Resident Scholar  Kenneth P. Green

Every now and then, the avuncular mask falls away from David Suzuki's face, and we catch a glimpse of his inner revolutionary--and it isn't a pretty sight. In fact, it's both anti-humanist and authoritarian. It's also essentially anti-environmental, since his is the kind of extreme environmentalism that has bred an anti-environmental movement which presumes that claims of environmental degradation are just a green cloak for the promotion of massive expansion of governmental control and collectivism. And there certainly are reasons for thinking this way.

An early example of Suzuki's extremism occurred in 1999, as the world pondered, with what turned out to be excessive fear, the potential for computer networks to fail with the beginning of the new millennium. In an interview with Reuters, Suzuki opined, "I hope there is a major glitch. It might give Mother Earth a rest." He also said, "I think it would be wonderful if things collapsed for a few days," cheerfully admitting that "chaos would happen . . . but it would be an amazing opportunity for people to really start thinking about things--and a global collapse would really make people think" (Eichler, 1999, Dec. 22). However, such a "major glitch" would have actually had astonishingly bad consequences for both humanity and the environment. A failure of the control systems on dams, chemical facilities, and nuclear reactors, for example, would have led to catastrophic events around the world.

More recently, in a speech to students at McGill University, Suzuki said, "What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing [to the environment] is a criminal act" (Gunter, 2008). The Suzuki Foundation tried to pass off this latest authoritarian outburst as a rhetorical flourish rather than a real suggestion, but as analysts point out, the fact that he said virtually the same thing to another audience in January 2008 probably indicates that he meant it (Gunter, 2008). . . .

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Kenneth P. Green is a resident scholar at AEI.