Ideas - We have a moral responsibility to this planet: David Suzuki

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

“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," says David Suzuki. For 44 years, the former host of The Nature of Things shared the beauty of the natural world and taught us about our moral responsibility that comes with being alive. In this episode, the award-winning scientist and environmentalist shares his life lessons as a proud elder. *This episode originally aired on June 8, 2023.

You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map You battled crackens and navigated through storms Your spades struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest While you cooked a lasagna There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas.

I'm Nala Ayed. Hello, I'm David Suzuki. Welcome to the first show in a new season of The Nature of Things. Each week we'll explore the mysteries of the natural world and exciting discoveries in science, medicine and technology. I hope you'll join me. Well, even if he did not introduce himself, that's a voice just about every Canadian will recognize. voice just about every Canadian will recognize. David Suzuki, host for the past 44 years of the world's longest running television science show, The Nature of Things. Here's tonight's lineup. An unorthodox teacher shows our everyday

world to be a flying circus of physics. Having no immune system to fight disease may mean a life in isolation. The remarkable life cycle of the monarch butterfly. Contact lenses that stay in place night and day. Convenient, but are they safe? And if you don't remember that particular program, that's because it was David Suzuki's very first appearance as host, October 24, 1979. Look at what was on the program. The flying circus of physics, our body's autoimmune system, the life cycle of the monarch butterfly,

and the safety risks of contact lenses. The show didn't change that much over the years, except to become a lot more focused on the natural world and environmental issues. A couple of generations of Canadians grew up with the nature of things and with David Suzuki. Between the two of them, they set a standard for how we should take care of the world we live in. He once said, 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. Today on Ideas, David Suzuki in his own words from a talk he gave at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto. At the age of 87, he had recently stepped down as host of The Nature of Things and this talk was a kind of story of my life. We're calling

this program David Suzuki has something to say. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you all. I'm honored and I'm thrilled that you've come. I'm in the last phase of my life and when I say this people go, oh no don't say that. Listen when you're my age it's not morbid it's just reality. This is the last part of my life and I am very proud to say that I've reached it and I've become an elder. Because elders I think are the, this is the most important time of my life. We elders have lived an entire life. And we've learned a lot.

I mean, I've made mistakes, I've had failures, a few successes. Those have all been lessons that I think are worth thinking about and passing on to the coming generation. As an elder, I don't have to kiss anybody's you-know-what in order to get a job or raise a promotion. As an elder, we don't run after fame or money or power. We're free then to speak the truth from our hearts. And if that offends people, it's not my problem, it's theirs. So I call on all elders to get off the couch or the golf course and get up and do the speaking. Think through your life and the important lessons that you've learned to pass on so that the coming generations don't make the same mistakes.

And so at the risk of boring you and it's a bit self-indulgent, I'd like to troll through my life and share a few lessons that I hope are worth considering. My story begins in between 1902 and 1906. That's when my grandparents emigrated to Canada from Japan. They spoke no English and none of them ever learned to speak English. So I never, in the time I knew my grandparents, ever had a conversation with them. I couldn't because I never spoke any Japanese. So my roots to Japan were nonexistent. I really didn't have any. My grandparents,

though, were driven to this land by their own poverty in their home country. When they arrived they knew nothing about the native flora and fauna. They knew nothing about the indigenous peoples who have lived in these lands for thousands of years. Canada to them as for most immigrants meant opportunity. Forest lands, land for agriculture, sea life of course, and they had no concern about the unknown history of the people who had lived and cared for those lands over time. They knew Canada was racist. They had to know that because they lived with it. They knew Canada was racist. They had to know that because they lived with it. They knew when they came that even if they became Canadian citizens, they wouldn't be able to vote.

