David Suzuki Quotes

We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyones arguing over where they're going to sit

Every breath is a sacrament, an affirmation of our connection with all other living things, a renewal of our link with our ancestors and a contribution to generations yet to come. Our breath is a part of life's breath, the ocean of air that envelopes the earth.

If we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance.

The environment is so fundamental to our continued existence that it must transcend politics and become a central value of all members of society.

Our identity includes our natural world, how we move through it, how we interact with it and how it sustains us.

As we distance ourselves further from the natural world, we are increasingly surrounded by and dependent on our own inventions. We become enslaved by the constant demands of technology created to serve us.

Eco” comes from the Greek word oikos, meaning home. Ecology is the study of home, while economics is the management of home. Ecologists attempt to define the conditions and principles that govern life’s ability to flourish through time and change. Societies and our constructs, like economics, must adapt to those fundamentals defined by ecology. The challenge today is to put the “eco” back into economics and every aspect of our lives.

The way we live has less to do with individual choices and more to do with the general bent of our society than many of us realize. We forget that we don’t need everything.

There is no environment "out there" that is separate from us. We can't manage our impact on the environment if we are our surroundings. Indigenous people are absolutely correct: we are born of the earth and constructed from the four sacred elements of earth, air, fire and water. (Hindus list these four and add a fifth element, space.)

The way we’ve set up corporations, even a majority vote of stockholders cannot demand that a corporation’s policies reflect the public good or preserve the environment for future use. That’s because profit is the one and only motive. It’s up to government and it’s up to people to protect the public interest. Corporations are simply not allowed to.

The only way you can endure your pain is to let it be painful.

Why do you need to go outside? For one thing, to appreciate what it is that keeps you alive. And the more time you spend outside, the more you are able to sense change in that world. If you can smell something, chances are that unless it's flowers or food, it doesn't belong there and is not good for us. But even more profound, we have to get outside and seek nature because we need that connection for our physical and mental health.

Benjamin Franklin, said: “Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.

To me, the real challenge is the human mind, which is driving our actions: our beliefs and values shape the way we see the world, which in turn determines how we will treat it. So long as we assume that we are the centre of the universe and everything revolves around us, we will not be able to see the dangers we create. To see those, we have to recognize that our very lives and our well-being depend on the richness of nature.

Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises — car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change. When the crisis is environmental and global,

Change is never easy, and it often creates discord, but when people come together for the good of humanity and the Earth, we can accomplish great things.

That little walk powerfully reminded me that nature is our touchstone. However sophisticated and technologically advanced we may be, we are biological creatures, utterly dependent on her beneficence for clean air, water and food.

There are some things in the world we can't change - gravity, entropy, the speed of light, and our biological nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and well being. Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere.

Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises — car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change.

A balance between sustainable ecology and sustainable human life, on the one hand, and the unfettered drive for profit, on the other, is just an oxymoron.

[Zuzuki-roshi] I don’t know anything about consciousness. I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing.

We needn't be saddened with the impossible weight of managing the entire biosphere, but we must meet the challenge of living in balance with the sacred elements.

Virtually all of the extremely important services that nature provides are completely ignored by conventional economics. The ozone layer, for example, shields all life from DNA-damaging ultraviolet radiation.

If we call insects "pests," then we can make war on them. And we have done that, developing powerful chemicals that kill all insects to eliminate the ones that are troublesome to us. To me, using broad-spectrum pesticides is like dealing with high rates of crime in a town or neighbourhood by removing or killing everyone in the area.

The future doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we're the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.

You needn’t be confused about which “expert” to believe, just talk to elders around you, people who have lived in your part of the world for the past seventy or eighty years. Ask them what they remember about the air, about other species, about the water, about neighbourhoods and communities, about caring between people and the ways they communicated and entertained each other. Our elders tell us of the immense changes that have occurred in the span of a single human life; all you have to do is to project the rate of change they have experienced into the future to get an idea of what might be left in the coming decades. Is this progress? Is this way of life sustainable?

The place where we spend most of our lives moulds our priorities and the way we perceive our surroundings. A human-engineered habitat of asphalt, concrete and glass reinforces our belief that we lie outside of and above nature, immune from uncertainty and the unexpected of the wild.

