The Origins of the Declaration of Interdependence

Human beings are an infant species, having appeared on the plains of Africa only about 150,000 years ago. We were upright, furless apes with few distinguishing traits, and there was little to indicate that we would become the dominant species on Earth. Our evolutionary advantage was hidden deep within our skulls—a brain that gave us a prodigious memory, curiosity, and inventiveness, which more than compensated for our lack of physical and sensory prowess.

For most of human existence, we were a local, tribal animal. We didn’t worry about people on the other side of the ocean, mountain range, or desert. We lived in our tribal territory and cared for our own people. Then, in the last century, we suddenly became a new kind of force, a species that has transformed the chemical, physical, and biological makeup of the planet on a geological scale. In four billion years of life’s existence on Earth, there has never been a single species capable of what we are doing now, and that ability was acquired in the last moment of cosmic time.

Humankind—A New Kind of Force

Humans are now the most populous mammal on Earth. Our sheer numbers mean that we have an enormous ecological footprint—the amount of land and water needed to fulfill our basic needs. But our impact is far in excess of what is required to meet those needs. We use huge amounts of technology to provide food, clothing, shelter, workplaces, transportation, and so on, and those technologies allow us to increase our demands beyond what any species has done before. It doesn’t end there. We have become afflicted with a huge appetite for Stuff—we are super-consumers. This consumptive demand is fed by a global economy that exploits the entire planet as a source of raw materials and seeks to use the entire global population as a market for its goods. When we add these together—our numbers, our technological muscle power, our consumptive appetite, and the global economy—we can see why our impact is so immense.

At the beginning of humanity’s time on Earth, there were not so many people and nature seemed vast and endlessly self-renewing. But today, as we clear the forests, eliminate species, and dump our waste and toxic material into the air, water, and soil, we are undermining the productivity of nature itself. For the first time we have to ask, “What is the collective impact of 6.7 billion human beings living on the planet?” For most of our existence, human beings were aware that we are deeply embedded in and utterly dependent on nature for our survival and well-being.

Even in 1900, with close to two billion people in the world, only fourteen cities had a population of more than a million. Most people on the planet lived in rural village communities. We were farmers. Farmers understand that we are dependent on the vagaries of weather and climate (winter snows are related to moisture in the soil in the summer), that not all insects are pests (some are important vectors of pollination), and that all wild plants are not weeds (some take nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil as fertilizer). Farmers know we depend on and must work with nature.

Only a hundred years later, in 2000, the global population had risen threefold to six billion, and the number of cities with over a million people had increased to more than three hundred. Most people, especially in industrialized countries, live in big cities, where it becomes easy to believe that our highest priority must be the economy. Ask an urban child about the source of his or her drinking water or electricity or food; ask what happens when we flush a toilet or put garbage on the curb. Most won’t know the answer. It is easy to assume our leaders in business and government are correct when they say the economy is the source of everything we need—the products, the garbage collection and sewage treatment, the plentiful electricity and clean water. Most don’t understand that every single thing we use comes from the earth and goes back to it as waste.

Economic Primacy and the Environmental Movement

We hear it all the time. I was told by a minister of the environment from Alberta that “we can’t afford to protect the environment without a strong growing economy.” Even a minister of the environment thinks his highest priority is ensuring economic growth. Like the Bush administration in the United States and Australia’s then prime minister, John Howard, the prime minister of Canada set the economy above other concerns as he informed Canadians that we cannot even try to achieve the targets of the Kyoto Protocol (even though we had agreed to it as a nation) or do anything to reduce greenhouse gases, because it would “ruin the economy.” Coming from the most powerful person in the country, this philosophy is doubly egregious. First, it is simply not true. Sweden, a northern country like Canada, put a price on carbon with a carbon tax in the 1990s and has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions to 8 per cent below 1990 levels while its economy has grown by 44 per cent. Second, leading economists like Sir Nicholas Stern of the U.K. inform us that a warmer world will be catastrophic to the economy, costing more than World Wars I and II combined and plunging us into an economic depression beyond anything we’ve ever experienced or imagined.

