We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit.
The terrible part of this looming catastrophe is that people have been working on solutions for years and have developed concrete steps to massively reduce our energy use, while stimulating whole new industries and technologies that are more efficient and affordable.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the paradox of having viable solutions to a crisis while still facing inaction and impending disaster.
David Suzuki highlights a critical issue regarding the impending energy crisis: despite the availability of practical solutions developed over years, society still struggles to implement these measures effectively. The quote suggests that there are innovative strategies and technologies ready to be utilized, which not only promise to reduce energy consumption but also foster the growth of new, sustainable industries. This call to action stresses the urgency of recognizing and acting upon the solutions already at our disposal.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared at an environmental conference to motivate attendees to take action.
More from David Suzuki
All quotes →As parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts we need to start getting out into nature with the young people in our lives. Families play a key role in getting kids outside.
One of the joys of being a grandparent is getting to see the world again through the eyes of a child.
The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.
Do you know how much land is under ice, rock and snow? Do you know why 90 percent of us live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border? We have this idea we're a vast country. But the reality is that a lot of it, a huge amount, is uninhabitable.
We no longer see the world as a single entity. We've moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world.
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For, behind the scenes, halfway around the world in Mexico, were two decades of aggressive research on wheat that not only enabled Mexico to become self-sufficient with respect to wheat production but also paved the way to rapid increase in its production in other countries.
Perhaps some day in the dim future it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances and at a cost less than the saving to mankind due to the information gained. But that is a dream.
It is shameful that there are so few women in science. [...] In China there are many, many women in physics. There is a misconception in America that women scientists are all dowdy spinsters. This is the fault of men. In Chinese society, a woman is valued for what she is, and men encourage her to accomplishments yet she remains eternally feminine.
We can't any longer have the conventional understanding of genetics which everybody peddles because it is increasingly obvious that epigenetics - actually things which influence the genome's function - are much more important than we realised.
Well-established theories collapse under the weight of new facts and observations which cannot be explained, and then accumulate to the point where the once useful theory is clearly obsolete.
Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.