t come to grips with that, then I think the humans are done for. The planet will exist and life will go on, but whether or not it will be inhabitable by us is really a good question. So let’s look at the way we live and ask a few simple questions: “Am I happier because of all this stuff? Is an SUV or a Diet Coke really the key to happiness?” Those are the questions we need to get to, this is what I believe is at the heart of the matter.