“In the short term, we must realize that we have better ways to create jobs and build the economy than holding an ‘everything must go’ sale on our precious resources . . . Our highest priorities must be the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil that provides food and the biodiversity that keeps us alive and healthy.”
– Dr. David Suzuki
Dr. Suzuki is one of Canada’s most influential conservationists and a world leader in sustainable ecology. He has used multiple arenas, including academia, radio and television, books, and the David Suzuki Foundation to spread his crucial message that humans cannot thrive without rethinking their relationship with nature and working to preserve the planet.
A geneticist by trade, Dr. Suzuki holds the title of Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia and 25 honorary degrees.
Dr. Suzuki has not confined his scientific knowledge to the ivory tower, however, but has been active in educating the public through his 52 books and numerous award-winning radio and television series.
Writer, Advocate and Conservation Leader
But Dr. Suzuki is not solely a researcher and educator; he is also an active advocate. In 1990, he co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation to “collaborate with Canadians from all walks of life including government and business, to conserve our environment and find solutions that will create a sustainable Canada through science-based research, education and policy work.”
The Suzuki Foundation has been leading the way towards a greener Canada. Strengthening laws to protect Canada’s watersheds and fisheries, mobilizing grassroots power to prevent the creation of a new “Mega-Quarry,” using litigation to ensure that Canada’s at-risk species are protected, and researching pathways to a clean energy future for Canada are just a few of the ways the Foundation has worked to protect Canada’s environment.
Inspiring Community Solutions
The Suzuki Foundation also embraces community solutions to ecological problems.
Through its “Homegrown National Parks” project, communities in Toronto have taken control of the ecological health of their city by innovating and implementing environmental projects throughout the city, ranging “from pothole planters and canoe gardens to butterfly friendly schoolyards and ‘parkify-ing’ a residential street.”
Join NWF in Celebrating Our Conservation Heroes
Dr. Suzuki has been an indispensable advocate for conservation and action on climate change. We hope you will join us at NWF’s National Conservation Achievement Awards Gala, April 30, to celebrate Dr. Suzuki’s incredible achievements!
Learn more about NWF’s National Conservation Achievement Awards Gala >>
As National Wildlife Federation’s naturalist and media personality, I do a monthly appearance on the Today Show, usually during the 4th hour with Kathie Lee and Hoda. Each time, I bring a variety of animal ambassadors to help inspire the millions of viewers to care about wildlife and to join in NWF’s conservation efforts.
I’ve been doing this Today Show stint for over four years at this point, so the ladies and I have become pretty comfortable with each other.
Watch the clip below to see Hoda poke a little good-natured fun at me. And as always, enjoy the beauty and the antics of the animals and get involved in our conservation work.
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My monthly appearance on the Today Show fell on Earth Day this year, which was a nice coincidence given that wildlife conservation and protecting the planet were already on everyone’s mind.
Below is the clip of the segment. As always I was there to introduce some wonderful animal ambassadors. You’ll see that some are cute and some beautiful, but as I pointed out to Kathie Lee and Hoda, even the scary or gross-looking animals are still important and worthy of our protection.
In the clip, I mention National Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Adoption Program, which you can check out here. It’s a great way to support NWF’s mission and help wildlife on Earth Day.
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If you missed the segment, here it is, broken up into two clips. Conan as always is hilarious and the animals were awesome.
Which animal is your favorite? If I had to pick, mine has to be the baby jaguars or the black throated monitor lizard!
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The scariest thing about television may not be the array of monster movies lined up on basic cable this month.
A new report from Common Sense Media (PDF ) finds that more than half of all American children between the ages of 0-8 now have access to one of the newer mobile devices at home, and nearly one-third have a TV in their bedroom. Overall, it indicates that ‘screen time’ is higher than ever for kids.
As if by providence alone, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned last week about the need to beat back this very trend, formally cautioning parents to limit their young kids’ screen time—and even the amount of time they spend watching TV near their kids.