At first you are awed by the splendour, by the beauty, of the planet and then you look down and you realize that this one planet is the only thing we have. Every time the sun comes up and goes down… and for us that’s sixteen times a day… you see a thin, thin, thin layer just above the surface, maybe 10 or 12 kilometres thick. That is the atmosphere of the Earth. That is it. Below that is life. Above it is nothing. JULIE PAYETTE, Canadian astronaut

We repeat like a religious mantra the unquestioned benefits and power of science, information and economics, without inspecting the structures and methodology on which they are built. Many of these beliefs are insupportable and dangerous. For example, the notion that human beings are so clever that we can use science and technology to escape the restrictions of the natural world is a fantasy that cannot be fulfilled. Yet it underlies much of government’s and industry’s rhetoric and programs.

Albert Einstein was asked one day by a friend “Do you believe that absolutely everything can be expressed scientifically?” “Yes, it would be possible,” he replied, “but it would make no sense. It would be description without meaning—as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation in wave pressure.” RONALD W. CLARK, Einstein: The Life and Times

student remembers a lecture where Suzuki Roshi said, “If it’s not paradoxical, it’s not true.

We know that deprivation of love can kill people. What are the effects of being deprived of a living environment?

I don’t trust anything but my feet and my black cushion. My feet are always my friends. When I am really standing on my feet I am not lost.

If we witness an act of discrimination but do not speak up or intervene, then we tacitly support it.

Corporations easily bully governments by threatening to deprive even democratic nations of their wealth. If we try too hard to control them, they say they’ll leave and take their jobs with them.

The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity -- then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective.

The nation that values youth and thinness is the most obese in the world. The place where the dollar rules has more diparity between rich and poor than any other industrialized nation. Although peace is one of its highest ideals, the United States is well known for violence. More people use drugs regularly in this land of opportunity than in the rest of the world put together. And more people per capita are imprisoned in the land of the free than in any other Western country.

Human domination over nature is quite simply an illusion, a passing dream by a naive species. It is an illusion that cost us much, ensnared us in our own designs, given us a few boasts to make about our courage and genius, but all the same it is an illusion.

Trees for which there is no commercial value are referred to as "weeds" that interfere with commercial harvesting. That's what alders were called until a method to make high-grade paper from them was developed, but you'd never know that alders play an important ecological role. They are the first trees to grow after an opening is cleared in a forest, and they fix nitrogen from the air to fertilize the soil for the later-growing, longer-lived, bigger tree species. Yew trees have tough wood with gnarled branches and were called weeds and burned until a powerful anti-cancer agent was found in their bark.

The economy — and the need to keep it strong and growing — has somehow become the most important aspect of modern life. Nothing else is allowed to rank higher. The economy is suffering; the economy is improving; the economy is stable or unstable — you’d think it was a patient on life support in an intensive-care unit from the way we anxiously await the next pronouncement on its health. But what we call the economy is nothing more than people producing, consuming and exchanging things and services.

Lignin is a linkage of three aromatic alcohols—coumaryl, coniferyl, and sinapyl—which fill the spaces in cell walls that are not already occupied by other substances, even ousting water molecules to do so. It thus forms a very strong hydrophobic net, cementing all the cell-wall elements in place and providing strength and rigidity to the xylem. It also provides an important barrier to fungal and bacterial infections. When a tree is invaded by disease, it seals off the infected section with a wall of lignin so that the disease cannot spread. Lignin is so tough that getting rid of it is a costly process in pulp-and-paper plants. The acids needed to break down lignin in pulpwood are the chief pollutants such mills contribute to the environment.

A tree can lift and transpire vast amounts of water. A single tree in the Amazon rain forest lifts hundreds of liters of water every day. The rain forest behaves like a green ocean, transpiring water that rains upward, as though gravity were reversed. These transpired mists then flow across the continent in great rivers of vapor. The water condenses, falls as rain, and is pulled back up again through the trees. It rises and falls on its westward migration an average of six times before finally hitting the physical barrier of the Andes mountains and flowing back across the continent as the mightiest river on Earth. Similarly, Indonesia, with 114 million hectares (280 million acres) of tropical forest (it is the second most forested country in the world after Brazil) is a vital part of the Asian hydrologic cycle. Around the world, forests constantly replenish Earth’s supply of fresh water and play a key role in weather and climate.

Patent law is a very interesting form of property,” she says. “With all other forms of property, you have ownership rights; but along with them, you have responsibilities.” If you build a building that falls down or a car engine that blows up, you can be sued by both the buyers and government agencies. This is not true in the case of patent owners. “Patent law is a kind of ownership law in which there is no liability,” says Shiva. “There’s no responsibility. There are only rights to exclude others from the use of whatever is your patent.