Even in their children who were born in Canada, couldn't vote. And there were many parts of Canada where they couldn't buy land and many professions that excluded them. What they did know was that if they kept their head down and they worked their asses off, that they might be able to carve out a place in this country. As I said, they never learned to speak English. I never learned to speak Japanese because my dad said, especially after the war, he said, look, if you're Canadian, you learn to speak French

if you're going to learn another language. And I regret very much that I never did acquire that part of my history. But as I went to school in Ontario, my history that I learned was British history. The music that I learned was Beethoven and Mozart. My literature was Shakespeare. I had no roots in Japan, but my roots, as little as they were, were rooted in colonial Canada. My mother was born in Vancouver in 1911, my dad in Vancouver in 1909. in 1911, my dad in Vancouver in 1909. They of course were fluently bilingual and like many of the children born in the country, they were the interface then between Western society and their

parents, my grandparents. They married during the Depression and the Depression had a profound impact on them, as I think it did on most people during that time. Although I must say, I visited the village of Fort Rupert on Vancouver Island, an indigenous community, and they told me that they didn't know about the stock market crash or the Depression depression because the forests were rich and the oceans were still intact and rich in fish. They didn't know there was a depression all through the the 30s but of course most of Canada and the world

in fact suffered under the depression and because of that it shaped the values of my parents which they pounded home in my sisters and me. They said always live within your means. They said save some for tomorrow. Share, don't be greedy. Always help your neighbors they are part of the community that you are a part of. And the most important lesson they said over and over again, you have to work hard to buy the necessities in life, but you don't run after money as if having fancy clothes, a big car, or a new house makes you a better, more important person. Those are

lessons, hard-earned lessons that they learn through the Depression. I was born in Vancouver in 1936, and my first memories of life, in fact, were camping and fishing with my father. And Dad was the eldest of seven in the family, and as the eldest he was always expected to be a role model for his siblings. And he disappointed his mom and dad because he worked hard, but he in fact loved hiking and camping and fishing and gardening with plants he would bring in from the wild. And we used to have weekly on Sundays, the whole family would gather with the grandparents and I just remember my grandparents giving my dad hell.

Why did you take David and go fishing on Saturday? You could have been working. I always thank my dad for being the disappointment to his parents. That he, it was through him that he gave me my earliest memories of fishing and camping. Of course, the evacuation was a devastating experience for my parents. I was six. I didn't know what the hell was going on. I mean, it's just my dad suddenly, he wasn't home anymore. I keep trying to imagine my mother in her early 30s having to deal with this with two,

three children and without her husband having to pack up. And I have no idea what happened to everything because we only had a limited amount of weight of stuff we could take with us. What did she think we were going to? I have no idea. For me it was just an adventure. And I didn't even realize that the train that we were on going to Slocan, which is where we were dumped off, was full of Japanese kids. We were off and we ended up staying in one of the old hotels in Slocan City.

Slocan City had grown up. Of course it was nothing. It wasn't a city. But it had grown up in the 1890s during a silver rush. And then as the silver was exhausted, the town became derelict, and we then were put into these old hotels and buildings. There was no school for a year for me, and you know, six years old, that was great. So I was off running around as a wild kid and when school did start, almost all of the other kids that... I went to school in Bay Farm and all the kids that I knew spoke Japanese.

They were Nisei and I was a Sansei. And of course, they would just go between Japanese and English. And I didn't realize it, but they used to beat me up. And the only reason I remember is that my father came to collect me from school once in the winter, and he saw this kid running and running, and these kids were running after him, and he would slip and fall, and they'd jump on him, and then he'd get up and run. And it was me. I don't remember any of that.

My father remembers it, but I do remember that I felt isolated, but because the kids picked on me, and there was a girl there my age, Daisy, whose father was white. Her father was in the army and was away, and she, Daisy, and her mother were in Slocam. And the kids picked on her. They used to call her Inoko. To me, Inoko means love child. But it was a slur, and Daisy would end up crying every time. And you know, when we're victims of prejudice and we become bigots ourselves, then bigotry wins. And that was a really hard lesson to see the way they treated someone like that, who was in the camps along with everybody else. But because of that, I spent almost all of my time in the woods.

