To Keep Catching Fish

In David Suzuki’s latest book — I say “latest” because even as a nonagenarian he remains a tireless firebrand — what struck me was the fish. Lessons from a Lifetime: 90 Years of Inspiration and Activism, written with Ian Hanington, is an unusual mash‑up: part coffee-table book, part memoir, part pre-obituary, for lack of a better word. At just under 200 pages, the relatively slim volume is chock full of photographs and testimonials from family, friends, and fellow warriors in the crusade to save the planet. It’s the third in a series of autobiographies. Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life came out in 1987, when Suzuki was fifty. A follow‑up, David Suzuki: The Autobiography, arrived in 2006. This most recent entry recycles much of that twenty-year-old material, chapter titles mostly intact — including the first and most direct: “My Happy Childhood in Racist British Columbia.” One would think there is nothing new to learn about the man. But as I pored over the text and photos, I kept marking pages with sticky notes bearing a single word: “Fish!” I seem to have missed this detail until now.

A geneticist by training, Suzuki began his life’s work as a science communicator in 1962, on local television in Edmonton. His broadcasting career ended only three years ago, when he signed off for the last time as anchor of CBC TV’s The Nature of Things. Over that period, he’s written over fifty books, while haranguing governments and businesses to protect the environment. He has posed (almost) naked for his cause. He is a scientist, a teacher, a mentor, a husband, a father, a grandfather — and, as became obvious in these pages, a keen fisherman.

Suzuki is old enough to remember catching sea‑run cutthroat trout around Vancouver’s Stanley Park and jigging for halibut off Spanish Banks Beach with his father. Those days were before the Second World War — before the federal government rounded up the family and sent them to an internment camp in the B.C. interior, where he fished some more. (That may be part of the reason Suzuki can describe the time as “happy.”) Even after a jarring move from the camp to Leamington, Ontario — internees of Japanese descent were expelled from the West Coast — it was nature that comforted the budding scientist: “My one solace was a large swamp that was a ten-minute bike ride from our house.”

This glimpse of a passion for the outdoors, first kindled through those early fishing trips, is a quiet, lovely revelation about an iconic Canadian. I wanted more of it. Even after consulting the two previous memoirs, I’m left with the feeling that there have been missed opportunities to fully tell the story of someone who has had such an outsize impact here and well beyond our borders.

Interspersed with Suzuki’s truncated personal history are anecdotes from family, colleagues, and the numerous celebrities he has met while jetting around the globe in support of one project or another. It is a celebration of life before death — which I applaud. Who among us wouldn’t want to know we are loved while we are still around to hear it? Images of Sting, William Shatner, and John Denver, among other famous faces, are sprinkled throughout. Jane Fonda, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Young provide tributes. For some, these red-carpet references may read as evidence of Suzuki’s appetite for celebrity himself. But this strikes me as too simple a take.

When you live your life as large as Suzuki has, people notice. Some of those people are rich and powerful. Many are not. To get a truer sense of the man, I found myself paying close attention to the accounts of those who dealt with him regularly. His executive assistant of ten years stresses his humanity, his compassion, his boundless love. His producers describe a good listener with a deep capacity for delight. His daughters — one from his first marriage, one from his second — both thank him for teaching them the magic of swamps. That too is a quiet and lovely tell.

As I was reading Lessons from a Lifetime and gazing at the many photographs, I was also making my way through a business and technology podcast called Acquired. Launched in 2015, the series offers superb storytelling about the titans of capitalism — riveting, if you have the stomach for it. For anyone who cares about the environment, it also produces a creeping sense of helplessness: if financial success is the pinnacle of human achievement, we may be doomed. But the podcast left me wondering why we don’t extend the same quality of storytelling to the people who have spent their lives trying to save the planet. Where is the book on Suzuki with the mass-market pull of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs?

I can think of one biography of a conservationist that achieved genuine mass appeal, and it likely succeeded because it was, at its core, a mystery. Dian Fossey, profiled in Gorillas in the Mist, was charismatic and obsessive, and she worked in a remote, visually ravishing setting. (Murder, it should be noted, also helps propel a narrative.) Another book that explores many of the same elements, but with a happier ending, is Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed. Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, planted millions of trees, was beaten and imprisoned by Daniel arap Moi’s government, and later won the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet titles like Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, where the Nike co-founder details how the world was persuaded to wear sneakers as a lifestyle choice, are often bigger hits.

Am I asking too much? Entrepreneurial stories tend to follow a satisfying arc of struggle, vision, disruption, triumph. For environmentalists like Suzuki, the victories are defined by what didn’t happen: the forests that weren’t logged, the dams that weren’t built, the streams that weren’t paved over.

Still, there may be a genuine opening for the right writer. Lessons from a Lifetime makes plain that Suzuki and his close-knit family have had an extraordinary influence on the people close to them. His experiences have the drama to create something metaphoric and transcendent: Japanese Canadian internment during the war, an idyllic then shattered childhood, racism, reinvention from geneticist to broadcaster to activist. Suzuki is a proud Canadian — remarkable given what his family endured, a thread that deserves far more unspooling — and in writing his own story, he is too polite to dish. He never answers how, unlike so many of us, he could outrun self-doubt and achieve everything he did. Perhaps the best explanation is that he has approached his life as an artist.

Art is a way of seeing the world, and Suzuki’s perspective has always been expansive. He is raucous in his curiosity and in his questioning of the status quo. His work on fruit flies and genetic mutations, for instance, is fundamental to research today into human disease. For scientific breakthroughs of that magnitude, it takes imagination: the ability to visualize the unseen and to connect disparate dots.

Suzuki brings that same artistry to communication, in rendering the difficult digestible. The American jazz musician Charles Mingus once observed, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace. Making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” That’s also Suzuki. “I thought I might have a knack for translating the arcane jargon of science into the vernacular of the lay public,” he writes, “and I felt that speaking on television was a responsibility I had assumed by accepting government research grants and public support at a university.” Beyond a sense of duty, I think love of the craft and an artist’s penchant for speaking truth to power may have compelled him too. As his producer Sue Dando testifies, “There was nothing our host wouldn’t do for the cause.” That’s why we have the tireless advocate wearing just a fig leaf for a publicity shot when he was sixty-four.

For all his creativity and passion for communicating science, though, Suzuki has consistently written his own history as a legacy document. That is a fundamentally different intention, and readers feel it. The storylines are delivered straight, without the kind of connective tissue that reveals a larger truth. Maybe he just doesn’t want to tell an allegorical tale.

Suzuki often says that his grandchildren are his true legacy, his nearest stake in the future. He hopes they will know their grandfather as someone who was part of a great movement that helped the planet turn a corner on the environmental crisis. But there is another wish, quieter and more personal: “I also hope that they might remember my most valuable lesson and be able to say, ‘Grandpa taught us how to catch and clean a fish. Let’s go catch one for dinner.’ ” If, many years from now, they can still catch one, Grandpa’s teaching will have paid off.