The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

by David Suzuki, Amanda McConnell (With), Adrienne Mason (With)

Overview

In this extensively revised and enlarged edition of his best-selling book, David Suzuki reflects on the increasingly radical changes in nature and science — from global warming to the science behind mother/baby interactions — and examines what they mean for humankind’s place in the world. The book begins by presenting the concept of people as creatures of the Earth who depend on its gifts of air, water, soil, and sun energy. The author explains how people are genetically programmed to crave the company of other species, and how people suffer enormously when they fail to live in harmony with them. Suzuki analyzes those deep spiritual needs, rooted in nature, that are a crucial component of a loving world. Drawing on his own experiences and those of others who have put their beliefs into action, The Sacred Balance is a powerful, passionate book with concrete suggestions for creating an ecologically sustainable, satisfying, and fair future by rediscovering and addressing humanity’s basic needs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781926685496
Publisher:	Greystone Books
Publication date:	05/01/2009
Series:	David Suzuki Institute
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

David Suzuki is an acclaimed geneticist and environmentalist, the host of The Nature of Things, and the founder and chair of the David Suzuki Foundation . He is the author of more than forty books, including Good News for a Change, From Naked Ape to Superspecies (both co-authored with Holly Dressel), The Sacred Balance (co-authored with Amanda McConnell and Adrienne Mason), and David Suzuki: The Autobiography. He is the recipient of the Unesco Kalinga Prize for Science, the United Nations Environmental Medal, the UNEP’s Global 500 award, and has been named a Companion of the Order of Canada. In addition, he holds eighteen honorary degrees and he has been adopted into three First Nations clans. Suzuki lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Amanda McConnell has written more than 100 documentary films, many of them for The Nature of Things. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature, and she writes and gardens in Toronto, Ontario.

Adrienne Mason has lived on Vancouver Island all her life and spent twenty years on the west coast, first in Bamfield and then Tofino. As well as writing a local history column for Tofino Time, she is the author of numerous books and magazine articles about science, nature, and west coast history. Her most recent titles include West Coast Adventures, The Green Classroom, and The Nature of Spiders. In the course of writing Long Beach: A Storied Stretch of Sand, Mason searched for cougar tracks with her children, found the remains of old trails and homesteads in the area, and spent many hours interviewing the people who arrived at Long Beach and never left.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter 7 THe Law of Love

The Power of Touch

With the first kiss of a mother’s lips, the first gentle whisper from a father, a tentative snuggle from a sibling, love works its way into our central core. Within a newborn’s tiny brain, neural chemistry is afire, forging new neural pathways as the infant’s senses of sound and smell and touch.relay a flood of information from its new world.
The brain grows at an astonishing rate when we are young. We know, for instance, that young children can learn languages much more readily than adults. The rational brain is learning and absorbing, but so is the emotional brain. Developing infants need to bond with others, to feel security, compassion and love. The role of touch is paramount in human development. Without it, we lack the emotional nourishment we need to thrive, and perhaps, even to survive.
Our body’s largest organ—our skin—is primed for touch. Skin is riddled with nerves, touch receptors with which we feel hot and cold, pain and pleasure, tingles and tickles. We know from studies of primates and other animals that touch is central to proper emotional, psychological and physical development. In one study with monkeys, mothers were separated from their infants by a glass partition. In one group, the mother and child could still see, smell and hear one another, but they could not touch. The conditions were the same for a second group except that the pair could touch one another through holes cut in the partition. The babies who could not touch their mothers cried and paced, whereas the babies who could touch did not show serious behavioural problems. When reunited, the babies that had been deprived of touch clung obsessively to their mothers and failed to develop the level of independence and confidence shown by the other monkeys.
A parent’s touch may not only comfort and please its offspring, but new studies show that touch actually modifies brain development. Like human parents, rat parents have different parenting styles, with some being more attentive than others. Michael Meaney of McGill University demonstrated that differences in maternal care can make physical changes in the brain and determine how rats cope with stressful situations.
Meaney found the offspring of rats that spent more time licking and grooming their pups were better able to deal with stress later in life. The higher the incidence of grooming, the lower the levels of stress hormones produced by the pups. This meant that pups raised by particularly attentive mothers were calmer during stressful times later in life, and they also showed a greater capacity for learning. Overall health improved as well, since long-term exposure to high levels of stress hormones can contribute to chronic problems such as heart disease or diabetes.
The stimulation provided by licking actually triggered a change in the DNA chemistry in certain genes in the baby rats. As the mother licked and groomed her pups, she essentially “flipped a switch,” turning on genes that reduced the amount of hormones released during periods of stress. More licking resulted in more receptors in the pups brains that regulate the production of stress hormones.

