'This is my home': David Suzuki's reflections on Vancouver and the state of the world
Despite the fact that David Suzuki was forced to leave Vancouver when he was only six years old, he now proudly calls this city home.
Suzuki, the iconic Canadian environmentalist known for hosting The Nature of Things and for his advocacy more broadly, was born in 1936 in Vancouver — shortly before the Second World War was declared and Japan subsequently attacked Pearl Harbor.
Along with thousands of other Japanese Canadians, the B.C. government incarcerated Suzuki and his family in an internment camp. After the war, he said his family then had to leave B.C. and decided to go over the Rockies to London, Ontario.
“B.C. kicked us out of the province,” he told Daily Hive on the phone.
Suzuki finished high school in Ontario, then went to the U.S. for his post-secondary education, where he completed his PhD and a post-doc.
But despite how he and his family had been treated, he wanted to return to Canada due to some key differences between his home country and the United States.
“And the differences really mattered,” he said.
He pointed out Tommy Douglas, who is known for bringing universal healthcare to Canada, and equalization payments between provinces.
He got a job at the University of Alberta, but decided to take an employment opportunity at the University of British Columbia. When he arrived in Vancouver, not only was the weather considerably warmer, but the city felt like home.
“I was shown around [and] suddenly, all of the stories from my parents, from when they lived and grew up in Vancouver, Burrard Street, Granville Street — I had all heard of these streets all my life. They were kind of magical things that I’d heard from my parents in my childhood,” Suzuki said.
His grandparents had moved to Vancouver in the early 1900s, and both his parents were born and raised there.
“It was as if my roots were here, and when I got the job, then that was it. This is my home.”
Suzuki’s path as an environmentalist
Now, Suzuki has been one of the most prominent environmentalists in Canada for decades, becoming a household name through his television show The Nature of Things.
He said that as a long-time environmentalist, he has realized that “you can’t run away” from a city’s problems.
“Make your commitment to a place, and then work like mad to make sure that place is as environmentally sound as possible. But don’t run away from it,” he said.
And his place? Vancouver.
“We’ve had our ups and downs,” he concedes. “We’ve had fantastic years under Gregor Robertson,” he said. “And then, of course, everything has its cycle. And now Ken Sim, my God.”
Ken Sim’s governance in Vancouver has been contentious with environmentalists, the result of decisions to cut back climate bylaws in buildings for the sake of affordability, reject protected bike lanes on Broadway due to costs, and cut funding to the city departments that worked on environmental initiatives.
“Ken Sim and his party reflect what is the dominant ideology now for the country, if not for the world, that the economy is the source of everything that matters,” Suzuki said. “That idea that we somehow distance ourselves from nature — it’s out there in the wild areas, in the old-growth forest and in the oceans.”
But Suzuki said that nature isn’t prioritized in today’s society.
“We are utterly dependent on nature for clean air, pure water, soil to grow our food, and the energy that we need that comes from the sun. That’s the basis of our existence, but it’s not in our legal, our economic, and our political systems because they’re all built around us. They ignore nature, and that’s why we are inevitably destructive, and that’s why Ken Sim and his groups looking at development have nothing to do with nature that allows us to live and live well.”
With the municipal election set on Oct. 17, Suzuki said he hopes the next mayor and council prioritize reducing the city’s carbon footprint.
Suzuki’s reflections on the state of the world
In 2025, Suzuki publicly said for the first time that the world is “too late” to fight the impacts of the climate crisis.
“A lot of environmentalists jumped on me and said, ‘No, no, no! We’ve got to stop — every 0.1 of a degree makes a huge difference.”
Suzuki agrees that it does make a difference, but he pointed out that scientists have been warning us about climate change and its effects for years, to no avail.
In 1992, the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity was published ahead of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, stating that a “great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.”
“The warnings came, and they were telling us exactly what had to be done to avoid the crisis we were headed for. Well, of course we didn’t do a goddamn thing about that,” Suzuki said.
In 2017, they issued their second warning, stating that many of the issues they warned about 25 years prior were getting worse.
Suzuki said he recently signed another official warning that is expected to come out next year, 10 years after the second warning.
“I mean, we’ve been told over and over again,” he said, pointing out that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a special report in 2018, stating that temperatures should not rise 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
But on Sept. 2, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published a report stating that under current policies, “exceedance of 1.5°C is now widely assessed as unavoidable.”
Further, Suzuki pointed out that we have passed the majority of the nine planetary boundaries, which include how much carbon is in the atmosphere, the pH level in oceans, and how much forest has been cleared.
“If we pass any one of them, we should be shitting bricks. We’ve passed seven of the nine boundaries,” Suzuki said.
Last year, Johan Rockström, a scientist who works on planetary boundaries, said we can go back to a safe zone if global emissions drop sharply within five years.
“We’ve had 30 years of COP (Conference of the Parties) meetings to try to beat climate change, the challenge of climate change, and in 30 years we haven’t even capped our global emissions, let alone bring them down. So, if we have only five years to change our behaviour and get out of the seven danger zones that we’re in, forget it,” Suzuki said.