| David Suzuki says poverty reduction is crucial in order to achieve world peace and he says Canadians should be doing more to help the world’s poor.
The world-renowned environmentalist, geneticist and broadcaster sees the continued inequality between western countries and the developing world as one of the major barriers to world peace and harmony. He points out that in the west, "our major health problems comes from overeating," while in developing countries, billions of people are living on $2 or less a day.
"I don’t see how you can talk about a world of peace when you have such inequities between half the populations of the planet. They look at us and it must seem obscene that we feed our dogs and cats better than most of them are fed," says Suzuki. "Do we not think that that is not going to generate hatred and jealousy?"
Suzuki plans to discuss the connection between poverty, peace and the environment during a speech on November 23 in Calgary. The speech is part of a speakers series put on by the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) in advance of a major conference this summer. The conference, which takes place every two years, will bring together educators, researchers and peace activists from more than 50 countries to discuss how to promote world peace.
Suzuki is calling on Canada to step up its foreign aid contribution because the country now has a reputation of being "cheap." Prime Minister Paul Martin has refused to come up with a timeline for when Canada will contribute 0.7 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to foreign aid, despite the fact that many other western countries have done so. Canada’s former prime minister Lester Pearson was the first to propose that countries devote 0.7 per cent of their GDP to foreign aid. In 2000, the federal government promised to achieve that target in order to meet the United Nation’s Millenium Development Goals, which included a commitment to decrease extreme poverty by 50 per cent by 2015.
"The seeds of hatred come from enormous inequities. We better start looking to the rest of the world and see that security only comes when the rest of the world has a decent shot at making a living," says Suzuki.
Meanwhile, Suzuki says there’s a direct connection between reducing poverty and ending conflict and protecting the environment.
"If we don’t deal with hunger and poverty, forget the environment. And the same thing applies to people who live under conditions of genocide or terror. They’ve got other things to worry about other than the quality of their environment," says Suzuki.
"They’ve got to worry about their very survival, so for me, coming to some kind of accord with mother earth also means that we’ve got to remove people from the terrible conditions of violence, war oppression, terror and genocide. Those are all critical to me as an environmentalist."
Suzuki says it’s unrealistic, for example, to expect people who are starving to refuse to eat an endangered plant or animal in a protected area.
"People that want to just set aside parks don’t deal with the fact that bush meat represents meat to hungry people, and they’re going to kill those gorillas regardless of where they live or how endangered they are, so you’ve got to deal with that," says Suzuki.
Suzuki says human beings are not only at war with each other, but also with nature, including their own bodies. He argues that humans are now completely out of balance with the natural environment.
"So long as we tear at our mother the way that we have been, I don’t see how we can ever speak of peace. Peace has to come not only between our species, but peace has to come in terms of our finding a way to live in balance with the natural world that makes life possible for us," says Suzuki.
Suzuki will speak at the University of Calgary’s MacEwan Hall on November 23 at 7 p.m. |
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