by David Suzuki
MY DEAREST ONES,
I hope I don’t get too preachy here when I talk to you about what drives us to do what we do and what values should motivate us. Well, I guess it’s inevitable that I will sound kind of preachy, but you can ignore most of it or pick and choose what you think is useful in your lives. What sets people on their life course? It’s a question I’ve often asked myself as I watch you grow older. Tamo, as the eldest of my grandchildren, your incredible athleticism in hockey, football, and snowboarding seemed to be leading you to some kind of career in sports. I was so surprised and so proud when you morphed into a snowboard activist trying to entice young boarders to notice the world around them and how they were affected by it and how they could make it better. Because of your Chilean roots, you could snowboard in Canada during the winter and then continue snowboarding in Chile during our summer. As a result, you were exposed to issues of poverty in South America and to environmental concerns like the plight of sea turtles, and you have since gone on to become an environmental activist. I wonder where that will lead you in the coming years, but go for it!
We know about child prodigies who are found to have incredible talents at hockey or chess or piano. But how do they discover that talent? What encourages them to go on? The story of how Canadian hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s father, Walter, would make a rink every winter so Wayne could play hockey is legendary, but what drove Wayne as a young boy to commit so much to the sport? It had to be fun, of course, but come on—for hours and hours?
Journalists often ask what led me to become an environmentalist. I never thought of environmentalism as a career, and when young people ask me how they can “save the world,” I tell them not to worry about the world. The planet will do what it does with or without us. I tell them, “Follow your heart. Do what you love, whether it’s art, music, writing, fixing cars, or carpentry.” Environmentalism is not a specialty or a discipline like medicine or teaching or law. It’s a way of seeing the world and recognizing that we are a part of the biosphere, dependent on nature—air, water, soil, photosynthesis, biodiversity—for our health and well-being, and we need everyone to see the world through that lens.
Our parents and the way they raise us tilt us toward what they are interested in and believe is important. When you look at religious affiliation or voting behaviour, for example, they follow family lines as if they’re hereditary. If your parents are Catholic, Muslim, or Jewish, chances are you will adopt the same religion. It’s the same with voting; despite a rebellious phase against parental values, chances are that as people grow older, they will probably vote for the same party as their parents. There are no genes for religious affiliation or political party, of course. But religion and socioeconomic group affect the way we see the world as much as gender and ethnicity influence the course we follow into life.
The overwhelming influence on my life was living in the camp during World War ii. Because Mom had a job while Dad was away in a road camp, I ended up in the surrounding forests. And they were a magical place that had a profound effect on me. The river, lake, and forest were my escape, a refuge from the other kids, an enchanted place. Even today, when I enter a forest I am overcome by the emotions I felt as a child.
After Dad joined us in Slocan, he and I were soon hiking those mountains in search of lakes and creeks where we could fish. Decades later, Dad, Nana, your parents, and I retraced those hikes, and the fish are still there! The big difference is, as my father remarked, the trees are so much bigger. During the war, we depended on the fish we caught for food. We hiked up mountains overnight, and once made a lean-to that kept out the snow but reflected the heat from the fire onto us. Dad kept the fire going all night, and we were very comfortable in our sleeping bags. We didn’t have tents, so we often slept in old log cabins built by miners or trappers. We clambered over immense treef-alls and had to watch out for the spikes of devil’s club.
Porcupines would come into the cabins and gnaw on paddles or anything that might have salt from sweat on it. Once when we got to a cabin and found a porcupine inside, Dad grabbed a sweater and began to hit the animal with it. It jumped around trying to escape as I begged Dad to stop. I thought he was hurting the porcupine, but he just wanted the quills to use as floats on our lines. In the fall, we would roam far and wide searching for the prized pine mushrooms (matsutake) that Japanese people adore for their aromatic smell and almost meatlike texture.
These experiences shaped me. Wilderness was a necessary part of my life, and I took all of my children out into the woods to camp and hike and fish from when they were infants. It has been a joy to me to see your parents take all of you out into the wilderness since you were babies. Jonathan, your physical handicaps have severely restricted your access to wilderness areas, but I know your parents have made a point of getting you out into canoes and to summer camps. One of my favourite pictures is of you in a canoe just laughing with pure joy. Remember when you came out to our cabin on Quadra Island and you caught a fish?
My parents didn’t take me out into the bush so that I would become a forester, fisheries officer, or biologist. It was just a part of our lives that made us happy. But I don’t think it is a surprise that I ended up studying biology.
My parents had lost everything during the war, and when we moved to Ontario, we started life from scratch—we had no savings, no household goods for the kitchen, living room, or bedrooms. But as I have said, I didn’t think we were poor. I was surrounded by family; we always had love, basic clothing, housing, and food; and being a child, I never worried about how my parents were providing it all. It was taken for granted that we all had to work to earn money, whether it was working on a farm during the summer, babysitting, or working in construction after we moved to London, in 1949.
