With “Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie,” writer/director Sturla Gunnarsson has managed to weave a brilliant environmental lecture with the fascinating life of the man doing the lecturing, creating a provocative mix of science and emotion in the process.
The film begins with a view of Vancouver at night, beautiful in all its glittering lights and surfaces. That glimpse also hints at the problems we face as a global community: an overpopulated city with a grave dependence on unsustainable fuels to keep us going. Then we meet David Suzuki, a smiling man of 75 who is renowned in Canada for his work as a scientist, environmentalist and television and radio broadcaster. The documentary follows him to his old workplace, the University of British Columbia, where he gives a ‘legacy lecture,’ a culmination of his life’s work and philosophy. “I can go home and die now,” he jokes to the camera, before heading onstage to a standing ovation.
As he speaks, he clearly lays out the crises we are facing. “For the first time since life appeared on earth, one species – us – is single-handedly altering the physical, chemical and biological nature of earth,” he tells the crowd. “We have become a force of nature.”
As he proceeds with his talk, the film cuts to his own life. Born in Vancouver to parents who were also born there, at the age of six he experienced the first upheaval to his world. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, his family was rounded up along with other Japanese-Canadians and put in camps, stripped of citizenship and property. With the film crew, he visits a camp, recalling the bitterness of life then, and weeping at the sight of the paper walls. His first recollection of being an outsider, however, was not being separated from his Canadian neighbors, but being beaten up by other Japanese boys for not knowing how to speak their language.
Near the end of the war, British Columbia kicked out all Japanese-Canadians, and a boatload was sent off to Hiroshima. Suzuki’s grandparents were on board; they were dead within a year. Visiting the peace memorial in Hiroshima, where 100,000 people were killed instantly, he speaks of the suffering that continued. One of the greatest fears at the time was that the land itself had been killed – sterilized permanently. He elegantly draws the link from that fear to millions of species that have and will become extinct in his lifetime.
Onstage, he tells the audience that climate change is just one of the problems we face. Forests will be lost in 100 years. We each have plastic and toxins dissolved in our bodies. The oceans are under threat from acidification, overfishing dead zones, and plastic pollution.
Suzuki harkens back to an early love for a naturally murky body of water. His was the first ‘colored’ family in Leamington, Ontario, and as such, young David was not allowed to ask a white girl out. Laughing, he says that as a horny, lonely youth, he went to the swamp for consolation, and found great treasures there. “The swamp saved my life,” he notes. But now it is gone, turned into a parking lot and shopping center.
He graduated from Amherst when the Cold War was in full swing. After Sputnik, the U.S. started shoveling money at scientists to get up to speed in the space race. (Governments should be doing the same thing now for the earth, he notes wisely.) He began doing biology research for NASA in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the same lab had been part of the Manhattan Project that ultimately killed his grandparents. There, he befriended lab technician Ruby Wilkison, an African American woman. The civil rights movement was in its early stages. The discrimination against blacks literally nauseated Suzuki to the point where his wife convinced him to leave the lab for his own well-being. The film shows a sweet reunion between the two lab buddies.
Twenty years after being kicked out of B.C., Suzuki was welcomed to the University of British Columbia as a professor of genetics. The film contains great footage of him at work and discussing the issues of the day while wearing some truly awesome 60s outfits.
His personal life was touched by the nascent women’s movement, as his first wife left in order to find her own way. He created a new family with Tara Cullis, his wife of 37 years.
As the years progress, we see his views become radicalized, in particular by a battle between the logging industry and the old-growth-forest homeland of the native people of the Haida Nation. His connection to the Haida continues to this day. In the process, “I became a student of Aboriginal people around the globe, who view the earth as our mother,” he notes. “We are the environment: what we do to it, we do to ourselves. There is no line between air and us. If I am air and you are air, then I am you.” His life, interwoven as it has been with some of the 20th century’s most enormous shifts and events, eloquently underscores his point.
At the lectern, the scientist rails against the myth that human constructs – the economy, capitalism – are immutable forces that requires protection over all else. Instead, it is the biosphere that is paramount; “protecting its health has to be our highest priority.”
If there is one point where the film takes a step back from its bold through line, it’s at the end. He has proven to the audience, and the viewer, that we must change our relationship to the earth, and recognize that we are at the last possible moment to save our home and ourselves. However, he mostly speaks of what we could or should be doing in general terms, although specifics would certainly be welcome from such a great mind at such a key time. Perhaps a sequel is in order.
Suzuki does offer a thread of hope. As he describes the moment after the Big Bang, the universe filled with particles, and even as they expanded, every particle exerted a tiny pull on every other particle. “The universe is filled with evanescent tendrils of attraction,” he says, “that some call love.”
“Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie” opens in New York City at Cinema Village on December 2.
