by David Suzuki
The CBC was extremely discreet in its handling of the list of nominees for its The Greatest Canadian program. For one thing, though working for the corporation, I never had even the tiniest hint that I was on the list. CBC staff must have been contacting people I'd worked with in the past to locate film footage, as well as friends and family for personal photos, yet no one leaked the information to me. When the list was announced, I was floored. How I wished my parents were still alive, because they would have savored it the most. After going through the rejection implicit in the expulsion of Japanese Canadians from British Columbia and the hardships they endured in this country of their birth, Mom and Dad would have been thrilled to see their child held in such high esteem.
ON THE NIGHT OF the final results of the contest, we got a call from our Gitga'at friend Art Sterritt in remote Hartley Bay. “Congratulations on coming in fifth,” he said. “Since everyone ahead of you is dead, that makes you the greatest living Canadian!”
“But Art,” Tara protested, “the program comes on three hours from now, so how do you know?”
“Oh, we have a satellite dish,” he replied. “We watched it from Newfoundland!” Hartley Bay is a tiny village in northern B.C. that can only be reached by plane or boat and is thousands of miles from Newfoundland, but thanks to technology, it is more plugged in than we are in the big city.
Only a few weeks later, Maclean's magazine in Toronto published the results of a poll in which women across Canada were asked with whom they would most like to be stranded on a desert island. They were asked to select from a small list that included me; CBC Television newsreader Peter Mansbridge; Canadian prime minister Paul Martin; Canadian Idol TV series host Ben Mulroney; and Calgary Flames ice-hockey superstar Jarome Iginla. I was flabbergasted when a writer with the magazine called to tell me I had been selected first, by 46 percent of the women (55 percent in Alberta), while the runner-up was young Mulroney at 16 percent!
Vanity Fair portrait of eco-heroes. Left to right: L. Hunter Lovins, Tim Wirth, Leon Shenandoah, Bonnie Reiss, Jack Heinz, Oren Lyons, Ed Begley Jr., me, Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, Cesar Chavez, Tom Cruise, and Olivia Newton-John at an environmental conference held in Malibu, California.
“Where were all those women when I was young and single?” I sputtered. Later, when I did a little strutting and suggested to Tara that I must be hot, she replied matter-of-factly, “David, women aren't stupid. They know you can fish. You were a meal ticket.” Ah, reality.
chapter EIGHTEEN
THOUGHTS AS I GROW OLD
ON MY BRIEF VISITS to Cuba, I have been impressed by the contrast between Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the public eye. Posters and T-shirts with pictures of Che and slogans from his writings before the Cuban Revolution leader was killed in Bolivia in 1967 are ubiquitous, but I have never seen a sign, statue, or picture of President Castro in the streets. The absence of his image is in keeping with his reputed attitude that nothing is permanent—even the sun will die in a few billion years—so why should people care about their legacy after they're gone?
I have never sought honors or fame, though one honor I received brought pleasure for what it enabled me to do. In 1986, I received the Royal Bank Award, which was presented in an elaborate ceremony in Vancouver before a tuxedo-wearing crowd that included my in-laws and my father and his companion, Fumiko. The award was a tax-free $100,000, and the pleasure it gave was the purchase of our beloved Tangwyn, a small piece of paradise on Quadra Island. When we finally purchased Kingfisher, a small cabin cruiser, in 2003, Tara proclaimed, “David, we've got everything we need in life. We don't need any more stuff.” If I ever receive another award of money, it will go straight to the David Suzuki Foundation's endowment fund.
The family at Tangwyn
Tara and I also believe we have given our children the best any parents could—unstinting love, a variety of experiences at home and in other parts of the world, and a good education. What more support do they need from us to face the future? Now our parental responsibilities are complete; though one may do so, there is no further obligation to pass on money, valuable goods, or property to them.
When Tara and I first met, one of the places we spent time together was her parents' waterfront cottage on Sechelt Inlet on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. We loved it there. Across the inlet was a muddy beach where we would dig for clams, feel cockles beneath our feet, and set our crab traps. I would cast out from the family float and catch ling cod, and we would take the rowboat offshore and fish for rock cod. We even got lucky and caught the occasional salmon.