And that, of course, was where I bonded with nature. And Dad always said, look, if you run into a bear or a wolf, don't yell or scream, don't look it in the eye, just stand still, and then quietly back away if it'll allow you. I never had to do that, but I did run into bears and wolves. They were just a part of my experience and they were very, very generous to me. Usually they ran away when they saw me. But that was a very defining time in my life because of the bonding with nature and the encounter of discrimination

and the pain that it caused. Now I don't know how many of you realize, you'll remember that as the war was coming to an end, British Columbia wanted to get rid of all Asians and the Japanese were one group they didn't want any more of. And so we were confronted with a choice. Renounce Canada, give up your citizenship and get a one-way ticket to Japan, which to both of my parents was a foreign country.

They'd never been there. Or get out of BC and go east of the Rockies. And of course it was such anger at the government for the way they'd been treated. There was a whole push then. Everybody sign up to get the hell out of Canada. And if you decided to stay in Canada, there was huge pressure within the community. My mother used to go to every once a week, there was a group of women who would knit and I guess gossip and talk.

But when we said we're staying in Canada, they treated her so bad. She never talked about it. She would never tell me what happened. But she never went back to that group again. And we were basically ostracized because we didn't make that step of signing up to go to Japan. And this is something that was very painful for my father because, of course, after the boats, after the war and people started to go back, the word came back, don't come, the

place is flat, it's terrible. And the people that were still in the camps waiting to go to Japan said, no, no, no, we don't want to go, and I don't know all the details. But my father always was very bitter that the people had treated him and my mother so badly because they decided to stay in Canada. We ended up, when the war ended, we staged in Caslow for nine months or so, and then off we went to Ontario and ended up on a farm in Leamington. When we moved into Leamington, the kids I used to play with, the white kids, would say,

no coloured person has ever stayed in Leamington beyond sunset. I think I was the first... We were the first coloured family to move into Leamington. And the reason they said that is Leamington was 35 miles from Detroit, and a lot of black people from Detroit on weekends would come to Leamington. There was a wonderful dock out into Lake Erie and they would fish. But they, the Leamingtonians, would not tolerate them staying in Leamington overnight. That was the time. But again, I was so clueless that Leamington was a wonderful experience for me. Brand new ecosystem, all kinds of fish that were different, but I fell in love with

insects. And I had an insect collection that I was very proud of. And it's interesting that my kids all love insects because I'm their dad, but they all refused to kill them. I'd say, let's start an insect collection. They refused to kill them. They would say, dad, we'll take a picture and then we'll have a collection. So big changes like that in the time. The other big change, I was introduced to the Detroit Zoo, which at that time in the 1940s was this unbelievable place. It was probably not that extensive, but it seemed so incredible to me to go and be able to see lions and tigers and elephants and monkeys. And it really was a very important, again, part of my life.

Because of the Detroit Zoo, I dreamed of going to Africa and South America and seeing these places. We, as I say, I loved, I loved Leamington when I started in grade 9. I went to Leamington High. I loved it. But my father felt very strongly that we needed to get to a bigger city where I could get a better education, because for him education was everything in terms of getting out of our poverty. You know, I got to London in 1949, I guess, 13, and you know, I'd just gone through puberty and I was so anxious to have a girlfriend. Oh my God, I wanted to go. There's no way I would ever think of asking a white girl out.

I mean, that was not something that was even possible to consider at that time. And I remember dad calling me, I'm sure many of you have heard this story that dad realized that I was looking at girls all the time. So he called me and said, David, I want to have a talk with you. So I go in and he said, now listen, you know that the only acceptable girl for you is a Japanese girl.

I said, Dad, there are only 10 Japanese girls in London and three of them are my sisters. Okay, he says, well, a Chinese girl would be okay with me. I said, there are only three Chinese families in London. I've never met any. Okay, okay, he says, a native girl would be okay. I said, I've never even met an Indian girl. I don't even know where the reserve... Okay, a black girl's okay. I knew one black girl, Annabelle Johnson, she wasn't interested in me. Okay, okay, a Jewish girl. So he had his ranking based clearly on the degree to which he felt they understood what discrimination was all about.

But the absolute unacceptable partner that I would kick you out of the family if you ever thought of marrying an English girl. Tara stand up my English wife. She had to wait though. She had to wait until I married a Japanese girl and then I moved over after a time. But before the war, a lot of people from England would come to Canada, and if you had a university degree, you would have a good chance of getting a position in government.

