Suzuki Explains Nature
Image via David Suzuki
“The future doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we’re the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.”
A highly influential Japanese-Canadian media personality, David Suzuki educated viewers with scientific news, findings, and concerns on TV and radio shows from the 1960s to today. He made scientific and environmental issues more interesting to the public, most widely through his television series The Nature of Things with David Suzuki (1979-present).
Suzuki was born on March 24, 1936, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Suzuki, a third-generation Japanese Canadian, was among thousands of people of Japanese descent in Canada and the United States who, in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack in the United States on December 7, 1941, by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service, was sent to live in internment camps. He, along with his family, spent four years living in an internment camp located in the Slocan Valley of British Columbia.
After World War II, the family relocated to Ontario, where Suzuki fostered a love of nature through exploring and collecting specimens at a local swamp. He relocated to the United States for university, earning a bachelor’s degree in biology (1958) at Amherst College in Massachusetts and a Ph.D. in zoology (1961) at the University of Chicago. He went on to become an assistant professor in zoology at the University of British Columbia in 1963, eventually becoming a full professor from 1969 to his retirement in 2001.
He wanted to educate the public on his scientific findings, and his first show Suzuki on Science aired on the CBC channel from 1971 to 1975. He would go on to be the host of the Nature of Things with David Suzuki for more than 40 years. He co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990, and its’ mission was advocating for environmental conservation through education and providing research materials for governments, businesses, and individuals.
Suzuki became one of the first major voices to call for action in the fight against global warming to the point where he reduced the number of tours and speaking events due to concerns about greenhouse gas emissions from frequent air and car travel.