But the relentless pressure of people like me meant that over time the ling have disappeared, easy victims of their ferocious appetites and aggressive territoriality. The rock cod on which we depended for breakfast became scarcer and smaller, while more and more cottages sprouted up around us with the inevitable increase in boom boxes, outdoor parties, and water skiers. Across the inlet, an entire hillside was shaved bare of its trees, and then poles and roads appeared, warning of the huge development that followed and the homes that now light up the night. After fifteen years, it was time to find our own place to retreat to from the city.
We began the search with the help of Tara's retired parents, who could check out some of the places that interested us. We spent months scouring properties for sale on the islands between the British Columbia mainland and Vancouver Island in the search for an ideal site that would give us a sense of isolation yet was affordable and reasonably accessible to Vancouver. We had focused on three pieces of land that were available on Quadra and Cortes islands near Campbell River on Vancouver Island. When we walked onto the land Tara later named Tangwyn (Welsh for “place of peace and restoration”), we knew instantly it was what we sought. Its ten acres contained some magnificent old-growth Douglas fir trees, a small creek, and perhaps a third of a mile of water-front that included beaches, rocky promontories, and at low tide a huge tidal pool. A land bridge connected Tangwyn and unoccupied Heriot Island adjacent to us. Tangwyn became our talisman, the place where we wanted our children to feel a strong bond to nature. And it became the place where the girls and our grandchildren would learn how to fish, then clean, cook, and eat their catch.
I love to fish, because fish are a major part of my diet and of who I am. I know sportspeople and conservationists advocate catch-and-release fishing, but I don't. There is no question that when we “play” a fish, the animal is struggling for its life. Usually a fish is worked to exhaustion before being released, so upon liberation, it is an easy target for predators like birds and seals. Fishing for trout in a lake in the Okanagan region of south-central B.C., I noticed loons hovering near the canoe and soon realized they had learned to take a fish right off the hook or to grab it when it was released. Marine seals have learned the same thing.
Enjoying my favorite pastime around the corner from Tangwyn and the cottage
The fish don't volunteer to be a part of our “sport,” and the notion of torturing them for pleasure and then releasing them as if we are being considerate and protective simply perpetuates the notion that nature and other species are playthings for our enjoyment. I know vegans condemn the catching and eating of fish as antithetical to a reverence for life, but I accept that as an animal, I depend on the consumption of other life to survive (plants are life forms too), and I try to do it with respect and gratitude.
IF WE AVOID TRAFFIC jams and make all the ferry connections just right, it takes just over five hours (six if we're unlucky) to get from Vancouver to Tangwyn. As we ride the last ferry from Campbell River to Quathiaski Cove on Quadra, our excitement grows and we delight in the sight of the island hills covered in forest, the dense schools of herring, the fishing boats pursuing salmon, and the ever-present eagles ready to swoop down and take a careless fish. We feel the joy of arriving back where nature is still abundant and intact.
But when we talk to our neighbors who have lived in the area for fifty years or more, they describe a world that no longer exis
ts around there: bays filled with abalone, red snapper, gigantic ling cod and rock cod as long as an arm, herring so abundant they could be raked off the kelp to fill a punt in minutes, and schools of salmon so thick they could be heard coming as their bodies slapped the water miles away. Today all of that is gone. Six years after we had bought Tangwyn, we were fishing for rock cod when Tara hooked a large ling. I watched in disappointment yet admiration as she removed the hook and carefully returned the fish to the water. “This is the first big ling we've seen in six years,” she said. “We can't kill it.”
