Biography

February 22, 1955 · St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

He was awarded the O.C. (Officer of the Order of Canada) on April 6, 2006.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

It's very easy to get judgmental. You know: corporations, you're bad; environmentalists, you're good. It has that polarizing effect. And then nobody respects either. What I want to say to corporations is: A dead planet is bad for business. Your business model falls apart when everybody is dying. And from the environmentalist point of view: how do we go about feeding and clothing and housing seven billion people and try to keep all that in check? We have no choice but to engage in technological innovations.

If you actually do something that plunges the electorate deep into a recession, then you're done, you're out. The electorate won't put up with that. So can you have a healthy, steaming economy with a decent growth rate, and also at the same time conserve and not exploit as much of the resources as is necessary to keep that growth?

We're the species that's now clearly in control of the resources and using them at breakneck speeds. You'd have to be under a rock not to know that we're not the best managers out there. Just look at the state of the oceans.

The more I worked on water, the more I recognized that it probably sits as one of the most important issues of our time. Of all the resource depletion that we're doing and all the interventions we're doing in nature, water is the most consequential. One thinks that water - it's a hydrological cycle, it just happens, it regenerates itself. But it doesn't.

I do love a photograph that doesn't immediately reveal itself, that you have to spend a bit of time with. In a world where we're so inundated with photographs, I try to find a perspective or point-of-view that challenges us in terms of what we're seeing. I'm always interested in finding that singular frame that defines his kind of large-scale human collective activity necessary to provide for seven billion people.