Environmental Guru Energizes Canadians

Climate change activist David Suzuki, 71, has been called the Canadian Al Gore. (Douglas Struck - The Washington Post)

TORONTO -- The rough ghost town in the Canadian Rocky Mountains that became a prison home for four members of the Suzuki family during World War II did not really seem such a bad place to 6-year-old David.

"For a kid suddenly plunked down in a valley where the rivers and lakes were filled with fish and the forests with wolves, bears and deer, this was paradise," Suzuki recalled years later in his autobiography.

Still, an internment camp for Japanese Canadians was an unlikely place to start for the man now embraced by Canada as a national icon, voted one of the country's "Greatest Canadians," the man seen as the guru of the environmental movement here.

His relentless hectoring on climate change, capped by standing-room-only rallies he held in 43 towns in Canada in February, has helped propel the environmental issue to the top of Canada's political agenda, already influencing the jockeying ahead of the next national election.

Suzuki, 71, admits that the treatment of his family -- which was split up during internment and forced to move east after the war -- seared him. Even now, as a third-generation Canadian who does not speak Japanese, he said, "I hate looking at myself, hate my eyes, hate all the insecurities" that came from his appearance. From those days, he says, he always felt like an outsider.

But that gave him the strength, he says, to champion unpopular causes -- global warming and other environmental issues -- long before they became fashionable.

Suzuki, inevitably, is called Canada's Al Gore, and Suzuki himself credits the former vice president with helping shape his grass-roots strategy. But Suzuki has his own long list of credentials on the issue, and the background of the two men could not be more different.

Whereas Gore is a patrician born to wealth and politics, Suzuki's father labored in the dry-cleaning business and chafed under the racism of the day.

Suzuki was a self-described loner who enjoyed spending his afternoons collecting insects in a bog. His father pushed him to join high school debate contests to learn public speaking. Suzuki excelled in the sciences, stopping for degrees or to teach at universities in Massachusetts, Chicago, Edmonton in Canada's Alberta province, and finally at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He chose genetics as his specialty.

He got his first exposure on television explaining science on a sleepy Sunday morning college program in Edmonton called "Your University Speaks." He liked it and was amazed that people watched the show.

"I realized, holy cow, TV is a very powerful medium," he said. Before long, Suzuki was hosting a weekly science program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1979, he took over "The Nature of Things," a CBC show he still hosts, and he has done dozens of other environmental programs broadcast in Canada and the United States.

Suzuki balanced his academic career with a growing list of environmental broadcast awards. In 1988, he interviewed Gore and professed himself awed by the then senator's grasp of climate-change issues. "He sent shivers up my back.