VANCOUVER, B.C. — In 1962, a young Canadian geneticist started reading “Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson’s damning treatise about the dangers of using pesticides to control insects. At the time, David Suzuki was a promising academic at the University of Alberta studying fruit flies.
His nascent views on ecology began to catalyze with each turn of the page.
“It was a spring without voices,” Carson writes in the introduction. “On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. … No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this sickened world. The people had done it themselves.”
Carson, the renowned nature writer and marine biologist, inspired the modern environmental movement with a scholarly tome that challenged scientific conventions.
Six decades later, Suzuki stands at the precipice of an ecological catastrophe clanging alarm bells as Carson once did. The man who gained worldwide acclaim as host of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s “The Nature of Things” has a sharp-tongued delivery he has aimed at the powers that be for 45 years.
If detractors had hoped his stance would soften as he approaches his 89th birthday, they were sadly mistaken. The Trump administration’s directive to dismantle hard-earned environmental protections to further fossil fuel development has triggered a slow burn.
