An opinion piece from Canada. Some of the comments are as relevant to Australia as to that country.
David Suzuki shows the ROM how we’ll die: Mallick
In a new play, David Suzuki again shows us the price we’ll all pay if we don’t act now on climate change.
Raina+Wilson Photography /
David Suzuki has enraged people by speaking the truth, warning of climate change causing “vast human misery” and an “irretrievably mutilated” planet if we don't cut back on carbon emissions.
By:
Heather Mallick Columnist,
Published on Sun Nov 10 2013
The great David Suzuki was put on mock trial for seditious libel on a
terrifying and wonderful staged show at the Royal Ontario Museum last week.
There he stood, the hero of my childhood, on a sort of gallows while his lawyers wrangled beneath over whether he was guilty of defaming and discrediting Canada in his fight over our crimes against the planet and the health and safety of our children. Suzuki read from his carbon manifesto, his J’accuse.
The play,
The Trial of David Suzuki, devised by Laurie Brown, had a great legal cast: Ontario Superior Court Justice Todd Ducharme, fine defenders and prosecutors, economist Michael Hlinka on the effect Suzuki’s plans would have on Canada — we’d be beggars — and
Ontario Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller on our grandchildren’s future (bleak to non-existent).
I was sitting on the jury with lawyers, planners,
Oakville Mayor Rob Burton and four high school students who were kind enough not to openly hate the jury’s older, more polluting generation.
Former Toronto Mayor David Miller opened the event and the effect on me was electric, for obvious reasons of nostalgia caked with a Mayor Ford-related ache that made my teeth sing with pain. I gave Miller my business card — call anytime, I said warmly — and sort of hung around seeing if he had enough chicken pot pie or smoked mussels on a toothpick ... or plans to run again. He did not.
Suzuki has enraged people by speaking the truth, citing the 1992 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity, which warned of climate change causing “vast human misery” and an “irretrievably mutilated” planet if we didn’t cut back on carbon emissions. The scientists came from 71 countries and included more than half of all Nobel prizewinners.
Ah, 1992, so distant, so tasteless! We were making Billy Ray Cyrus’s Achy Breaky Heart a huge hit while we blew the planet’s riches.
The climate, the economy and humans are facing a brick wall. If we burned all the fossil fuels we have in reserve, humanity would expire. Even a 2°C rise in temperature will mean terrible disturbance, defence witness Gord Miller told the court. “We’re at 0.85°C now and look at the disruption. At our present rates, we’ll reach it in 20-25 years.”
At this point my mind wandered into math. I was worried to discover that my death might postdate this. My dreamed-of grandchildren would be starting university, probably in haz-mat suits. Only my early suicide would give them enough cash to protect them from the worst the planet and its billions of hot desperate humans would dish out. Note to self: Get Seconal.
But of course this selfish thinking is part of the problem. Who cares? We don’t. We care about personal, and to a certain extent, national comfort. We in the north will not be taking in billions of refugees from the hottest nations we doomed with our squandering of fossil fuels.
And the earth is indifferent to us. Unlike people who protest against wind farms, even those out in the distant expanse of Lake Ontario, the earth does not care about appearance. It simply reacts to our abuse. Its reaction will kill us — crop failure, flooding, drought, devastating storms, melted land, dead wildlife — but it meant nothing personal.
Suzuki says the tarsands projects must cease, our carbon sinks — the acidifying oceans and Canada’s boreal forest — must be protected, 70 per cent of our energy must be renewable within one generation, climate scientists must not be muzzled by governments and corporations and a carbon tax of $150 per tonne must start immediately.
Hlinka described the economic effect of Canada ending its toxic relationship with oil and gas — a massive hammer blow — and pointed out that we only produce 2 per cent of the world’s CO² emissions. So why bother? Why lead by example?
He’s right. Inertia is so attractive. But once again, we are driving into that brick wall personally, not just us but our children whom we love more than ourselves.
The final vote from the jury, audience and online? We found Suzuki not guilty of seditious libel by a vote of 1,614 to 117. We headed home by subway and bus, looking grim.
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The Trial of David Suzuki (Read 2094 times)
