David Suzuki Gets It Right @ Occupy Vancouver

I have been talking about the need for leadership from the digital sphere to offer new models and strategies for the Occupy movement, strategies that are not reactive and not based on ‘fixing’ the existing financial system.

But we also need leadership from oral elders who can reorient the Occupy movement away from self-defeating aims like reforming the banking system and instead focus on building a sustainable future based on a sustainable economy. If the Occupy movement does not rally around the earth, if it does not rethink our relationship to our planet as it rethinks our economy, then it will miss the true crux of the problem.

We need an economy based on relationships not on products, on dialogues not on monologues. An economy that puts the earth first. If we can do that we may also learn to put each other’s welfare ahead of our own. If we remain lost in our dream of ‘ownership’ of the earth and of all living beings on it we will have little chance of overcoming those who claim to own us. Nor will we deserve to.

David Suzuki gets it: