Dr. Suzuki is on a big media blitz these days, pro­moting his new auto­bi­og­raphy. There’s high pro­file inter­views on BC and national CBC radio. As they’ve pointed out in the lead-​​ins to the inter­views, according to the Official and Canonical List of the Greatest Canadians (Male), at #5 David Suzuki is appar­ently the greatest living Canadian. Holy crap.

Somewhere along the line there’s been a sea change in Dave’s pro­file. Back in the day (in this case, back-​​in-​​the-​​day on the scale of my short life), David Suzuki was a under­re­garded geek. Being a Suzuki fan was a very slightly sub­ver­sive thing biology nerds did in an effort to con­struct an alter­na­tive glamour around their own geek­i­ness. Subtle, inside jokes about Dave made in main­stream com­pany gen­er­ally turned out to be just too insider for any sort of response beyond blank looks. Somewhere in the last couple or five years, David has emerged from his crusty bearded cocoon as some kind of national media figure. I sup­pose he’s been very inten­tion­ally devel­oping a media pro­file for years, but since 2000 he’s passed some threshold, gained some kind of crit­ical mass, and become a more or less main­stream icon within Canada. Well, that’s great. Welcome to the nature show. Those who have long loved him for his slightly bel­ligerent, bug-​​eyed sense of effu­sive pos­i­tivist wonder in the face of the muli­tudi­nous mys­teries of the nat­ural world are happy to share. For the full effect, you really need to start watching the Nature of Things on a fairly reg­ular schedule, prefer­ably starting at an early and impres­sion­able age. That way your mental out­look will be opti­mally molded towards awe and respect for the nat­ural world. If your main impres­sions of the Great Man come from the cur­rent media circus you are cer­tainly free to par­take in the Canadian-​​style cult of per­son­ality which is growing up around him, but I promise it’s a much more ful­filling expe­ri­ence if your impres­sions of him are shaped mostly inci­den­tally to the slices of nature he presents to you through his TV pro­gram­ming. His doesn’t lack for inter­esting per­son­ality traits to endear or mock, but really I think the body of work he has con­tributed to through his career is every bit as compelling.

So there’s my back­handed attempt to lay claim to the David Suzuki legacy for those of us biology geeks who feel like the rest of the world is showing up late to the party and without much respect for the orginal cos­tume theme. Regardless, if you’re going to have a national hero, you could do a lot worse than Dave. He’s got some­thing for everyone: nature for the nature nuts, sci­ence for the sci­en­tistas, fire and brim­stone envi­ron­men­talism for the con­ser­va­tion­ists and politicos, a subtle under­cur­rent of spir­i­tu­ality for the meta-​​minded. And in each of those cases, the stuff he brings is good stuff. There’s no ques­tion that the TV shows he nar­rated helped shape the course of my life. That time in a packed Whistler auda­to­rium when he picked me out of the front row atten­dees to lock eyes for the “I am you. You are me.” part of his speech was some­thing of a full-​​circle moment for me. More than you know Dr. Suzuki, more than you know. And now as he becomes a national figure, per­haps He is Canada, and Canadians are Him. Especially if they buy the tshirt.