Suzuki’s polarizing style won’t move us forward

Progress will come with trade-offs and compromises, Tom Powrie says.

I was at the recent convocation where the University of Alberta gave David Suzuki an honorary degree. I am an economist, and Suzuki finds some problems with that breed, as I have some problems with him.

But first, there are some problems with his detractors. The folks who protested his degree that day, although they were commendably quiet, should have known better than to be there at all. The point of the day was to honour the young people who were receiving their degrees.

Also, some donors to the university withdrew their gifts because of this honour to Suzuki. This seems to say that their support is contingent on their agreement with all of the university’s policies. I hope they will think about this. We all want our university to be of high quality, and for that its independence is required. We do not want a place whose decisions are bought.

Suzuki has one of the very best styles of speaking that I have ever heard. It was a pleasure to listen to it. And his shows Quirks and Quarks and The Nature of Things are great contributions to Canada.

But he has shortcomings for the honour he was being given, and the content of his speech displayed them. He told us of a visit from a corporate CEO who wanted to discuss things with him. He explained how he asked this man to forget he is a CEO and to talk with Suzuki as an equal.

He then said he addressed this man as “Mr. CEO” and explained to him that the laws of physics and chemistry and biology cannot be ignored, and that these laws say that clean air and water and land are essential to human life. (The pomposity here was cringeworthy.)

He told us that the CEO refused to agree with him about the overriding value of clean air, clean water, and unpolluted land. He speculated that the CEO could not agree because he would have been fired if he had.

My own speculation is that the CEO would more likely have been fired if he had said he was in favour of dirty air, dirty water and polluted land. But more to the point, I suspect that the CEO was looking for, and not getting, a discussion of in-between cases, a discussion of tradeoffs and compromises.

There was no trace in Suzuki’s talk of any awareness of any need for any such discussion. In fact, every breath we take puts a little puff of polluting carbon dioxide into the air, and yields the benefit of life itself. This is a trade-off, where a cost in one form brings a benefit in some other form. Every breath we take, every meal we bake, every poop we make, pollutes the land and the water and the air a little.

All are trade-offs of costs for benefits. And of course we make many trade-offs with very high stakes, and some, I think, that are wrong because the costs exceed the benefits.

The issue with the environment is not how to keep it pure and perfect.

The only way for us to give overriding priority to clean air, clean water and clean land, is for us all to cease to exist, but I think we are worth keeping.

So the real issue is, what set of trade-offs is the best balance between damage to the environment and resulting other benefits, and what set of rules and arrangement will best achieve this balance? These questions are very, very hard. And they are very, very important.

Let’s all help. One way to help is to skip the polarizing perfectionism that refuses to look for the answers in the only place where the answers can be found, in trade-offs and compromises.