But the former study concentrates largely on the breakdown of what kinds of media kids are using, and how they split up demographically. It spends a lot of timing parsing out childhood use of mobile apps and equal access to TV. It certainly doesn’t mention screen alternatives.
And the latter warning, while commendable, actually represents a softened stance from a similar 1999 recommendation:
Dr. Brown said the new policy was less restrictive because “the Academy took a lot of flak for the first one, from parents, from industry, and even from pediatricians asking, ‘What planet do you live on?’ ” The recommendations are an attempt to be more realistic, given that, between TVs, computers, iPads and smartphones, households may have 10 or more screens.
So while we learn more all the time about the scale and toll of the indoor (and screen-bound) childhood epidemic, many seem to be conceding defeat—or at least admitting that prying kids away from TVs, computers and the like is simply too unrealistic.
Risks of (and Alternatives to) a Screen-Bound Childhood
Children who play outside are healthier, more creative in their play and show better concentration. Sometimes ignored but no less important, research (PDF) has shown that outdoor activities like hiking or camping can positively influence a kid’s attitudes toward nature (and environmentally conscious behavior) when they grow up.
Instead of screen time (or at least balancing moderate screen time), encourage your kids to do something outdoors the next time they say they’re bored. Check out these outdoor Halloween games or download a Spider Bingo card. Better yet, take ’em to Walker Nature Education Center for bat classes!
Do you know of any great outdoor activities, the kind that reliably make kids forget they’re not staring at a screen? Let me know in the comments below!
A new study from researchers at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Burden of Disease and Cost-Effectiveness and elsewhere published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine finds that, for people over the age of 25, every hour of television watched could shorten life expectancy by nearly 22 minutes.
The amount of TV viewed in Australia in 2008 reduced life expectancy at birth by 1.8 years (95% uncertainty interval (UI): 8.4 days to 3.7 years) for men and 1.5 years (95% UI: 6.8 days to 3.1 years) for women. Compared with persons who watch no TV, those who spend a lifetime average of 6 h/day watching TV can expect to live 4.8 years (95% UI: 11 days to 10.4 years) less. On average, every single hour of TV viewed after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 (95% UI: 0.3–44.7) min.
That means that, while enjoying the 2002-2008 HBO series The Wire, I basically shaved 1,320 minutes off my life. The Wire is a really great show, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t watch it, but…that’s 22 lifespan hours down the tubes, to be measured from now on as Subtracted Max Hours (SMH).
Delightful Aaron Sorkin genre-straddler SportsNight clocks in at 495 minutes–8.25 SMH. Even The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, which I watched on TV last night, robbed me of nearly 0.5 SMH (commercials included). I thoroughly enjoy unrealistically limber sitcom dialogue and watching Stockard Channing assemble a team of basketball players according to astrological sign, respectively, but I probably could have used that end-of-life time for something, you know, meaningful.
As noted by Jenna Peters last month, a recent study showed obesity rates climbed over the prior year in 16 states, and not a single state reported a decline in the proportion of excessively overweight residents. Over 2 million children in America are obese … and, hey, look at that: children ages 3-12 spend 1% of their time outdoors, and 27 % of their time just watching TV.
In June, Jenna highlighted a study that concluded that for every additional two hours people spend glued to the tube on a typical day, their risk of developing type 2 diabetes increases by 20% and their risk of heart disease increases by 15% (honestly, those two posts do a much better job of summing up the stakes than I do).
Owing partly to their role as the conservationists of tomorrow, young people need to spend more time in nature and being generally active. That much is clear. But we sometimes forget how important it is for slightly-less-young people to do the same thing. As always, staying healthy is a big part of that.
I hereby resolve to start trading the occasional hour spent watching television for a Green Hour, and be more selective with the TV I do watch (who really needs to see the episode where George gets the Frogger machine for the 7th time? Not a strong one anyway).
