Rediscovering Nature: A Sloth's Guide to Survival

Andrew Shaffer and Richard McNamara
Kyushu Lutheran College, Kumamoto

2002.Marｃｈ

Chances are that a twenty-one-year old young adult
today has never experienced nature on her own terms.
With over 80 % of the developed world's people living
in cities, humankind's collective knowledge and
experience with the natural world is at a dangerous
decline. As our consciousness and knowledge of nature
decreases so does our resolve to halt its destruction.
In spite of this disheartening scenario, it is hard to
imagine that highly resourceful and active
environmental movements exist among the young today,
with both a voice and a mission.

One such individual who embodies these ideals is
Severn Cullis-Suzuki, who like her well-renowned
father, David Suzuki, has been actively campaigning at
the international level to reverse environmental
destruction through the promotion of grass-roots
activism. Many people know Cullis-Suzuki as the
founder of ECO, the Environmental Children's
Organization, who at 12 years old, spoke at the Rio
Earth Summit ten years ago and touched the hearts of
many a world leader with her strong, but disarmingly
simple message: that we adults have the duty and
obligation to preserve nature for the health and
well-being of future generations. Now a fourth-year
ecology and evolutionary
biology student at Yale University, Cullis-Suzuki has
taken her message to world conferences, schools and
public forums around the globe. She has also hosted
Suzuki's Nature Quest, a children's television series
currently airing around the world. She has a
bibliography that reads like a tenured professor,
including a published book with Doubleday called Tell
The World.

Having witnessed firsthand the destruction of the
Amazon rainforest during an extended stay with the
Kayopo people in the lower regions of Xingu valley in
Brazil, she has made it her mission to inform people
of the importance of biodiversity in our lives.
Through her speeches, Cullis-Suzuki has persuaded
people to reject current trends in mass consumerism
and overconsumption of our natural resources which are
known to be the root cause of both environmental and
cultural destruction.

With the advent of so-called eco-tourism encroaching
on remote rainforest, desert, and mountainous regions
around the world, a growing number of people like
Cullis-Suzuki are becoming more determined to protect
our few remaining unspoiled ecosystems. At the same
time, however, invasive development threatens their
survival. What may appear to be an archetypal clash
between environmentalists and developers is in
fact a lack of mutual understanding between those who
have experienced nature on her terms and those who
have
not.

While the current rate of environmental destruction is
high, Cullis-Suzuki's message is very clear:
rediscovering our dependency on our earth's
biodiversity will sensitize us to the importance of
disengaging the socio-political mechanisms that are
currently destroying our world. We can make a
difference by undertaking surprisingly simple tasks.
Among them are:

1. Get outside! Go camping! Go for a walk!
2. Remember life can be sustained with less!
3. Travel by bike! Use public transportation!
4. Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!

Despite what some people would have us believe, nature
is our life-blood, our answer to our collective
environmental malaise. Cullis-Suzuki's art of making
things happen is a living testimony that nature is
clearly not a commodity that can be sold or packaged
to us as entertainment, but our only tangible means of
survival.

Andrew Shaffer and Richard McNamara
Kyushu Lutheran College, Kumamoto

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