An interview that I conducted with Canadian scientist, environ-mentalist, author and broadcaster David Suzuki has been posted on the web by Science & Spirit, a magazine that explores the relationship between, well, science and, uh, spirit.
Suzuki is a visionary thinker, as well as a fiesty and funny person to boot. I talked with him in his Vancouver BC home as his book/public TV series "The Sacred Balance" was just coming out, so our conversation tended towards discussion of the intersections of modern science and aboriginal/indigenous wisdom, one of his favorite subjects. Click here to read the interview.
One of my favorite Suzuki quotes from our talk: "The native communities up and down the coast here have a clan system, built on cedar, on frogs, on killer whales. They call these things their “relatives.” Well, if you look at the Human Genome Project, to me the exciting thing about completing the human genome is not that we’re going to discover the cure for cancer and all that stuff, but that in the human genome, we find genes identical to genes found in frogs, insects, bacteria, fungi, and trees. What the Human Genome Project does is it confirms what native people have always known: They’re our relatives. And if you look out at the world and you see a world filled with relatives, surely you’ll treat your relatives differently from the way we treat the planet’s inhabitants."
david suzuki
environment
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