The environmental movement is a young one, whose conception I attribute to Rachel Carson’s pioneering book, Silent Spring. Published in 1962, this book documented the unexpected effects of DDT and other chemical pesticides. Suddenly the world became aware that there were hidden costs to our intellectual and technological prowess. In 1962 there wasn’t a single “department of the environment” in any government on the planet. The word “environment” didn’t mean what it does today. Carson’s book was read by millions around the world, and it generated a massive response. I, and millions of others, began to look at the world differently. We could see the problems our powerful technologies and consumptive demands were causing, and we became aware of the consequences of using the entire planet as a dump for our wastes. In British Columbia, the first issue I saw through an environmental lens was the American plan to detonate underground nuclear devices in Amchitka, off the tip of Alaska. Many of us feared this would trigger tidal waves or earthquakes or vent a cloud of radioactive gases. The U.S. government paid no heed to the objections.

British Columbia was also dealing with other issues—clear-cut logging in the temperate rain forest, a proposed dam on the Peace River, drilling for oil in the treacherous waters of Hecate Strait, pollution from pulp mills. We were removing too many resources from our environment while putting too much waste and toxic material back. In addition to protesting, some of us lobbied for laws and the infrastructure to enforce them.

In my mind, the solution was to set up ministries of the environment that would develop regulations to ensure clean air, clean water, and species protection and be responsible for enforcement. By the early 1970s, I realized that our ignorance was vast and that we would never be able to regulate all of the powerful new technologies. When DDT was recognized as an insecticide, scientists didn’t know about biomagnification—the process whereby deadly concentrations are amplified up the food chain. This phenomenon was only discovered when eagles began to disappear in the United States and biologists eventually traced the source of the problem to DDT. When atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945, scientists didn’t know about radioactive fallout, electromagnetic pulses of gamma rays that knock out electrical circuits, or nuclear winter. When we used millions of pounds of CFCs, we had no idea that in the upper atmosphere ultraviolet light would break chlorine free radicals off the CFCs and that chlorine would break down ozone.

When the effect of CFCs on the ozone layer was first announced, my response was, “What ozone layer?” And now, genetically modified organisms are being grown around the world with very little understanding of the long-term consequences of creating novel combinations of genes and releasing them into the environment.

A Different Perspective

We are in the midst of a huge crisis. We need more science to inform us about how the world works. And since we know so little, how can we be sure that applications of our incomplete knowledge will not have completely unexpected and deleterious effects? There is a way out. Nature has had four billion years to experiment with ways of solving the same kinds of problems we now face, such as how to find food, how to keep from getting eaten, where to get energy, how to recover from illness. Rather than bludgeoning nature into apparent submission with our powerful technologies, we can approach her with greater humility. We can ask how nature has solved problems and what we can learn from those solutions. Janine Benyus coined the term “biomimicry” to explain this new approach, and although there is no guarantee we won’t still have problems if we copy nature, I believe it will be far less likely.

In the late 1970s I became aware of a battle over forests and logging that had been raging for years in the islands off the tip of the Alaskan panhandle, called Haida Gwaii by its original inhabitants. I flew to the islands to interview forestry executives, environmentalists, politicians, and the Haida people. Guujaaw, a young Haida artist, had led the battle against logging for years. But the forest industry employed many Haida, who desperately needed economic opportunities. Why fight logging, then? I asked what would happen if the logging continued and the entire island archipelago was logged. Guujaaw answered, “Then I guess we’ll be like everybody else.” A simple yet incredibly profound statement. Guujaaw opened the window on a radically different way of seeing the world. He was saying that to be Haida means to be connected to the land; the Haida’s connection to air, water, fish, trees, and birds is what makes Haida special, and without that connection they become like the rest of society.

