When she left the stage to come to us near the middle of the auditorium, her first words to Tara were, “Mommy, could you hear my heart beating?” As she sat down between us, a member of the American delegation rushed over to shake her hand and congratulate her. “That was the best speech anyone has given here,” U.S. senator Al Gore told her.
The speech was filmed and is archived with the United Nations. I have a copy of it and have shown the video dozens of times to audiences attending my talks; each time, I am moved by its simplicity and power. The repercussions of that speech had a huge impact on Sev's life. Canadian journalist and human-rights activist Michelle Landsberg wrote a column about it, and the speech has been printed verbatim in dozens of articles and translated into several languages. John Pierce of Doubleday contacted Severn about writing a book based on it, which she did in 1993; the book is called Tell the World. She was interviewed again and again, offered opportunities to host television programs, and invited to give speeches. She received the United Nations Environment Program's Global 500 award in Beijing in 1993.
It was all pretty heady stuff for a twelve-year-old, and I began to worry about what this would do to her sense of herself. I stopped worrying the next year, when she was invited to appear on The Joan Rivers Show in New York. “Dad,” Sev told me, “I hope it's okay, but I'm not going to do this. I have to study, and I want to make the basketball team.” She had her priorities right.
AGENDA 21 IS THE 700-page tome adopted by 178 governments at Rio; essentially, it was a blueprint for the world to achieve sustainable development. The cost of this massive shift from a focus on the economy above all else to an inclusion of environmental factors was estimated to be $600 billion a year, although the cost of not doing anything was not estimated and would have been many times greater. The developing world was expected to put up $450 billion of it, a sum that represented 8 percent of their collective gross domestic product (GDP), and the industrialized nations were expected to cough up the remainder, a mere 0.7 percent of their GDPs. Before the Earth Summit was over, developed countries were already complaining that their contribution was impractical, and the target of 0.7 percent of GDP has not been reached by any of the major industrial nations such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, even though the goals set in Rio in 1992 were re-affirmed at the Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002.
FOURTEEN
PAPUA NEW GUINEA
IN 1992, A MAN who was working in Papua New Guinea asked if he could drop by my house in Vancouver. Shortly after he arrived, Nick Fogg asked to go to the bathroom and stayed there for an inordinately long time, audibly ill. When he emerged, gray and weak, he told me he was having a malarial flare-up. Nevertheless, he managed to ask me whether I'd be interested in visiting the South Pacific country.
Nick worked for CUSO (formerly Canadian University Services Overseas and still known by the old acronym), a nongovernmental international developmental organization, and despite his alarming condition, I was immediately interested because I'd heard so much about the island nation from Richard Longley, the main researcher for the television series Science Magazine.
Richard was trained in England as a botanist and had taught for a number of years in Papua New Guinea. Long before I became involved in the TV program The Nature of Things, he was the contact person for CBC producer Nancy Archibald when she made a film there for that series. Richard eventually moved to Toronto, where he was hired to do research for the new series Science Magazine. In that capacity, he visited the University of British Columbia, where he interviewed me, and later I ended up being asked to host the show.
I had seen Nancy's program on Papua New Guinea, which showed some of the incredible variety of people and animals living on the island of New Guinea north of Australia. To bird-watchers, Papua New Guinea is famous for its fabled birds of paradise. I was thrilled with Nick's invitation, and I made the visit to Papua New Guinea in 1993. It is an awesome place, more than 80 percent of it covered with high mountains and deep valleys. At one point we flew into a large valley, where I could see five airstrips carved into the hills within a six-mile radius; the villages they serve are only a few minutes apart by air, but the valleys and dense forest between them take days to cover on foot. The isolation imposed by the rugged terrain has resulted in a profusion of cultures and over seven hundred languages, about 45 percent of the world's total.
Not long ago, neighboring tribes raided each other and practiced cannibalism, which perpetuated a terrible disease called kuru, for years thought to be hereditary. Famed population geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote a paper in Science magazine describing kuru as a disease caused by a dominant gene. However, Stanley Prusiner had earned a Nobel Prize in 1997 by showing that kuru was caused by a “slow virus” related to the prions causing BSE (mad cow disease) and the human counterpart, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Kuru, or “laughing disease,” was so named because its victims suffered facial muscle contractions that gave the appearance of a grotesque smile.
Kuru was transmitted primarily to children and women, who tended to be given the highly infective brains to eat while the men ate the preferred muscles, which carried far fewer of the causative agents. Christianity had ended the cannibalism and intertribal wars, and although I didn't like the way the religion had come to dominate Papua New Guinean cultures, it was hard to decry the abolition of the killing.
Nick had arranged for Indigenous Environment Watch, a group of native and nonnative environmentalists, to issue a formal invitation, which I immediately accepted, and the next time I was visiting Australia I flew in to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. When my plane landed and taxied toward the terminal, I peered out to see a crowd of children holding up flags and a large sign of welcome. “Must be a politician or someone important,” I remarked to my seatmate.
Imagine my surprise when the plane stopped and I saw that the sign said “Welcome Doctor Suzuki”! As I walked from the plane to the airport terminal, a man painted yellow and wearing an elaborate feather headdress, boars' teeth piercing his nose and hanging from his neck, and a grass skirt, and a bare-breasted woman who was also elaborately painted, greeted me and, dancing, led me to a room where I was waved through customs without a question. Then I was led to a car and whisked into town. Wow, wish I were met like that everywhere. It was just a hint of what was to come.
Papua New Guinea had been claimed by a succession of countries during the colonial period of the nineteenth century, from Holland and Britain to Germany and Australia, and received full independence from Australia only in 1975. Real European contact with the establishment of permanent European outposts and diplomatic relations goes back little more than a century, and many tribes had been contacted by white people only within the past few decades. In Port Moresby, I met an anthropologist named Nicholas Faraclas, who had worked and taught at the University of Papua New Guinea for many years. He has a great affection for the people and in 1997 wrote one of the most powerful pieces about them that I've read. Here is part of what he said:
Imagine a society where there is no hunger, homelessness or unemployment, and where in times of need, individuals can rest assured that their community will make available to them every resource at its disposal. Imagine a society where decision makers rule only when the need arises, and then only by consultation, consensus and the consent of the community. Imagine a society where women have control over their means of production and reproduction, where housework is minimal and childcare is available 24 hours a day on demand. Imagine a society where there is little or no crime and where community conflicts are settled by sophisticated resolution procedures based on compensation to aggrieved parties for damages, with no recourse to concepts of guilt or punishment. Imagine a society. . in which the mere fact that a person exists is cause for celebration and a deep sense of responsibility to maintain and share that existence.