So I think that a lot of the people that were administering the evacuation orders and enforcing our roundup and shipping out had English accents. So my dad really blamed the English for that. And again, it was his own bias, his own bigotry that he attempted to pass on to me. He felt that sports, one of the things that I really, my dad was my great love and my mentor, but he was a hard driver.

And he said, no, sports are a waste of time. If you've got time to play sports, you can come home and do your chores. And that's one of the things I really regret very much, that he never encouraged me to go into any kind of sports. He did say, you know, the trouble with Japanese in Canada is they're so timid. When they're asked to get up and respond to something,

they're really shy. And he said, you want to succeed in Canada, you've got to be able to get up on your feet and speak. And so he made me go into public speaking contests. And in grade nine in Leamington High, they had a program where they had public speaking. And he trained me to be a public speaker. And what he made me do is I'd write out my speech, and then every

night, after we'd had dinner, down in the basement, he would sit there with my written speech, and I would have to get up and give the speech. If I made a mistake or flubbed a word, I had to go back to the beginning and start over. If he said, okay, now, this is a really important part, so as you begin to speak you slow down and then come up and you move your hands and then I'd have to go back to the beginning and start over again. And every night I'd be crying in frustration and just doing over and over. But I'll tell you, by the end of this, you could wake me at three o'clock in the morning and say, give this speech, and I would give it perfectly.

So I hated that process, but my father, because he felt so strongly that to be a Canadian and to do well in it, you had to be able to get up and speak in public. And now, of course, I'm grateful to him. And that's what I used to do when I became a professor in university. I would write out my lessons and then I would practice them. That's the way you do it, folks. For any young kid in here, I'm sorry, that's the way you do it. Be able to public speak, he said, and if you want to succeed and compete with white people,

you have to work twice as hard. Fortunately, that wasn't very hard. So he also thought... For some reason, he thought you have to be able to dance. I never did follow through on that. But I was, was again very lonely, of course I didn't have a girlfriend through high school and I found the great solace for me. If I got on my bike about 10 minutes away by bike was a gigantic swamp or we'd call

it wetland today and that was a place, because I could go out and forget, just go out in the swamp. I'd go in with my shoes and pants, just walk right in, and I don't know what it is, but you have this bond. It was where I learned so much, you know. I remember the time I collected eggs. I thought there were frog eggs and they were salamander eggs. And when I brought them home, my mother never gave me heck because they came in all wet and muddy and she just took my clothes and put them in the laundry. When I'd bring home these treasures, tadpoles, or when I got the salamander eggs, you'd think I won a Nobel Prize or something. It was just so...

So they encouraged me in that time that I spent out in nature. And that was a magical place, but today when I go back to London, my swamp is now a huge shopping center and a parking area. And you know, it just hurts me to think of young people today. Where does the young David or Mary get their inspiration? Is it in these electronic game parlors? But there's not the kind of world that I had available to me in the outskirts of London. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1. We're a podcast and a broadcast, heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America,

on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map. You battled Krakens and navigated through storms. Your spade struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest. While you cooked a lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible.

Did you know Canadian news is still banned on Instagram and Facebook? And this August will mark two years since that ban began. So if you can't trust the algorithm to keep you updated, trust World Report instead. I'm John Northcott. I'm Marcia Young, and we want to unblock you from the news that matters most. Give us 10 minutes every morning and we'll give you the biggest stories happening in Canada and around the world. You can find and follow World Report, wherever you get your podcasts.

Teaching all of us the importance of rediscovering the natural world. That's probably David Suzuki's greatest achievement. And as he's been saying, that's probably a lot more difficult today. There are fewer ponds, fewer magical places as he calls them. He once said, we emerged out of nature and when we die we return to nature. We need to know there are forces impinging on us that we will never understand or control. We need to have sacred places where we go with respect. And that pond outside London, Ontario, long gone now, would be one of those sacred places. Here he is again from a talk at the Japanese-Canadian Cultural Centre, soon after his retirement

after 44 years as the host of The Nature of Things. This is David Suzuki has something to say. I had the curse in high school of being what they call a brain. A brain just meant you got good grades. But in the sociology of high school, being a brain was like having leprosy or something. Anyway, in grade 13, we had grade 13 in Ontario in those days, and I hung out with a group of nerdy guys, and one of them said to me, hey, Dave, why don't you run for school president? I said, what are you talking about? He said, yeah, yeah, come on, you know, you're smart.