Protection of intellectual property is clearly not the only, or perhaps even the main reason for Monsanto’s strategy in threatening to bring thousands of farmers into court. The purpose is to generate fear, and hence, compliance, in order to force the purchase of more GM seed. — E. ANN CLARK, PLANT AGRICULTURIST

Monsanto, at least, has found a way to make the victims of genetic contamination pay for the privilege, and for a very wealthy corporation, the costs of lawyers and legal wrangling are part of the cost of doing business. Individual farmers have to assume enormous costs by themselves. Plant scientist E. Ann Clark points out, “Monsanto is the only biotech company that sues for patent infringement [italics ours]. The others use other strategies, for example, embedding their patented traits in hybrid canola, which the farmer cannot save as seed anyway, to safeguard their patented genes.

The media have indeed informed the public about threats to our air, water and food. Ever since 1962, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, more and more information has been made available. And the public has responded. About fifteen years ago, public interest in the environment reached its height. In 1988, George Bush Senior promised that, if elected, he would be an environmental president. In the same year, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was re-elected, and to indicate his ecological concern he moved the minister of the environment into the inner Cabinet. Newly created environment departments around the world were poised to cut back on fossil-fuel use, monitor the effects of acid rain and other pollutants, clean up toxic wastes, and protect plant and animal species. Information about our troubled environment had reached a large number of people, and that information, as expected, led to civic and political action. In 1992, it all reached its apex as the largest-ever gathering of heads of state in human history met at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. “Sustainable development” was the rallying cry, and politicians and business leaders promised to take a new path. Henceforth, they said, the environment would be weighed in every political, social and economic decision. Yet only two weeks after all the fine statements of purpose and government commitments were signed in Rio, the Group of Seven industrialized nations met in Munich and not a word was mentioned about the environment. The main topic was the global economy. The environment, it was said, had fallen off the list of public concerns, and environmentalism had been relegated to the status of a transitory fad.

Canadian David Suzuki, a former genetics professor and ardent environmentalist, apparently doesn’t agree with Darwin. He said:   Economics is a very species—chauvinistic idea. No other species on earth—and there are maybe 30 million of them—has had the nerve to put forth a concept called economics, in which one species, us, declares the right to put value on everything else on earth, in the living and non-living world.

After I read David Suzuki’s book, I took salmon from my dinner plate and I buried it in the woods, hoping to assist the growth of a large tree.

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open for everything. —Shunryu Suzuki And

It wasn’t just oneness and duality, but “the duality of oneness and the oneness of duality.

The world of thinking is that of our ordinary dualistic mind. The world of pure consciousness or awareness is that of buddha-mind. Phenomena in the world of thinking are constantly being named or labeled by our minds. The world of awareness does not label or name, it only reflects. The world of pure consciousness thus includes the opposites in the world of thinking.

environmentalist David Suzuki said, “We’re in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit.

We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they're going to sit David Suzuki

Life thrives on life;

By being loved the power is released in the infant to love others. This is a critically important lesson that, as human beings, we need to understand and learn: that the cultivation of the growth and the development of love in the child should be its natural birthright.

Si tu mente está vacía, siempre está preparada para todo; está abierta a todo. —Shunryu Suzuki

Savremen čovek hoda po licu Zemlje i ostavlja pustinju u otiscima svojih stopala.

Add together the collective global impact of population, consumption, the global economy, and technology and it is clear how we have become a geological force. Human activity has so disrupted processes on the planet with consequences that what were once called "acts of god" or "natural disasters" now carry the undeniable imprint of our species. We have become almost like gods as we affect natural events such as weather and climate, earthquakes, floods, drought, mega-fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Once, our fear of gods acted to restrain human excesses, but now we have ourselves become the gods.

Ancient forests that took millennia to evolve are called "decadent" or "overmature," so clearing them is justified by the notion that they are finished or at an end. Sometimes the forest industry labels such forests "wild," and what is planted and grown after it has been clear-cut is called a "normal" forest. We define things in terms of human utility, not in any way that makes ecological or even biological sense.

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open for everything. —Shunryu Suzuki

I just didn’t want my friends to be involved in the kind of nationalism which I thought might destroy Japan completely. It’s more dangerous than war.

Our victories were pyrrhic because we failed to address the values, assumptions and beliefs that underlie our destructive demands and activities. The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If we regard a mountain as a deity rather than a pile of ore, a forest as a sacred grove rather than lumber and pulp, other species as our biological kin rather than resources, the planet as our mother and life-giver and not an opportunity, then our actions will reflect far greater humility, respect and responsibility.