John Bryson
Author, Journalist and Lecturer
by David Suzuki
Greystone Books, 2010
The title, Legacy, does double work: the information is his legacy to us, and a polluted world is our legacy to our children and to theirs. The work is a distillate of his research, and an expansion of his speech delivered in 2009 which reads like a farewell.
Offers the author’s thoughts about the destructive relationship that now exists between humans and nature, and a proposition to adopt a holistic worldview in order to save the planet.
Greystone Books.
As ever, Suzuki provides us with a focus on the fragility of this world and its biologies, but as interesting is where it leads us, and what it leads us to question.
After reading The Legacy my own thoughtful path took this direction;
The genesis of the living world is impossible by any known standard.
From a state of nothing comes an explosion which creates matter and creates energy. The sudden existence of matter begat volume, which is a measurement of matter, which begat space. The sudden existence of energy begat movement which begat time, which is a measurement of movement.
So now we have space/time.
Some matter loses energy enough to cool and become sufficiently solid to allow changes to its structure and to produce at least one world with a biosphere which is so thin that the tallest mountains poke through it into the stratosphere. Our biosphere is a closed system, except for the entry of sunlight.
If the inexplicable explosion is suddenly reversed, because of an imbalance between matter and anti-matter, in a nanosecond we become a smudge somewhere in space, if space then exists, unless we destroy our biosphere before this happens.
I’ve been waiting for someone to suggest we solve our uranium disposal problems by simply flicking it into the sun. Currently the Mafia runs a uranium disposal service by loading it onto derelict ships which they then sink in the deeper trenches of the Atlantic. This may be a slower way to disable the biosphere than messing with the sun.
All this leads to a focus on the love western political economies have for antagonistic competitive societies, and their loathing of co-operative societies.
I think this is the point to which Suzuki leads us.