Internet can bring communities together

Here’s your weekly Science Matters column by David Suzuki.
(This article holds a special place in the hearts of the hard-working volunteers and editors of thegreenpages.ca.)
I don’t know what’s more inspiring – the audiences or the videos. Traveling across Canada, and seeing so many faces in so many different communities, I have to keep pinching myself to make sure it’s all actually real.
And just when I start getting down, after a long bus ride when the audience faces start to fade from memory and I start to wonder – did it really make a difference? That’s when I watch some of the videos and get inspired all over again.

There are now hundreds of “If I were Prime Minister” videos up on the tour website (www.davidsuzuki.org). Some are silly. Some are inspiring. Some are familiar faces and others complete strangers. But they are all Canadians who have ideas on what our politicians can do to make Canada a world leader in sustainability.
And that’s just the point. I don’t want to cross the country talking at people. Our goal is to get people talking with each other. Sharing ideas. Pushing our leaders to get serious about the environment. Canada’s oncevaunted environmental reputation is falling apart, and no politician has picked up the pieces yet, let alone started putting them back together. I’m hoping my audiences will stand up and exercise their rights to demand real change.
The videos are one way to do that. At each event, young Simon, our videographer, is there ready to record clips of people expressing the kinds of changes they would make if they were prime minister. Sometimes people are shy, but more often than not, Simon is practically mobbed by people wanting to express their opinions. That’s especially true of the realityTV generation, who has been raised under the blinking light of a camcorder and has few reservations about talking to one.
All those videos will eventually go up on our website, if they aren’t there already. And the beauty of the internet is that you don’t have to actually come out to an event to put up a video. YouTube has made video posting accessible to anyone with access to a computer. You can watch, rate and even comment on all the posts. It’s an easy and democratic way to get your point across. And at the end of the tour, we’re going to send all the videos to the party leaders.
We’ve been fortunate on the tour to have earned the support of a number of wellknown Canadians. I was recently interviewed on Much Music with hiphop artist kos, for whom I have great respect. And singersongwriter Sarah Harmer even performed at one of our events. Ms. Harmer is an impressive musician and passionate about conservation.
But while I really appreciate support from amazing people like these, the videos that really blow me away are from average Canadians who are clearly so passionate about environmental issues. There seems to be a growing sense that for too long we’ve tried to separate our environment and our economy into two separate and distinct entities.
That’s caused huge problems in our society, because our environment is our home and it is finite. Our economy, on the other hand, is predicated on relentless growth and considers environmental issues “externalities,” as though they don’t really matter. Yet, they do matter because today with problems like global warming we are seeing what happens when endless growth meets a finite system.
What we need now is to rationalize our economy with ecological reality. This means we need to shift our economy to be cleaner and smarter. We need to stop subsidizing polluting industries. We need to create targets and timelines to reduce pollution to levels that do not jeopardize our natural systems. It means our environment, not our economy must be the real bottom line.
Take the Nature Challenge and learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.