Since then, I have met Aboriginal people in different parts of the world and encountered that same connection to nature and the land. Aboriginal people refer to Earth as their Mother and speak of the four sacred elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. They have totems and clans based on other species—fireweed, cedar, killer whale, wolf, eagle, and raven. To Aboriginal people, these other species are not merely resources or commodities, but our relatives.

As I contemplated these lessons, I realized we had framed the environmental problem incorrectly. We are the environment. There is no separation; there is no environment “out there” that we have to regulate our interaction with. Air is in us and circulates throughout our bodies at all times, we are made up of more than 60 per cent water by weight, we are built by the molecules in the food we consume—most of which has come from the earth—and every bit of the energy that we need to grow, move, and reproduce is the fire of the sun captured by plants through photosynthesis. We are the earth, and so whatever we do to it, we do directly to ourselves.

The Turnaround Decade and the Declaration of Interdependence

Since Carson’s book, environmental issues have become major social and economic concerns—clear-cut logging, toxic pollution, massive oil spills, endangered species—that occupy increasingly more time and space in the media. Ten years after Silent Spring, in 1972, a U.N. conference on the environment in Stockholm led to the formation of the United Nations Environment Program. But despite the phasing out of CFCs, the cross-border agreements to reduce acid rain, and the legislation for clean air, clean water, and biodiversity, ecological issues proliferated and worsened.

By 1988, global concern had made the environment the highest priority; Margaret Thatcher declared she was a “greenie,” while George H.W. Bush promised, if elected, to “be an environmental president.” In 1990, the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C., labelled the 1990s “The Turnaround Decade,” in which we would have to make significant changes to the way we interacted with the planet. That year, with that challenge resonating, we opened the doors of the David Suzuki Foundation.

In 1992, environmentalists around the world anticipated the largest gathering of heads of state in history at a meeting in Rio de Janeiro. The Earth Summit was meant to ensure that henceforth all human actions would include a consideration of environmental consequences. The David Suzuki Foundation was a new organization with a small, all-volunteer staff. We wanted to make a contribution to the Summit, but what could it be? I believed we needed to move away from our anthropocentric focus—our belief that human beings are the centre of everything and that everything we do must be measured according to human consequences and economics. We needed to help people see the world differently, to look through the perceptual lens of biocentrism, recognizing that we are part of a community of organisms sharing the same biosphere, dependent on each other for our survival and well-being.

We began to think about a statement—a declaration that might convey this profound perspective. We set about crafting a document that would address the issues that concerned us. Taking a cue from the American Declaration of Independence, Tara Cullis suggested we call ours the Declaration of Interdependence. Tara and I worked as a team, scribbling down sentences that expressed what we felt were the critical issues. We wanted the document to be uplifting and poetic, something that would capture people’s emotions and move them to action. I had been overwhelmed by the lessons I learned from Guujaaw, and I wanted to include this new insight. I wrote, “We are made up of the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe.” It was clumsy, but it contained the essence of what I had learned. But then I remembered: it’s not “we are made up of…” It’s “we are the earth.”

We knew we needed different perspectives and expertise, so we invited others to contribute. We asked Guujaaw, who had opened my eyes to a new way of seeing. We engaged Raffi, the internationally renowned children’s singer, who provided critical elements with a child’s perspective in mind. We brought in Wade Davis, an eminent ethnobotanist and author whose profound and evocative writing grows out of his vast experience with indigenous peoples around the world. They each provided invaluable wisdom. We knew that crafting any work by committee presents a challenge, but we were committed to incorporating all of the voices.

We completed the Declaration in time for the Rio Summit. After reviewing it with colleagues, we had the final version translated into five languages—French, German, Russian, Japanese, and Mandarin. The Declaration of Interdependence—our formal contribution to the Earth Summit conference—is the David Suzuki Foundation’s call to action and our prayer for the continuation of life on Earth. It has become a lasting statement to guide the Foundation in all of its activities.