So I go home that night, and I say to my father, you know that Vic, he's so crazy, he thinks I should run for school president. My dad says, yeah. So I said, no, I said, no, that's crazy. Then dad got really mad. He said, what the hell are you talking about? How are you gonna know whether you're any good or not? He said, there are always going to be people who are better

than you, that are smarter than you, that are stronger than you, but how will you know if you don't try? He said, there's no shame in running and losing, but you ought to try. And that was, for me, a very, very important lesson. And so my nerdy friends and I ran, I ran, and our whole thing was that I'm not one of the beautiful people, but I've got some ideas about what high school should be and so on. And the amazing thing was that I was elected with more votes than all of the other candidates put together. That's an important lesson. I think part of it was because I was Japanese in an all-white school and I was different, I don't know, but I always felt

that there are way more outies than innies. And if you can rally them, in fact, you can have power. So while I was the school president, I was interviewed by a reporter, I think it was about should younger people get the vote, people under 21. And I don't even remember what I said, but my dad read it in the newspaper and he said, why did you say that?

That's not what you believe. And I said, well, I didn't want people to get mad at me. Boy, did my dad get mad at me. He said, listen, if you want to be liked by everyone, you're not going to stand for a goddamn thing. He said, if you're going to stand for something, there are always going to be people who are going to be opposed to you and object to you. So get used to it.

If you want to make a difference, you have to be able to stand up and then duke it out with the people that don't agree with you. Again, one of those lessons at my age in high school, it was really, really important, and I still remember him telling me that. One of my classmates was an American and John went to college in the States after grade 12 and I met him at Christmas when he came back and and he raved about this college and said you should go and he sent me all the forms of application and just for a lark, I filled them all out, sent them in. And to my astonishment, I was accepted and given

what at that time was a huge scholarship. It was worth more than my father earned in a year. It's $1,500. And because of that scholarship, I got to go to an elite private school, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts. And of course, I still had to work during that time, but it was a great experience. And I feel that that Amherst College made me as a scholar, as an academic, that experience. But in my third year at college, because I was in an honors biology sequence, I had to

take genetics. And I was blown away. You know, normally you think of biology as identifying birds or animals or dissecting them and knowing all the parts of the organs and all that stuff. But here was this unbelievable science. It was like mathematics. And you could deal in numbers, and you could determine the behavior of genes and chromosomes and how they're passed on. For me, it was mind-boggling because genetics allowed us to peel back the layers of complexity

using these simple tools of plant and animal breeding. I just fell madly in love with genetics and said, I want to do this for the rest of my life. But on October 4th, 1957, I was in my last year in college, the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik. I didn't even know there was a space program. And you got to remember in those days, 1950s and 60s, Russia was a powerhouse. The Soviet Union was extending its hegemony around the world in Africa and South America and Southeast Asia. The Soviet Union was making inroads all over the world. There was a war going on. And every hour and a half that satellite went overhead and it was beeping and kind of thumbing its nose at the United States. And it was a really scary time because the U.S. realized, holy

cow, now they had rockets, Army, Navy, Air Force rockets. Now the Soviets, Sputnik was about a basketball size. The Americans tried to launch a grapefruit-sized satellite. Every one of them blew up. Meanwhile, the Soviets launched the first animal in space, a dog, Laika. The first man, Yuri Gagarin. The first team of cosmonauts, the first spacewalk, the first woman, Valentina Terezkova. The American response was absolutely incredible. Ditsa said, we, we gotta crank it up.

We gotta catch up to these guys. And they started pouring money in. Nobody said we can't afford this. They just said we gotta go for this. And it was a glorious time to be a student in science. All you had to do was say, gee, I really like science. And they threw money at you. It was, I really like science, and they threw money at you.

