In 1962, there wasn't a single department or ministry of the environment on the planet. Carson's book put the word “environment” on everyone's lips, and the movement had grown so explosively that by 1972 the United Nations was persuaded by Canadian businessman and international environmentalist Maurice Strong to hold a major conference on the environment in Stockholm. The American scientists and educators Paul Ehrlich, Margaret Mead, and Barry Commoner were there, as was the English economist and conservationalist Barbara Ward, along with Greenpeace and thousands of environmentalists concerned about species extinction, pollution, and disappearing habitat.
The United Nations Environment Program was established as an outcome of the Stockholm meetings, and environmentalists took up causes from whales and seals to polluted air and vanishing forests and rivers. The spectacular postwar economic growth had come at a cost that people recognized only after Carson's warning shot. Technology and human activity have consequences for our surroundings, and we had ignored them for too long.
For most of our species' existence, we have been profoundly local and tribal, spending most of our individual lives within a few tens of square miles and coming into contact with perhaps a couple of hundred others in a lifetime. But now we were emerging as a global force. Now we had to consider the collective impact of all of humanity, and it was a difficult perspective to grasp and accept.
When Tara and I had visited the village of Aucre deep in the Amazon rain forest in 1989, we had left a small plastic bag of garbage in our hut, assuming it would be buried after we left. When I returned a decade later, that bag was still there. Throughout their existence, the Kaiapo had lived with materials that were totally biodegradable and so could be left where they were or tossed into the forest to eventually decompose. When plastics and metals began to appear in the Amazon as the Kaiapo made contact with the outside world, those materials were strewn around just like the banana skins of old.
In the twentieth century, human beings had become so numerous and our technological prowess so powerful that we were affecting the biophysical features of the planet on a massive scale. Yet we still thought as local animals. It was almost impossible for the average person to grasp the idea of millions of acres of forest being destroyed, billions of tons of topsoil being lost, toxic pollution of the entire atmosphere, and a massive spasm of extinction. The environmental movement had to come up with catchy ways of representing the bigger picture so people could relate to it — the Amazon as the “lungs of the planet,” cute and cuddly baby seals, charismatic animals like whales or gorillas.
The movement grew as local communities began to grasp the consequences of using air, water, and soil as toxic dumps and belatedly recognized the value of wilderness and of other species. By the late '80s, grassroots concern had pushed the environment to the top of the list of public concerns to such an extent that Margaret Thatcher, the ultra-right-wing Conservative prime minister of Britain, was filmed picking up litter and declaring to the camera, “I'm a greenie too.” In Canada, newly reelected Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney demonstrated a sudden commitment to the environment by appointing his brightest star, the mesmerizing political novice Lucien Bouchard, as minister of the environment and raising the portfolio to the inner cabinet.
In the United States in 1988, Republican political candidate George Bush Sr. promised that, if elected, he would be “an environmental president.” Australia's Labor government was led by Bob Hawke and then by Paul Keating during this period, neither of whom had any record of interest in the environment. But the public was concerned, and Keating was forced to appoint as minister a champion of the environment, Ros Kelly, whom I met and admired over the years.
As their records in office demonstrated, it was public concern about the environment that generated the declared environmental commitments by politicians, not any deeply felt understanding of why the issue was important. When economic difficulties set in, the environment disappeared as a high priority and the environmental movement was forced to struggle to keep matters on the political agenda. To the jaded media, the environment was an old story. Indeed, some revisionists, such as the American writer Gregg Easterbrook, the Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg, and former Greenpeace president Patrick Moore, began to argue that the environmental movement was beating a dead horse, that it had been so successful that it was time to move on to other issues such as the economy.
If 1988 was the peak of public concern, interest continued to be high enough in 1991 to make the Earth Summit a highly anticipated event. It would be the largest gathering of heads of state in history, but I was skeptical that such a huge meeting would accomplish much. My daughter, Severn, had other ideas.
When we had returned from our trip to the Amazon in 1989, Severn had been so upset after seeing the rain forest under assault by farmers and gold miners that she had started a club made up of her grade 5 friends who shared her concern about forests. They would gather at our house to have tea and talk about what they might do. They called their club the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO) and soon were giving talks at their school and then at other schools as word of their existence spread. They began to make little salamanders and earrings out of Fimo clay and sold them to raise money.
Somehow Severn heard about the Earth Summit and asked whether Tara and I were going. I answered that we weren't and asked why she was curious. “Because I think all those grown-ups are going to meet and make decisions and they're not even going to think about us kids,” came the answer. “I think ECO should go to remind them to think about us.”
Tara and I had been involved in a number of international issues, but we had not worked with international organizations such as the United Nations, around whose official Conference on Environment and Development the broader Earth Summit had evolved. Without even reflecting on Severn's idea, I rejected it: “Sweetheart, it's going to be a huge circus with lots of people. Rio will be hot and polluted. Besides, it will cost a lot of money.” Then I promptly forgot about Sev's hope.
That summer, we had a visit from Doug Tompkins, an American who had started the clothing company Esprit with his wife, Susie Russell. When the marriage broke up, Susie bought him out and left him with a considerable chunk of money, reputed to be in the hundreds of millions. Flying his own plane, Doug travels the world looking for opportunities to invest in groups fighting to protect large areas of wilderness, and he personally buys large tracts of land to protect.
Somehow he had heard about Tara and me and the newly formed David Suzuki Foundation, so he flew to British Columbia with deep ecologist Bill Duvall and visited us at our cottage on Quadra Island for two days. During that time, unknown to Tara and me, Severn told Doug about her idea of taking ECO to Rio the following year. He was more enthusiastic than we had been and told her, “That's a good idea. Write to me about it.” She did, and one day a couple of months later, she said, “Hey, Dad, look,” and held up a check for US$1,000 from Doug Tompkins.
I was astonished. I was also pleased with her initiative in writing on her own, and for the first time, I reflected seriously about her idea; I realized she could be on to something. I talked it over with Tara, and we decided it might be worth going to the Earth Summit if children could call attention to the long-term implications of what was being decided by grown-ups. So we went back to Sev and told her we realized she had a good idea and that we would support her by matching every dollar ECO could raise. That meant she already had $2,000.
Severn and Sarika and the other ECO girls plunged into projects to raise money, gathering and selling secondhand books, creating and selling their Fimo salamanders, and baking cookies. But all that brought in only small change. Jeff Gibbs of the Environmental Youth Alliance, that young man who had cut his teeth in environmental activism in high school, took ECO under his wing and helped the girls publish a series of ECO newspapers with articles the youngsters wrote about the environment. Jeff also suggested a major fund-raising event at which the kids could tell people what they wanted to do. It was scheduled for March 17, 1992. With a great deal of help from Jeff, Tara, and others, the girls booked the Vancouver Planetarium, made and distributed posters, and called members of the press and urged them to cover the event. Parents, relatives, and friends, of course, were recruited to attend.