Thinking back, I realize Dad was wondering all that time what I might do when I was a man. When I was in my early teens and he emphasized how important it was to be able to speak extemporaneously, he suggested I think about becoming a minister in a church because I had a good, loud voice. Since I was an atheist, I never took him seriously. When he met a man in Leamington who was in the jewellery business, he got interested in how gems like diamonds were cut and urged me to go with him to watch so that I might consider becoming a diamond cutter. I had no interest at all, but now I realize it wasn’t so much what I might do that concerned him but that I find a job that would be secure for life.
Dad constantly told me that I should always work hard at whatever I was doing. He hated a lackadaisical attitude toward work. “You only get out of it what you’re willing to put into it,” he admonished. I knew that since he was Japanese, he had to work harder than white people just to get the same pay. But he also wanted, by working hard, to prove that Canada had made a mistake in treating us so badly during the war. My parents were always concerned about security—security from debt, security in health, security in work. The very idea of ever going on welfare was totally repugnant to my parents, a sign of some character flaw, a lack of pride, or laziness. I find it astonishing and unacceptable to try to make a lot of money through some kind of clever scheme or by seeking a job just because it pays well. Sure, it’s great if a job pays well, but if you’re going to spend more than half your waking hours doing it, it should provide something more than just money—either enjoyment or contribution to society. I am so glad your parents have the same sense and that none of you is obsessed with running after money.
It may sound weird, but I enjoyed whatever I worked at, and believe me, some of it was pretty difficult—try tarring a concrete foundation in a narrow trench when the temperature is 35°C, navigating along floor joists covered in ice at subzero temperatures, or shovelling eleven or twelve truckloads of gravel into a concrete mixer for a foundation. Or for that matter, as I did after I became a scientist, looking at thousands of fruit flies through a microscope for hours on end, day and night, day after day.
You may know that ever since I married Nana, I have been the dishwasher in the family. I
made a promise to her, and that’s my job. And I enjoy it. I enjoy taking a huge pile of dirty dishes and pots, scrubbing my way through them, and leaving them clean and shiny. I guess it’s just about a person’s attitude toward a task. At the cabin on Quadra, our septic system has backed up a couple of times, and I’ve loved watching the plumber suit up in a rubber outfit and enter the tank to fix it. It’s a very smelly job but one that we are so grateful is being done, and I know that if I had the skill, I would gain a lot of satisfaction doing it too.
When Severn and Sarika were still girls (I think about eleven and eight years old, respectively), we went on a rafting trip down the Babine River. It was to be a no-impact camping trip, meaning that during the ten-day trip, we would leave nothing behind—no garbage, no ashes from fires, no toilet paper, no feces. We had a portable potty and pooped into a plastic bag. Each day, the poop had to be squeezed to the bottom of the bag, which would then be knotted up and put into a barrel with a tight lid. Someone had to do it, usually one of the river guides, but I volunteered for the job because I wanted the girls to see that no one should think they are too good to do the most menial task. And it wasn’t a horrible experience.
In the 1950s, when I went to high school, perhaps 10 percent of kids went from high school to university, and kids who liked science or were good at it often aimed to go into medicine. I got good grades because my parents constantly emphasized that the way for us to “get ahead” (whatever that meant) was through hard work and education. So I expected to go into medicine, not because I loved medicine or wanted to serve humanity, but because that’s what top students did, especially if they were good in science. I didn’t even think much about what it would mean to be a doctor.
Back in those days, in Ontario, we went through grade 13 before going to university. If you had good marks, you could be accepted into medical school at the end of the second year of university. I went to school in the United States, but since we lived in London, which was home to the University of Western Ontario (now called Western University), I dropped into Western at the end of my second year to visit the dean of Medicine. He assured me that with my grades and academic record, I would have no trouble getting into medicine there. But in my third year of honours Biology, I had to take a course in genetics. I was hooked. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t wait to get to the next class. I found the mathematical elegance and precision of genetics fascinating, and Bill Hexter, the professor, was a masterful teacher who unfolded the solving of mysteries of heredity like a detective story. There was no turning back. I wanted to become a geneticist and wrote the dean at Western that I had decided not to pursue medicine. My mother was especially disappointed that I turned down a chance to be a medical doctor in order to study fruit flies, but I never regretted it.
FROM MY POSITION now as an elder and your grandpa, I can say that I have learned a lot from my mistakes, failures, and successes. The most important piece of advice I can offer is please do not shape your life around making money, acquiring power, or becoming famous. These ends may be the consequence of working toward something that is important to you, but they should not be your goal.
What do you believe in? What do you enjoy? That should guide you in life. If by chance you do achieve money, power, or fame, they will not bring real joy, pride, or satisfaction. And too often people who aspire to those goals will sacrifice friends, even family, trying to achieve them. But when they become rich, famous, and powerful, what do they stand for? What are their values? These are the important questions.
AFTER I MADE the decision to become a geneticist and then completed my PhD in genetics, I received a number of offers from American universities. They were tempting, but I decided I did not want to live permanently in the United States, not because Canada was superior, but because it was different, and the difference mattered to me. To me, Canada meant Tommy Douglas, the socialist CCF party that later became the NDP, medicare, Quebec, a balance of payments system whereby the well-off provinces shared some of their good fortune with have-not provinces, the National Film Board, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Those were some of the fundamental differences that I treasured and that allowed me to make a commitment to this nation.
