“My great mentor and hero was my father,” says David Suzuki, renowned geneticist, environmentalist, broadcaster and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, an environmental charity. “He was my pal and toughest teacher, the man who inspired me all of my life.”
Born in Vancouver in the late 1930s, Dr. Suzuki recalls early memories of fishing for trout with his father in Stanley Park or jigging for halibut off the Spanish Banks, now depleted of fish, as he sharply points out.
His childhood was bittersweet. When Dr. Suzuki was six years old, he and his family were incarcerated in a Canadian internment camp in the interior of British Columbia because they were Japanese. It was there that he formed his bond with nature.
“The area was beautiful, with forest all around, now part of Valhalla Provincial Park,” Dr. Suzuki says. “There was no school for a year and a half because there were no teachers, so I just roamed the hills gathering flowers, collecting insects and fishing.”
Long after the war, in 1992 when his father was in his eighties, they made a trip back to the area, fulfilling his father's long-held wish to see it again. Two years later, his father died of liver cancer.
“He was totally unafraid,” says Dr. Suzuki, who moved in with his dad for a last wonderful month together. “We laughed and cried. He kept saying over and over, ‘David, I am a wealthy man. I die a rich man.' And yet, we never once talked about ‘remember that closet full of fancy clothes, or that big car in 1979 or that huge house we had in London.' We talked about family, friends and the things we did together. That was his wealth.
“When I was a child, we were told, ‘you need food and clothing, but don't run after money. That's not what life is about.' Why have we got onto this thing about stuff? And money? I guarantee that at the end of your life, money is not going to be the thing you're most proud of. I believe that when we have strong, healthy sustainable communities, we'll have a strong, healthy sustainable planet.”
Dr. Suzuki is recognized globally as a leader in sustainable ecology and has received numerous awards including a UNESCO prize for science, a United Nations Environment Program medal and is a Companion of the Order of Canada. In addition to his work with the David Suzuki Foundation, a Vancouver based organization with about 50 staff, Dr. Suzuki continues as host of the long-running CBC TV show on science, The Nature of Things , and as professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, where he has been a faculty member since 1969.
“I'm very proud to be a scientist,” Dr. Suzuki says. “What I feel science has given me is a way of looking at the world, particularly from my colleagues in biology and ecology. What we do as ecologists is to try and find the underlying principles and conditions that have allowed life to survive and flourish.”
