Ideas - Suzuki's Survival Guide | How We Got To This Point

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

In 1989 the Canadian government was set to spring into action to address climate change. “If we don’t move now, it will be a disaster,” said then-Conservative environment minister Lucien Bouchard. “We are dealing with the survival of the species.” This podcast features David Suzuki’s prescient radio series, It’s a Matter of Survival from nearly four decades ago. It includes conversations with notable politicians and environmental experts of the day.Listen to the first episode in this series: Suzuki's Survival Guide | A Warning For other episodes from David Suzuki's radio days, stream audio here.

I'm David Ridgeon, host of the award-winning podcast Someone Know Something. Each season, I investigate a different unsolved case, from a mysterious bomb hidden in a flashlight, to two teenagers killed by the KKK. The New York Times calls SKS a consistently rigorous, intelligent gem, and Esquire named the series one of the best true crime podcasts of 2021. Find Someone knows something wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Global warming, if you look at it, if you want to set up real solutions, you have to change our way of life. That's former conservative environment minister, Lucien Bouchard, speaking to David Suzuki back in 1989. And if we don't move now, there will be a disaster. We are dealing with the survival of the species. and I don't want to be to scare people, but we all know that it is a question of great, great emergency. Lucien Bouchard was one of the featured voices in David Suzuki's 1989 series called It's a Matter of Survival.

I'm David Suzuki. We have just over 10 years until the end of the century. Those 10 years will determine, if and how we will exist on this planet. You will make that decision. It's a matter of survival. While David Suzuki is known mostly as the host of CBCTV's The Nature of Things, his radio series was astonishingly prescient.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that within the next 10 years, the global temperature will have increased by at least 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-indexam. levels. In 2023, we broadcast a retrospective of David Suzuki's radio work. This is the second episode from that series. The signs that the climate

is becoming unstable are all around us. Scientists say that this warming trend is the result of human activity that is putting more carbon, carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, into the atmosphere. Like a pane of glass in a greenhouse,

these molecules let sunlight in, but prevent heat from escaping into outer space by reflecting it back to Earth. It's not something for us to worry about in the future. We've got to worry right now, because it's becoming obvious that the first casualty in this altered world is the global food supply. Mick Kelly is an atmospheric scientist at the University of East Anglia in England. At present, the temperature of the planet is higher than it's been since records began, and the concern is that over the next 50, 60 years, temperatures may rise by two, three, possibly four degrees Celsius,

and that's a change in climate on the scale that brought the planet out of the last ice age, but it's going to occur in decades rather than millennia. So the next few years, really, are a critical period. We're breaking records already as far as global temperatures concerned. Any further warming is going to push us beyond the limits of natural variability, and that's when we can expect to see the first substantial impacts. In the United States, for example, it's been estimated that a one-degree rise in temperature

would reduce wheat yields by around 10%. Now, we're talking about a three- or four-degree rise in temperature, so we're reaching the point where we're almost halving productivity there. A one-degree increase doesn't sound like much, especially compared to temperature changes between day and night. But even a one-degree average increase means far more hotter days and warmer nights, and plants, especially agricultural crops, have been selected to tolerate a limited range of temperature extremes.

One study in 1986 by the Council of Scientific Unions predicted a one degree increase in temperature, if accompanied by a 10% decrease in rainfall, could reduce wheat yields by 25%. The message from all this is that we don't understand at all the effect of climate warming, but there are serious threats right now to our food supply. We hardly think beyond the supermarket when it comes to food.

We sit and read about other parts of the world that have too little food. I guess we feel protected. But that will end, says Lester Brown of the World Watch Institute. What we're seeing overall is a loss of momentum in the growth of world food output. That loss of momentum has been brought into focus by a poor monsoon in India in the summer of 87, and by severely drought-reduced harvest in North America in the summer of 1988. At the beginning of 1989, world grain stocks are at about the lowest level since the years immediately following World War II. It now looks as though that even with normal weather in the world, with a reasonably good crop,

we will not be able to rebuild depleted grain stocks. When the next drought comes, there will be a frantic scramble among the hundred or so importing countries for grain supplies. In 1988, for the first time in history, the United States did not produce enough grain to satisfy its own needs. The next time that happens with depleted world grain supplies, world grain prices are likely to double or triple. No one knows because never since North America has emerged as the world's breadbasket has the United States not had exportable grain supplies. It's a very worrying portent of what might occur as global warming develops because the drying. out of the continental interiors, the United States, parts of Canada, is one of the most definite predictions that our numerical models have given to us.

