David Suzuki

by David Suzuki

After hearing Sev's stories about being back in the Amazon, I decided to return to Aucre to see Paiakan while we were in Brazil filming for The Sacred Balance. Paiakan was heavier, and the village too had changed since my last visit. For some unfathomable reason, the thatched roofs had been replaced with metal. A dispensary with a concrete floor had appeared, staffed by a Brazilian who gave out medical drugs; a solar-charged television set was turned on for a few hours a night to show soccer while I was there, and a hut had been built for people who were coming and going to the research station upriver. In Aucre, I woke to the tap, tap, tap of metal devices being used to shell Brazil nuts for the Body Shop chain, which uses the extracted oil in its cosmetics. The plane we had delivered in 1989 still linked the Kaiapo villages together.

  The cook for the camp at Aucre was a Brazilian who had a genuine affection for the Kaiapo and had been adopted by them as a Kaiapo, which is a tremendous honor and act of trust. To be adopted, he had to fast for a day, have his hair shaved off, and undergo an entire day of ritual dancing and painting.

  Another big change was that Paiakan's daughters were being educated away from the village, in Redenção. Paiakan allowed mahogany trees to be selectively logged for the money he needed to keep the girls in town, and Juneia Mallus is disillusioned by this, but Barb Zimmerman believes such selective logging has a relatively small ecological impact. Paiakan still hopes to rally more outside supporters for preservation of the Amazon, but time has gone by and he has been stuck in the village, marginalized, forgotten by the media.

  While I was there, Paiakan and I went fishing again. Unlike our summer visit of 1989, this one took place right after the rainy season and the river was quite high, flowing over the banks and into the forest. As we started off, Paiakan drove the boat right into a bush overhanging the river and began picking the walnut-sized orange fruit and dropping them into the bottom of the craft. When he had accumulated quite a large pile, he backed the boat away and, as we began our trip downriver, he told me to bait up with the fruit. If I hadn't known any better, I would have thought he was playing a trick on this gringo, and I was a little skeptical, but I dutifully pushed a hook through the skin of the fruit.

  “Cast it out,” he urged me, so I began to cast in a half-hearted way. I just couldn't imagine fishing with a fruit on my hook. What if someone saw me? Paiakan killed the engine, baited a hand line with another fruit, and began to throw it toward the trees along the river's edge. Right away he was hauling in a huge, flat, silvery fish. Well, I began to cast in earnest then and immediately hooked a fish, which broke my line. Paiakan caught three fish, while I hooked several and lost them all. We drifted down to a place where there were large rocks and pools; Paiakan jumped out and cast a hand net, pulling in several of the same species at each throw. In the end, we had ten beautiful fish, and once again I was awed by Paiakan's skill and knowledge. I caught no fish that day.

  All too soon, my short visit was over, and I began to prepare to leave. Irekran offered to paint my body, which I had always hoped for, but I knew I would have to be filming again in a few days. “Not my face,” I told her, with mixed feelings. Severn had been painted and I would love to have had that experience, but it would also have made me stand out and be subjected to stares in airports, which did not please me. So Irekran painted me up to my chin, with long, vertical stripes of dark-black dye. When I asked her how long the paint would last, she answered, “About ten days.” Wrong. It lasted a month and created a buzz when I went to the gym back in Canada.

  The day I left Aucre, I was wakened by a horrendous racket, which I learned was the pharmacist spraying insecticide around the village—malaria had come to this part of the forest. It seems there is no way to escape the forces of change, even in the deepest part of the Amazon.

  Paiakan and me displaying his wife Irekran's paint job

  chapter TEN

  DOWN UNDER

  WHEN I WAS A BOY, another magical place I dreamed of visiting was Australia, home of the fabled duck-billed platypus. The platypus was the sort of creature that fired the imagination of an animal nerd like me, and I yearned to see a live one. With a flat, wide bill like a duck's tacked on to a furry body, webbed feet for swimming, and a poisonous spur on the male's hind legs, the platypus is an egg-laying mammal that suckles its young on modified sweat glands that drip milk onto hairs from which the young can lap it up. In North America, zoos might boast kangaroos or even a koala, but never a platypus.

