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Question & Answer with David Suzuki

Mike W. Bryant
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Apr 22/02) - A familiar face to all Canadians, David Suzuki was the keynote speaker at a recent youth conference in Yellowknife. He shares his views on development in the North and the effects of big business

Yellowknifelife: I was told you have a particular interest in the North. What does it mean to you?

David Suzuki: I'm always interested in coming up North because it's such an important part of the Canadian mystique. It's what really (Peter) Gzowski loved too -- the North. I think Canadians identify the North as part of what makes our country different. So, any chance I get to come I'm happy to do it.

Yellowknifelife: You were asked to speak to youth at the Interchange on Canadian Studies Conference in Yellowknife. Why do you feel that's so important?

DS: I get asked a lot to speak to high schools. There's just so many in Canada I can't accept any of them (individually). But having a group of kids that are interested in issues, coming together like this, they are a great audience so that's ideal for me.

Yellowknifelife: Do you think there is still a view out there that the NWT is the Wild West -- the last frontier -- and that environmental practices are not up to speed with the rest of the country?

DS: Well, I've been in Yellowknife for what? 12 hours? I can't make any pronouncements on that. But I think the surprising discovery a few years ago -- the grasshopper effect where you spray on fields in Mexico or the United States and you volatilize your product or your factories that send stuff into the air, they're carried on the jet stream and when they hit cold they condense and drop down, so that in the most pristine areas on the planet, which is the Canadian Arctic, you have major, major problems. They come from the rest of the world. That's been one of the real shockers.

When McGill scientists were looking into levels of PCBs in the breast milk of women in Montreal, they chose a group of women on Baffin Island as the control because they figured it was one of the most pristine areas, but they found the highest levels of PCBs in the world. That was the beginning of the realization that, even though we have this sense of this vast, pristine, limitless area, it is not.

And now I see all the developers -- like on the plane (when I flew up) -- coming in. There were all these mining people. I mean, it is a gold rush in the Arctic.

Yellowknifelife: Have you been following the mining industry developments in the North?

DS: There is a lot of industry coming in and, in the rush to benefit economically, there are going to be huge compromises on the landscape. There's no doubt about that. Something like pipelines, we have no idea what the long-term effects are going to be. It would be an absolute miracle if there are not any negative effects.

Yellowknifelife: Back in 1976, when the Berger inquiry was going on, the word at the time was, "We don't want development, we don't want pipelines." That has changed somewhat.

DS: Well, when I first saw (Stephen) Kakfwi on air, it was clear that it was a different regime.

Yellowknifelife: Any thoughts on that?

DS: It's not a museum here. We can't preserve people as they use to be, as nomadic hunters and gatherers. You know, that's long past, and the environment, as I was saying, the grasshopper effect and all these things are closing in on you here. It's not the way it was 100 years ago.

The question is whether traditional sensibility has any relevance anymore? People want cars, and they want ski-doos and heating in their homes and computers and all these things. The land here can't yield that in the traditional way. What's happening now is that this society is going to have to muddle its way into the future.

I think a lot of things that are going on are the wrong way to do it. Inviting multinational corporations to come in and exploit your land for you is a big mistake, because when the head office is in Johannesburg or New York or Tokyo, they don't give a shit about the people or the land. What they want to do is get their money and get out. As you've seen with one of your gold mines (Giant), when they get out they don't even have to pay for what they leave. The public is going to have to pay for the clean up of the arsenic. This is crazy. This is not sustainable.

Yellowknifelife: The government said the easiest and most economically viable thing to do right now is keep it there.

DS: The problem is those priorities are determined by very short time frames. In the long, ecological timeframe -- of decades -- I don't see how anyone can say with confidence (that) this is the best we can do.

Yellowknifelife: We have a resource-based economy. We don't have agriculture. Tourism is not quite there yet, at least not in comparison to the Yukon. Is there any ecologically sound role big business can play up here?

DS: You've got a growing, transient population -- people coming here who are basically not committed to this community. They are coming here for the opportunities. When they make their fortunes they will leave. It is a very different kind of commitment from people for whom the commitment to the land is unbreakable. This is their home. I don't know how you get big corporations coming in ... their whole reason for existence is to make money. So, I don't know how you can get something like that coming in that will benefit the community.

The big offer is jobs but, as you know, companies will downsize in a flash if it increases profitability. They have an obligation to employ people. It may be you'll get socially-responsible companies. The head of Toyota International is apparently a very committed environmentalist. It may be there are certain companies that will come in and do the right thing, I don't know.

Yellowknifelife: What worries you most about the North?

DS: I think the North is an area that cannot tolerate a high population, and I think the (traditional) way of life is so compromised in terms of the impact from the South that the North is inevitably going to be developed, and is going to be trashed.

Yellowknifelife: In your new book, Good News for a Change, you talk about some positive initiatives from big business.

DS: The big problem from big business, when the drive is for profit, that's got to come before everything else. Nevertheless, companies can do good things and still maintain profits. The problem is what if doing the right thing means cutting way back on your profit? Then companies are very antsy about that.

What we're trying to do is when a company which is still doing bad things does something that's in the right direction, we want to give credit for that. So that will help encourage the company to keep going that way. So we give credit to Shell, and BP -- (formerly) British Petroleum -- because they have made massive investments in alternative energy, even though they're bad guys.

Oil's going to run out. So the question is whether it's 10 years or 40 years. Far-seeing companies are saying, "We want to be in business for a long time, we don't care whether it's wind or solar."

Yellowknifelife: What do Northern people do -- in light of what's going on in Alaska -- where George W. Bush has an aggressive energy policy right now? He wants to open up the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge.

DS: It depends on the extent of how much those caribou matter. I think increasingly as your population grows, especially coming from the South, they'll be less and less concerned about the caribou. And I'm sure you're going to get arguments here that say, "Well, we're past that time, that caribou aren't that important traditionally." But really, the big thing is development money, and there's an opportunity to make money.

Yellowknifelife: There is a lot of encouragement for young people in the North to go into these industries. What message do you have for them?

DS: Well, they have every right to need jobs ... what you need young people to start asking is, "What will be left for me 50 years down the line?" When you ask that it changes a lot of the things we do today.