So I think the consequences are extremely serious. And if we look 10 years hence to a point when, well, one climate model is predicting drought of this nature six times every decade, if we get to that point, then food security is going to be a serious problem worldwide. That was atmospheric scientist Mick Kelly. With the threat of droughts becoming more frequent in North America, as the climate heats up, the food security problem may be the first one we face. Paul Erlich has an ominous warning. There are some people who seem to have the idea that places like Canada and the United States

can remain islands of affluence in a sea of misery. It's just not going to work that way. As people around the world get more hungry and more desperate, they're going to come pounding on our doors. There's going to be a flow of ecological refugees. that's going to be very difficult to stem. So you can just forget about the idea that we're going to live happily while they go down the drain.

Our fates are intimately tied up with their fates, and we're either going to save the world or we're not going to save ourselves. We can't just save ourselves and let them go. How did we get to this critical point in time? Graham DeCarrie is chairman of the history department at Concordia University in Montreal. Can history give us any clues?

It's been a long time developing, you know. The whole Western tradition is that nature is something ugly and dangerous, something to be feared. And what you have to do is just roll over it. We got a warning of what we were doing, I guess, in the 1930s. Those were the years of the Depression, of course. But in the West, it wasn't just the Depression. It wasn't just you couldn't sell wheat. The problem was you couldn't grow it.

And that was because there was about 10 years of drought. Now, drought had happened before in the West. and the West had somehow come through it. Well, the difference now was that all the natural cover was gone from the West. In just, oh, three generations of farming, we'd stripped off all of that natural cover so that in this drought, the protection was gone. The soil blew away.

Maybe we would have taken the warning, but in 1939 we found ourselves in a war. And, you know, coming out of the 30s, out of 10 years of depression, six years of war. There were all those years of things that we'd wanted, deferred, that we hadn't been able to have. Now we could have anything, we could

do anything, and in the 50s we did it. Everybody got a car, almost everybody, and there were millions of roads for them and millions of acres of suburban mongolos and motor boats on every lake and chemical enrichment of land and cattle and those marvelous

little spray cans, so you didn't even have to open bottles anymore to pour the stuff out. It all seemed to come true. And in the 60s, we took that giant step into a world of no limits at all, and science did it for us. A man on board was orbited around the earth from the Soviet Union. He is airman, Major Yuri Gagarin, an Air Force pilot. I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the go before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

He has now turned around and he's putting his left on. That's one small step for man, giant leap for man. There we were going out into space. Well, you know, children, of course, picked up in this right away. You had all those little rocket toys and kids running around with those plastic bubble life support helmets on their head. And I guess you can understand children getting swept up in the fantasy of all that science could do and all the power that it meant. The shocking thing is that adults did it too.

I remember buying orange juice, which I was assured was the orange juice they drank in space and the product of the latest technology. In the 60s, everyone became a space adventure and everyone moved into a world in which there were absolutely no limits. we were gods. You do get some public reaction. It was a reaction that came in the form of a book. It was a book which talked about how we had lost our sense of living with nature. As lords of nature, we were living against it. We were destroying it.

And ultimately, as we did that, we were going to destroy ourselves. And that was Rachel Carson's silent spring. We spray our elms. and the following springs are silent of robin song. Not because we sprayed the robins directly, but because the poison traveled step by step through the now familiar elm leaf earthworm robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable,

part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life or death that scientists know as ecology. We were getting warnings that there was a limit, but, of course, nobody paid any attention to it. The 1970s gave us an even better chance to show what power we had over nature. We could use nature as we wished,

and then, and this is the ultimate power, we could just throw it away. From Buy It, the Paddymatic. Yes, party goers, it's the paddy grounder, paddy maker, patty stacker, all rolled into one. Make your hamburger patties in just... seconds with the pattymatic. Now for just 9.95. And when you're finished, just throw it away. You'll find disposable cups, disposable plates, disposable cutlery, disposable diapers, disposable

razors, all your disposable needs at the convenience center, 132 Main Street, Northwest. Use it once, then just throw it away. Are you sick of crying over your onions? With Megamatic, you can chop pounds in just seconds. Then just throw it away. The 70s with a decade of disposability. Now, business loves disposability. Disposability is profitable. We've always had a kind of artificial disposability. And we've had fashions and clothes,

that clothes which are perfectly good can no longer be worn because they're out of style. We've had artificial disposability of cars by putting a year on them, and you know that if your car is three years old, you're out of style, and you've got to get another one, even if it's working fine. And that sort of thing, even spread into kitchen appliance,

but the 1970s brought something even better. Things were designed to be used only once or a few times and then to be thrown away. It was disposability probably that gave us the sense that we had absolute mastery of nature. We could take out whatever we liked, we could throw away whatever we liked. There was no limit.

