Book Reviews

Suzuki on Suzuki

David Suzuki (Author)
David Suzuki: The Autiobiography. Greystone Books
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Reviewed by Graham Huggan

Accolade on accolade has been heaped upon the scientist-broadcaster-activist David Suzuki, one of Canada’s most familiar public figures and sometimes heralded as “the greatest environmentalist of our age.” Suzuki’s autobiography should therefore be further cause for celebration or—as he himself would probably prefer it—contemplation, since The Autobiography, part-styled as memoir, is a conscious attempt to reflect on a life and to persuade readers to reflect similarly on their own.

Like much of Suzuki’s work, the autobiography has a morally exemplary quality. As he makes clear from the outset, his experiences are metonymic for the Japanese Canadian story: poverty-induced emigration, family solidarity, and work ethic in the face of continual displacement and racial hostility, the need for acceptance measured against the persistent feeling of being marginalized and oppressed. “All my life as an adult,” he says in the opening chapter, provocatively entitled “My Happy Childhood in Racist British Columbia,” “my drive to do well has been motivated by my desire to show my fellow Canadians that my family and I had not deserved to be treated as we were.”

Subsequent chapters follow Suzuki’s fluctuating fortunes through college in the US, a highly successful university career as a geneticist in Canada, and an equally successful “parallel life” as a media celebrity and high-profile campaigner for social justice and environmental rights. Suzuki is well aware of his celebrity status if not always welcoming of it, and conscious of the levelling-down tendencies of celebrity to equate the opinions of a “scientist, doctor or other expert” with those of a “lightweight or a fool.” He is also aware of both the advantages and disadvantages of his primary chosen medium, television, which has the potential to reach out to millions but also to simplify, even distort, public understandings of, for example, the natural world. The chapters on Suzuki’s TV work are thus torn between the ongoing desire to impart information with the honesty and integrity that have become his trademarks and the persistent temptation to sensationalize material as a means of engaging public concern.

As in Suzuki’s other books, there is no doubting the force of his personality and opinions, both of which are embodied in the eco-activist work of the David Suzuki Foundation, founded in the early 1990s to promote the ideals of civic responsibility and global sustainability at a time of acknowledged environmental crisis. All of Suzuki’s work is infused, in fact, with an environmental ethic, sometimes aggressively anti-capitalist, sometimes more contemplative and mystical in form. Environmentally speaking, Suzuki might be described (though does not necessarily describe himself) as a deep ecologist: not anti-humanist, but certainly anti-anthropocentric; not anti-technology, but certainly anti technological supremacism; not anti-development, but certainly anti development as unfettered economic growth. There are deep ecological strains, as well, in his flirtation with Asian and Aboriginal religions, and in his apparent espousal of a version of philosophical holism that acknowledges the salvific role of modern science while remaining critical of science’s tendency to compartmentalize, thereby losing sight of the whole.

Suzuki’s autobiography will likely consolidate his status as both global celebrity and national icon, although its at times rather leaden prose style may not necessarily attract new readers to his work. However, The Autobiography affords another reminder that Suzuki is as likely to be critical of Canada as celebratory of it, and, unlike other celebrity conservationists, the late Steve Irwin for instance, he has never allowed himself to be co-opted for a cultural-nationalist cause. A more troubling aspect is the extent to which Suzuki’s status as a Canadian hero depends on a form of honorary whiteness. Certainly, his life and work mobilizes a set of discourses around “Asianness” and “Asianization” in relation to white normativity. Thus, while for Suzuki himself, his status as a Japanese Canadian marks him out as an outsider and an adversarialist, and while his perceived experience of marginalization has provided him with cultural capital (e.g. with Aboriginal people) in his work, his name continues to function within the context of the strategic de-racialization of environmentalist discourses, suggesting that environmentalism and its literary wing, ecocriticism, are still—despite their loud protestations to the contrary—a predominantly “white” field.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #197 (Summer 2008), Predators and Gardens. (pg. 188 - 189)

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