The first thing that surprises me about David Suzuki is that his office is an epic mess.
Not the kind that takes a day or two to tidy, but rather one that includes layers of clutter that could well date back to Precambrian times – yellow papers, dusty textbooks and, weirdest of all, a life-sized cut-out of Mr. Suzuki himself standing in the corner, surveying the whole sorry state.
It's shocking, of course, because this is the office of a man who has devoted his life to the noble (but perhaps lost) causes of clean air, land and water.
Now, he is leading me away from the mess, down a greyish hallway into a greyish room, where I expect him to discuss these things as he marks a milestone: His 75th birthday.
Instead, he wants to talk about women. He has just heard a radio documentary about how Japanese Canadians are astonishingly unlikely to marry within their culture. That makes Mr. Suzuki an anomaly, because his first wife is Japanese-Canadian.
“That's because after the war, I never had the nerve to date a white girl. Really, we were the enemy,” recalls Mr. Suzuki, a third-generation Japanese Canadian whose family suffered internment in British Columbia during the Second World War.
The government sold his family's dry-cleaning business and sent his father to a labour camp. The Suzukis subsequently relocated to London, Ont.
“When I was a teenager, my dad took me into a room and said, ‘Listen, the only acceptable girl for you is a Japanese girl,'” Mr. Suzuki says.
“I said, ‘Dad, there are only 10 Japanese girls in London and three of them are my sisters.'”
Mr. Suzuki's father said that if his son couldn't find a Japanese bride, he should, in descending order of preference, seek out the following: Chinese, native Indian, black or Jewish.
“Unacceptable was white,” he says. Which is what his second, and current wife, Tara Cullis, happens to be. When he married her in 1972, his father was not pleased. “We'd go out to dinner and he'd say, ‘Your people did this,' and she'd end up weeping. Finally, one night, it was unbearable. ... I went to my dad's place and I said, ‘Listen, just because you've been a victim doesn't give you the right to be a goddamn bigot. You're nothing but a racist.' And he broke down and wept. I'd never seen my dad cry, but that was when he began to heal,” recalls Mr. Suzuki, whose father died at the age of 85.
That's 10 years older than Mr. Suzuki is today (his birthday was on March 24), but he says he has crossed the threshold into the “death zone,” where the obituaries he reads in the newspaper tend to be devoted to those younger than him.
That has him thinking about the inevitable subject of legacy.
Mr. Suzuki started his career as a geneticist in the 1960s, studying fruit flies, and spent the next decade distinguishing himself as a science broadcaster, with the weekly children's show Suzuki on Science, then Quirks and Quarks and, ultimately, The Nature of Things, which has aired in nearly 50 countries around the world. He helped to establish the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990, a non-profit environmental organization.
Today, Mr. Suzuki has become the very thing he claims to loathe: a personality, a face that fronts a cause. “I did not want [the foundation's success to be based on] a cult of personality,” he says. “The foundation has got to go on after I kick the bucket.”
But his popularity as a television personality drew donations. Started during the height of the environmental movement, the foundation seemed to tap into a demand for change.
Even right-wing politicians such George Bush and Margaret Thatcher were claiming to be environmentalists because they felt that the label would win them votes.
