It’s been an important time for us in the Cullis-Suzuki household and at the David Suzuki Foundation, as David retires from The Nature of Things. I wanted to share my thoughts and processing of this with you, our community of support, because I know you care about Dad’s career and impact.
I realize I’ve been asking “How can we change the world?” my whole life. I think I always will. The answers may change, but my values and reasons for asking will stay the same.
I learned to ask this from my parents, life-long social and environmental justice advocates.
Dad, the crusader and truth-teller. Mum, the relationship-holder and solution-finder. Partners in life and activism. They raised me to believe I was a lucky kid in a beautiful world under siege, and that I could use my privileges to make a positive difference.
My whole life — for 44 years, and until last Friday night, April 7 – Dad’s been hosting CBC’s The Nature of Things, Canada’s longest running television show. Almost daily, I meet people who tell me they grew up watching him on “his” TV show.
The Nature of Things (which we lovingly call TNoT) has offered an encyclopedia of learning. Dad brought science and nature into our homes before it was cool on Netflix, before Nat Geo had a channel, before BBC’s Planet Earth.
TNOT also had a huge influence on Dad. It made him famous beyond his genetics renown. And what he was learning on the show galvanized him into environmental activism. He continued to expand his scientific knowledge, and he met Indigenous people around the planet who were fighting to defend their lands and ecosystems. In many cases, he got involved in their struggles for justice. He took that education and made the relationships and knowledge the cornerstones of his activism as a Canadian environmentalist.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that in the mainstream, it’s been mostly ignored that he’s a person of colour. But to other people of colour, his representation in the media has mattered. I’ve heard so many stories of what he’s meant to other “hyphenated Canadians,” seeing someone like him representing science, education, public good, trustworthiness.
Forty-four years ago, the media landscape was not diverse. For the dominant Canadian culture at the time, having David Suzuki in your living room once a week was a major inroad to normalize difference.
Lately, he hasn’t been wearing his glasses and he’s getting older — 87 last month. When he’s not recognized, he’s vulnerable to the same prejudices others face. Recently in Montreal for COP15, an unpleasant interaction he experienced at his hotel reminded us of the risks always present for people of colour across our country.
But today, more Canadians are addressing racism. More and more individuals and organizations — including the David Suzuki Foundation — are talking openly about addressing systemic bias, and working to counter our internalized white supremacy culture. It’s hard and imperfect, but it’s happening.
I think Dad’s time on TNoT has helped us reach this moment.
As he retires after more than four decades onscreen, I’m wondering: How has this host – who is both a celebrated geneticist and a survivor of a Japanese internment camp – shaped us?
We’re used to hearing David’s calls for Earth. But less celebrated, understood and meaningful to dominant culture is his identity as an othered Canadian — and his life-long work to widen the tent of who is represented and trusted on the screen and on the Canadian stage. Today, the TV host landscape is much different than it was four decades ago.
As people in Canada continue to unearth children’s bones beside residential schools, finally facing the horrors of our colonial past, I believe Dad’s face, voice and relentless commitment to raising awareness about Earth and listening to Indigenous Peoples has helped prepare us for this moment. If we take up his call, then we must bravely step up, take responsibility and address these inextricable pieces: systemic racism and our destruction of the natural world.
The DSF was created in 1990 to create change. For so many decades, David was warning the world about environmental destruction, consumption and climate change. While he sometimes gets depressed that we haven’t yet seen the change we need, I think his work and the work of so many others have gotten us to a new phase. We’re no longer debating whether climate change is real, or whether ecosystems are in trouble. We’re in the next stage of the struggle. The alarm has sounded. We’re awake. Now we must turn this awareness into transformation.
Today, this is what the DSF seeks to do, and it’s one of the great honours of my life to be part of this organization. We are striving for change in a diversity of ways: working to end fossil fuel supremacy, become an anti-racist organization, support citizens to take action and mobilize, and provide government with research, data and recommendations to do the right thing.
I know that one answer to the question, “How can we change the world?” is “Together.”
Dad’s time on The Nature of Things wasn’t just a broadcasting career — it was a journey people in Canada have been on with him.
My message to him is: I’m so proud of what you’ve accomplished, Dad. And I’m grateful that your work — while not yet finished — has made it more possible for those who have been othered to have a voice, and has helped get us to the next phase of the work: being the transformation we seek.
Thank you for reading and helping me mark this moment, friends and supporters.
I look forward to continuing to work for change with you all.
Severn Cullis-Suzuki, Executive Director, David Suzuki Foundation
