Growing up, Wednesday nights had a rhythm. After dinner, my dad would settle into his chair and the television would find its way to CBC. David Suzuki’s “The Nature of Things” would come on, and without much fanfare, the whole family would just… watch.
There was something about Suzuki’s voice that made the room go still. He wasn’t performing or preaching. He wasn’t selling anything. He was simply a man who found the world astonishing and wanted you to feel that too.
My dad was like that in his own way. He was someone who genuinely loved nature. He could identify birds by their call before they ever came into view. He knew the names of plants along the trail. He had this quiet reverence for wild places that I absorbed without realizing it.
But life asked something of him, and he moved into a corporate role to support our family. The wilderness didn’t leave him though. He carried it into every weekend, every camping trip, every moment he pointed at the sky and said, “Listen. That’s a varied thrush.”
Watching Suzuki together felt like an extension of that. It was my dad’s love of the natural world translated into television. And Suzuki had a gift for making you feel that the fate of a salmon run or an old-growth forest was not some distant policy problem but something intimate and urgent, something that touched the very ground you stood on.
The Sacred Balance and a University Awakening
Years later, in university, I found myself doing what I can only describe as self-directed wandering through ideas. I wasn’t assigned “The Sacred Balance.” I just picked it up. And it changed something in me.
Suzuki’s argument in that book is deceptively simple: we are not separate from nature. We are made of it. Every breath we take is borrowed from the atmosphere. Every cell in our body carries the memory of ancient oceans.
He walks you through the four classical elements, earth, air, fire, and water, not as metaphors but as literal biological necessities, and then he asks the question that cuts right through you: if these things are what keep us alive, why don’t we treat them as sacred?
What made the book so powerful wasn’t just the science, though the science is rigorous and beautifully explained. It was the way Suzuki wove together Indigenous stories, spiritual traditions, and ecological data into something that felt whole. He wasn’t compartmentalizing. He was saying that the way we have separated science from spirit, human from nature, is itself the wound. And that healing it requires a different way of seeing.
I remember sitting with that book in a campus library and feeling like the floor had shifted slightly. Not in a destabilizing way. In the way that happens when something you already sensed but couldn’t articulate suddenly has words.
A Voice Shaped by Displacement and Deep Roots
To understand why Suzuki sees the world the way he does, you have to understand where he came from.
He was born in Vancouver in 1936 to Japanese-Canadian parents. During the Second World War, his family was forcibly interned, relocated to the Slocan Valley in the interior of British Columbia. It was an act of profound injustice, one that stripped his family of their home, their livelihood, and their dignity. But the Slocan Valley is also a place of staggering natural beauty, and it was there, in the wilderness of that displacement, that Suzuki’s relationship with the land took root.
There is something worth sitting with in that origin story. A child who loses his home finds a deeper home in the land itself. A family uprooted from society finds belonging in the more-than-human world. It is not a silver lining to a terrible injustice. It is simply what happened, and it shaped everything that came after.
Suzuki has never explicitly claimed Shinto as a personal practice, but the resonance is hard to ignore. Shinto, the indigenous spiritual tradition of Japan, holds that the natural world is alive with kami, with spirit and presence.
Mountains, rivers, forests, stones, all of it inhabited, all of it deserving of reverence. When Suzuki says that every breath is a sacrament, or that there is no environment out there separate from us, he is speaking a language that has deep roots in that tradition, whether consciously or not.
And then there is British Columbia itself. If you have ever stood at the edge of the Pacific and looked north toward the Great Bear Rainforest, or paddled through the channels of Haida Gwaii, or watched a heron lift off a tidal flat at dusk in Vancouver’s Fraser River Valley, you understand that this place does something to a person.
It insists on its own aliveness. It is very hard to live in that landscape and maintain the fiction that nature is a backdrop to human life rather than the whole story.
Learning from the Haida and the Land
Suzuki’s relationship with the Indigenous peoples of British Columbia, particularly the Haida, deepened his philosophy in ways that went beyond intellectual appreciation. He has Haida grandchildren. His connection to that community is personal and familial, not just philosophical.
The Haida worldview, like all Indigenous traditions of the Pacific Northwest, does not separate the human from the natural. The salmon is a relative. The cedar is a teacher. The land is not property but a living community of which humans are one small part. This is animism in its truest sense, not a primitive belief to be explained away by science, but a sophisticated ecological understanding that Western thought is only now beginning to catch up to.
Suzuki spent decades arguing that Indigenous ecological knowledge is not folklore. It is data. It is centuries of careful observation, relationship, and reciprocity with specific landscapes. And he argued this not as an outsider romanticizing Indigenous culture but as someone who had listened, learned, and understood that his own scientific training was incomplete without it.
This is what made “The Sacred Balance” so unusual for its time. It didn’t ask you to choose between science and spirit. It said the division was always false.
Seeing Him Live, and a Lesson About Heroes
Living in Vancouver, I had the good fortune of seeing Suzuki speak several times over the years. He was a compelling presence in person, direct and unsparing, with the kind of moral clarity that comes from someone who has spent decades saying the same true thing and watching the world refuse to listen.
After one of those talks, I did something I’m a little embarrassed to admit now. I followed him. Not in a sinister way, but in the way of an overeager admirer who has convinced himself that a brief conversation with someone he admires will be meaningful and welcome. I caught up to him, said something, tried to open a dialogue. And he looked at me, not unkindly, and said he just wanted to be left alone.
I walked away feeling deflated. But the more I’ve thought about it over the years, the more I’ve come to see it as one of the more useful lessons I’ve received.
We do something strange with the people we admire. We turn them into public property. We decide that because their ideas have been important to us, they owe us access to themselves. But Suzuki had spent decades giving. Decades of lectures and interviews and documentaries and books and campaigns and fights. A man who has spent that much of himself in service of an idea has earned the right to a quiet walk home.
There is also something fitting about it, given everything he taught me. He spent his life arguing that we need to stop treating the natural world as a resource to be extracted. And here I was, trying to extract something from him. The irony is not lost on me.
As we get older, most of us come to understand the value of stillness. Of not being on. Of having a life that belongs to you. Suzuki modeled that too, in his way, even if the lesson came through a door I didn’t expect.
What He Left in Me
I think about my dad when I think about Suzuki. Two men who loved the natural world deeply and found different ways to carry that love through lives that didn’t always make room for it.
My dad gave it to me through early mornings on the water and the names of birds. Suzuki gave it to me through a television screen and a book I picked up on my own.
What both of them taught me, in their different ways, is that paying attention to the natural world is not a hobby. It is a practice. It is a way of being in relationship with something larger than yourself. It is, as Suzuki would say, a form of reverence.
The sacred balance he wrote about is not a metaphor. It is the actual condition of life on this planet. We are held in it whether we acknowledge it or not. The question is whether we choose to live as if we know that.
I’m still working on that. But I’m grateful to have had guides who pointed the way.
To learn more about David Suzuki, visit the David Suzuki Foundation website. The photo in the header of David was taken by Juri Peepre in BC’s Hart River valley.
I also a run a cultural ecotourism organization called Sacred Treks that helps people travel with a purpose on mindful trekking pilgrimages and connects them with the world's most knowledgable certified hiking guides.
