hello i'm david suzuki welcome to the nature of things where do you start with david suzuki he first came to the public's attention as an innovative down-to-earth science professor you know i study fruit flies and i suddenly realized that basically we're all fruit flies a geneticist with a way of connecting with his students and his audience the cells in the region of the cut they have the blueprint that should allow that that finger to grow back a new finger that ability to distill ideas for the masses made him one of canada's best known and popular broadcasters for more than 50 years well the changes are still going on right now if humans are to colonize space they'll have to invent something that mimics gravity suzuki is not universally loved though instead of conserving energy our society uses it up and then has to find more of it his ringing of alarm bells about pollution and his unwavering belief in climate science has made him a nuisance to certain industries and some politicians this is the more active government david suzuki still host of the nature of things turns 85 years old today i took the opportunity to check in with him from his home in vancouver i should start by saying happy birthday thank you thank you at at my age i don't uh you know birthdays mean nothing it's every day is a happy day i'm still here well well tell me typically what does an 85 year old like to talk about on their big day well i'm more i guess i spend all my time saying uh you know what what are the grandkids doing now and right now we're locked down in vancouver and i'm just missing my grandchildren i wish they were here for my birthday yeah well and the pandemic must put quite an interesting twist on on how you reflect right on on on your life and and the life that you've lived i'm i'm thinking you know uh the the deaths of course so many of the deaths while the great majority of deaths from uh covet were older people and you have to think there's something wrong with that two of my dear friends are now are are now dying and i've talked to both of them and said look you've got to do your most important function think back on your life what have you learned from your lifetime having been led and you've got to pass it on to our kids that's got to be the most important job for elders and i regret that they're hived away in these long-term care centers where they had to die this pandemic has has really laid bare who is vulnerable in society it has laid bare inequalities i i do think though in a way that it has also shown us something about what humanity is capable of for years now environmentalists like me have been going to ottawa begging for you know a few million dollars for public transit and for retrofitting houses and solar panels and all that and the government's always said well you know it's we can't we don't have the money we don't have the money covet hits and suddenly we're not talking millions we're talking billions of dollars suddenly appear out of nowhere so as we come out of the crisis don't no government can say oh we don't have the money because climate change and species extinction represent a far greater threat to human survival than uh coronavirus 19 far greater threat scientists as a whole have been very apolitical but they're the ones who have the power to make these the ones who are generating the knowledge but the power to use it ultimately comes into the hands of the technologists engineers and of course political power and i think business do you remember early on when the pandemic was taking form and the human toll what was terrible even back then at that early stage in the game except we were noticing something bizarre was happening in the environment around us right we were noticing that the air was was getting cleaner that the water was was getting clearer yeah and that should have been a warning you know this is an opportunity and it's going to continue to happen to us because we're pushing organisms into tighter and tighter areas by the degradation of forests and and destruction of the land and so these exotic viruses are going to keep jumping out at us and so the covid crisis is i think a warm-up to what is coming but maybe an opportunity to say we can't go back to the way it was before covent that was not normal david very few scientists speak out the way you do why do you i think it really is a result of a unique set of circumstances almost in that as you know during the war i spent time in the i call them concentration camps in the interior of british columbia even though i was a third generation canadian and the result of that was i guess a psychological scarring in a sense i became very sensitive to being a member of a racial minority in this pandemic we have one of the ugly sides to it i believe is we have seen this kind of latent racism against asian canadians asian americans kind of rise to the surface and and and we've seen it in a pretty concrete way we've seen an increase in explicit attacks on on on on us look i you know when when i heard about the atlanta killings uh my response is what do you expect we live in a society in which racism is systemic it's built into our culture but do you think that there are people who are only pissed off at asians those are the same people that will slaughter black people or or or worshipers in a synagogue or go after muslims i mean they're all the same it's racism and when you look at canada's history canada of course has it built right into the first contact and and the uh the the treaties that were made with the indigenous people will we continue to cling stubbornly to our present attitudes or will history look back and see this as a period of change of questioning of new insights well let me ask you then just as we close this off what is the bottom line for you what what is the the the nugget the pearl of wisdom that an 85 year old not to belabor the point but but then an 85 year old might impart on on someone like me ho ho do not forget we are animals you're an animal and that's not an insult it's a biological statement and as an animal what do you andrew what does david suzuki what do my grandchildren need most importantly well guess what if you don't have air for three minutes you're dead if you have to breathe polluted air you're sick so surely clean air is this gift from nature that we have a responsibility to protect for all future generations and for the rest of the web of life from one animal to another david suzuki happy birthday and thank you so much for the time that you've spent with us i really appreciate that thank you