How did I miss this? Not only did I miss the story Friday morning but I got an e-mail from the Suzuki Foundation on Saturday, and I missed that, too. Boo me.
Anyway, David Suzuki has resigned from the board of his charitable foundation. Here’s an excerpt from his resignation letter:
I have reached a point in my life where I would like to consider myself an elder. I want to speak freely without fear that my words will be deemed too political, and harm the organization of which I am so proud. I am keenly aware that some governments, industries and special interest groups are working hard to silence us. They use threats to the Foundation’s charitable status in attempts to mute its powerful voice on issues that matter deeply to you and many other Canadians. This bullying demonstrates how important it is to speak out.
You can read the whole thing here. Righteous squawking aside, I think it’ll be okay that Suzuki stepped down from the board of his foundation — though it could conceivably mess up his Science Matters column, which we’ve been running for more than a decade (I’m looking into that).
Who knows, maybe he was going to step down anyway, but because he’s politically savvy, he used his departure to take a well-deserved shot at our depraved, oil industry-run Conservative government (which totally deserves it for behaving like fascists). UPDATE: Suzuki actually resigned last year but the news broke in the media last week.
Speaking of Suzuki’s enemies, they are real and they are organized. Example: we got an op-ed submission last week criticizing Suzuki’s absolutely terrific article in the April 5 prairie dog. The letter was from Ottawa-based Tom Harris, executive director of the Orwellian-named International Climate Science Coalition, and was a nakedly political effort to attack Suzuki’s credibility and obscure the facts around climate change. I forwarded it to Dechene, who’ll have a blog post at some point. (We might also do something more in-depth on this organization in a future issue.)
A newspaper editor who wasn’t savvy to anti-environment propaganda would probably have been duped into running the ICSC column without comment. It’s a good reminder how pro-oil industry organizations with secret funding wage organized propaganda campaigns against environmentalists and the public interest.
