My Debt to David Suzuki

One thing that struck me during my second posting to Butterworth was the gulf between the rich and the poor. Why this didn’t strike me the first time I don’t know. Before leaving Australia in 1971 I pictured a poor country – and in many ways I was right. I remember telling my cousin Norm who had been discharged from the army after completing his national service in Singapore only a month or so before I departed that I intended to buy a car and race it when I got to Penang. After all, I figured, none of the locals could afford anything decent so it should be easy to get something competitive. It didn’t take too long to see that I was mistaken. Norm must have smiled inwardly as I spoke.


In Malaysia the rich and the poor lived side by side. Inhabiting the same country, same state, same island, they lived in completely different worlds. Large houses and luxury cars, beggars on the streets, hawkers peddling their goods from their carts, push bikes and Honda step-throughs carrying wares to market, and families living in thatched roof shacks. The contrast was everywhere.


This was so unlike the world I had grown up in. We were not rich.  I remember Dad making toys as Christmas gifts for cousins. But we had three good meals a day, a lot of it coming from the farm, and Mum always made sure we were well dressed. And it was like that with everyone else I knew. There may have been one or two families that had an upmarket car, but they were the exception, and no one that I was aware of lived in poverty.


What I saw in Penang troubled me. It seemed so unfair. Surely, I thought, there has to be a better way.


I returned to Melbourne in January 1980 and the images and thoughts of the unfairness of Penang quickly faded. It would be almost another 10 years before I was challenged to think again about the unfairness of the world in which I live.

In December of 1980 I became a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church following baptism. Since its inception the Church has developed a strong focus on supporting the poor and providing medical care and schools in some of the poorest parts of the world. The Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) now operates in around 125 countries across the world responding to disasters and running development projects to help lift people out of poverty. Yet, from the pulpit and in its denominational magazines it rarely challenges me to think about my relationship to the world around me and of my responsibility as a global citizen.


The man that first challenged me to think seriously about these things was David Suzuki. I began working for the Church in 1989, two years after my discharge from the RAAF. They paid me for two years to complete an associate diploma in occupational health and safety and after I completed this I began working from an office in Kilsyth in Melbourne’s Eastern suburbs. My job involved travelling to different Church workplaces around Victoria with frequent trips to Warburton, about an hour away. I decided to use this time to broaden my education by listening to audiobooks from the local library.


It wasn’t long after I started this that I borrowed a six part radio program featuring Suzuki. This could best be described as an environmental apocalypse, a prediction of what the world could become in 50 years’ time – which back then was 2039. And it wasn’t pretty. Rising sea levels, increasing natural disasters, increasing desertification, food shortages, tropical diseases spreading further as global temperatures rose and environmental refugees with nowhere to go.

Until then environmental responsibility wasn’t anything I had given any thought to. And it definitely wasn’t on the agenda of the Church. After all, if Jesus was coming again soon to burn it all up why bother? There was a sign posted in the Dandenongs soon after the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires that summed up my attitude towards environmentalists, ‘Grow your own dope, plant a greenie’. But as I listened to Suzuki I realised that he wasn’t only talking about trees or a few endangered frogs. He was talking about relationships between people, greed and exploitation of the weak and vulnerable. Surely, I thought, if Christianity and the Bible have anything relevant to say to the world it must say something about this.


So, with the aid of a concordance and marginal references I began to search the Bible. In the story of the Old Testament I found a real connection between the spiritual condition of the people and the health of the environment. God had delivered the Hebrew nation from Egyptian slavery to establish a radically different social economy. He promised that if they remained faithful to Him He would bless them abundantly. The rains would come on time, their flocks and fields would flourish, and they would enjoy good health, prosperity and live without fear of invasion from the enemies that surrounded them.


At the heart of all this was a requirement that they cared for those that fell on hard times – the poor, widows, orphans and the alien who lived among them. If the system had worked as planned the people would reap the rewards of their labour. There were inbuilt safeguards to prevent the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few while others languished in poverty. Every seven years anyone who had become indebted to another and as a result forced to work off their debts was to be set free and paid generously for their labour. And if the family land had been forfeited to another because of indebtedness it was to be returned to the family in the Year of Jubilee – which occurred every 50 years.


The rationale underlying this was the Exodus experience. They had been slaves in Egypt and God had delivered them. He alone claimed ownership of the land in which they lived and they were His tenants. It was He who gave them the ability to earn wealth and who had promised to provide for and protect them. In return for His generosity towards them they were commanded to be generous to others. And if they weren’t, the land would dry up, their crops would fail, there would be famines and diseases and they would return to slavery, driven from the land by their enemies.


And so the prophet could say: ‘What sorrow for you who buy up house after house and field after field, until everyone is evicted and you live alone in the land’ (Isaiah 5:8) – words that directly challenge the Coles’ and Woolworths’ of today - or, in a passage from Hosea that could well describe the world today:


‘1 Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel!
   The Lord has brought charges against you, saying:
“There is no faithfulness, no kindness,
   no knowledge of God in your land.
2 You make vows and break them;
   you kill and steal and commit adultery.
There is violence everywhere—
   one murder after another.
3 That is why your land is in mourning,
   and everyone is wasting away.
Even the wild animals, the birds of the sky,
   and the fish of the sea are disappearing.’ (Hosea 4:1-3)


Suzuki argues that the answers to the world’s environmental problems are spiritual. I agree, but not with the neo-pagan spiritualties that Suzuki seems to favour. Christianity places high value on the sanctity of human life. If there are answers to the challenge posed by human impact on the earth they will be found in ways that that maintain human dignity and place high value on human life and not subject it to the priority of nature.


This is not to say that we can disregard the natural world, to use its resources at our whim. The argument over Genesis 1 and whether or not it is to be taken literally has distracted us from its key message. It is, to me, primarily an ethical statement that says, in essence, let the earth team with life in all its many and varied forms. Anything that intentionally or negligently destroys life violates this statement.


I don’t have all the answers to the challenges the  world faces. If they do exist I believe they will be found in ways that support cooperation, not competition, reward effort, alleviate poverty through development rather than handouts – recognising at times the latter will be necessary – and care for the creation. If it had not been for David Suzuki I may well have forgotten those days in Penang and may never have found what, for me, is an all-encompassing and holistic spirituality.