When I hop on a Zoom call with David Suzuki and Tara Cullis-Suzuki in late January, David is wearing a collared shirt with a red zip-up jacket over top, sporting his trademark wild white hair, beard and glasses. As for Tara, well, it occurs to me that many people probably don’t know what Tara looks like. That’s because she’s been largely behind the scenes orchestrating David’s success during her 51-year marriage to Canada’s most famous scientist.
But David isn’t letting Tara continue as the unsung hero any longer. He interjects several times during our 45-minute conversation to brag about his wife — about her “mind-boggling” thesis, about the time she learned Portuguese and chartered two planes for 40 people into the Amazon rainforest at the drop of a hat and that time she flew with a three-week-old baby and a three-year-old child to meet up with him in England.
At ages 87 and 74, David and Tara are mostly trying to stay out of the limelight these days and act like retired people. But on this day they’re doing publicity for their play, What You Won’t Do For Love, which makes its West Coast premiere this week in Vancouver.
It’s a production they were initially reluctant to get involved in, but the more they shared their story, the more they realized the playwrights were helping to make sense of their lives.
“It became clear that the hero of the play is Tara,” David said. Indeed, while he was becoming increasingly famous and travelling around the world filming TV shows, Tara was starting the David Suzuki Foundation, raising their children, finishing her PhD in comparative literature and being “the backbone of the whole thing.”
What You Won’t Do For Love is described as “an intimate experience that poses the question: can the love we have for each other save our planet?” During the 90-minute play, David and Tara are joined onstage by actors and real-life couple Miriam Fernandes and Sturla Alvsvaag.
“We have to consider what kind of advice we’re going to give and it becomes quite emotional,” Tara says. “It isn’t just two old fogies sitting on the stage, reminiscing.”
As in life, David and Tara spend the play balancing the dire straits of the planet with the need to have hope.
“Action is hope. Without action, there is no hope,” David says. “You’ve got to be doing something.”
He trails off, referring to them as “old and decrepit now” but Tara cuts in with a rebuttal: “He goes to the gym every day. He says exercise is his medicine.”
She has her own message of hope: “One of the things we’ve noticed is people feel that they can’t make a difference because they are just a drop in the bucket. And yeah, they’re a drop in the bucket. I’m a drop in the bucket. But there’s a hell of a lot of drops, and there’s a lot of us, and it’s so much fun when you suddenly realize, ‘Hey, we’re really powerful.’ ”
Read on for more on how David and Tara met, who hit on who and the best job David has ever had.
Tara: They’re really trying to figure out whether they should have children. And that’s a very personal and painful and difficult topic nowadays. And David has been telling them all kinds of things about where we’re going with climate change and species destruction and so on. And so they start asking: is there any hope and why would we bring children into this world? And since our great joy is our children and grandchildren, we’re left with a bit of a conundrum on how to answer that question.
Tara: No, our first child was born in 1979. So that was pre real awareness of climate change, which for me came around 1988. There were murmurings of it, but it wasn’t really a daily topic.
David: Well, I like to think that when you have a child, you have made the greatest commitment to the future, and the planet.
Tara: You know, there is nothing a parent or a grandparent wouldn’t do to try to improve things for their offspring.
David: So the child wasn’t just a commitment for Tara and me, it was really reinforcement that we’re in it for the long run. And we’ve got to pull out all stops. I mean, they are what keep us going now. To me, when you stop and you say ‘I’m not going to have children’ deliberately, you’re stopping 150,000 years of evolution. That is a very, very profound moment that we have come to a time when we actually are beginning to say, ‘This is the end, I’m not going to even try to carry on with my species.’ It’s an evolutionary thing that is very, very profound.
David: Oh, that’s in the play.
Tara: It was epic really.
David: She picked me up.
Tara: He picked me up. We picked each other up. Well, I had decided that I ought to put in some effort to finding a partner who I was going to spend the rest of my life with because I was in the second year of my master’s degree and I thought ‘Gee, I’ve worked so hard for every essay I write but I never lift a finger to find a partner.’ So I said to myself, ‘Okay, so now if you meet somebody you think is interesting, you’ve got to make an effort. And make sure you meet the person. And don’t just let them wander off and say, “Oh, I hope we run into each other again.” ’ And then two weeks later, along comes David and I go to his lecture. And then I think, ‘Well, that’s the first person I’ve seen who I’d consider marrying, but now I’ve gotta do something about it.’