Table of Contents

Annotated with new material
Chapter 1: Homo sapiens: Born of the Earth
• New information on brain plasticity.
• Updated information on total number of species on Earth and examples of how little we actually know when discussing life on Earth
• Addition of information on the Human Genome Project.
• Expansion of section on consumerism and the societal and environmental effects.

Chapter 2: The Breath of All Green Things
• New section on how humans and other mammals cope in low-oxygen environments
• Revised section on how, 2.5 billion years ago, bacteria developed a way to capture light energy and convert it into energy/food —photosynthesis
• New section on how atmospheric pollutants "jump" to regions far from their source (e.g., contamination of Arctic mammals, including humans, from pollutants that original thousands of kilometres away).

Chapter 3: The Oceans Flowing through Our Veins
• New information on the idea of "Hypersea" proposed by Mark and Dianna McMenamin
• Addition of information on the influence of the Amazon Forest in driving world climate and weather patterns.
• Addition of information on water on other planets, including Mars, Saturn, and some Jovian moons.
• New section on the environmental consequences of bottled water.

Chapter 4: Made from the Soil
• Update on the incredible diversity of life in the soil—as many as one billion individual bacteria, split amongst 40,000 species, in a teaspoon of forest soil
• New section on life forms distinct from anything that has been discovered before.
• New section on the abundance and importance of fungi.
• Update of section on human agriculture.
• New section on the tragic desertification of the Aral Sea, which, up until the 1950s, was the world's fourth largest lake.
• New section: Feeding Ourselves Susatainably. Discusses the constraints of industrial agriculture and ways in which communities around the world are trying to reverse the effects through local sustainable agriculture projects.

Chapter 5: The Divine Fire
• New section on medically-induced hypothermia and how it can help the body heal in certain situations, such as after brain injury or brain surgery.
• New section on animal thermoregulation.
• New section on preliminary experimentation creating fuel from photosynthesis (hydrogen gas).
• New sections on peak oil and climate change, including examples of how some communities are making positive changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Chapter 6: Protected by Our Kin
• New section on gene transfer technology, and the risks of tinkering with lifeforms when our basic knowledge about how cells, organisms and ecosystems work is too limited to allow us to anticipate the repercussions of manipulating genes.
• New section on the "salmon forests" of the west coast of North America. A wonderful example that illustrates the interconnectedness of life.
• Update information on biodiversity of life as well as repercussions over rates of extinction.

Chapter 7: The Law of Love
• New section on the chemistry of love; the changes our bodies go through when we give and receive love.
• New section on the power of touch, with examples of how humans and other animals can fail to thrive without the emotional nourishment of touch.
• Update to section, Lessons Learned from Tragedy, on how institutionalization as babies and toddlers affected Romanian orphans.
• New section on the social relationships of non-humans, particularly other primates.
• Updates to section on biophilia.
• Introduction to ecopsychology, and how reconnecting with others and the nature can help people heal.


Chapter 8: Sacred Matter
• New section on consciousness and self-awareness in humans and other animal species.
• New section discussing ideas as to why we have religion.

Chapter 9: Restoring the Balance
• Updating ideas for positive action, including the Suzuki Foundation's Nature Challenge.
• Update to section on The Natural Step, including examples of communities and companies adopting ideas from this philosophy.
• Update to information on Grameen Bank.