The earth would supply us with all we needed forever. We could dump our garbage back into the rivers and the lakes and into the ocean and into continents that we didn't have to look at and it would never affect us. There was no end to it. And yet, even in the 70s, you begin to get international concern that perhaps there was a limit to what we could take and to what we could throw back. The Stockholm Conference in 1972 brought international attention. And closer to home, there were the demonstrations against the use of fluoric carbons for, sprays and concern about the damage that they were causing to the atmosphere.

The trouble with most of those protests is they still seem to think that we could get what we want. If only we could do it more logically and scientifically and carefully, we could still have it all. We didn't realize that the problem was not a matter of logic and science. The problem was us and the way we lived. and we continue to think that despite the fact that disaster after disaster in the 1970s gave us warnings that we could not go on and we could not solve it as we were doing.

The local people are dumbstruck by the tragedy. Their lives depend on their fishing and their power to attract tourists. For all of them, the Amoco Cadiz has brought economic chaos and a violently polluted environment. As you drive along 99th Street, homemade signs read, Danger Area. chemicals at work. There are also for sale signs, but everyone knows all homes are for sale. This is Niagara Falls, the Love Canal District. The canal started out as... There's no warning as you drive into Sevonzo that anything might be wrong. Small children play in streams, which according to one expert on TCDD may already be polluted. They've set up a special

medical center to deal with people who may have been contaminated but who are not sick enough to go into hospital. Their findings, the accident at three-mile island was caused by several mistakes made by people, a couple of mechanical failures, and at least one design fault in the power plant. And at the site near middle... The message from history is that our assaults against the environment and our unending appetite for more of the planet's resources have caught up with us. When I was a kid back in the 40s,

I remember saving string, taking my own bags to the store, and keeping clothes until they were worn out. People always recycled things. But as I grew up, people began to say, there's lots more where that came from. And now, we live in an era

when 20% of the world, those of us who live in North America, Japan and Europe, consume 80% of the planet's resources, and we still demand more every year. We in the industrialized countries are the major cause of the planet's destruction. And if we want to prevent overwhelming climate change in our children's lives, we are the ones who have to change the way we think and act. And if you want to know the starting point,

it's our use of fossil fuel, coal and oil. They are the major cause of global warming. We all use them, from the electricity we get from coal-fuel generators to driving our cars and heating our homes. And Canada is one of the most energy-intensive countries in the world. Our per capita emissions of carbon are more than 16 times that of the developing world. Last year in Toronto, an international conference on the global atmosphere called for a 20% reduction in carbon dioxide emission over the next 15 years. Stephen Lewis was the Canadian ambassador to the United Nations at the time

and chaired the conference. He goes even further. I think, David, that the major policy must be the reduction of the combustion of fossil fuels by 50% within a 10-year period, with the intention on the part of the Western world, virtually to eliminate dependence on fossil fuels overall as fast. as it is humanly possible to achieve. It means a massive shift from the use of cars

to public transportation. It means a massive shift away from oil and coal in the first instance to natural gas as a transitional fuel to all of the alternatives from solar to thermal, et cetera, as fast as anyone can possibly do it. It means fuel-efficient cars of a kind that we have not even begun to approximate.

It means massive reforestation, in developed and developing countries. It just means an all-out attack, an all-out assault on the whole process of fossil fuel combustion everywhere in order to save the planet. You see, if in truth the Western world takes the current major trends seriously, particularly the warming effect,

then it's a challenge to the whole economic order. It's a challenge to capitalism, as we know it. It's a challenge to the international economic relationships developed in developing countries, as we know them. Fossil fuels have become an essential part of our economy, the power that drives this engine of society. To economists, growth is the main reason governments, industries, and societies exist.

If our economy fails to grow, we call it a recession or a setback. A society that says, enough, we've got a number. We've got more than enough. Let's just stay at this level. It's simply inconceivable. Yet global warming says, if we continue to grow, we may die. What is the magnitude of what we are doing to the atmosphere? George Woodwall is the director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. We're releasing through burning fossil fuels at the moment

between 5 and 6 billion tons of carbon annually. So that's the scale of the problem. We're probably releasing somewhere in the range of 2 to 3 billion tons from deforestation. That means that we have the possibility of, say, reducing the use of fossil fuels by something of the order of 50% immediately in getting 2 to 3 billion tons.

If we stop deforestation on a global basis, we might find another two to three billion tons. And that solves the immediate problem. But in the longer term of a decade or so, which is not very long, we'd have to reduce fossil fuel use by 75 or 80 percent to get to the point where we were no longer building up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from that source. That's a very significant change.

It means to all practical purposes that the era of fossil fuels has passed and that it's time to move on to the new era of renewable sources of energy. The public has certainly indicated in the last couple of years that the environment is a major concern, and of course greenhouse warming has been one of the areas that they've readily identified, especially after the drought last year. But what you're talking about,

the phasing out of fossil fuels, is really a massive change at the very individual level, for example, having our own two or three cars per family. And do you think the public is ready to bite that bullet? Oh, I think the public is ready to bite that bullet. There are various alternatives. I can envision hydrogen-powered cars with hydrogen made by the hydrolysis of water using solar energy to do just that.

So I don't see this as such as the end of the world by any means. I see it as emergence into a new realm in which we use, much more benign technologies constructively. How urgent is this? Is this something we have five, ten years to get going on? It's urgent. We have to get started on it right now because the more the earth warms,

we've already made a commitment to warming the earth by allowing these heat-trapping gases to accumulate. Why, the worse the problem. The more the earth warms, the more of the release of carbon dioxide and methane from soils and from the destruction of forests, and the more the earth will warm after that. So stabilizing the gaseous composition of the atmosphere

is a very urgent problem. It has to be started right now. It cannot be started soon enough. It's a bit late for discussion and time for action. The kind of action Dr. Woodwell is talking about can only start at the highest levels of government, the federal government. The environment is now front and center,

and that's obvious from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's choice of environment minister. Lucien Bouchard is not just a rising political star, he also sits on the powerful priorities and planning committee. It's a group of seven cabinet ministers who oversee all government initiatives. Lucien Bouchard. The main problem we feel as far as international consultation is concerned

is a certain need of global warming. And global warming, if you look at it, if you want to set up real solutions, you have to change our way of life. You have to think about energy, conservation, alternative form of energy, renewable energies. And only from the energy of your point, well, it's almost a revolution you have to do.

And if we don't move now, there will be a disaster. We are dealing with the survival of the species, and I don't want to scare people, but we all know that it is a question of great, great emergency. We must stop seeing the burning of fossil fuels are the only way to live in Canada. Mr. Bouchard says we are talking about the survival of the species.

He says, if we don't move now, there will be a disaster. These are tough words for tough times. Former United Nations ambassador, Stephen Lewis. If you were a government that was serious about controlling the greenhouse effect, you would instantly abandon every mega project to which we are now committed, from West Coast natural gas to Lloyd Minster to Hibernia, you would simply announce their cancellation. in the interests of Canada and the world.

The politicians would go berserk provincially, and you would simply tow the line federally and put it on the strongest moral and principled grounds. It would be worth staking one's entire political leadership on, staking one's government on, because any project which speaks to coal, the largest single producer of carbon per unit of energy, or oil or natural gas,

is, of course, participating in the dooming of the planet. So if you make the argument that you must reduce the carbon emissions and do that through the reduction of combustion of fossil fuels, then you abandon all of these preposterous megaprojects which run counter to the entire environmental ethos. Now, you may recall some little while ago that Morris Strong spoke to the premiers of the Atlantic provinces, and they had a kind of public apoplexy.

There were incipient cardiac arrests, as he said to the maritime premiers, you've got to cut the production of coal. And Buchanan, in particular, talked incredible rubbish about needing to continue to produce the coal because it was the source of income and jobs in Nova Scotia. Well, of course it's the source of income and jobs in Nova Scotia. But one assumes that every cutback you make in terms of fossil fuel combustion, will be accompanied by a really Herculian effort to retrain, re-employ, alter the work opportunities. That's where the money you save from the megaproject gets poured in.