Even in the brief time Tangwyn has been part of our lives, we have seen the herring vanish because of the insane fishery permitting the capture of spawning herring for the females' ovaries, which bring a high return in Japan. I call it insane because herring are one of the key prey species for salmon, seals, whales, and other carnivorous fishes, and First Nations have long harvested their eggs without killing the fish. Because the spawning herring form large schools, they become such easy prey that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans actually has had ten-minute openings—seiners are allowed ten minutes to set their nets with the potential to make a year's worth of pay for the crew members. What kind of a delusion is it to think a ten-minute season is a fishery that is sustainable? Years ago, one opening for the herring roe fishery wiped out the large populations around Tangwyn, and they still haven't come back.
Abalone were once abundant throughout the islands in Georgia Strait, but when scuba divers were allowed to “harvest” them, they quickly disappeared and have not come back. In the fifteen years we have gone to Tangwyn, we have found two live abalone—essentially they are extinct, and it is highly doubtful they will ever come back within my children's lifetime.
Geoducks (pronounced “gooey-ducks”), the huge clams whose siphons are highly prized in Asia, are being blasted out of the ocean bottom by divers wielding pressure hoses. The clams are like nuggets of gold but are exploited with almost no idea of their biology or life cycle; they may reach decades if not a century or more in age. I watched in helpless fury as divers spent two days off the shores of Tangwyn pumping geoducks out of the ocean floor. We were delighted to find a small patch of perhaps fifty geoducks at low tide that had been missed by the commercial divers, only to see them trashed by oyster farmers dragging heavy loads of spat-laden shells across them.
Rock cod, which we once took for granted as a dependable meal, have been depleted by commercial fishers, who ship them live to the Asian market. When the DFO announced a quota for sport fishers of one rock cod a day, it was clear the fish should be declared totally off-limits to all fishing until they can replenish themselves.
We tend to think of the oceans as a homogeneous environment from which we can catch creatures that are somehow magically replaced without end. We know that as a rule, the bigger, older animals are far more prolific than younger fish, yet we allow fishers to keep the largest and return the small ones as if somehow this is good management. I believe we should allow fewer fish to be caught, encourage release of large ones, and mandate that fishers stop letting the small ones go until a trophy fish is captured. Once sport fishers have caught their limit of salmon, they often target other fish, like ling and halibut, loading up with hundreds of pounds of fish. They may proudly display halibut more than six and a half feet long and weighing over 165 pounds and release the chickens (under 30 pounds), which is exactly the opposite of what should be done.
Since our purchase of Tangwyn, logging on Quadra has gone on steadily. As we drive from the ferry terminal at Quathiaski Cove and turn onto the road to Heriot Bay, the large swath of forest to our left was clear-cut long before we got there, and the section to our right was cleared a few years ago. The cynical strip of trees left standing beside the road cannot hide the devastation of clear-cutting. Every day, truckloads of trees leave the island; yet one of the ironies of globalization is that at the lumberyard on Quadra, the only lumber sold comes from California.
Another problem is that most of us today live in large cities: we've become urban animals, occupying a human-created environment that is almost devoid of biodiversity. We have a few domesticated plants and animals that we like to have around us, and we tolerate the pests we can't eliminate, but basically we live in a biologically impoverished region wherever we dwell. That means the baseline against which we judge the wildness of nature is so shallow that to us, the Tangwyn of today seems rich and abundant.
And that, it seems to me, is a major challenge we face as humanity explodes in numbers and consumptive demand—our collective memory is so short that we soon forget how things were. We take for granted a small cluster of trees in an empty lot, and then suddenly one day the trees are gone. Soon after, an apartment complex goes up. Within months, we barely remember the trees and open land that were once there. And so it goes all across the planet as we lose links to and reminders of a richer world that has disappeared in the name of economic development.
When I was growing up in Vancouver, Dad would row a boat around Stanley Park in downtown Vancouver, and catch sea-run cutthroat trout. We would jig for halibut off Spanish Banks on the city's waterfront, catch sturgeon in the Fraser River, and ride horses up the Vedder River to catch steelhead and Dolly Varden trout.