It was, no, really. So then I got to go to the University of Chicago. I got married when I graduated from Amherst, and we went to Chicago. And so the plan was, you know, I'd get through graduate school, I'd get a job, and then we'd start a family. And I'm trying to go to grad school. She had a ticket to work. and so she worked in the daytime. I would work on my degree at night.

And I finished my PhD in two and a half years. Then got a very prestigious opportunity to spend a post-doctoral year in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Oak Ridge was a company town, company to AECL, the Atomic Energy Commission. Oak Ridge was set up in the hills of Tennessee because if an atomic bomb were to land on Oak Ridge, it had all of the mountains around to baffle the impact of an atomic bomb.

Oak Ridge was where they isolated the plutonium to go into atomic bombs. And they had manufactured then the bombs from Oak Ridge plutonium and dropped them on Japan in 1945. After the war, they converted the labs that were used to isolate plutonium and make the bomb into biology labs to study the impact of radiation on genes. And by the time I had my PhD in genetics, it had shifted completely. They were just interested in basic genetics. And Oak Ridge had one of the best genetics groups in the world,

and I got a research associate ship to go there, and it was a fantastic place. Fantastic experience to go to, but Oak Ridge itself was segregated. My lab mate, who became my, like a sister to me was a black lab technician, Ruby Wilkerson. Ruby couldn't go to church in Oak Ridge. She couldn't shop in the big stores in Oak Ridge. She couldn't go to movies in Oak Ridge. It was segregated. segregated and this upset me very much and what happened was I became so angry, so angry that I just resented every white person that we'd meet on the street. It was amazing to watch her if we were walking down the street, if a white person came, she always stepped off the sidewalk. Just automatically did that. And I'm going, what the hell? You

know, that's a guy. He should at least make way for a woman, let alone a black woman. I became a racist while I was in Oak Ridge. I resented white people for what they were doing to Ruby and her family so much that I just felt this tremendous anger and my wife said to me, look, you got to get out of here. You're sick. And I realized then that, you know, you don't win anything when you become what you hate, the racists. And so, even though Canada had treated Japanese Canadians so badly, Canada was my home, and Canada was smaller, and Canada was different. I valued Canada having Quebec, and the National Film Board, and the CBC,

and those were things that mattered so much to me. And so I decided then to leave the United States. And I took the first job I could get and came back to Canada to the University of Alberta. And it was a great job. And I loved it there there but it was cold. The first winter there we had a week of minus 40 and I said human beings shouldn't have to live like this. How the hell did the Inuit do it? I can't stand it. But while I was at the university, this is in 1962, I got my job there, a woman changed

the course of my life. A woman named Rachel Carson published a book called Silent Spring. And it was all about the unexpected effects of pesticides. Now you might think, wow, how did that change your life? But you've got to remember in the 1950s and 60s, we thought people thought science was going to just make life so great. The guy that found that DDT kills arthropods, including insects, Paul Miller won a Nobel Prize in 1948 for that discovery. And we began to use DDT like mad. And then Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring

and said, wait, the Silent Spring, the birds, where are the birds? The birds were disappearing. And then she showed that there were all kinds of unexpected effects. You know, scientists had focused, they would have a growth chamber or even an open field, a control field, and they'd put plants in there, then they'd introduce insects, then they'd spray and they'd count the insects. And, you know, they'd done all these experiments and showed DDT was great. Didn't seem to affect mammals, but it affected arthropods. And so we began to use it. But the wind blows, it rains, it snows, and the

DDT you spray doesn't stay in fields and it washes into the rivers and creeks. And then scientists discovered something they didn't even know called biomagnification. You spray in parts per million. The DDT is absorbed by microorganisms that aren't killed. They're eaten by bigger invertebrates. And as you go up the food chain, you concentrate it. It's now called biomagnification. Concentration. So by the time you get to the breasts of women, or the shell glands of birds, that's why birds were laying eggs with thin shells that were breaking.