If you can spend several billion dollars on hibernia, then you can spend several billion dollars creating jobs for the people who might otherwise have been employed. This is the second of our special series. We're calling Suzuki's Survival Guide a retrospective. we first broadcast the series in the summer of 2023. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hi, it's Thomas LeBlanc, host of Celine Understood,

a deep dive into the cultural, political, and economic alchemy that created Celine Dion. And there are more seasons have understood. Follow our feed to learn more about other big stories in the news like the rise and fall of cryptoking Sam Bankman-Fried, or the controversy behind another notable Quebec institution, Pornhub. And if you're already a follower, thanks. Please tell your friends about us. Back in 1989, David Suzuki hosted a radio series called It's a Matter of Survival. And while some of the specifics have changed since the 1980s, the themes he hit on then are prescient for us today. Today's program features excerpts from the second episode of It's a Matter

of Survival. The mega projects we've been hearing about are multi-billion dollar commitments to Newfoundland, Alberta and British Columbia to exploit oil and gas and inject money and jobs into the local economies. They have become a symbol of political,

not biological realities. Federal Minister of the Environment, Lucien Bouchard. There is the contradiction. And this is a fascinating thing with environment. Environment is exacerbating our contradictions. I don't think that we can stop everything like that, you know, with a radical move to start from stretch tomorrow because today is the last day of history, of ancient history. We must live with what we've been and what we still are.

We are concerned with the environment, but we are also deeply concerned with other. aspects of life. We want jobs. We need jobs. Think about the unemployed people in Newfoundland, for example. Tell them that we, Abernia, this project which has been envisaged for the last 10 or 15 years, will be stopped because of environment. I don't think you can do that. You can do that. And if we limit our, and if we devote our energy and our efforts and resources to fight those battle, we have a big problem. Those are things from the past now. Ebernia has been decided. It has been a dream for many, many years. It will be realized now. The decisions have been made. And we should tackle current problems. And I don't think that we should start new Ebernius.

We take our decisions. We must live with our history. And now, look into the the future and try to devise new forms of energy. Personally, what I think is that we must phase out those things and begin a new era with new ideas. And personally, if we talk about practical things, the first thing to do is have an energy policy, energy policy where new forms of energy will be used. Well, I'm sorry, I just feel that it's a cop-out in a way to say that this is the historical reality. The fact is that there is a massive amount of money potentially going into

Hybernia. Lloyd Minster, I mean, that was a commitment during this government's time. Those projects, in fact, could be stopped with the money going in for other things in the areas that the money was promised for. I don't see that it's either Hibernia or jobs. And remember that if hibernia is developed, that's going to run out as well. If Canadians only used Hibernia oil, it would only last three years. I mean, is that long-term planning? At the same time that that province is being hammered by a really horrifying

depletion in its codstocks, are there not things that can be done in other ways that would be environmentally sound, that would be an investment into the future? Surely governments can say we made a mistake, and that things have changed now. We are in a really frightening

scenario now, and that everything's off. We start over fresh, right? right now. Yes, we start fresh, but we can annihilate the past. And Ibernier, well, of course, it's very actual because the money will be spent and the project will be realized, but all the decision-making and everything that happened before, this is from the past, and we have to live with a result of the past.

Personally, I don't want to go back to this, because I know it's a lost battle, first of all. We can't go back. It's impossible. Personally, it's what I think. No government can go back on this because people need immediately to have those jobs and we need energy. But in the same time,

I would like to draw a line between this and the future. And I am concerned with the future. Federal Environment Minister Lucien Bouchard. Dr. Jim McNeil was Canadian representative and Secretary General of the United Nations sponsored Commission on the Environment and Economics headed by Norway's Prime Minister, Grow Harlem Brundland. The Toronto Conference in June of last year

stated very clearly that the industrialized world had to move rapidly toward policies that would reduce fossil fuel burning and the emission of carbon dioxide. Toronto said we should set a target of a reduction of 20% in carbon dioxide emissions by 2005. The policies are available to do that. We can easily through maximizing energy efficiency and energy productivity

achieve a reduction of 20% by 2005. The policies we have in place at the moment are encouraging us to do the exact opposite. And a good case in point are Canadian policies to subsidize fossil fuel megaprojects like hibernia and Oslo, and I expect that there are others in play as well. If global warming is the criterion for our energy policies and it ought to be, then we should be cutting subsidies

to a large energy megaproject, such as Hibernia and Oslo. These projects are not only economically blind, they're also ecologically blind. There are no reasons that I can see for them proceeding. Whether it's 20% or 80%, the writing's on the wall. We're going to have to cut carbon dioxide emissions in the next decade.

