http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_suzuki.html

Science and Health:

Transcript: Bill Moyers Interviews David Suzuki

MOYERS: You say in the series, and in the book that we have become a super species.

SUZUKI: Uh-huh. I don't… never in the four billion years that life has existed on this planet has a single species been able to transform the physical, chemical and biological makeup of the planet as we are doing now. We have become a new kind of force, what I call the super species. Now, human beings have never had to worry about what are all of the humans on the planet doing to the Earth.

We were a local, tribal species. We aggregated within very small areas. You know? I've gone down into Brazil many times in the Amazon. And you go into a native community. There's plastic everywhere. And you say, "What's wrong with these people?" Well, they've never lived with material that persists over time. They eat a banana, they throw the peel around, it biodegrades in a matter of weeks. That's been the way we've always existed.

For the first time in human history we now have to ask what are all six billion people on the planet doing? What is the collective impact of humanity? And because we've never had to do that we're not used to thinking this way. And it's taking time for us to catch up and adjust to this new collectivity.

MOYERS: How much weight do you think the earth can bear?

SUZUKI: That's the big question. We brought an aboriginal Kayapo from the Amazon to Vancouver and I thought, "Boy, is he gonna be impressed with Vancouver. You know, sparkling city, cars." And he looked out and he said, "All of this has come from the earth. How long can the earth keep doing this?" And I thought, "My God, here's a guy right out of the Brazilian rain forest and he sees it immediately." I don't know. Who can tell? We have now become the most numerous mammal on the planet. I was just in Australia a few months ago and I said there are more humans than all of the rabbits on the planet. And they got it right away…

SUZUKI: That is a hell of a lot of human beings. There are more humans than all of the rabbits on earth. There are more of us than all the wildebeests, than all the rats, than all the mice. We are the most numerous mammal on the planet. But because we're not like rabbits or rats or mice we have technology, we have a consumptive appetite, we have a global economy. We are now like no other mammal that has ever existed. And it's time for us to sit back and start saying, "Wait a minute. Now, yes, we've got a very productive economy. But what are we doing in terms of our grandchildren and their grandchildren?" I thought that the responsibility of every generation was to receive the earth from our ancestors and to pass it on to future generations as we receive that. This hasn't been going on for many generations now.

The places that I remember as a child in British Columbia where we went fishing for halibut and sturgeon and salmon I can't take my grandchildren to because there are no fish left. Well, you know, what are we to assume? That the fish that we destroyed are somehow somewhere else? They're not anywhere.