And the reason for that is that DDT is lipo-philic. Lipo is fat. Philic they love. DDT goes to fatty tissues like the breasts of women and the shell glands of birds. We didn't know there was a thing called biomagnification until eagles began to disappear and scientists tracked it down and discovered a really brand new phenomenon. And that's when I realized science is very powerful, but how the world works is very, very complex and we don't know it. You don't learn about how the world works by focusing and just studying parts, bits and pieces.

And for me, that was a very, very profound discovery. And the other thing I discovered at the University of Alberta was they had a program, an hour program, once a week on the local CBC channel. It was called Your University Speaks and any professor who could get up and talk well they would film him for half an hour and run the... So someone heard that I was a good teacher and so they asked if I would come and do a talk on genetics. And I did and it was great and they really liked it. They said, come back and do another one. And I ended up doing eight and I think they paid me maybe $15 each time. I mean, I didn't do it for the money. But I discovered that I wasn't intimidated by the camera. And it's interesting, because my father always paid attention to what I was learning in school.

Every night at dinner, he would say, all right, what did you learn today? And I'd have to explain to him what I learned in different classes. And if he didn't understand it, he'd get mad and say, all right, what did you learn today? And I'd have to explain to him what I learned in different classes. And if I, he didn't understand it, he'd get mad and say, I don't understand it. What do you mean? What did you learn? And so I had to learn to say it and express it to him so that he understood. So I always, when I'm watching the camera, I think that's my dad.

So, you know, I got to give it so he understands it. Now this program is shown on Sunday morning around 8 or 9 in the morning. People would come up and say, hey, I saw your show. That was really interesting. And I'd go, what the hell are you doing watching television at 8 o'clock in the morning? And that's when I realized, holy cow, this is a powerful medium of communication. And I began to take television seriously then as a way of educating people. But it was cold.

And although I loved the university, a job came up at the University of British Columbia. When I left Edmonton, it was 10 below. And when I landed in Vancouver, it was eight above, and everybody in Vancouver was saying, God damn it, it's so cold. I said, ah, this is for me. Anyway, I took the job and stayed there for the rest of my academic career.

In my first classes, most of the students hoped to get into medical school. They were pre-meds. So they were really interested in, you know, what are the medical effects? What are the hereditary diseases? What about genetic engineering and cloning and all? I didn't know about any of this. I hadn't studied that when I was getting my education. So I had to do a lot of reading. And to my shock, genetics, this subject that I had fallen in love with, had been used for some of the most terrible things

in human history. In the exuberance over the discovery of genetic principles in 1900, geneticists began to believe, they said, we've got our hands on the levers of life. We can now use this knowledge and begin to apply it to humans. We can begin to get rid of all the bad things and improve the quality of humans. So a whole new field arose called eugenics, true genetics. It was all about humans. There was negative eugenics, which is how do we find ways of keeping the bad genes out

of reproduction, and positive eugenics, how do we encourage those people who have the good kinds of genes to breed and have more children? There were journals, eugenics journals, there were eugenics departments in universities, some of the top geneticists at the time were in eugenics. So this was a very serious subject. There were eugenics acts invoked in which people in mental institutions began to be sterilized on the basis that we didn't want them to pass their genes on, even though in most cases we had no idea whether those problems were hereditary or

not. There were acts that discriminated against certain people for immigration. Immigration laws discriminated against those people thought to be inferior. There were states in the United States that had laws preventing interracial marriage or miscegenation. So all of these were based on the notion that many of these characteristics that were desirable or undesirable were hereditary. I found the justification for the incarceration of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians were genetic. The whole idea behind it was if you have two communities that have been genetically isolated for a long time, when you put them together you get an interaction between those genes that were isolated in a way that

leads to what they call disharmonious combinations. Well, the irony of all of this is one of the great discoveries in the application of genetics was hybrid corn. You take a highly inbred stalk of corn, you take a completely different inbred line of corn, and you cross them, and you get hybrid vigor. It's now this is called heterosis. It is a biological phenomenon. The more diversity you bring together, the more you get hybrid vigor. And we all know that there's so much interracial marriage now with Japanese and what? And those kids are always beautiful, right? Because it's hybrid vigor. But the, well not always, it's genetics after all.

