David Suzuki
Canadian scientist, television personality, author, and environmental activist David Takayoshi Suzuki has the talent to make scientific and environmental issues understandable to the public. He has written or co-authored more than 50 books, of which 20 for children. In 1975, he helped launch and host the long-running CBC Radio’s, Quirks and Quarks. And in 1979 he started his television series The Nature of Things, one of the most successful series in the history of Canadian television which has aired in almost 50 countries worldwide.
Suzuki, a third-generation Japanese Canadian, was born in Vancouver, British Colombia, in 1936 and has a twin sister, Marcia. In June 1942, the government sold the Suzuki family's dry-cleaning business and David, his mother, and two sisters were interned in a camp the Slocan valley of British Columbia. His father was sent to a labor camp in Solsqua. After World War II, the Suzuki family settled in Ontario, where David developed an early love of nature and spent a lot of time in a swamp near their home. Suzuki earned his bachelor’s degree in biology (1958) at Amherst College in Massachusetts and a Ph.D. in zoology (1961) at the University of Chicago. After graduating, Suzuki took a research associateship at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1961–62) and later taught genetics at the University of Alberta (1962–63). He moved to the University of British Columbia in 1963 as an assistant professor of zoology, becoming a full professor in 1969 and professor emeritus in 2001.
Being a long time environmental and global change activist, Suzuki co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990. The foundation's priorities are: oceans and sustainable fishing, climate change and clean energy, sustainability, and Suzuki's Nature Challenge. Through evidence-based research, policy analysis, education and citizen empowerment, they conserve and protect the natural environment to create a sustainable Canada. They also work on ways to help protect the oceans from large oil spills such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The foundation collaborates with non-profit and community organizations, all levels of government, businesses and individuals. If you want to know more about the foundation, you can check their website here.
Toward the end of the 20th century, Suzuki became one of the first major voices to call for action in the fight against global warming, and in the early 21st century he slowed down his touring and speaking efforts because of concerns about greenhouse gas emissions from frequent air and car travel.
What makes David Suzuki so incredible is his ability to spread awareness about climate change and the state of the environment based on scientific evidence. He has the talent to do so communicating with a broad audience in a way that is accessible and interesting to many. He has stressed the dangers, as well as the benefits, of scientific research and technological development and has campaigned tirelessly for social responsibility in science. In Dr. Suzuki's opinion, our species' big advantage is the ability to see potential dangers and opportunities - and then find ways avoid the former and exploit the latter.
In 2009 Suzuki was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (by some referred to as the Alternative Nobel Prize) “for his lifetime advocacy of the socially responsible use of science, and for his massive contribution to raising awareness about the perils of climate change and building public support for policies to address it.”
More recently, Suzuki commented on the COVID-19 pandemic: “The COVID crisis is a crisis for human beings, but the climate crisis is a crisis for life on the planet.” He mentions that this is a huge opportunity to redesign our economy for the future, in a way that values the common fundamentals of life such as air, water and food. According to him, people must stop looking to political leaders to lead change when it comes to the climate crisis. “The political system cannot deal with (the climate crisis) unless civil society rises up and demands they do it,” says Suzuki. Therefore, massive efforts on the part of the public are critical, such as the half-million demonstrators who accompanied Greta Thunberg in the global march for climate action in September 2019. The ways governments responded to the covid crisis - ways that were unimaginable before - demonstrate huge opportunities to tackle climate crisis, which is a far greater threat than the current pandemic.
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