David Suzuki Read online

  DAVID SUZUKI

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  DAVID SUZUKI

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Copyright © 2006 by David Suzuki

  06 07 08 09 10 5 4 3 2

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright).

  For a copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Greystone Books

  A division of Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  Canada V5T 4S7

  www.greystonebooks.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Suzuki, David, 1936–

  David Suzuki: the autobiography.

  Includes index.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55365-156-7

  ISBN-10: 1-55365-156-1

  1. Suzuki, David, 1936–. 2. Environmentalists—Canada—Biography.

  3. David Suzuki Foundation. 4. Authors, Canadian (English)—20th

  century—Biography. 5. Broadcasters—Canada—Biography. I. Title.

  GE56.S99A3 2006 333.72′092 C2006-900541-9

  Editing by Nancy Flight Copyediting by Wendy Fitzgibbons Jacket design by Jessica Sullivan & Naomi MacDougall Front jacket photographs: top left, top right, middle right, and bottom left: courtesy of the CBC; bottom right: Chick Rice Back jacket photograph courtesy of the CBC Text design by Lisa Hemingway

  Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens

  Printed on acid-free paper that is forest friendly

  (100% post-consumer recycled paper) and has been processed chlorine free

  Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

  With deepest gratitude,

  I thank and dedicate this book to the general public,

  who made my life's work possible.

  You watched and listened to my programs;

  you read, thought about, and responded to

  ideas I expressed in writing.

  Your support added weight and

  visibility to my efforts and carried me past

  numerous roadblocks and detractors.

  That support has been a great honor, privilege,

  and responsibility, which I have tried in my fallible, human

  way to live up to.

  My life and career in the university, research, and media

  would not have been possible without the generous and enthusiastic

  support of so many people in so many ways.

  With all my heart, I extend thanks to:

  My elders—Mom, Dad, Freddy, Harry

  My anchor and the love of my life—Tara

  The future—Tamiko, Troy, Laura, Severn, Sarika,

  Tamo, Midori, Jonathan

  The many students, postdocs, and associates who made my lab

  such a vibrant, exciting, and productive community

  The dozens of CBC radio and television staff, freelance researchers,

  writers, and media professionals whose efforts have made me look good,

  a job that Jim Murray reminded me is not easy

  The hundreds of volunteers, staff, and associates who have made

  the foundation such a supportive, joyful, and positive community

  The tens of thousands of people who have contributed to

  the foundation so generously

  Elois Yaxley, for bringing some order to my life

  Rob Sanders of Greystone Books and Patrick Gallagher

  of Allen & Unwin Publishers for steadfast support and encouragement

  Nancy Flight and Wendy Fitzgibbons for making this prose readable

  And my kid sister Aiko, who taught me so much about life

  and who died on the eve of 2006

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  ONE My Happy Childhood in Racist British Columbia

  TWO College and a Burgeoning Career

  THREE A New Career

  FOUR Stand-ups and Fall-downs

  FIVE Family Matters

  SIX Haida Gwaii and the Stein Valley

  SEVEN Adventures in the Amazon

  EIGHT Protecting Paiakan's Forest Home

  NINE A Step Back in Time

  TEN Down Under

  ELEVEN Starting the David Suzuki Foundation

  TWELVE Up and Running

  THIRTEEN Rio and the Earth Summit

  FOURTEEN Papua New Guinea

  FIFTEEN Kyoto and Climate Change

  SIXTEEN Reflections on Science and Technology

  SEVENTEEN A Culture of Celebrity

  EIGHTEEN Thoughts as I Grow Old

  Index

  PREFACE

  IN 1986, THE year I turned fifty, I had the temerity to write Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life. It was not intended as an autobiography but as a series of essays. My publisher encouraged me to supplement the pieces with more and more personal material, until the essays were reduced to three at the end of the book. To my astonishment and delight, people were interested in my experiences, and the book sold more copies than any other I have written. At the time, at the relatively young age of half a century, I didn't feel I had matured enough to have a perspective on my life. Now, two decades later, I know I was still a child in maturity, and even now, looking in the mirror, I have difficulty reconciling the old man gazing back at me with the still-young person in the mind behind the face.

  Although all people on Earth, as members of one species, share the same anatomy of the brain, the same chemistry of neurons, and similar sense organs, each of us “perceives” the world in a very personal way. We experience it through perceptual filters that are shaped by our individual genes and experiences, by our gender, ethnic group, religious background, socioeconomic status, and so on. Essentially, our brains “edit” the input from our sensory organs, “making sense” of it within the context of our personal history and the values and beliefs we have come to acquire.