It will mean changes in industry, energy sources, and jobs. And there's no question jobs will be affected. The people hardest hit will be workers. Hugh McKenzie is research director for the United Steelworkers of America. I think that generally speaking, because of the kinds of areas that working people live in, In fact, working people probably experience environmental degradation more directly and more immediately than most other people do. For example, if you live in Hamilton, air pollution is not an abstraction.

Air pollution is very real. If you're a working class person who lives in Toronto, the closure of beaches, for example, is not something that means that you have to go to the cottage every weekend. It means that you don't have any place to swim because you don't have a cottage to go to. so that those kinds of problems are very immediate. Certainly the public opinion results show that everybody's an environmentalist, if you mean by that, that people are deeply concerned about environmental quality locally and the future of life on the planet. And union members are just the same as everybody else in that respect.

And one of the things that our union has been talking about and has adopted as a policy recently is, first of all, to call for the union to become involved in pressure for environmental change, partly because our union amongst others is identified with spokesstack industries, and so our union is under pressure in that way. But secondly, because our members are calling for environmental change just as much as anybody else in the population. And I think the innovation in what we're talking about

is to say that the job impact, the job security impact, of an environmental change should be taken into one. account right from the beginning. So that, for example, if you're talking about a change in air pollution standards that is going to require an investment in technological change by a company, and that investment in technological change is going to reduce the employment levels, then that question should be addressed right at the beginning. And if there are people who are going to have to lose their jobs, then somehow the institutional process has to produce early retirement options for people, retaining options for people, relocation options,

if that's what's required, all those things. I don't think it's good enough anymore to come up with overall policies that don't address the jobs issues, and then at the end of the day complain because working people aren't willing to sacrifice their own jobs in order for society as a whole to benefit. And it seems to me, and it seems to our organization, that if you're going to make changes that benefits society as a whole, we're going to support those changes and we're going to work with people

who are pushing for them. But in doing so, there has to be some direct consideration and explicit consideration of those impacts. They have to be taken into account directly. Politicians carry an immense burden of public trust.

Not only do they have to represent us and do what they perceive as best, but they have to show leadership. Doug Scott is conservation director of the Sierra Club in San Francisco. Our leaders must take this problem seriously. The public has grasped in a very profound way

that the assumptions they've made about the stability of the world they live in are no longer guaranteed that the chance to pass on their little bit of the earth to their children and their children's children unchanged is under great doubt because change is all around us. changes all around us. But I think this is not terribly surprising. We have lived in a fool's paradise. We've said pour whatever you want into the air, pour whatever you want into the water, do whatever you want for the pleasures of the moment and for the economic benefit in the shortest

possible term as captains of industry, as individual consumers, as voters, and the devil take the hindmost. The bills are coming due, as someone said, the alarm bills of the earth are ringing, and the people are hearing it because they're seeing these changes in their daily lives. Our times cry out for leaders in all those affairs. There is a vision that says the world can become a better place to live if it adjust to living within the prescriptions of the laws of the natural world. We've been violating those laws.

We oughtn't be surprised that the world is striking back and let's clean up our act. But are you saying that essentially we can have our cake and eat it, that in fact we can still have our VCRs and our two-car garages and our homes filled with all kinds of gadgets and an easier life and still have a clean environment? We cannot have all those conveniences if they're powered by the combustion of fossil fuels.

That is a dinosaur technology. We've got to get rid of it. Now, there's a challenge to our scientists and our engineers find better ways. And in the process, the people will respond as consumers, as voters, will respond by saying, I now understand the consequences, and that will change my choices. My vision of what a comfortable life is for myself and for my children

may change as I understand that I was doing it all on a big, gigantic ecological credit card. Balance due, overdrawn at the bank, time to change. I'm David Suzuki. And how does history look at the 1980s? From New Jersey to Rhode Island. No one knows exactly where it's coming from, but hypodermic needles, vials of blood, and other medical waste, some testing positive for AIDS and hepatitis, are still washing in from the ocean. Investigators joined by the FBI continue to...

Thomas Mills, come on down. On Tuesday, 3,000 residents of a small suburban community outside Montreal fled their homes in the middle of the night. A nearby warehouse used to store PCBs had exploded into flames, spewing out a black cloud of highly toxic. Lifestyles of the rich and famous. It's a land to make me leave. Dreams become reality. After at least two deaths, and perhaps many more, with a number of people suffering from radiation exposure, at least 18 of them seriously, according to official figures, it now appears that the crisis at the Chernobyl nuclear power station is under control.

