Suzuki's Nature — Page 2

There are really two David Suzukis, and unless you own a coal plant, it’s hard not to admire them both. The first is the engaging, mild-mannered scientist who’s charmed his way into millions of living rooms since 1979 as host of CBC’s long-running The Nature of Things. The second, a fiery, outspoken critic of all things pollutant, is an extension of the first, emerging, Incredible-Hulk-like, when a comment angers him or he senses nature is in pain. The combination of the two has catapulted him into the pantheon of celebrity scientists—Stephen Hawking, Jane Goodall, Noam Chomsky—who draw large crowds of neophytes into their folds, eventually finding voiceover work on The Simpsons or having a species of fruit fly named in their honour.

In the environmental arena, Suzuki’s only rival is the suddenly charming Al Gore, whose Oscar-winning apocalypse doc An Inconvenient Truth helped move the discussion off the internet into mainstream media. When the two met, in the 1980s, Suzuki asked then-Senator Gore how he could help environmentally minded politicians like him. “Don’t look to politicians like me,” Gore told him. “You’ve got to convince the public there is a problem, show them there are solutions, and then get them to care enough to demand action. Then every politician will jump on the bandwagon.”

Suzuki took the message to heart, and in 1990 he established the David Suzuki Foundation, whose mission is to translate the science into solutions-oriented answers for the public. The foundation’s website is a one-stop activities centre for environmental pacifists looking to up their motivation—blogs, podcasts, petitions, and challenges help the uninitiated move the conversation from “What’s happening?” to “How can we fix it?”

Hardly Suzuki’s style to sit behind a desk encoding hyperlinks and signing paychecks, he leaves the day-to-day operations to the foundation’s board and staff, playing the role of spokesman rather than CEO. The arrangement frees him to maintain a tightly choreographed tap dance in the spotlight, whether ambushing Environment Minister John Baird in front of the cameras at Toronto’s Green Living show, serving as guest editor of the Vancouver Sun, or convincing the Calgary Flames to go carbon neutral.

With the foundation serving as his alter ego—providing the science and the public support to reinforce his initiatives—Suzuki’s iconic status as nature’s spokesman has made him the media’s go-to-guy whenever a hurricane devastates a Pacific nation or a tree frog breaks its leg in Bolivia. “Because he’s been in the media so long, he knows how to get his point across effectively,” says filmmaker Kyle Welton, who is producing a documentary about Suzuki’s bus tour. “It’s a two-way street. The media knows what they need and he knows what he needs from the media. They need each other to exist.”

The downside to constant media exposure, of course, is that you are constantly being mediated—that is, at a certain level of saturation, you cease being yourself and become what others represent you to be, which is often an interpretation of someone else’s interpretation. “When you get media response to that media, it gets distorted and distorted,” says Suzuki. “I get letters all the time saying, ‘You’re going on a delegation to China and you’re pushing for’—I don’t know—‘killing the porpoises in the Yangtze River,’ and I think, ‘Where the fuck did this come from?’ But that’s the nature of this world where celebrity is amplified by reports based on other reports.”

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