David Suzuki

by David Suzuki

  As with my other children, we took Sev on camping trips from the time she was an infant, and she was soon catching fish in the ocean or freshwater lakes with my father, who was a fishing nut. From infancy, she accompanied us on Vancouver's annual Peace March as well as to protests against clear-cut logging.

  We moved to Toronto the September after Severn was born, so that Tara could commute to Boston to teach expository writing at Harvard while a nanny and I cared for Sev and, later, Sarika. For five years after that, we relocated to Toronto each autumn so Tara could teach the fall semester; I would work on the new season of The Nature of Things. We'd move home to Vancouver at Christmas and stay there until the next fall.

  We thought it was cute when Severn, at age five, gathered a group of children on the block in Toronto and decorated a wagon with signs saying things like Save Nature, and Protect the Animals. That summer, back in Vancouver, we found Sev had removed a number of hard-cover books from the house and had set up a table outside, where she was selling them for twenty-five cents apiece to raise money to help protect the Stein Valley. It was a noble cause, so we couldn't chastise her just because she didn't understand economics. I hope I managed to hide my annoyance.

  When Severn was born, it had been sixteen years since the 1964 birth of my youngest child in my first family, Laura, so having Sev seemed like starting anew. When Sarika arrived three and a half years later, Sev was running and talking and entertaining us with her cleverness. Sarika was a placid baby—we even thought of calling her Serena—so we could put her down and she would gurgle away happily as Severn cavorted at the center of attention. As Sarika grew and started to talk, we would often call her “Little Me Too” because of her insistence that she not be ignored. It was hard when her sister was constantly attracting the limelight. Sarika was very shy, but she was fearless and always up for any family adventure.

  Sarika in an Inuit outfit I brought back from the Arctic

  IN THE MEANTIME, AS our young family was growing, Mom was beginning to show signs of forgetfulness. She was constantly misplacing things—checks, clothing, letters—that might turn up weeks or months later or not at all. Dad and my sisters insisted she had Alzheimer's disease, but I denied it, because Mom exhibited no change in temperament. She did lose some of her inhibitions, however, and I took great delight in teasing her and telling off-color jokes, which would cause her to giggle.

  By the early '80s, though, it was clear she was losing her short-term memory. She never became incontinent or failed to recognize her family, although Dad said she sometimes confused him with her brother.

  As Mom lost interest in taking care of their finances, sewing, and cooking, Dad took on these responsibilities. He never complained, but I could see it was a heavy load, so I urged him to let me hire someone to help him. He resisted. “She devoted her life to me,” he said. “Now it's my turn to pay her back.” As Mom's needs increased, I saw a patient side of Dad—he was compassionate, considerate, and loving, and I admired him for it. But it was not easy. I once dropped in to my folks' place in the evening to find Mom in bed and Dad weeping with sadness and frustration about the condition she was in.

  The day Sarika was born, I was in the hospital with Tara and Sarika when Dad arrived and asked anxiously, “Is Mom here?” She wasn't. My parents had come to the hospital to see the new baby, but as they were walking down the hall, Dad spotted an acquaintance and ducked in to see him, instructing Mom to “wait right here.” When he came out a few minutes later, she was gone. We began a frantic search for her, first running along all of the corridors of the hospital, then driving along streets in the neighborhood. Poor Tara had just given birth but was now worried sick about her mother-in-law. Tara's brother, Pieter, joined Dad and me as we drove along a series of grids looking for Mom, with no success.

  Night fell, and we decided to wait at home and hope the police would find her. A call came at about 3:00 in the morning, and Dad and I raced down to the police station. A cab driver had picked her up and realized she was confused and needed help. Dad leaped out of the car when we got to the police station and raced up the stairs, where Mom was waiting at the top. He was crying as he hugged her. “What are you crying about? Let's go,” she said, as if nothing had happened. Her stockings had been worn right through, and she had been spotted in the Marpole neighborhood of Vancouver, miles away from the hospital, and trying to get into a blue Volkswagen van like the one Dad owned. Much later, the taxi had picked her up in a completely different part of the city.

  On April 25, 1984, a month after they celebrated their fiftieth anniversary, Dad and Mom walked a few blocks to a local restaurant, had a meal together, and then went to a movie. As they were walking home, arm in arm, Mom had a massive heart attack and dropped to the sidewalk. Someone called a paramedic crew, who arrived within ten minutes and resuscitated her. They were doing their job, but the ten minutes of anoxia would have caused further damage to the brain already ravaged by dementia.

  I was in Toronto at the time and was able to rush home and be with her for the week before she finally “died” on May 2. As Dad said, “She had a good death,” she didn't suffer, she was not incapacitated physically, and she had been with him right up to the heart attack. An autopsy revealed that she did indeed have the brain-tissue plaques characteristic of Alzheimer's.

  chapter SIX

  HAIDA GWAII AND THE STEIN VALLEY

  ALONG THE WEST COAST of Canada, extending south from the tip of the Alaska panhandle, is a chain of islands that some call Canada's Galápagos Islands. During the last glaciation, some ten thousand years ago, most of Canada was entombed in an ice sheet more than one mile thick. It is thought the ice might have encircled but not completely enveloped the islands, which became refuges for species that could move away from the ice. As ice formed, plants and animals moved up the mountainsides, which eventually became islands in a sea of ice and the repository of the survivors. Today many of their descendants are found nowhere else on the planet. This is Haida Gwaii, the land of the Haida people, which was named the Queen Charlotte Islands by more recent arrivals.

