There are some real gems, but they steal his thunder: they say what Suzuki is trying to say more effectively and succinctly. Suzuki tries to beef up his argument with texts and graphics culled from everywhere from the Bible to Romantic poets to Nobel laureates. He even goes so far as to suggest that the act of a mud dauber feeding its young might be an act of “love.” He branches out from his biologist and naturalist roots, making pronouncements about pop psychology (children who aren’t loved grow up maladjusted), and about human spirituality and love in the natural world. But Suzuki delivers this message in a backhanded and disorganized way.
The Sacred Balance is vintage Suzuki: he argues that our actions are throwing the Earth’s life support systems off balance and possibly endangering all life forms that to save ourselves and the planet we must change our profligate ways and restore the sacred balance. To do this he borrows heavily from Lovelock’s Gaia principle, which argues that the Earth itself is a living organism, delicately balanced and self-regulated in the same way the human body is.
Since then, environmentalists, writers, and scientists have been trying to write a new explanation of humanity’s role in the world.ĭavid Suzuki’s new book, The Sacred Balance, attempts to stitch together this new world view by looking at the balances that occur in the human body, the natural world, and in our social and spiritual lives. It buried forever the notion that people are masters of their environment. That view from space has changed the way we think about the Earth and the part we play in it more radically than did the Copernican revolution in the 16th century.
Cities, skyscrapers, and other Guinness-Book-of-World-Records manmade wonders disappeared into a swirl of greens and blues shrouded in a white cape of weather and atmosphere. Only a few decades ago, human beings had their first look at Earth from space.
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