♪ (Upbeat) ♪ >> Hello, this is Canada Files and I'm Jim Deeks.

Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this program is Dr.

David Suzuki.

One of Canada's most recognized and respected scientists, and broadcasters.

His weekly television program, The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, has been aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation since 1979.

Dr.

Suzuki is now over 80 years old, and is one of Canada's most decorated, and as you'll see, most passionate citizens.

His views on climate change and the environment have generated their fair share of controversy over the years, which we will talk about.

David, you've been speaking and lecturing and providing evidence of the change in our climate for decades, probably close to fifty years.

And yes, there may be some cyclical and natural forces at play, but surely, there is no question today that human activity has really been the cause of most of the problems we are facing today.

Yet here we are, two decades into the new century, and it's an even bigger problem than it's ever been.

Is our planet doomed?

>> The planet's not doomed .

This is the thing kids come up to me often and say, "What can I do to save the planet?"

My answer is, "The planet's fine.

The planet did fine for 3.6 billion years without human beings."

We've only been around for 150,000 years.

Long after we're gone... the planet will continue to do what it does.

We are in an unprecedented moment though where we recognize the crisis that we're in.

We are the creature, the only creature, that was endowed with foresight.

The ability to look ahead, and based on what you know and observe, see that we can affect the future by what we do today.

We can see where there are dangers, where there are opportunities and deliberately choose in the present, to avoid danger and exploit opportunity.

I believe foresight was the critical ability that we have, that took us out of the Savannahs of Africa and took us around the world.

So that we are now the dominant animal on the planet.

>> And, yet you must be awfully frustrated after all these years of seeing the degradation of our planet caused by us brilliant people with foresight.

You must be very frustrated that even today there are so many people, and people in power, who refuse to believe there is a problem.

>> Well, it's caused, I believe, by a fundamental shift in the way we see ourselves in the world.

For 99% of our existence, we lived within an eco-centric way of seeing our world.

When you live within an eco-centric world, you give thanks to whoever you believe in.

The Indigenous people call it their Creator.

They thank their Creator, but they enter into a reciprocal relationship.

I thank the Creator for your abundance and generosity, but I acknowledge a responsibility then to care for nature, to ensure she will continue to be abundant and generous.

That reciprocity has been lost, and it's been lost in our economic system.

It's been lost in our judicial system, It's been lost in our political system, because... we changed from an eco-centric way of seeing ourselves to an anthropocentric way.

where we think we're the center of the action.

Everything revolves around us.

It's all about us.

The big thing that happened was 200 years ago, with the industrial revolution.

We suddenly found we could create telescopes that let us see beyond our solar system to the edge of the universe.

We could make microscopes and discover a world of life in a drop of water.

We could make machines that would work 24 hours a day that could move faster than any other creature.

So the idea began, "We're so smart.

We're special."

We're so smart, we don't have to be bound by any of the restrictions or the confines of nature.

We just have to be smart enough to invent ways of exceeding - >> Ways of using nature to our advantage.

>> Exactly.

It's all about us.

>> Don't you think today that particularly, climate change deniers are using that assumption that we will overcome this.

Yes, maybe we're screwing up the planet in some way but our intelligence will overcome all of these problems and we'll have a better tomorrow.

Is that actually possible?

>> Well, of course not.

We are on an absolutely destructive course and it's taken a teenage girl in Sweden to cut through all of the garbage and say, "Look at the science.

The science tells us... People are saying, go to school and get an education, ...but I don't have a future to look for!"

She has cut through all of the garbage.

Now when you look at the people trolling her website and all of the criticisms of her, it's the refusal... ...to accept the power of her message.

Listen to the scientists.

What are the scientists telling us?

I think the terrible thing, if you look at the history of the fossil fuel industry, which is at the heart of this, they have known since the 1960s that burning fossil fuels was warming the planet.

In 1965, Frank Ikard, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, gave a public speech in which he said, "Coal, oil, gas... Burning that is warming the planet.

And if we don't do something about it by the year 2000, it'll be out of control.

1965!

In the 1970s, John Black, the senior scientist for Exxon , was saying, "Look, we've looked at the science.

The planet is warming."

What happened?

Exxon then chose the path that the tobacco industry had used for years.

For years, the tobacco industry said, "No, no, no...there's no evidence.

