David Suzuki Receives Alternative Nobel

Environmentalist David Suzuki will receive an honorary alternative Nobel – the Right Livelihood Award – for his decades-long efforts to raise awareness about climate change. Suzuki will receive the award in December in Sweden, just ahead of Nobel Prize presentations.

Created to recognize efforts in areas that are not within the Nobel Prize scope, Right Livelihood selected Suzuki “for his lifetime advocacy of the socially responsible use of science, and for his massive contribution to raising awareness about the perils of climate change and building public support policies to address it.”

In an interview with The McGill Tribune, Suzuki said, “Some things in the world we have to live with – entropy, gravity, the speed of light and the Laws of Thermodynamics. Other things such as the economy, market or currency were created by us and if they don’t work, we should change or replace them with something that does. When we are told we need a strong growing economy to afford to protect the environment or that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be too expensive, we elevate economics above ecology. This is suicidal.”

The Right Livelihood Award Foundation, a charity that awards the exceptional in order to further its laureats’ causes, appears as frustrated as Suzuki. The Foundation’s website states: “Despite the scientific warnings about the imminent threat and disastrous impacts of climate change and despite our knowledge about solutions, the global response to this crisis is still painfully slow and largely inadequate.”

Like many, their eyes are on December’s Copenhagen Climate Conference where hopefully a new global warming treaty, which will replace the Kyoto Protocol in 2012, will be approved.