My grandchildren have no hope of experiencing the richness I knew as a child. And there is no longer any living memory of passenger pigeons, of prairie lands covered by millions upon millions of bison, which were preyed upon by grizzly bears all the way across to Ontario and down to Texas. And so we continue to celebrate our imprint across the land, taming the wild and reminding ourselves of what once was with the names of suburbs and streets—Oakview Lane, Forest Hills, Arbutus Drive.
When we purchased Tangwyn, the agent took great pains to inform us it could be subdivided into three pieces. “You could sell two and pay for all of it,” he said, as if that were an incentive and option. It wasn't. We are privileged to claim to own what was once First Nations land and would like to see it become a part of a larger entity, the forest. Subdividing it into smaller parcels that would be sold off to be developed further will not do that. Somehow we have to find a way to maintain the integrity of wild areas.
It's not all hopeless if we can transcend the current conceit that what is the latest is the best, that history and the past are mere academic pursuits. We can learn much from lessons of the past; indeed, we can find ways to husband scarce resources and even replenish and expand them by applying ancient methods.
In 1995, a geologist, John Harper, was flying in a plane along the British Columbia coast at low tide when he noticed semicircular structures radiating out from shore at the tide line. He recognized that they were not natural and must have been made by people. He investigated these structures, which have now been found up and down the coast of B.C., and today it is recognized that the original people on the coast created them by placing stones at low tide. Over time, the incoming tide would wash shells, sand, and debris over the rocks and into the semicircle, perfect beds for clams. In fact, these were “clam gardens,” deliberately created so that clams could be harvested on a regular basis.
When Severn began her graduate degree with the noted University of Victoria ethnobotanist Nancy Turner, she learned about clam gardens and met Adam Dick, a Kwakwaka'wakw elder who was traditionally educated and knew about many of the traditions lost by most tribes. Severn was sure the rock structures along the connection between Tangwyn and Heriot Island were not natural and took Adam to look at it. “Oh, yes, that's a loki way,” he said, matter-of-factly. It was indeed a human-made clam garden, and that also explained the midden we had found on the property near the beach.
For centuries, explorers finding new lands occupied by aboriginal peoples have dismissed those peoples as primitive savages lacking the technological evidence of civilization. We are only now realizing that, in fact, thousands of years of observation and thought had created a profound knowledge base that allowed people not only to exploit natur
e's abundance but also to enhance certain parts of its productivity, from clams to forests.
SEX HAS BEEN a driving force in my life. In today's liberated society, the ideas about sex I grew up with seem quaint at best, naive at worst. Chastity and premarital virginity of prospective brides were still hoped for and highly prized. Where the men were to gain their experience, I have no idea, because certainly paying for sex was not socially acceptable. Puberty hit me like a concrete wall, testosterone hammering through my body and wreaking havoc on my brain when I was about twelve. Only as age has brought relief from the high titer of sex hormones have I been freed of thinking of sex once a minute. Now it's about once every five minutes.
I am delighted to see the role sex plays in the lives of Tara and my daughters; it is part of their lives but doesn't necessarily mean a permanent commitment. It just seems so much healthier to be able to have sex instead of the prolonged and agonizing petting sessions that passed for sex in my youth. When I was a boy, it was widely believed that for many women, if not most, sex was not a pleasure but something to be borne. Frigidity was widely regarded and accepted as most women's lot, a notion I am sure women today would vehemently reject. My generation placed far too much value on the act of sex itself.
As well as being liberated to explore their bodies and sexuality to the fullest, women are breaking down gender barriers as I never dreamed would be possible in my lifetime. My daughter Tamiko decided to play team hockey when she was in her late thirties, and though I never saw her play, she is such an athlete that I'm sure she did very well. I say “did” because she was forced by knee problems to give it up after a few seasons. When I was a young man, we would never have imagined teams of middle-aged women playing ice hockey. I have delighted in cheering on Severn and Sarika as they played a kind of basketball that wasn't practiced in my youth; when I was in high school, girls in “bloomers” were allowed to dribble the ball twice before passing, a completely different game from the rough-and-tumble sport today. My niece, Jill Aoki, was a soccer star, as is my granddaughter, Midori.