Doesn't cause cancer.

That's a lot of garbage.

Scientists lie.

Baloney."

Exxon and all the other fossil fuel companies then hired people from the tobacco industry to do the same thing!

"No, the science isn't true.

This is a natural cycle.

It's sun spots.

It's all of the stuff."

Anything to avoid looking at the science.

>> You mentioned those people giving us those warnings over 50 years ago.

You were also one of them.

You and others in Canada, and around the world, were talking a lot about air pollution, but also the warming of the planet and the depletion of the ozone layer, although that may not have been totally understood at the time.

Does it give you satisfaction... unfortunate satisfaction now, but does it give you satisfaction now that after being called basically a kook and a naysayer all those years ago, that, in fact, you were right.

>> Absolutely not.

Absolutely not!

I would desperately pray that I'm wrong.

There's no satisfaction in having been demonized and ignored, then to say "I told you!"

What the hell?

The future for my grandchildren is what's at stake.

I don't feel any satisfaction just because I was right.

You know, it's a tragedy of monumental proportions and it was driven by capitalism.

Capitalism is at the heart of the problem, and the corporations now have become so powerful.

The ten largest corporations on the planet have more wealth than 95% of the nations on the planet.

When our politicians are elected, whose agenda are they jumping to?

When you look at Trump, when you look at Ford, here if you look at Harper when he was prime minister, it was all the same.

They think their job is to drive the corporate agenda.

The problem with the corporate agenda is this... there's no reciprocity.

It's all about making money.

The reasons that corporations exist is to make money.

>> But they would also say to you, and they don't necessarily put it this way, but they would say, look, "Ok, mistakes have been made.

Yes, the climate is perhaps in more trouble than we give it credit for being in.

But the cost of turning things around, the time it would take, and the effects on mankind to change the way we exist, where we have heated homes and we have abundant food and all the things the industrial revolution has given us, mankind would be doomed anyway if we turned the ship around.

How do you answer that?

>> Well, I say that you haven't even tried.

In the name of profit, right to this moment, the fossil fuel industry is spending billions of dollars exploring for new resources of oil and gas, and continuing to support a PR campaign to say, "Well, it's not that certain."

But also to say, "Oh, but we're looking at growing algae and algae is a new energy source."

It's just disgraceful.

And... all the while, they are doing what corporations are meant to do.

Looking at the bottom line, which is to make money.

Even when the very future of our species is now at risk.

The problem is capitalism.

The driving agenda now is a global economy that is based really on freeing corporations to do their thing.

So as long as we fall down before- we had a prime minister for 10 years, Stephen Harper, who said, "We can't do anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It'll destroy the economy."

In that simple statement he said the economy is more important than the atmosphere that gives you air to breathe-- >> And survival.

>> --climate and the seasons.

This is madness!

We have become so puffed up with how important and how great we are, that our institutions, like economics, like politics, are considered more important than the very things that keep us alive.

Profit is the driving force.

It's a... It's a tragedy.

>> The passion with which you speak is overwhelming.

>> How could you not be passionate about it?

>> But let me ask you this, six years ago in a MacLeans' magazine profile on you, you said and I quote, "Environmentalism has failed".

>> Yes.

>> Was that just a period of personal angst for you or do you still feel that way?

>> No!

The failure is reflected in the fact that 11,000 scientists signed a document talking about the scenario of where we're heading and it's terrifying.

The failure has been to accept the warnings from scientists that were way back in the 1970s!

Senior scientists were saying, "Look, the evidence is in.

This is not a theory or a possibility.

It's happening now ."

So the science has been coming at us stronger and stronger.

>> Since you've started talking about the environment 50 years ago, the main thing, as I mentioned earlier, was air pollution.

We were all concerned about the pollution coming out of our chimneys, and industrial chimneys.

Today, of course, the effects of climate change are far broader than that.

I mean, we have violent storms, weather patterns have changed, famine, floods, the melting of the ice caps.

Are you surprised by the rapidity of all these effects all coming into play?

Did you see all of that 50 years ago?

>> No, I knew about global warming -- we called it back in the 1970s.

I thought, "Oh, this is a problem."

But, to me, I remember... we did our first program on global warming on the Nature of Things in 1989, and I remember writing in the script then, "This is a slow motion catastrophe."

I expected that we had 70 to 80 years to do something about it.

