David Suzuki

In 1942 the Canadian government sold the Suzuki family's dry-cleaning business in Vancouver and sent David Suzuki, then six, with his mother and sisters to a camp in the Slocan Valley. He took his doctorate in zoology at Chicago in 1961 and built a research career on temperature-sensitive mutations in fruit flies, teaching genetics at British Columbia until he retired in 2001. Broadcasting made his name: Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio from 1975, then The Nature of Things, which he presented from 1979 to 2023. He set up the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990, has put his name to more than fifty books as author or co-author, and is a Companion of the Order of Canada. The Legacy: An Elder's Vision for Our Sustainable Future (2010) expands a lecture he gave in December 2009, filmed by Sturla Gunnarsson as Force of Nature, and carries a foreword by Margaret Atwood. David Suzuki's Green Guide (2008), written with the environmental lawyer David R. Boyd, covers home, travel, food and shopping, and insists that private effort needs public policy behind it.