But I was a trained geneticist and anxious to make my name in the field when I obtained a university position back in Canada. So how did the environment come to dominate my life?
That reality happened when I became interested in television journalism. And I was first attracted to television because I felt it was important to inform and educate people about the repercussions of powerful new ideas and applications from science and technology. I was extremely fortunate to land in the orbit of Jim Murray, the executive producer of The Nature of Things. He was strongly influenced by John Livingston, a former executive producer of the show and professor of environmental studies at York University. Livingston had an uncompromising biocentric view; he saw humans as one species among many on Earth—not as the centre of everything and the most important species, but as a part of and dependent on the rest of nature. Most people see humans as the centre of the universe. This is known as the anthropocentric view, and a long time ago I used to see us that way too.
I remember arguing with Jim, who said every species had just as much of a right to live as we did and so we fight to keep them from going extinct for their sake. I responded that a right is a human-created concept that doesn’t exist in nature. Because we consider other life-forms important to us, each extinction diminishes us. I’m embarrassed by that argument now, although I do say we must preserve ecosystems and protect all species because it’s in our self-interest—not just for aesthetic or philosophical reasons, as real and important as those are, but because life is the fount of our lives; our survival and well-being depend on nature’s survival and well-being.
Jim would also be distressed if after we did a story I became passionate about it and couldn’t just move on. When we reported on the Amazon, I met the remarkable Kaiapo leader Paulinho Paiakan, who galvanized me with his struggle to protect his territory. Nana and I ended up raising money for him and visiting him in his village. We also brought him and his family to stay with us when his enemies threatened to kill him. When we did a story on the Cree of Quebec and their fight against the huge dams that were flooding their territory, I ended up narrating a film for them, speaking out on their behalf at rallies, and visiting their communities. Over and over, I championed causes that were brought to my attention by our programs. My work on these issues took up time and detracted from my own work, but it gave me a sense that I was working for ecological or social issues that mattered to me. So in the end, it was selfish of me because I gained satisfaction from doing something I felt was important, and I was fortunate to have both a platform to spread ideas and a boss whose worldview was closely aligned with mine.
Whatever you do, do it to the best of your ability and make sure it aligns with your deepest values. I meet people who apologize because they work for salmon farms, on the Alberta tar sands, or for a pharmaceutical corporation or logging company. They say they don’t agree with their employers but they have to make a living. I hope none of you finds yourself in a situation where your job clashes with your beliefs.
I owe a lot to my father for bringing me up with a strong sense that I must speak out and act on my beliefs. He warned me that if I wanted everyone to like me, I wouldn’t stand for anything because there would always be people who disagreed with me. He had contempt for people who wouldn’t speak up because they were afraid of the repercussions.
Dad was a most unusual man. I loved to listen to him tell stories of his childhood. He was the oldest child in a family of seven children and thus was expected to be the role model for his younger siblings. As with most immigrants, making money and having financial security were his parents’ driving principles. But Dad was a dreamer. He told me that when he was a boy, he found he could catch sticklebacks in a small net. I guess it was fun, so he kept catching more a
nd more and stuffing them into a bottle. To his surprise, they all died. That was the first time he realized that fish needed enough water to live.
He also told me how he would watch wasps collecting balls of mud to make their nests. “You know, David,” he said, “I saw there was some kind of parasite on them that looked like a tiny lobster.” At the time, I was a professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), so I nodded politely and patronizingly. Later I discovered that indeed there are parasites of insects that do look like little crustaceans.
When Dad was five, his mother took him to Japan, intending to leave him there to be educated as a Japanese. He didn’t want to stay there, so he wouldn’t let her out of his sight. When she disappeared, he would start howling. His grandparents didn’t want this crybaby and made her take him back to Canada. But while he was in Japan, he watched how people processed nori (seaweed) by chopping the seaweed into small pieces, making those pieces into a slurry, and then passing a screen through the slurry so that the seaweed could be picked up in a thin sheet. He had amazing powers of observation and memory. He would also lie on the ground and actually watch bamboo shoots grow.
His father was a boatbuilder, and one time he took Dad on a boat to Gambier Island, in Howe Sound, not far from Vancouver. While my grandfather was doing business, Dad could play. Even though he was a boy, Dad was fascinated by the miniature arbutus trees with smooth red bark growing on rock like bonsai. So he carefully dug them out and filled a bucket with them to take home and plant. When his dad came down to the boat, he threw away the bucket full of plants without even asking what they were for. When Dad told me this, I could see it still hurt him that his father thought what he did was a waste of time.
On weekends, when we would go to my grandparents’ place, I often heard my grandfather chastising my father for “wasting time” by going camping or fishing instead of working and making money. I appreciated that Dad had not lived up to his father’s wish that he be a role model for his younger siblings. I would tease Dad by calling him a “mutant,” since he was so different from the obedient child he was supposed to be. I was glad he was a mutant.