The Sacred Balance

Everyday in the media, society is confronted with the attitude that we are inevitably heading for a global environmental catastrophe that will destroy mankind. Constantly scaring society as a means to create awareness for the environment has created ‘doom fatigue'. The threat of doom for humankind is used so often, that it has become a cliché that many dismiss simply as a shallow warning. In his book The Sacred Balance, David Suzuki has attempted to overcome the ‘doom fatigue' so his ideas of conservation and environmental management do not become the monotonous endeavours of intimidation that many environmentalists employ. The extensive use of diagrams, quotes, anecdotes and statistics are utilised to create a holistic portrayal of our dependence on the environment, thus reinforcing Suzuki's attitude that society needs to treat the planet as though it were sacred. While The Sacred Balance reveals how we are influenced by our habitat from numerous positions, I feel as though Suzuki has failed to overcome the ‘doom fatigue' in his book. Even though I will live a majority of my life in the years that many depict to be consumed with disaster, The Sacred Balance has not convinced me about the future of our planet.

Suzuki uses statistics throughout the text to allow the reader to visualise elements of his arguments that may be difficult for many to understand. Statistics also add credibility to Suzuki's propositions, giving abstract ideas a calculated value, regardless of whether the figures are rough estimates. In the chapter "The Oceans Flowing Through Our Veins" Suzuki discusses our dependence on our water resources and argues how we have forgotten that we must protect them from pollution. Simply saying our water is polluted is hardly engaging, instead Suzuki reveals how each cup of Toronto's drinking water contains 30,000,000,000,000 molecules of water from human urine, ten million molecules of industrial solvents and even four million molecules of banned CFC's.