  In the 1960s, when I was starting out at the University of British Columbia, I met Jim Peacock, a brilliant young Australian doing groundbreaking work on chromosome replication in plants. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oregon, and we would meet at conferences. We became friends. Unknown to me, he put my name forward for a position at the University of Sydney. Out of the blue, I received a request to apply for a genetics position. I was flattered to receive an unsolicited inquiry right at the beginning of my career, so I sent my very short curriculum vitae, hoping that at least I might be invited to visit and give a talk.

  Instead, I was offered the position. I knew the university was the home of an eminent chromosome expert, Spencer Smith-White, which made the institution an attractive place to be. But my marriage was breaking up, and I could not imagine being so far away from my children, so I turned down the opportunity without even mentioning it to the head of my department to try to chisel a raise. I have often wondered what might have happened had I accepted that job.

  In 1988, I finally went to Australia, and I immediately fell in love with it. The environmental movement was at a peak of energy and public support around the world, and Australia had recently established the Commission for the Future, a government-funded organization to look at the role of science in Australian society and its place in the country's future. It was a good idea, similar to the Science Council of Canada, which Brian Mulroney dismantled in 1993 during his second term as prime minister.

  Phil Noyce (not the Aussie filmmaker of the same name) had been a science teacher who was recruited to the Commission for the Future because of his interest in communicating science to the public. He was young and keen and had encouraged the organization to invite me to give a series of talks in 1988. He would later become a close friend who convinced me of the importance of acting immediately to fight climate change. I had known humanity was affecting Earth's climate, but I felt it was a problem far in the future and that there were other, more pressing issues. Phil disagreed, and the evidence has piled up to show how prescient he was in believing action was urgent. (Tragically, he had an undetected congenital heart defect and died in the prime of his life, while playing tennis.)

  I was delighted to receive the invitation and accepted. At last I would be going to Australia. What would I see? Because of the horrific discrimination endured by the Aboriginal people of Australia and the government's infamous “white Australia” policy of restricting immigration to maintain a Caucasian-dominated nation, I expected to have to search hard to see a person of color. In addition, the sexism of the country was well known, and perhaps that is why one of the most globally influential feminists of the time was an Australian, Germaine Greer. I was fully prepared to encounter bigotry, sexism, and anti-gay attitudes. I also thought there would be kangaroos and other marsupials jumping through fields and streets.

  How ignorant I was. Like Americans arriving in Toronto to find a huge, modern city devoid of the expected igloos, I landed in Melbourne to discover a huge, sophisticated city of great diversity. I certainly did not expect to find vigorous Chinatowns in Melbourne and Sydney, as well as lots of Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese restaurants. To my surprise, I discovered sophisticated, multicultural cities with plenty of ethnic diversity. There were no kangaroos in the cities, of course, but I did see them in the wild, where I learned they also gather in farmers' fields and graze openly. In the cities and in “the outback”—less inhabited, vast inland areas—there was an amazing profusion of birds in all shapes and colors—c
ockatoos, budgies, parrots. Even the “pest” birds like magpies are beautiful. And I'm not a great birder.

  On one of my early visits to Australia, Phil took me to Phillip Island south of Melbourne, where fairy or little blue penguins (Eudyptula minor) still live in tunnels in the banks above the beach, and it is possible to listen to them making their gurgling songs in their nests. We can watch as they waddle down to the water's edge in the morning, hesitate, and then collectively plunge into the surf on their way to sea. In the evening they make their way back to their homes, walking past tourists without paying any attention. It's an impressive sight that reminded me of the way animals on the Galapagos Islands failed to recognize us as deadly predators and simply ignored us.