  Now, as my aging body imposes limits and tells me to slow down, I spend more time in reflection, trying to put my most memorable experiences into a kind of order. It's the way scientists write up a research report or paper: we follow different avenues of inquiry, going down blind alleys, hitting a fast lane or taking a shortcut, zigzagging along as we probe an interesting observation or phenomenon. Then, when it's time to “write it up,” we shuffle through the experiments, tossing some out and organizing the remainder into an order that creates the illusion that a direct path was taken from the initial question to the final results.

  So it is with my life story. I don't have a photographic memory (thank god), and certain events that might have passed unnoticed by someone else may have stuck in my mind, whereas other, seemingly more monumental moments have faded away. This, then, is a story I have created by selectively dredging up bits and pieces from the detritus of seventy years of life. The first five chapters skim over the first fifty years, giving a somewhat different emphasis from that of Metamorphosis and offering some different information about those years, and the rest of the book describes events since then.

  Why would anyone else be interested in my life? I know people like to delve into the hidden parts of the lives of people who have acquired some notoriety, hoping to find juicy bits of gossip, signs of weakness, or faults that bring the subjects down off pedestals, or simply to expand on what one know
s about a public figure. It's not my intention to satisfy that curiosity. Instead, as an “elder,” I hope my reflections on one life may stir a reader to consider those thoughts in relation to his or her own life.

  chapter ONE

  MY HAPPY CHILDHOOD IN RACIST BRITISH COLUMBIA

  JAPANESE IMMIGRANTS BEGAN arriving in Canada in great numbers at the end of the nineteenth century, lured by the tremendous abundance of land, fish, and forests that promised money. Small, diligent, smelling of strange foods, speaking heavily accented English, these Asian newcomers seemed to be another kind of human being, willing to live in cramped quarters and squirreling away their hard-earned money. Laws were passed to bar them from voting, purchasing land, and enrolling in universities.

  Like many other Japanese, my maternal and paternal grandparents came to Canada less because they wanted to make a new life than because in Japan they were locked into extreme poverty. I cannot imagine the terrible conditions that made them take the chance to come to a country that regarded them and treated them as belonging to a kind of subhuman race. Japan was their home, and their intent was to return to it when they had made their fortune. But it was a journey to a distant land with no assurances they would ever return. After my birth, my father's parents never went back to Japan, and my mother's parents returned only after World War returned only after World War II, disillusioned by their treatment in Canada. They went back to Hiroshima, and both were dead in less than a year.

  My grandparents started their lives in Canada with little more than hope and a willingness to work. They had no formal education, spoke no English, and were of a culture totally alien to Canadians of the day, who had different attitudes and perspectives about everything from family to customs. Like the waves of immigrants who have come to this place over the past two centuries, my grandparents saw Canada as a land of opportunity and plenty. There is a story that neatly encapsulates this belief. Two immigrants arrive in Canada on a Sunday and take a stroll together along the street. One of them looks down and spots a twenty-dollar bill, which he bends to pick up. He's stopped by his friend, who tells him, “Leave it there; we'll start work tomorrow.”

  Today I watch the Chinese family that operates the corner store, the Punjabi cab driver working long, hard hours, and the Mexican itinerants picking vegetables; all doing jobs that few Canadian-born folks are willing to endure, they are part of the stream of immigrants like my grandparents who have enriched what has become a highly multi-cultural society. They bring to it their vigor and their exotic practices, languages, and beliefs. But in the early part of the last century, there were no constitutional guarantees in this country.

  My father and mother were born in Vancouver in 1909 and 1910, respectively, and survived the trauma of the Great Depression thanks to hard work and a strong extended family, which was held together by economic necessity and the forces of racism in British Columbia at that time. Asians, Canadian-born or not, differed from other Canadians in language, physical appearance, and behavior. My parents went to schools with other Canadians, and though Japanese was the first language each acquired at home, they soon were fluently bilingual and had many non-Japanese friends. Education was a very high priority for their parents, and Mom and Dad both completed high school, which was considered a good education in the 1920s. They stoically accepted encounters with bigots at school, in stores, and on the street, whereas only the most rebellious among Japanese Canadians of that time would ever have thought of dating, let alone marrying, a white person. Every one of the nine siblings of my parents' families married Japanese (today, among dozens of their children and grandchildren, only my twin sister, Marcia, is married to a Japanese). Even though their social lives revolved around family and other Japanese, however, my parents felt themselves fully Canadian.

  Hard work was a constant part of their lives from childhood on. At about ten years of age, my father was sent to live with a wealthy white family as a “houseboy,” performing small chores for the household and receiving room and board in return. Perhaps the most important effect of that period in his life was that in his time off he read the entire set of the encyclopedia The Book of Knowledge, and he retained much of that information. As a girl, Mom went out picking berries, something at which she became very adept. After the war, when we lived in southern Ontario, she, my sisters, and I worked on farms, picking strawberries and raspberries on piecework (that is, we were paid a set amount for each box we picked), but it was impossible to keep up with Mom.

