Background and career
David Takayoshi Suzuki (born March 24, 1936) is a Canadian academic, science broadcaster, and environmental activist. Suzuki earned a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961, and was a professor in the genetics department at the University of British Columbia from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. Since the mid-1970s, Suzuki has been known for his television and radio series, documentaries and books about nature and the environment. He was the host and narrator of the long-running CBC Television science program The Nature of Things until his retirement in 2023. A longtime activist to reverse global climate change, Suzuki co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990. The Foundation's priorities are oceans and sustainable fishing, climate change and clean energy, sustainability, and Suzuki's Nature Challenge. The Foundation also works on ways to help protect the oceans from large oil spills such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Suzuki also served as a director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association from 1982 to 1987. He has frequently criticized governments for their lack of action to protect the environment. Suzuki was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2009. His 2011 book The Legacy won the Nautilus Book Award. He is a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2004, Suzuki ranked fifth on the list of final nominees in a CBC television series that asked viewers to select The Greatest Canadian of all time.
David Suzuki has a twin sister, Marcia, and two other siblings, Geraldine (now known as Aiko) and Dawn. He was born in 1936 to Setsu Nakamura and Kaoru Carr Suzuki in Vancouver, British Columbia, where his parents were also born. Suzuki's maternal and paternal grandparents immigrated to Canada at the beginning of the 20th century from Hiroshima Prefecture and Aichi Prefecture, respectively. A third-generation Japanese Canadian ("Canadian Sansei"), Suzuki's family suffered internment in British Columbia early during the Second World War until after the war ended in 1945. In June 1942, the government sold the Suzuki family's dry cleaning business, then interned Suzuki, his mother, and two sisters in a camp at Slocan in the British Columbia Interior. His father had been sent to a labour camp in Solsqua in the Southern Interior region of BC two months earlier. His sister Dawn was born in the internment camp. After the war, Suzuki's family, like other Japanese Canadian families, were forced to move east of the Rockies. They moved around Ontario, from Etobicoke, Leamington, and eventually to London. In interviews, Suzuki has consistently credited his father for having interested him in and sensitized him to nature. Suzuki attended Mill Street Elementary School and Grade 9 at Leamington District Secondary School before moving to London, Ontario, where he attended London Central Secondary School.
Suzuki received his Bachelor of Arts degree in biology in 1958 from Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he first developed an interest in genetics, and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961. From 1961 to 1962, he worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. From 1962 to 1963, he was an assistant professor at the University of Alberta. He was a professor in the genetics department at the University of British Columbia from 1963 until his retirement in 2001, and has since been professor emeritus at a university research institute. Early in his research career he studied genetics using the popular model organism Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies). To be able to use his initials in naming any new genes he found, he studied dominant temperature-sensitive (DTS) phenotypes. He jokingly noted at a lecture at Johns Hopkins University that the only alternative subject was "(damn) tough skin."
Suzuki began in television on January 10, 1971, with the weekly children's show Suzuki on Science. In 1974, he founded the radio program Quirks & Quarks, which he also hosted on CBC AM radio (the forerunner of CBC Radio One) from 1975 to 1979. Throughout the 1970s, he also hosted Science Magazine, a weekly program geared towards an adult audience. From 1979 to 2023, Suzuki hosted The Nature of Things, a CBC television series that has aired in nearly 50 countries. In this program, Suzuki aims to stimulate interest in the natural world, point out threats to human well-being and wildlife habitat, and present alternatives to humanity for achieving a more sustainable society. He has been a prominent proponent of renewable energy sources and the soft energy path. Suzuki was the host of the critically acclaimed 1993 PBS series The Secret of Life. His 1985 series A Planet for the Taking averaged more than 1.8 million viewers per episode and earned him a United Nations Environment Programme Medal. His perspective in this series is summed up in his statement: "We have both a sense of the importance of the wilderness and space in our culture and an attitude that it is limitless and therefore we needn't worry." He concludes with a call for a major "perceptual shift" in our relationship with nature and the wild. Suzuki's The Sacred Balance, a book first published in 1997 and later made into a five-hour mini-series on Canadian public television, was broadcast in 2002. Suzuki is now taking part in an advertisement campaign with the tagline "You have the power", promoting energy conservation through various household alternatives, such as the use of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. For the Discovery Channel, Suzuki also produced "Yellowstone to Yukon: The Wildlands Project" in 1997. The conservation-biology based documentary focused on Dave Foreman's Wildlands Project, which considers how to create corridors between and buffer zones around large wilderness reserves as a means to preserve biological diversity. Foreman developed this project after leaving Earth First! (which he co-founded) in 1990. The conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss were also directly involved. In October 2022, Suzuki announced his retirement from The Nature of Things series in spring 2023, to be replaced as host by Sarika Cullis-Suzuki, his daughter, and Anthony Morgan.
In February 2008, Suzuki urged McGill University students to speak out against politicians who fail to act on climate change, saying, "What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act." Suzuki is unequivocal that climate change is a very real and pressing problem and that an "overwhelming majority of scientists" now agree that human activity is responsible. The David Suzuki Foundation website has a clear statement of this:
The debate is over about whether or not climate change is real. Irrefutable evidence from around the world—including extreme weather events, record temperatures, retreating glaciers, and rising sea levels—all point to the fact climate change is happening now and at rates much faster than previously thought. The overwhelming majority of scientists who study climate change agree that human activity is responsible for changing the climate. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is one of the largest bodies of international scientists ever assembled to study a scientific issue, involving more than 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries. The IPCC has concluded that most of the warming observed during the past 50 years is attributable to human activities. Its findings have been publicly endorsed by the National Academies of Science of all G8 nations, as well as those of China, India and Brazil.