  In the early 1970s, a combination of citizens, First Nations, and environmentalists on Haida Gwaii had become appalled at the logging practices on the islands and called for the British Columbia government to intervene and protect the land from the depradations. A symbol of the contentious areas was Windy Bay, a pristine watershed covering 12,350 acres of Lyell Island near South Moresby Island in the southern third of the archipelago.

  In 1974, a group of citizens on Haida Gwaii demanded protection of critical parts of the islands from clear-cut logging. In response, the provincial government set up the Environment and Land Use Committee, made up of representatives of the various interest groups. In 1979, one of the committee's recommendations was not to log in Windy Bay. That was not an acceptable option to the forest company, which continued to press the B.C. government to allow logging. But Premier Bill Bennett could not ignore the environmentalists' increasing outspokenness or the public's greater awareness of environmental concerns. So in 1979 yet another group comprising a broad spectrum of environmentalists, forest company representatives, and other interest groups was set up as the South Moresby Resource Planning Team, chaired by Nick Gessler, an American expat who was running the Queen Charlotte Islands Museum.

  I first heard about this controversy in 1982, when I received a handwritten note from the New Democratic Party member of Parliament representing the Skeena riding, which includes Haida Gwaii. In his note, Jim Fulton, the young social worker who had defeated the beautiful, charismatic incumbent and cabinet minister, Iona Campagnolo, wrote: “Soozook, you and The Nature of Things should do a program on Windy Bay.” At that point, I had no idea what the battles were about or even where Windy Bay was. But as I learned the issues, I could see it would be an important story and I suggested to Jim Murray, executive producer of The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, that we do a program on the fight over its fate. In fact, Dr. Bristol F
oster, a wildlife biologist who had worked for the B.C. government for years before quitting in frustration, had already contacted Murray about the Windy Bay story.

  Jim assigned the program to producer Nancy Archibald, and after the show's writer, Allan Bailey, had researched the background of the issue, Nancy and a crew flew to the islands to film. I followed days later to do some critical interviews and stand-ups on location in different parts of the archipelago. It was expensive to hire a helicopter and fly to the significant sites, so there wasn't a lot of time. Working frantically with Allan, I wrote, rewrote, and memorized the on-camera pieces as we flew by helicopter to different locations. Looking over those stand-ups today, I am gratified that they still resonate with relevance. I began the report this way:

  The vast forests of Canada are more than just a potential source of revenue: they're part of the spiritual mystique of the country. I'm on Windy Bay in the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, and this virgin forest began its existence over eight thousand years ago. Many of these trees were already mature adults long before Christopher Columbus discovered America. It was here that the Haida Indians hunted and fished. They used these trees to build their dugout canoes and their longhouses. It was these trees that inspired Emily Carr to paint some of her most haunting pictures. Having existed for thousands of years, this forest could disappear in a matter of months through logging. Tonight we face a special issue that could affect all Canadians and asks us to redefine our notion of progress.

  I continued with a piece on location in a clear-cut on Talunkwan Island, not far from Lyell Island, where logging was speeding along:

  There's nothing subtle about logging. It's the application of brute strength to efficiently clear large tracts of land. This is Talunkwan Island across from Windy Bay. Ten years ago, it was covered in forest just like Lyell Island. Then it was logged. It'll be a long time before the land recovers. We often hear of “harvesting” trees, but in areas like this, you can't farm a forest the way you do corn or tomatoes. The topsoil takes thousands of years to build up and the population of trees changes slowly over long periods of time. Now the thin layer of soil is exposed to easy runoff—and it rains a lot here. No one can say what these hills will look like in a hundred years, but you can be sure the forests will look nothing like the ones that once were here.

  At the end of the program, this was my conclusion:

  The Queen Charlotte Islands are at the outer edge of the west coast, a unique setting where we can be transported back to prehistoric times when only natural laws prevailed. It took thousands of years and countless seeds and seedlings before giant trees like those at Windy Bay took root and survived. Many of them are more than six hundred years old. Once it took two men weeks to cut one of them down—today one man can do it in minutes. Is this progress? Wilderness preserves are more than just museums for relics of the past, they're a hedge against our ignorance, a tiny reserve from which we might learn how to use our powerful technologies more wisely. But in the end, our sense of awe and wonder in places like this changes us and our perspective of time and our place in the nature of things.

  I have often been accused by vested-interest groups like loggers and forest company executives of being biased in my reporting. Viewed through their perspectives of immediate jobs and profit, my statements may seem slanted, but nature and so many other values are ignored by the lenses of such priorities. I believe a huge problem we face today is the overwhelming bias of the popular media that equates economic growth with progress.

