I believe that we've framed the problem the wrong way. And for me, the big change happened in the late 1970s, when I became aware that there was a battle raging in our westernmost archipelago, what were once called the Queen Charlotte Islands, but are now called Haida Gwaii.
for - progress trap - turning point - David Suzuki - Haida Gwaii
Geoengineering is about the human arrogance that we have screwed up the atmosphere so bad that we're now going to take over for nature, and we're going to engineer the atmosphere so that it doesn't create more catastrophic climate change
for - progress trap - geoengineering - David Suzuki
We need technology, much of it to solve the problems that we've created with technology in the first place. But since our ignorance is so vast, how could we possibly develop new technologies that wouldn't in turn create more technologies-- more difficulties that we hadn't anticipated? And you see it in spades right now.
for - progress trap - David Suzuki
by the time Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, we knew there were ramifications we didn't-- couldn't have anticipated, the most amazing being biomagnification. When eagles began to disappear in the United States, scientists tracked it down to the fact that DDT sprayed at low concentrations would be amplified up the food chain. So by the time you get to the fatty glands and the fat tissue and the shell glands of birds and the breasts of women, DDT was concentrated hundreds of thousands of times beyond what we had sprayed it at. By the 1960s, women's breast milk was considered too toxic to feed to babies.
for - progress trap - DDT - David Suzuki
Who would have imagined that high up above the Earth, CFCs would be hit by ultraviolet light, breaking off chlorine free radicals, which scavenge ozone. Nobody could have anticipated that consequence when we began to use it.
for - progress trap - CFC's - David Suzuki
she said is, yeah, you scientists are clever. You can make powerful compounds like DDT, but you don't know enough to anticipate all of the consequences. Because, first of all, the lab is not a replica of the real world. The lab is an artifact, something that has very little to do with the real world out there. In the real world, everything is connected to everything else, and we don't know enough to anticipate the effects of what we do with our powerful technologies.
for - quote - progress trap - David Suzuki - quote - Indra's net of jewels - David Suzuki
quote - progress trap - David Suzuki - What she (Rachel Carson) said is, - Yeah, you scientists are clever. You can make powerful compounds like DDT, but you don't know enough to anticipate all of the consequences. - Because the lab is not a replica of the real world. The lab is an artifact, something that has very little to do with the real world out there. - In the real world, everything is connected to everything else, and we don't know enough to anticipate the effects of what we do with our powerful technologies.