Stockholm - David Suzuki of Canada has for many years actively debated the socially responsibility of science, and its relationship with society. On Tuesday, he was named winner of the honorary 2009 Right Livelihood Award, often known as the "alternative Nobel prize".
Born 1936, Suzuki has a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago. Since 1979 he has been anchorman of a science programme on Canadian television that has played a key role in raising awareness about science.
"It is such an important democratic question that the public be informed about natural science because many of the questions about survival today are scientific questions, like biodiversity, like climate change," Ole von Uexkull, director of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, told the German Press Agency dpa.
"If we don't have an informed public, then we cannot make informed choices," he added.
Climate change has been an issue Suzuki has worked on during the past 20 years, but he has also focused on the risks linked to genetic engineering.
In the early 1990s, Suzuki set up his own foundation to highlight what he called "the decade of sustainability," von Uexkull said.
Suzuki has criticized the conventional wisdom about growth, saying "steady growth forever is impossible in a finite world and our world is defined by the biosphere, the zone of air, water and land where all life exists."