All of mine again, but it was genetics that was used to justify so many of these acts. You've all heard of the Holocaust, of the death camps, Joseph Mengele, the infamous doctor that fled to Brazil, he was a geneticist. He would select out twins that were coming to Auschwitz to make studies of them. And so that for me was an absolute shock. And I then looked at genetics and all of the insights we're making and saying, holy cow, science can be very powerful. What Rachel Carson showed is we can develop a very powerful toxin like DDT, but we don't know enough about

what the effect of using it will be on the whole system. Science doesn't look at whole systems, it looks at parts. And then the application of knowledge based on tiny studies in fruit flies or some kind of plants, you can't extrapolate to human behavior and think that we are somehow having a directed effect on genetics. Let me leave this whole issue by putting you at rest in terms of genes and intelligence. Because I've debated with Philip Rushton, who is the psychologist at the University of Western Ontario, who said that, you know, if you look at all indications of comparing black, white, and yellow people, if you look at penis size, they're bigger in black people, medium in white people and smaller in Asian people.

When I debated him, I wanted to say, let's have a look. But he said, there's a correlation. If you look at cranial size, he said it proves that the evolutionary history is that Asians are smarter than whites who are smarter than blacks. And so I debated with them. And the point about all this is very, very simple. You can't prove whether or not genes have anything to do with the fate.

Because of course, we live in a racist society. And until you can control for the impact of racism, there's no way you can compare different populations. The only way Philip Rushton could continue his work is either he's very stupid and doesn't understand genetics, or he's mischievous. Gee, I didn't get the finish here. I just sat on the train today kind of sifting through my life and thinking about some of the things that I've gone through in this life.

I'm so grateful that I got the parents that I did who were such an important part of my life and the experiences, a lot of them were not pleasant, but those experiences are all important teaching moments that we can use to inform our lives and to pass them on. So I hope they've been interesting to you and maybe some of them are useful and I'd love to talk to you now about anything that you want to talk about. Thank you. Okay, thank you. If there are questions, I'd be happy to answer.

I just want to say it was actually brilliant. You'll be the equivalent of David Attenborough from where I'm from. I just want to say it was very inspiring from start to finish. I love the way you told the story of your life. And I just want to say thank you. Now, based on your life, of all the places you've been in Canada, where would that space be for you to feel more connected to the land,

inspired and to feel which place in Canada would that be? So I know I can go and visit. Yeah. Well, I mean, they're everywhere when you're a child. But of course, increasingly, magical places are harder and harder to find. I mean the truth is Haida Gwaii where I now have grandchildren, what used to be called the Queen Charlotte Islands, is the place where I want to go and die. It's where I would love to spend the rest of my life. It's a magical place, but it's everywhere.

You know, we have become this urban creature, and we think somehow nature is out there. It's everywhere, but we're not aware of it. And I think, you know, for your age, I think you're looking for inspiration, but I think of children. Children, they've got to learn about nature. And the terrible thing that we live with now, it's something I'm on about a lot these days, is that we think somehow we're separate and different

from the rest of nature, and that we use that sense to justify trashing nature as if somehow what we do to nature isn't going to affect us. You know, we're a part of nature. We've got to reinsert ourselves back into the natural world. And even when you live in a city, you're not immune to it. It's there because whatever you do to nature, you do to us. But whatever we do to nature, we do directly to ourselves.

And we've got to start thinking about that. Doesn't matter where you are. We can't escape that. Thank you very much, Dr. Suzuki. And thank you for making so much time for us this evening. It has been a great, great honour to have you with us tonight. Thank you. APPLAUSE

On Ideas, you've been listening to David Suzuki has something to say from a talk he gave at the Japanese-Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto. Our thanks to Chris Hope, President of the Centre, for his help with this program. David Suzuki has something to say was produced by Philip Coulter. If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard in this episode or in any other, you can do that on our website, cbc.ca.ca.ca.ideas where you can always get our podcast. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Technical Production, Danielle Duval.

Our Senior Producer is Nikola Lukcic. The Executive Producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad.