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Suzuki's
Nature
He’s sanctimonious. Shrill. In your
face.
Full of himself. He’s also right
By Chris Cannon
The church pews creak and groan from the weight of the
sinners. Hundreds of bodies cram the room to capacity,
seeking a more practical salvation than the venue usually
provides. This is God’s house, but David Suzuki—freakishly
deific in the early-morning light streaming through
floor-to-ceiling windows—has borrowed it for a
revival of his own. Even the students on a field trip
stare raptly from the mezzanine. Flash photography is
not allowed, but the click and whir of shutters creates
a barely audible white noise, and every few minutes
a cellphone pokes its head above the audience, like
a harbour seal surfacing, for a shot of nature’s
minister.
It’s February 26, Day 27 of the Suzuki Foundation’s
“If You Were Prime Minister” tour, a month-long,
coast-to-coast bus ride through 41 Canadian communities
to spread the environmental gospel. This morning event
in Surrey—one of three scheduled for the chilly
day—finds Suzuki remarkably spry for a 71-year-old
man who’s spent the past month living on a bus.
His well-rehearsed speech is effortless but passionate.
When it’s over, he can barely navigate the throngs
of grateful fans who block his escape. At a sushi lunch
before the afternoon event, in New Westminster, he jokes
with his staff about the “close call” early
in the tour when he almost didn’t get a standing
ovation. Later that evening, his routine at the Stanley
Theatre on Granville elicits a salvo of women’s
panties from the front row.
To call Suzuki a rock star may be a bit hammy—the
night of the panty barrage his wife and daughter were
in the audience and Raffi joined him onstage for a less-than-Zeppelin
tune—but the metaphor is often applied to his
public appearances. Despite his age, Suzuki retains
a boundless energy and a physique Robert Plant would
have envied in his heyday. Besides, his lyrics are a
whole lot easier to understand.
“If I have any talent, I thank my father for it,”
Suzuki says, explaining how he managed to sell out every
show on his bus tour. “When I was a kid, my dad
would come home from work, and after dinner he’d
say, ‘What did you learn today?’ And I’d
have to explain. If he didn’t understand it, he’d
say, ‘What are you talking about? Tell me in a
way I can understand. I love you, I’m interested,
but if I don’t understand it, it’s not my
fault, it’s your fault.’ And he’d
make me explain so that he understood it. If I have
any talent, it’s that I can take arcane stuff
and try to find a way to make it not only accessible
but exciting.”
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When I utter
the word "doomed," Suzuki's
jaw tenses and he threatens to end the interview.
"Then what the hell are you
doing here?" he screams.
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As the planet begins to face up to the complex topic
of global warming, accessible and exciting presentations
are in short supply. Neither adjective applies to this
year’s damning series of reports from the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the
watered-down cornerstone of the current discussion—and
most of us get our information in pre-chewed, easily
digestible chunks that lack real nutrition, such as
the Time magazine cover story that opened with the Pulitzer-worthy
line: “Climate change is caused by a lot of things,
and it will take a lot of people to fix it.”
I, for one, am looking forward to the end of the world.
It kind of takes the pressure off. Why concern myself
with winning a Nobel prize if my grandkids can’t
take it to show and tell? Why bother the cat, who likes
to sleep on my un-optioned screenplay that no one will
be left to see? Why worry about the fate of a lifetime
of scribbled words if they are destined for a lost race,
empty messages to an extinct species?
Suzuki doesn’t agree. He thinks we can pull it
off. His Foundation’s slogan—“Solutions
Are In Our Nature”—reeks of the hope mirrored
in the doe eyes of his adoring fans. My own position—“Self-Immolation
Is In Our Nature”—not only lacks a clever
double entendre, but collapses hope in the face of foregone
conclusion. When I utter the word “doomed,”
Suzuki’s jaw tenses and he threatens to end the
interview. “Then what the hell are you doing here?”
he screams. “Get out of the way! Shut up and get
out of the way if you believe that!” I would have
been stunned had I not seen it before, and, indeed,
expected it.
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