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.’’

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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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