  We had a similar experience in 2003 on Kangaroo Island off the southern coast of Australia. There we encountered an echidna; it and the platypus are the only members of that select order of egg-laying mammals, the monotremes. With a sharper beak, the echidna carries a layer of thick, protective quills and makes a living by rooting about for grubs. When we spotted one, we jumped out of our vehicle; the creature ignored us as it dug into the side of the road and we chalked up another amazing encounter.

  I asked Phil if I could finally see a platypus, and I was rewarded at the zoo in Melbourne. I was taken behind the exhibits and shown an elaborate waterway constructed for the animals. I was able to watch them for as long as I wanted and saw them being fed their favorite food, a kind of crayfish called a yabbie. It was the realization of my childhood dream and one of the great thrills of my life.

  The Commission for the Future was determined to get its pound of flesh out of me, so Phil had arranged a heavy schedule of publicity events in addition to several formal speeches. It was virgin territory for me and for my audience. No one there had heard of me or my ideas, so I could spout off about all of my favorite subjects and be as opinionated as I wanted. It was very gratifying that people were tremendously receptive to my words. It makes sense—Australia is a country whose climate and unique ecosystems encourage being in the outdoors, whether swimming, camping, or just firing up the barbie and chugging a few frosties from the Esky (translation: lighting the barbecue and drinking a few beers from the cooler). Water is a very real issue to everyone. I also suspect Australians were intrigued to hear a “Japanese” (me) who would slang the Japanese for their depredation of global resources like trees and fish. Whatever the reasons, there was a flurry of media interest in me wherever Phil had arranged interviews and news conferences.

  The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is as important to Australians as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is to Canadians, but unlike Canadians, Australians fiercely support and defend the public broadcaster. After relatively small cuts were made to ABC's budget in the late 1990s, more than ten thousand people gathered at a demonstration in Sydney to protest the loss of funding. In contrast, when the federal government made draconian cuts in the CBC's budget, only a couple of hundred people gathered in Toronto to support the corporation.

  Quokkas, a type of marsupial, on Rottnest Island, near Perth, Western Australia

  In Australia I was extensively interviewed on several local and national programs on ABC, none more important than the long-running Science Show hosted on radio by Robyn Williams. Robyn is an expat from Britain whose abilities in science communication have made him widely recognized and admired by the public, a kind of Aussie version of the late American astronomer-broadcaster Carl Sagan. I have come to know Robyn very well, as we have crossed paths often in Australia and North America. He has been the only host since the Science Show began to broadcast in the spring of 1974, and his program was a wonderful opportunity to talk about my ideas in depth.

  By the time I had finished my first visit, I had not had time to get outside Melbourne and Sydney and so had still not seen any of the fabled wildlife of the continent. Nevertheless, I had fallen head over heels for the country and its people. Back home, it seemed everything I looked at triggered a memory of Australia. “Gee, in Sydney. . .” I'd say. Finally, Tara looked at me suspiciously and asked if I had a girlfriend back there.

  As a result of that first visit, several groups invited me to return to give talks, and I was determined to go back with Tara. I was also approached by Patrick Gallagher, head of Allen & Unwin Publishers, an Australian company that had started out as a subsidiary of the English publishing house of the same name but in 1990 became independent. We have become good friends, and I have enjoyed a close relationship with the company. When I told Patrick I wanted to set aside some of my Australian book royalties to support Aboriginal and environmental groups in Australia, Patrick promptly offered to contribute 5 percent of the profits the company makes on my books to the fund.

  Soon I was planning a return visit to Australia, this time to tour several cities to talk about my books Metamorphosis (my first autobiography) and Inventing the Future (a collection of columns I had written for newspapers). In 1989, Tara accompanied me to see for herself what had so impressed me with the country. We had a whirlwind tour through Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra with lots of media interest. Sales of the books took off, and they became best-sellers.

