“We invented the notion of a future”

There’s another excerpt from the foreword David Suzuki wrote for Now or Never, the latest from Tim Flannery, that I wanted to share in addition to the one I cited yesterday. I can’t really praise Suzuki’s eloquence without sharing my favourite excerpt from the foreword in question:

“It has long been my contention,” Suzuki writes, “that at the time of our emergence as a species on the plains of Africa, we gave no hint of our explosive development into a dominant force in only 150 millennia. That’s because our evolutionary advantage was hidden in our skulls. The human brain conferred an enormous memory, insatiable curiosity, and impressive creativity that more than compensated for our lack of physical and sensory capacities.

“Accumulating knowledge through experience and imagination, we invented the notion of a future; and in so doing, we found we could influence that future.

“Using our knowledge and memory, we could look ahead, anticipate dangers and opportunities, and thus deliberately choose to take actions that avoided the dangers and exploited the opportunities. Foresight was our great advantage and was a key part of our enormous success as we spread across the planet.”

It’s this gift of foresight that Suzuki says, at the end of the passage I cited yesterday, “demands that we take the gloves off and tell it like it is” about the urgent need for action on climate change.

This is the second time in as many days that I’ve plugged Flannery’s book by praising the foreword written by another author, and I’d hate to make you think that Flannery himself hasn’t written a great book. There’s an interesting figure or quotable idea on just about every page, and I definitely encourage you to check it out.

Posted in Uncategorized