The consequences of the human radiating... ...was apparently trying to avoid icebergs when the ship went aground. Its belly was ripped open, outpoured millions and millions of leaders of black crude. It spread like a pancake of molasses within hours. The 80s have been an era of dangerous contradictions. While report after report of ecological disasters appear in the media, we continue to cling to the notion that we can still go on as we always have,

the consummate consumers. Part of the problem is that while we recognize the signs, the crisis seems so immense that we often feel powerless to do anything about it. What can we do? Stuart Boyle is Energy and Environment Director for the Association for Conservation of Energy in London, England. I think there's actually a great deal

that the individual can do, because if you break the greenhouse effect down into its simple component parts, it's about energy consumption, it's about agricultural systems, it's about industrialisation, it's us. The greenhouse effect is us and therefore the solution is us. So you can move and looking at your own energy consumption, simple things like replacing your normal light bulbs with their modern compact fluorescent light bulbs,

which are a bit more expensive, but only produce about a sixth of the carbon dioxide in terms of the energy consumption of normal light bulbs. that's the thing you could do tomorrow. Improving the insulation of your building. A lot of buildings are very leaky. They have inefficient heating systems. Those are things you can do.

Transportation is a very key issue. It causes about 20% of global carbon dioxide emissions, but rising about 4% a year. It really is out of control. So I need to look at that about whether you're using an efficient car, a car that's actually got pollution control, catalysts, whether that's actually got that as standard.

That's the first step. And secondly, whether you need to use the car on a lot of trips. And most people use trips less than 10 kilometers. Therefore, a lot of those trips could be used sharing the car, using public transport where it's available. And that does need to be improved. And also using the bicycle. I mean, people forget this.

These little trips down to the shop, you know, a kilometer away, it's cheaper and much quicker to use the bicycle. And better for you. And better for you. You get the exercise, you know, the benefits of turning the muscles thrown up for free. Food. I mean, in a fundamental way, becoming vegetarian. helps the greenhouse effect because actually the increase in cattle

who are actually burping out huge quantities of methane acts as a result of people's desire for cheap hamburgers and meat. So if you become a vegetarian, it'll help. It's a small way, but it actually helps on the process. And finally, your own use of resources, things like paper, packaging and so on like that. That's all waste which needs energy, which in the end decays and produces methane, one of the greenhouse gases. So therefore cutting down in that waste, simply doing a waste, a checklist and looking at what you do in your own home, your business that you work with,

looking at the sort of products and processes, I think you can do a great deal. Now, in putting that all together, clearly individuals on their own are not going to be able to solve this. I really think it's a partnership between individuals participating, pressuring national governments to take unilateral actions, and also negotiating in an international setting. It's those three levels in which you're going to solve this. but without the individual level, frankly, we are not going to be able to solve environmental issues on this planet.

It's the same message over and over again. We are going to have to change the way we live on this planet if we are to survive. And the first step is to change our value system. We must do it personally and we must do it professionally. Citizen advocate Ralph Nader. The corporate culture places on the highest pedestal, the mercantile standard by which everything is judged.

And if you can't turn everything into money and the kind of money that makes the rich richer and the corporation's cash registers ring, then it's not adequately valued. And so I think that we've got to develop a civic culture because whether we like it or not, we are growing up accepting corporate value systems not only in the marketplace,

but in terms of political activities, a campaign finance, in terms of their influence over higher education, in terms of their influence over scientists and research and development. We need a parallel civic culture, which is a sensitive membrane for a whole range of values other than just a mercantile one. And that means health, safety, impact on posterity, the preservation of other living things in the society,

taking a longer view, developing a qualitative measurement of our, quality of life, not just, well, GNP and the personal average income and corporate profits. We have been corporatized more than any other society in the history of the world. In ancient China, Mandarin China, they understood that merchants were important, but they put them on the lowest rung and they told them, stay by yourself, perform what you have to do, but we're not going to give you any honorifics because we have other values in the society

that we don't want contaminated by the mercantile value. And I think we have allowed all boundaries around the merchant class or the corporate class to be demolished as this tidal wave of mercantilism sweeps forward and says, oh, pollution, look at it. That's the price of progress. That's the smell of economic activity instead of, that's the scourge of cancer.

If you still need convincing that the crisis is real, I suggest this. Talk to your elders, your parents, grandparents, people who have lived here for 60 or 70 years. Ask them what they remember of this country and the world when they were young. They are a living record of the enormous changes that have happened within the span of a single human life.

