David Suzuki

We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit.

As parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts we need to start getting out into nature with the young people in our lives. Families play a key role in getting kids outside.

One of the joys of being a grandparent is getting to see the world again through the eyes of a child.

The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.

Do you know how much land is under ice, rock and snow? Do you know why 90 percent of us live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border? We have this idea we're a vast country. But the reality is that a lot of it, a huge amount, is uninhabitable.

We no longer see the world as a single entity. We've moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world.

The future doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we're the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.

The terrible part of this looming catastrophe is that people have been working on solutions for years and have developed concrete steps to massively reduce our energy use, while stimulating whole new industries and technologies that are more efficient and affordable.

Economics and a reliance on science and technology to solve our problems has led to an unsustainable situation where continued growth in consumption is required for governments and business to be considered successful. This is a form of insanity. Economics is at the heart of our destructive ways and our faith in it has blinded us

If we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance.

If you're not being pessimistic, you're not being very realistic. But I think one must always have hope, and when you have children, of course, you have no choice but to work your tail off to try and protect the future for your children. And that is infused by hope in the end.

Conventional economics is a form of brain damage. Economics is so fundamentally disconnected from the real world, it is destructive.

Beyond reducing individual use, one of our top priorities must be to move from fossil fuels to energy that has fewer detrimental effects on water supplies and fewer environmental impacts overall.

I see a world in the future in which we understand that all life is related to us and we treat that life with great humility and respect.

Hydraulic fracturing requires massive amounts of water. Disposing of the toxic wastewater, as well as accidental spills, can contaminate drinking water and harm human health.

Doing all we can to combat climate change comes with numerous benefits, from reducing pollution and associated health care costs to strengthening and diversifying the economy by shifting to renewable energy, among other measures.

It's not unexpected that shooting massive amounts of water, sand, and chemicals at high pressure into the earth to shatter shale and release natural gas might shake things up. But earthquakes aren't the worst problem with fracking.

A baby nursing at a mother's breast... is an undeniable affirmation of our rootedness in nature.

We can't blame children for occupying themselves with Facebook rather than playing in the mud. Our society doesn't put a priority on connecting with nature. In fact, too often we tell them it's dirty and dangerous.

Some solutions are relatively simple and would provide economic benefits: implementing measures to conserve energy, putting a price on carbon through taxes and cap-and-trade and shifting from fossil fuels to clean and renewable energy sources.

Conserving energy and thus saving money, reducing consumption of unnecessary products and packaging and shifting to a clean-energy economy would likely hurt the bottom line of polluting industries, but would undoubtedly have positive effects for most of us.