Invasive species transported in ballast water carried by oceangoing ships have already imposed huge costs on communities throughout the Great Lakes region and devastated the fish and wildlife native to the Great Lakes and beyond. We can ill afford new invasions by the Asian carp or other non-native species.
As in the case of the recent Exxon Mobil oil spill in the Yellowstone River, the Enbridge spill has harmed the people and wildlife dependent on Talmadge Creek, a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. These oil spill incidents are not isolated. They underscore the crying need for better oversight of existing pipelines, as well as a halt to new ones such as the Keystone XL pipeline, which would perpetuate the world’s unsustainable dependence on oil while posing grave risks to America’s heartland.
Earlier this week, I talked about how few reporters are connecting Western wildfires to global warming despite overwhelming scientific evidence. But do other fields of research treat connections so gingerly?
Global warming is loading the dice for extreme weather events. Here’s how Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, puts it:
Given that global warming is “unequivocal”, and is “very likely” due to human activities to quote the 2007 IPCC report, the null hypothesis should now be reversed, thereby placing the burden of proof on showing that there is no human influence.
So we frequently hear that “while this event is consistent with what we expect from climate change, no single event can be attributed to human induced global warming”. Such murky statements should be abolished. On the contrary, the odds have changed to make certain kinds of events more likely.
But Dr. Trenberth has been quoted on the connection between climate change and wildfires just once in the last week, by the New York Times‘ John Broder. Instead, reporters continue craving those murky statements. “Can we attribute it to one thing? I don’t think so,” quoted a Greenwire report. “It would be irresponsible to say that,” quoted USA Today‘s story.
So how reporters treat similar connections in other areas? Does murkiness rule? A new study tying extended television watching with a range of serious heath problems gives us a chance to find out.
Would CNN’s report start with a warning that it would be irresponsible to connect any one death to television watching? Completely the opposite:
The connection between TV and disease isn’t a mystery. TV watching eats up leisure time that could be spent walking, exercising, or even just moving around, and it has also been linked to unhealthy diets, including consuming too much sugar, soda, processed food, and snacks — foods, perhaps not coincidentally, that are often found in television commercials.
What’s more, some studies suggest that prolonged sitting, over and above its impact on eating habits and exercise, may cause metabolism changes that contribute to unhealthy cholesterol levels and obesity.
“This is really the couch-potato syndrome,” Hu says. “These are extremely sedentary people who spend several hours on a couch watching TV. They’re very passive and their energy expenditure is very low, even compared to other sedentary behaviors like sitting and reading, or sitting while driving.”
Those threats are one of the big reasons the National Wildlife Federation launched the Be Out There movement to reconnect kids with nature.
Now here’s the key for the climate conversation. Of course you won’t be reading any obituaries saying, “John Doe died at the age of 78 after a long battle with TV watching.” But just because it’s not literally the cause of death doesn’t mean there isn’t a massive connection:
Extrapolating their findings to the entire U.S. population, the researchers estimate that for every two hours Americans spend watching TV each day, there are 176 new cases of diabetes, 38 additional deaths from heart disease, and 104 additional deaths due to any cause per 100,000 people per year.
Individual physicians may not see a dramatic rise in illness and death as a result of excessive TV watching, but the cumulative effect could have a major impact on public health in the long term, Kopecky says.
Of course global warming didn’t reach a hand down from the sky to light the wildfire. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a direct, provable connection.
And it certainly doesn’t mean Congress should keep sitting on the couch doing nothing about the climate crisis. No, wait – House Republican leaders are proactively trying to make things worse by attacking the Clean Air Act while refusing to roll back Big Oil subsidies. That’s despite a new Yale/George Mason University poll showing 85% of Republicans want clean energy and half want their members of Congress to make climate action a priority.
Considering what the latest climate science tells us about how fast our planet is warming, Washington’s climate inaction the equivalent of responding to a diabetes diagnosis by buying a new flat-screen TV and stocking up on Mountain Dew.
Learn more about the connection between global warming and changes to our weather patterns at NWF.org/ExtremeWeather.
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