David Suzuki – reflections of an elder

Robyn Williams: And so to our final guest and another transition, David Suzuki, who hosted Quirks And Quarks on CBC Radio from three months after I started The Science Show, and from the same studio. And then Dr Suzuki went to CBC TV to present The Nature of Things, from which this year he's just stepped down. And it was in the '80s and '90s in Australia that he became really famous, mainly through this program, The Science Show. So I thought we'd hear something of his personal reflections on his life and commitments to broadcasting and much else. David Suzuki on CBC Radio:

David Suzuki: Thank you so much. Thank you all. I'm honoured 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 have reached it and I've become an elder. Because 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 trawl through my life and share a few lessons that I hope are worth considering.

My story begins 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 non-existent. 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 when they came that even if they became Canadian citizens, they wouldn't be able to vote, even 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 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. 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, and they told me that they didn't know about the stock market crash or the 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 '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 neighbours, 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 that they learned 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 mum 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. 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. You know, '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. 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. 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 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 realise 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 knew spoke Japanese. And of course, they would just go between Japanese and English. And I didn't realise 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 Daisy and her mother were in Slocam. And the kids picked on her. They used to call her ainoko. To me ainoko 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 realise, 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 there 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…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 ostracised 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 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, 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'd decided to stay in Canada.

We ended up…when the war ended, we staged in Kaslo 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'. 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 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…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.

The other big change, I was introduced to the Detroit Zoo, which at that time in the 1940s was this unbelievable place. You know, 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 part of my life. Because of the Detroit Zoo, I dreamed of going to Africa and South America and seeing these places.

As I say, I loved Leamington. When I started in grade nine, 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. You know, I'd just gone through puberty and I was so anxious to have a girlfriend. There was 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 realised 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 ten Japanese girls in London and three of them are my sisters.' 'Oh, 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, so a native girl would be okay.' I said, 'I've never even met an Indian girl. I don't even know where the reserve is.' 'Okay, a black girl is 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, 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. My dad was my great love and my mentor, but he was a hard driver. And he said, 'No, sports are wasted time. You know, 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, you know, they're really shy. And he said, 'If 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, 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 fluffed 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…', and then I'd have to go to the back to the beginning and start over again. And every night I'd be crying in frustration at just doing it 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. Also, for some reason, he thought you have to be able to dance. I never did follow through on that.

But you know, I 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 ten minutes away by bike was a gigantic swamp. Or we'd call it wetland today. And that was a magical 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 they were frog eggs and they were salamander eggs, and when I brought them home, my mother never gave me heck because I came in all wet and muddy, she just took my clothes and put them in the laundry. And when I'd bring home these treasures, you know, tadpoles or when I got the salamander eggs, I mean, you'd think I'd won a Nobel Prize or something. 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 centre and a parking area. And 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 parlours or…but there's not the kind of world that I had available to me in the outskirts of London.

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.' I said, 'No, that's crazy.' And then Dad got really mad. He said, 'What the hell are you talking about? How are you going to 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, and our whole thing was that I'm not one of the beautiful people, you know, but I've got some ideas about what the 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, you can have power.

So while I was a 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 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 was $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 Amherst College made me as an academic, that experience.

But in my third year at college, because I was in an honours biology sequence, I had to take genetics. And I was blown away. You know, normally you think of biology is 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 behaviour of genes and chromosomes and how they're passed on. And, for me, it was mind boggling, because genetics allowed us to peel back the layers of complexity, using these simple tools for plant and animal breeding. And I just fell madly in love with genetics and said, 'I want to do this for the rest of my life.'

But on October 4, 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've 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 US realised, holy cow, now they had rockets, army, navy, air force rockets. Now, the Soviet's 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 Tereshkova. The American response was absolutely incredible. They just said, 'We gotta crank it up. We've got to 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. You know, all you had to do was say, 'I really like science,' and they threw money at you. 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 postdoctoral year in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Oak Ridge was a company town, AEC, 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 them, the bombs, from Oak Ridge plutonium, and dropped them onto 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 associateship to go there, and it was a fantastic place to go to.

But Oak Ridge itself was segregated. My lab mate who became 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. And this upset me very much. And what happened was I became so angry, 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 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've got to get out of here, you're sick.' And I realised then that 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, I loved it 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, 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 controlled field, and they'd put plants in there, then they'd introduce insects, then they'd spray and they'd count the insects. And 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 lipophilic, '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 brand-new phenomenon.

And that's when I realised 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 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. 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, they really liked it. They said, come back and do another one. And I ended up doing eight. And I think they paid me the $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, '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 I gotta give it so he understands it.

Now, this program was shown on Sunday morning, around eight or nine 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 eight o'clock in the morning?' And that's when I realised 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 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 it's so cold. I said, ah, this is for me. 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 premeds. They were really interested in what are the medical effects? What are the hereditary diseases? What about genetic engineering and cloning? 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 eugenics journals, there were eugenics departments in universities. Some of the top geneticists of 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 sterilised 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. So all of these were based on the notion that many of these characteristics that were desirable or undesirable, were hereditary.

And, to my horror, 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 vigour. Now this is called heterosis, it is a biological phenomenon. The more diversity you bring together, the more you get hybrid vigour. 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 vigour.  Well, not always, it's genetics, after all, but all of mine have been.

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, Josef 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 were 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 behaviour and think that we are somehow having a direct 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 Philippe Rushton who is the psychologist at the University of Western Ontario who said that if you look at all indications, comparing black, white and yellow people, 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, you know, 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 him.

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 Philippe Rushton could continue his work is either he's very stupid and doesn't understand genetics, or he's mischievous.

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 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.

Question: It was absolutely brilliant, you will 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. 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.

David Suzuki: Yeah, well, 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'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 we use that sense to justify trashing nature, as if somehow what we do to nature isn't going to affect us. 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. Whatever we do to nature, we do directly to ourselves. And we've got to start thinking about that. It doesn't matter where you are. We can't escape that.

Robyn Williams: David Suzuki on CBC Radio. He retired from The Nature of Things this year.