BY THE time this column sees print, Dr. David Suzuki
should be down in the Amazon Basin taking an enormeus

chance with his life.

Accompanied by the in-
domitable Paul Watson and s
group of journalists, Suzuki will be
taking a three-day journey by air
into the deepest Amazon in order
to deliver $75,000 to a group of
Indians.

ne flew off for Brazil. This kind of
a high-risk venture isr’t new for
him, but to the best of my recol-
lection, it is the first time that the
good doctor Suzuki has gotten in-
volved in an ecological ‘‘action"’
so deeply, apart from showing up

Next to the alarming decay of the ozone
layer, the heating-up of the world’s
atmosphere poses the biggest threat to life
that there is. It guarantees unprecedented
hunger, hurricanes and floods.’’

= x a Tae

The idea is that by being there,
Suzuki and Watson and the media
will create enough of a human
shicld so that the natives will risk
coming into the open. They fear
the Braziliar. Army, which has
reportedly never stopped shooting
at them.

If they emerged from the forest
by themselves, the Indians expect
they would be slaughtered. By
training a media spotlight on them,
they ought to be safe for the mo-
ment; at any rate.

The truth is that even if the ar-
my didn't shoot at them, ranchers
undoubtedly would. The area into
which Suzuki and Watson are ven-
turing is close to where rain forest
crusader Chico Mendes was
murdered by ranchers a few mon-
ths ago.

Ie was largely international
media attention on Mendes’
murder that generated the political
heat to force the World Bank to
indefinitely postpone a $500-
million loan to Brazil.

The gift of $75,000 from Suzuki
to the Brazilian Indians is to
undertake land claims that would
provide them with the legal power
to protect the forests in which they
live.

! talked to Watson just before

at rallies.

I've known Suzuki since the late
*60s. Often, when I was writing a
column elsewhere, 1 used to go out
to UBC to ask the great geneticist
questions about science and poli-
ties.

Apart from his passion for
science, his biggest issue then was
the racial prejudice he’d personally
experienced as a Japa-
nese-Canadian. There was no
doubt he was bitter about it. I
would be too.

But he wasn’t particularly into
ecology back then, which surprised
me. I assumed that all scientists
were, a naive view if there ever was
one.

Our roles changed when 1 got ,
involved full-time in environmen-
talism in the mid-70s, and Suzuki
was by then well-established as a
CBC interviewer.

I remember his telling me once
that he didn’t see the point in mak-
ing a fuss over the whales, since
the planetary bio-system could
survive without them, just as it had
survived the demise of the
dinosaurs.

What intrigued him wasn’t the
whales themselves but the fact that
anybody cared enough about them
to risk his life.

What has happened to Suzuki
over the last decade to drive him to
take the extreme risk of going all
the way to Brazil to help the In-
dians protect the rain forest? He
has certainly been radicalized.

By his own account, a previous
five-week trip to the Amazon filled
him with horror at the rate at
which the place was ‘‘being flat-
tened.”’

In a profile on him in the
January issue of Vancouver Maga-
zine, he said:

“‘The major reason for extinc-
tion (of animate) f° ft

destructio: * hing
we can de :
eventual . - aro
destruction « ive
areas that suppws.. ain Of life

on earth .., rich areas like the trop-
ical rain forest. You can look at
the world and see that it is being
destroyed.’’

Suzuki and Watson are address-
ing themselves to one of the most
critical environmental issues of all.
Next to the alarming decay of the
ozone layer, the heating-up of the
world’s atmosphere poses the big-
gest threat to life that there is. It
guarantees unprecedented hunger,
hurricanes and floods.

To go to the Amazon now is to
go into the belly of the beast. The
destruction being done is in-
calculable. Yet a mood of
Brazilian xenophobia prevails.

As Watson put it before leaving,
“it’s a bit like going into the deep
south during the civil rights days.’’
Worse, quite possibly, than New-
foundland during the anti-sealing
days.

The boys in the Brazilian gov-
ernment must be furious about the
loss of the World Bank loan,
which was caused by fierce lobby-
ing by environmentalists who op-
pose Brazil's grand plans to build
136 hydro dams that would destroy
62 million acres of rain forest.

Environmentalists exactly like
Watson and Suzuki. I think Such
men deserve commendation for
bravery above and beyond the call
of duty®

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