We've called these changes the price of progress in the past. But is it progress to threaten the very things that keep us alive? The great evolutionary strategy of human beings was foresight to look ahead at the consequences of our actions and to take steps to avoid danger. Will we be able to do it now? It may, and some, of course, already be too late. And so I'm hoping, and I think most of my colleagues are hoping,

that the experiences we've had already, ranging from the hideous drought last summer, to the starvation in Africa, to the continual warnings about not going out on the sun, because the ozone hole is, the ozone layer is being depleted. All of these things will build enough in people's minds that they'll say now, stop, that the time has come, that something is seriously wrong, and we've got to rethink it. If we wait to the full-scale catastrophe, we may or may not survive it, but I'd rather not run the risk.

Production assistant Steve Payne, researcher Alan Goldman, actor Ray Landry, announcer Judy Madron, field producers, Lynn Glazier and Chris Chris Groskirth of the program Sunday morning. Writers, Anita Gordon and David Suzuki. Technician Larry Mori with technical assistance from Brian Hill. Producer Penny Park.

Executive producer Anita Gordon. I'm David Suzuki. It's a matter of survival first broadcast in 1989. The original series explored the idea of the two ecosystems, ecology and economics.

If you think about it, the whole idea of economics is an incredible conceit. I mean, there may be 30 million species on this planet. Human beings are only one of them, yet we have invented a system that only sees value in human terms. If we can think of a use for something, it has economic worth. If we can't, then it's worthless. So in economic terms, the Amazon rainforest is undeveloped

and only full of economic potential, even though to the millions of species that have lived there for millions of years, the forest is already fully occupied and fully developed. To economists, the fact that a standing forest performs services, like cleansing the air, modulating weather and climate, preventing erosion and flooding,

supporting animal and plant communities, has no economic meaning. Those services are called externalities, that are not costed in standard economic analysis. It's no wonder, then, that the head of a major multinational corporation could state that a tree has no worth until it's cut down. That's the economic mentality at work. Can we bring an about-turn?

Bill Reese is a professor of urban planning at the University of British Columbia. I guess my greatest hope is that we, over the next 20 years, can abandon the ethic of growth as the be-all and end-all. We've lost sight of so many other potentials that human beings have. And it's simply been submerged in this interminable quest for material possession and new wealth. Stickers on bumpers that you see around town here, he who dies with the most toys wins is a kind of symbolic representation of the games people play in our economy at the present time. It's a joke, but it's not funny.

Many people take it very seriously. The great tanker spill in Alaska, for all its environmental damage, for all the tragedy that has created for local people, added several millions of dollars to the U.S. gross national product. So it goes down by our standard indicator of progress as a great benefit

because it created new jobs in the shipyards that will have to repair the tanker, hundreds of new jobs and terms of the people cleaning up the mess and so on. All of those things are added to GNP, when in fact the quality of the life for people there and indeed for the globe as a whole has deteriorated. Well, this is an absurd system. We have to shift from a system in which material progress

is the only measure of worth. We are in fact in need of what people call a paradigm shift or a change in worldview, and it will require a massive, effort at every level of society to change the value set, the expectations of people by which we now operate on a daily basis if we're going to move in the direction necessary to, well, save the species, save the planet. What Bill Rees is talking about is a fundamental change in our value system.

We've become blinded by the idea of progress that is defined by technological domination and economic growth. Mustafa Tolba, the head of the United Nations Environment Program, told me how as a schoolboy growing up in Egypt, he was shown pictures of factories in Cairo belching out thick smoke over the countryside and proudly told by his teacher, this is a sign of progress.

An ad for a Canadian tractor shows untouched forests as a before picture and an after picture in which the entire landscape is now a completely cleared and plowed field. Symbols of success, domination, control, and growth. Meanwhile, the planet is being skinned of its life support. Don't you think it would be an astounding achievement to live in balance or equilibrium with the rest of nature?

Don't you think that would be a true measure of progress and growth? Human growth. L. Gore is chairman of the Environmental Study Group of the U.S. Senate. Our challenge really is to create in a single generation a future in which people think and behave so differently that they look back on 1989 at the kind of pollution that is now underway, at the kind of destruction now underway.

And they wonder as they shake their heads, how could people have thought in ways that allowed them to tolerate this kind of activity. That excerpt is from David Suzuki's It's A Matter of Survival, originally broadcast in 1989. This week on Ideas were featuring episodes about the climate. Next up will be my conversation with journalist John Balliant. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas.

Technical production, Danielle Duval. Senior producer is not. Nikola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.