Tara: I just hung around. I didn’t know what to do.
David: I saw her the minute she came in and sat down. It was like there was a light shining on her. But there was something that happened halfway through my speech. It was a big room with over 400 people, it was packed. And suddenly I realized nobody’s listening to me. There’s this kind of commotion. And so I look up and there at the window is a huge snowy owl and this is on the top floor of the highest building on campus. And there was this giant bird kind of looking in the window. And all my Indigenous friends say that was a sign, that owl was there to tell me something. When I finished my lecture, she came down.
Tara: But I didn’t have any question to ask. I was just trying to obey myself.
David: So I said, ‘I hope everybody’s coming to the party tonight’ and I left.
Tara: Then I had to find the party. Anyway, I found it.
David: My being away filming was the real challenge. I mean, I spent so much time in the field and being apart was really the most testing.
Tara: I had two children, I was finishing my PhD. And he was travelling so much. And then I was often a single mother because he was gone. But it was such a blur that I don’t remember it too well, except I remember trying to feed the children at nine o’clock at night and thinking ‘It’s awfully late to be feeding young children and I’m a bad mom.’ My parents lived upstairs, so I could go off back to work. And there were times when I was there until three or four in the morning just trying to get the Suzuki Foundation up off the ground. And it was a lot to do. But it was really exciting and a lot of fun.
Tara: Oh, yeah. He always said, ‘Your turn will come. I’ll back you up at some point.’ But he’d always say the next trip is the last trip. And then I’d think, ‘Well, how can that be? He’s doing the show.’ And then I realized, ‘Oh, yeah, the next trip is the last trip. It’s the last trip before the next trip.’
David: But did you ever feel resentful?
Tara: Sure, I would feel resentful. It seemed like I was carrying a lot of the weight of the household. But as I mentioned, my parents were upstairs. I didn’t expect David to be able to carry half the weight because I knew he was doing Suzuki on Science, a national TV program. And I didn’t want him to stop, right? So it wasn’t as if I thought he should be home all the time. And I just felt well, okay, we got to spread the load out. And my parents were happy to help. Like, my dad took care of the house, his father and mother lived just up the road. So they were over every day to help with the kids. And we’ve always had at least a three-generation household. Even now. At one point, it was a four-generation household. And I feel like people need to know that for David to be David Suzuki, he had this huge team … that’s what it takes.
David: Well, without the love, I think you give up. The love is what gives you the strength and the two of us, we both get down and despair, but thank God, it’s never been simultaneous. It’s one or the other. And she has pulled me out many, many times. But I also think it’s a love of Turtle Island, a love of nature.
Tara: I think it’s a very odd thing that when we are trying to work as environmentalists, we are always getting all these facts — we’re using our left brain and we’re trying to use logic and convince politicians and the public and so on. But what is really at the heart of everything we do is emotion, it’s a sense of what could be done to make life better. And that is a kind of love, and it’s not really logical. And that’s why I’m so pleased with the play because it gets at the fact we’re usually ignoring.
If it weren’t for the love my parents had for us, we wouldn’t have been able to raise the kids well, we wouldn’t have been able to do the work we do. If it wasn’t for the love that all the people who donate money have for whatever their little river is or their grasslands or their trees, then they wouldn’t send any money, we wouldn’t be able to do the work we do. When you get down to it, it’s really based on love.
Tara: He just retired from The Nature of Things last June. And so you’d think we would be able to do some kind of classic retirement stuff, like go on a nice trip or something. But now he won’t fly because of climate change. And besides, he’s flown so much. So we can’t do that. So we have to kind of travel inside B.C. But our kids are at that stage where they need what we got from our parents.
David: Our youngest daughter is now a co-host of The Nature of Things. So I told her, ‘When you’re gone, I’ll take your place.’ So I’m now in the happiest, greatest job I’ve ever had: I’m a full-time grandpa.
Tara: He catches the bus and goes over to Victoria, and gets up at 6:30 and makes the kids breakfast and gets them into the car to get them to school and everything. They love him and they crawl all over him.
David: Meanwhile, Severn, who’s now the executive director of David Suzuki Foundation, lives upstairs, where her grandma and grandad lived until they died. And so Tara is spending a lot of time with her two boys.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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