SYDNEY Reuters Photo
Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki speaks during an interview in Sydney October 16, 2006. Suzuki, best...
He regrets that after decades of campaigning for everything from cleaner air to sustainable farming, his work has not had more impact.
"Nobody any longer knows what a sustainable future is," the bearded, bespectacled environmentalist told Reuters in a recent interview in Australia to promote his book, "David Suzuki: The Autobiography."
"I feel like we are in a giant car heading for a brick wall at 100 miles an hour and everyone in the car is arguing where they want to sit. For God's sake, someone has to say put the brakes on and turn the wheel."
Suzuki is no less passionate about preserving the planet than when his first series, "Suzuki on Science," aired in 1969 but he wants more time for himself.
Over his career he has written more than 40 books, including the best-selling "Looking At" series of children's science titles, and set up the David Suzuki Foundation.
But he regrets having never learned to surf and admitted in his first autobiography in 1987 that the first of his two marriages failed because he refused to give up his work for family time.
"I always thought our programs on nature would be different...but now I realize that I, too, am creating a virtual world, a fabricated version of the real thing," he writes in his autobiography.
Suzuki welcomes a new generation of media-friendly environmentalists, notably former U.S. vice president
But he expresses regret that most people still live out of step with nature.
"We are intelligent, so we create our own habitat and we don't need nature except as entertainment or for the extraction of resources," he said. "We still don't get it, that the simple acts of eating a pizza reverberates around the world."