I was more focused on deforestation and ocean pollution.

Those were the issues because I thought we had time.

I have been amazed with a one degree rise.

We're already over one degree now since pre-industrial times.

the ramifications through eco-systems has been absolutely astonishing.

The inter-connectedness of everything.

For one thing, carbon dioxide is one of the major greenhouse gases, with more carbon dioxide built up, then at the interface of the atmosphere and the oceans.

And the oceans cover 70% of the planet.

Carbon dioxide dissolves as carbonic acid.

So the pH, the acidity of the oceans, is increasing.

A tiny fraction of the pH has changed.

Yet shellfish, oysters, clams can no longer make their shells.

And yet, shellfish are a major remover of carbon from the water by making their shells, as it's calcium carbonate.

So just that tiny change of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is changing the pH of the oceans.

When I saw the first changes in pH, I said, "That's such a trivial amount" and then I realized... if our blood, which is the same pH as the oceans, changed by that amount, we'd be dead .

So you realize all of these concentrations... >> They're all interconnected.

>> Yeah, and we have a lot of climate deniers who are saying, "Carbon dioxide is food for plants, the more carbon dioxide we'll have, the better.... we'll green the planet."

What a lot of [bleep].

The fact is we all need oxygen, but guess what?

You have too much oxygen, you're gonna die.

Too little oxygen, you're gonna die.

Because we evolved to live within very narrow limits.

This idea that carbon dioxide is food is just a lot of baloney.

>> You mentioned The Nature of Things.

T hat's a television show that you have hosted for 40 years now on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation , It's been broadcast, I think you mentioned to me earlier, in something like 80 countries.

So you are well-known around the world.

Are you well-known for being Canadian?

If so, what does being Canadian mean to you?

Or is it more an accident of birth?

>> I have no idea.

That's a very good question because, what I find is, if I'm shown in the Philippines, they dub me.

So all over the world-- We were shown in Israel.

...apparently I was speaking Hebrew !

So I don't know what people feel!

Of course, they understand this is made by the CBC .

I suspect that nationality in those kinds of programs is not very... it's not very relevant.

I don't know.

>> What is being Canadian?

Does it have a special meaning for you personally?

>> Yes.

I lived in the United States getting an education that wasn't possible in Canada at the time.

I was an undergraduate at Amherst College, Massachusetts, Then I went to the University of Chicago to get my advanced degrees.

I loved the United States but I saw some very real differences.

I was a senior in college, my last year at Amherst in 1957.

On October 4, 1957... Do you know what happened on October 4, 1957?

>> I would guess the Sputnik .

>> Yes.

We were astounded.

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik.

I don't know how old you were at the time.

Were you old enough to remember?

>> I do remember it vividly.

I was about 7.

>> I was in the United States.

Every time that satellite went overhead.

That beep, beep, beep was thumbing its nose and saying, 'Hey guys, we're Russian!".

The United States then had their individual rockets in the different armed services.

Every one of them blew up.

Meanwhile the Russians launched the first animal in space.

A dog, Laika.

Yuri Gagarin, the first man.

The first team of cosmonauts.

The first space walk.

The first woman, Valentina Tereshkova America didn't flinch.

They just said we've got to catch up to these guys.

They began to pour money.... they set up NASA .

They poured money into NIH and NSF.

Science departments and universities... and even though I was a Canadian if you said I liked science, they threw money at you!

I went to a conference, a scientific conference, and I wasn't looking for a job, I got three job offers!

One at Stanford.

One at UC Davis.

I mean, it was a glorious time but I went back to Canada.

Why?

Because Canada was different.

Not better but different and for me, preferable.

Canada meant the CCF at that time, which became the NDP.

A socialist party... a perfectly legitimate party.

Which America would have said, "They're commies!".

>> They still would.

>> Maybe.

I hope Bernie has made a bit of difference in the US.

The CCF was very important.

Tommy Douglas was a man I just admired so much.

>> He was the leader of the party at the time.

>> And he brought in Medicare.

Medicare was important to me.

We have a system called equalization payments where the well-off provinces share some of their wealth with the poorer provinces.

I love that whole idea!

>> Why did you never run for politics?

I'm sure you've been asked that question a million times.

>> I've been asked by more than one party in fact.

I've always said, "Who would I run for?"