  Australia is as exotic as any place, yet people are familiar and speak English, so it is easy to get about and converse. Australians and Canadians share a colonial history and ties with Britain, and both are adamantly proud of not being American. In Australia, scores of young Canadians can be found working on farms or waiting on tables, and Australian accents can be heard all over the ski slopes of Whistler and Banff. People in both nations think of themselves (erroneously) as a country with a small population covering a vast area. In fact, much of Canada is covered in snow, ice, or rock, and that's why most Canadians snuggle along the southern border with the United States. Similarly, much of Australia is desert, so most of the population crowds into five major cities on the coasts. But nature and wilderness or the outback are a critical part of what people in the two countries value as part of our heritage and culture.

  I once heard the Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan remark that one difference between Americans and Canadians is that Americans will invite new acquaintances into their homes, but Canadians invite them to meet in a pub or restaurant, preferring to keep home for family and friends. I don't know how good a generalization that is, but I do feel Canadians are not nearly as outgoing and open as Americans. I have often been astonished to meet an American for the first time and be invited to stay at his or her home after a very short period of conversation. It is a quality I admire and appreciate.

  In Canada, in contrast, we are far slower to extend such hospitality, but when we do, it seems more deeply felt and meant. Australians are much more open and gregarious than Canadians, but without the underlying assumption of superiority many Americans express. And the use of language by Australians is enthralling, from the contraction of words as in “uni” (university), “ute” (utility vehicle), and “servo” (service station) to novel terms like “larrikin” (hooligan) and “come the raw prawn” (attempt to deceive).

  On that visit in 1989 with Tara, Phil Noyce and his wife, Georgina Tsolidas, accompanied us on a jaunt to the Great Barrier Reef. We flew to Cairns, the northernmost city on the east coast of Queensland. From there we traveled north by bus for another hour to the sleepy town of Port Douglas, where, a few years later, the wonderful Australian film Travelling North was shot. Port Douglas at the time was a tiny village with a few shops and a harbor where the Quicksilver, a large twin-hulled catamaran, is moored. It departs for the barrier reef daily, tying up at a permanent float at the outer reef. From there, tourists fan out to scuba dive or snorkel or just go down into a viewing area under the float.

  Our first trip to the reef was heaven. We had never experienced such diversity of form and color, including dozens and dozens of species of coral—immense beds of purple stag coral with antlerlike branches, and huge domes of brain coral. There are giant clams with lips of gree
n, pink, and purple, threatening to clamp onto unsuspecting divers the way they do in horror movies, and fish from immense groupers to parrotfish, pufferfish, and tiny clownfish hiding in the protective tentacles of soft corals. The Great Barrier Reef is truly one of the wonders of the natural world.

  When we returned from our enchanting trip on the Quicksilver, we noticed an excavation site a block away from Port Douglas's Four Mile Beach with a sign saying an apartment building was soon to go up and one suite remained for sale. Phil, Georgie, Tara, and I bought it. Tara and I have enjoyed it ever since, an investment that represents our commitment to Australia as a second home. In the eight years I had lived in the United States, the idea of staying there permanently never entered my mind. But there in Port Douglas, having spent a wonderful day on the Great Barrier Reef, then walking the exquisite sands of Four Mile Beach in perfect weather, we seriously thought about moving to Australia. We have never regretted remaining in Canada, but we do feel privileged to be able to return to Australia again and again.

  We fell in love with Port Douglas because it seemed a throwback to another time, when people moved at a slower pace. But when we returned a few years later, the town had been “discovered” and had undergone a major growth spurt that included a new Japanese-backed luxury hotel. Eventually the Quicksilver was sold to a Japanese company, and now high-end restaurants attract more tourists, and the feel of the place has changed. But the Japanese invasion and explosive development are just the latest assaults to change the area.

  From December to March, the hot, muggy weather leads locals and visitors to spend a lot of time in the water. But you can't go swimming along Four Mile Beach, because of the “stingers”—poisonous jellyfish—some of which can incapacitate and even kill an adult human. Pictures of victims with stinger “burns” are pretty brutal, displaying open sores and wide swaths of red, swollen tissue. The only ocean swimming in the summer is in “stinger nets,” which are strung out in the water and provide a haven from the jellyfish. It's not the way I had imagined spending time in the ocean.