  For the program I interviewed Tom McMillan, then federal minister of the environment; environmentalist Thom Henley; Bill Dumont, with Western Forest Products Limited; forester Keith Moore; Nick Gessler; Bristol Foster; traditional Haida Diane Brown; Miles Richardson, then president of the Haida Nation; and Guujaaw, a young Haida artist and carver. Ruggedly handsome, long hair loosely braided, a twinkle in his eye so you never knew whether he was serious or kidding, Guujaaw changed the way I viewed the world and set me on a radically different course of environmentalism.

  The Big Four on Haida Gwaii—me, Miles Richardson, Jim Fulton, and Alfie Collinson

  I knew that unemployment in Skidegate and Masset, the two Haida communities, was very high, that some of the loggers were Haida, and that the non-Haida forest workers often spent money in the two communities. If economic opportunities were desperately needed, one would think the Haida would welcome forest companies; yet Guujaaw had been a leader in opposing logging. When I asked him why, he answered, “Our people have determined that Windy Bay and other areas must be left in their natural condition so that we can keep our identity and pass it on to following generations. The forests, those oceans, are what keep us as Haida people today.”

  Windy Bay, forests, and oceans were critical to Haida identity? This was a statement of a fundamentally different relationship with the “environment” than most of us have, a sense that we are where we live, a relationship that is essential to future generations for whom present Haida people feel a responsibility. I wondered how many executives of forest companies—or of any company for that matter—would consider future generations a fundamental part of their planning and actions.

  I continued my interview: “So if the trees are logged off—” Before I could finish my question, he responded, “If they're logged off, we'll probably end up the same as everyone else, I guess.”

  “The same as everyone else”—such a simple statement, yet so deeply significant. It was only days later, while I was watching the rushes, that I recognized the enormity of this insight. Since then, Guujaaw has confirmed that my interpretation of his remarks is correct: Haida people do not think they end at their skin or fingertips. Guujaaw opened for me a window into a radically different way of seeing the world. As I reflected on his words, it became obvious that these words are true for me and for all of us.

  If we looked at another person with a machine that registers temperatures in different colors, we would see a gradient of heat exuding from her body into her surroundings. Water vapor and tiny electromagnetic emissions also fan out from any body while we exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with plants on land and in water. Each of us is connected to our surroundings, just as the Haida see that the air, water, trees, fish, and birds of their land make them who they are. Talk to most Haida and within a few minutes it becomes clear that Haida Gwaii, “Island of the People,” the islands they consider home, not only embody their history and culture but also are the very definition of who they are and why they are special and different.

  Miles Richardson once told me about a meeting of the Fourth World Wilderness Congress, held in Colorado and attended by delegates from fifty-five countries and indigenous representatives from around the world. Miles was there for his expertise in aboriginal politics. One evening, he found himself in a circle with other First Nations representatives, including some elders. He was lamenting that the Haida had lost so many of their ceremonies and cultural traditions, as well as their language. An elder sitting next to him, who Miles had thought was snoozing, lifted his head and remarked: “You know those ceremonies, those songs, those traditions you're talking about—they haven't gone anywhere. They're in the same place your forefathers found them. They're in the forests, they're in the ocean, they're in the birds, they're in the four-leggeds. You've just forgotten how to listen. I have a suggestion—before you take another step forward [meaning, do more politicking], take a step back and remember how to listen.” Miles was tremendously moved by this and says he hardly said a word for the next three days.

  My grandparents, like most newcomers to North America over the past five centuries, arrived with a very different attitude to the land. To them, Canada was a totally alien country. Many earlier immigrants survived only because of the knowledge and generosity of the aboriginal people. The attraction of North America may have been freedom from the tyranny of church or despots, opportunity in a resource-rich region, land for farming, ranching, mining, or ot
her development. But most of those immigrants were incapable of learning from the aboriginal people or the indigenous flora and fauna because they lacked the respect to watch, listen, and learn from them. Instead, they attempted to “make over” the land to what was familiar, bringing their domesticated plants and animals, clearing the land of its native forests and prairies, draining wetlands, straightening or damming rivers, and dumping wastes without a thought. And once they were established, they attempted to remove the indigenous people by killing them or forcing them to abandon their languages, culture, and values to become Canadians.

  The Nature of Things with David Suzuki program on Windy Bay was broadcast in 1982 to a large audience and elicited more letters in response than any other show in the series since its inception in 1960. After the program had run, the South Moresby Resource Planning Team reached the same conclusion as the committee before it—Windy Bay, a jewel set in the misty isles, had to be protected from logging.

  Premier Bennett still resisted the team's recommendation because of immense pressure from logging interests. He did what politicians often do in such circumstances—he punted, setting up yet another group, the Wilderness Advisory Committee, headed by the respected lawyer Bryan Williams. But so many battles over logging had broken out all over the province that the committee was charged with examining sixteen contentious areas and coming up with decisions on all of them in three months! After years of deliberation and no decisions about Haida Gwaii, Bennett set a ludicrously short time to decide on all these areas. Environmentalists immediately pointed out there wasn't enough time to perform the job responsibly, adding that the committee's membership was too heavily weighted toward the logging industry.