I mean, the party I would have run for, earlier after I returned to Canada, would have been the CCF or the NDP, the socialist party.

But I felt that I had an audience with The Nature of Things that was far greater than any audience, or possibility that I would have in government.

I knew that I would never run for a party that got into power, unless it was a minority government.

The one time I came very close was when a man I admired very much, the first Jewish premier of British Columbia, a man named Dave Barrett.

Dave came around to me.

I admired him because the story is, when he was elected.. you have a socialist government in British Columbia, he sat down with his people and said, "Alright, are we going to have fun, or are we going to get re-elected?"

And he said, "I'm going to have fun."

That government passed an average of new legislation every three days!

They changed the whole nature of British Columbia.

Of course he didn't get re-elected because he was doomed by that.

But he did things.

When he was going for re-election, he came to me and asked me to run.

I said, "No, no.

I'm a university professor.

and, (mumbles)..." So then after I turned him down, he really got mad and he said, "You academics!

You talk, talk, talk."

He said, ""You see that mountain there, Cypress Mountain?

That mountain will never be logged because of what I did."

And he began to point.

He said, "You know the Agricultural Land Reserve ?

I did that!

That land will never be developed.

You academics are just good with words.

You don't do anything."

And I felt so guilty that... >> He had a point.

>> ...I came very very close.

>> Another politician that you are close with today is, Stephen Lewis, who will be on Canada Files, I'm proud to say.

Stephen Lewis was a member of the New Democratic Party as a politician some forty years ago.

He later became Canada's ambassador to the United Nations.

But you and Stephen, both now, I daresay in your eighties, are taking the message about climate change out to Canadians and hopefully to other jurisdictions as well.

Tell me a bit about what you're doing.

>> We're trying to say that acting on climate change is no longer a partisan issue!

If we don't act as if we are at war, if we're going to bicker over carbon tax, or pipelines or foreign-funded radicals, we're never going to deal with the issue.

The real issue is as Greta Thunberg said, "We've got to reduce our emissions very, very quickly!"

50 percent by 2030.

100 percent by 2050.

And if we don't, all hell breaks loose.

>> And can we?

>> Well.....maybe.

The window is very, very tight.

I used to say, "I feel like we're heading at a brick wall at 100 miles an hour and everyone in the car is arguing about where they want to sit."

I talk about the cartoon, Roadrunner .

You remember the bird-- >> Beep beep.

>> --and he's being chased by Wile e Coyote .

and he comes to the edge of the cliff.

Roadrunner does a 90 degree turn.

'Wile e' goes right over the edge.

And there's the moment when Wiley goes "oh..." He's 500 feet above the canyon and then he goes.

We're at that point.

We're over the edge of the cliff.

But that doesn't mean it's too late.

It makes a big difference whether you fall 500 feet or 50 feet.

And I'm going to do everything I can, to make it a 50 foot drop and not a 500 foot drop.

But we're over the edge of the cliff.

>> Are you ever going to retire?

>> My wife has finally convinced me that retirement is not a word that means anything.

I believe passionately in what I'm doing.

It's no longer about celebrity or power or money.

It's about my grandchildren.

My youngest grandchildren are now two years old.

They're twins.

When my youngest daughter was pregnant and found out she had twins, she and her husband and their child moved upstairs and lived with us for two years.

They had the babies and we helped care for them.

When the babies were about five months old, I was holding them.

They're the joy of my life.

I'm a twin myself.

I don't know what happened but suddenly, I just began to cry.

My wife and my daughter grabbed the babies and asked, "What's wrong?

What's wrong?"

And I just started to wail and I was out of control!

Because I realized those kids don't have a chance.

I mean, the things that I say I believe.

The science tells us... they don't have a chance.

It's a terrifying... It's a terrifying thing but all I can do now is ensure that whatever I can do to make their life worthwhile-- They're here now.

They're the joy of my life.

--and work to try to... to try to minimize the impact of what's coming.

That's all.

>> Let's hope it doesn't get that apocalyptic.

but certainly people with your passion-- It's great having you on the show.

And great to hear your views.

Thank you so much for joining us.

I'm sorry we've run out of time.

Thank you very much for joining us on Canada Files .

Hope you'll watch our next episode Thanks for being with us today.

♪ Closed captioning provided by Rogers TV .