  Dad and Mom met while they were both working with Furuya's, a Vancouver company that until recently still existed in Toronto; it specialized in imported Japanese food and cooking paraphernalia. The company had a rigid rule of nonfraternization between the sexes, but Mom and Dad began to date on the sly. Eventually, Dad had to quit Furuya's to date Mom more openly. His Japanese had deteriorated when he went to school, and when he approached Mom's father to ask permission to take her out, he must have phrased it in such a way that it sounded as if he were proposing marriage. “You're both far too young,” my grandfather replied in Japanese. “If you're serious, then wait, and come back in five years.”

  Well, they continued to see each other, and five years later, in the mid-1930s, Dad asked for permission to marry Mom and got it. Theirs was not a traditional arranged marriage; instead, they were imbued with the Western notion of romantic love. We kids took it for granted that they smooched, and on occasion we could overhear their active sex life.

  After they were married, they received financial help from Dad's parents to start a small laundry and dry-cleaning shop in Marpole, a Vancouver neighborhood near the edge of the city and alongside the Fraser River. We lived in the back of the shop. Mom had a miscarriage early in their marriage, and then Marcia and I arrived in the world on March 24, 1936. Dad says Mom became enormous, and the delivery was long and harrowing. I was born first, weighing in at nine pounds, but Marcia took a lot longer—so long, in fact, that Mom had no strength left and finally the doctor reached in with forceps and dragged Marcia out. As the second-born of twins, she is considered in Japanese tradition to be the elder, who allows the younger one of the pair to exit first. But she was tiny, weighing less than three pounds, and the forceps delivery caused some damage that resulted in a weakened right side.

  I was taken home when Mom left the hospital, but Marcia stayed behind. Visiting her daily, Dad was upset that she seemed to be left without any care, whereas I was at home and the center of attention. He told the doctor that if Marcia was going to be left to die, he would prefer to take her home where she could be loved and cared for. The doctor assented, and so this young couple took over responsibility for both babies, one requiring a lot of care and attention. And Marcia pulled through. As she grew up, I always felt Mom and Dad were too hard on her, treating her no differently from me and later our two sisters and demanding that she work alongside us. I learned later from my father that Mom was determined Marcia would grow up to be tough and able to take care of herself. She did; she became a terrific softball pitcher and is competitive in anything she does. She had two children and is a wonderful grandma to her two grandsons.

  Mom (Setsu Nakamura) and Dad (Carr Suzuki) on their wedding day, March 21, 1934

  Dad and the twins, Marcia (left) and me, in 1936

  Aiko arrived a year and a half later. Dad had hoped for another boy and had chosen the name Gerald, so when she was born, she was called Geraldine, or Gerry for short. We all had Japanese middle names, and in later life when she had assumed a more bohemian, artistic life, Gerry dropped her first name for Aiko, her second.

  Sibling to twins, Aiko behaved like the stereotypical second child: a trickster, full of mischief, always wanting to explore. Dad had a classic Japanese attitude toward girls: they should finish high school, get a job, and find a husband. We later moved to London, Ontario, and both Marcia and Aiko took off for Toronto as soon as they finished high school so that they could become independent. Soon Aiko was immersed in an artistic c
rowd. I remember going home to London while I was in college in the United States and meeting her boyfriend, Alex, a big Hungarian with a beard and ponytail. This was the mid-1950s, and a beard was shocking enough, but to us a ponytail on a man was unheard of. To top off the shame, Alex and Aiko were living together in an age when many men still hoped to marry a virgin. Aiko always pushed the edges, and I, Mister Square in a brush cut, was pulled into her exciting, scary world. I was with her when she died on December 31, 2005.

  During the war, when we were living in internment camps in the interior of British Columbia, Dad had been separated from the family for a year as he lived in a road camp building the Trans-Canada Highway. He did manage to make his way to Slocan City, where we were imprisoned, for a couple of days before going back to the road camp. Nine months later, our youngest sibling, Dawn, was born. Dawn became Dad's surrogate second son and accompanied him on numerous fishing trips. She did not want to follow her older sisters by going straight to work after high school, and when she said she wanted to go to university, Aiko and I lobbied very hard to support her until Dad relented. She was also a wonderful ballet dancer and, after completing her degree at the University of Toronto, obtained a Canada Council grant to dance with Martha Graham in New York City, a position she held for years.

  AS A BOY, I would stand for hours behind a steam-operated machine that Dad used to press shirts and pants, asking him a steady stream of questions as he worked. He was able to answer me with what he remembered from The Book of Knowledge. He would take me along when he delivered clothing to customers, and I would patiently wait for him in the car. He was a garrulous man, and toward the end of the deliveries his visits with customers got longer, probably because he was having a social drink or two while talking. Dad was a great friend, and I hope he found my companionship as much of a delight as his was for me.