Trust Suzuki to get it right

I hadn't read any David Suzuki for a while, and I'd forgotten just how brilliantly he cuts to the core of things.

"We are the earth, and whatever we do to it we do to ourselves."

It's from a speech Suzuki gave at at the 2008 Commonwealth Lecture in London. I thank Online Opinion for drawing my attention to it, but for some reason they decided to chop it up - it's much better in full here.

Of course if I argue for a full reading rather than a misleading excerpt, that should apply to the above quote too. Screw it. The quote illustrates one of many points he makes during the talk: we cannot separate ourselves from the environment. This is the fundamental perspective shift Suzuki argues humans (at least those that wear suits) still need to make before we can think properly about how to solve the environmental problems that so beset us.