David Suzuki Quotes

I was caught on the freeway for hours when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The entire city had to be evacuated. I observed lives threatened by catastrophes and a whole range of behaviour. What could people do during a crisis?

The Middle East is literally going up in flames, as is California, and Katrina's problems haven't been solved, and Congress' response is to criticize Federal judges.

I hope my work contributes to understanding long-term patterns of human behavior and how we survive, thrive, or fail during times of environmental, social, and economic crisis.

The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done - challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.

We've been given a warning by science, and a wake-up call by nature; it is up to us now to heed them.

If enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one.

With a disaster like global warming, it's too late to worry about when it's looming except to figure out how to adapt to it.

We're learning as we go. We're a lot smarter this time. We understand what it takes to mobilize away from the threat of a hurricane.

Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination.

We ignore slow environmental changes unless they are crisis-driven, such as hurricanes in Florida.

Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each other to flee from a disaster scene, but in fact are trying to manage a situation. We may in fact revert to some sort of primordial civility.

During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.

One of the things government should be around for is to deal with catastrophes. It should do that well. To me, that's a government function, and we shouldn't be playing political games with it.

We are losing our environment so rapidly.

Devastation could arise insidiously, rather than suddenly, through unsustainable pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. Indeed, these pressures are the prime 'threats without enemies' that confront us.

I believe it is essential for our planetary future to develop tools that can change the consciousness which has created the crisis that we are in.

I always thought we had an environmental problem, but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.

If this summer is especially bad a crisis mentality will take over and Congress will want to pass legislation to show that they're on top of the situation.

This was the most anticipated natural disaster in history.

In a broader sense, the irony in all of this is the single most necessary element for life to exist, in fact, is killing everything, from our ecosystems to potentially our food supply if we're poisoning fish and the foods that we eat. That is the broader sense.

Climate change, if unchecked, is an urgent threat to health, food supplies, biodiversity, and livelihoods across the globe.

So many of us who've been thinking about the ecological crisis have had this horrible creeping feeling, like nothing was getting done and it was getting worse.

We are killing life on Earth, we're in the sixth mass extinction event and it's possible that human beings will go extinct. We're in a culture that doesn't want you to think about that.

Since 1963, the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center has conducted nearly 700 field studies on floods and earthquakes, and on-site research reveals the same results every time: the vast majority of people stay calm and help each other.

Without sounding too grandiose, the survival of the planet itself is at stake, you have rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans, immigration sparked by climate change, droughts that are much more severe.