The EcoGospel According to David Suzuki
At 90, Canada's most celebrated environmentalist delivered a sermon. He called it science.
Note: I dedicate this one to my friends and former colleagues in the academy, active and retired, who have spent decades frightening young people with endless predictions of impending environmental apocalypse.
David Suzuki turned 90 in March, and Canada's media-environmental complex has spent the better part of 2026 celebrating the occasion with the reverence one reserves for saints. Biopic in production. Memoir published. Fundraising concert at Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Theatre, tickets starting at $272.99, Al Gore and Jane Fonda on stage, Neil Young as surprise guest. The event was called "Legacy.”
The word fits, though perhaps not as its organizers intended.
The speech Suzuki delivered that evening, subsequently published in The Tyee under the title "Call to Action at 90," is worth reading carefully. Not because it advances a scientific argument (it does not), but because it is the clearest distillation in years of what Suzuki's environmentalism actually is: a theology, fully developed, internally coherent, and almost entirely disconnected from the evidentiary standards of the discipline whose authority it constantly invokes.
Understanding that distinction matters, because millions of Canadians have spent decades being told that disagreeing with David Suzuki means disagreeing with science. The speech makes clear that this has never been quite true. Here is my analysis:
The Structure of a Sermon
Strip away the celebrity tributes and the concert soundtrack, and the speech follows a structure any student of homiletics would recognize.
First, the declaration of crisis: "We are at a remarkable tipping point in the history of life on Earth." No qualifier, no citation, no threshold defined. Just assertion delivered with prophetic authority.
Then the diagnosis of spiritual failure. Modern civilization has sinned by forgetting its creaturely status. "We forget we are animals," Suzuki tells us, and the forgetting has consequences. Technology, the economy, the legal system, politics itself: all these have allowed humanity to "exceed all limits of our biology" (whatever that means) while "ignoring the massive degradation of our home."
Then the invocation of the sacred past. Before this fallen civilization, there was a better relationship. "For almost all of human existence, we understood that we are one small strand in a web of relationships with air, water, soil, sunlight and our relatives, all the other species that share the planet with us. In ceremony and rituals, we constantly acknowledged this relationship, thanking our Creator for Nature's abundance and generosity and promising to 'act in a good way.'"
Then the call to action and the exhortation to love. "The primary force motivating the demand for change must be not fear but love. Love for our children and grandchildren. Love of community. And love of the planet from which we are created."
Note that last phrase. Created. This is Suzuki, the avowed atheist, speaking the language of Creation theology. The word is not accidental. It is structural. In the EcoGospel, Nature replaces God as the transcendent ground of moral obligation, and love of Nature replaces love of the divine. Suzuki has been performing this liturgy for decades. At 90, he delivers it without even noticing the vocabulary.
This is not an attack on religion. Religious reasoning has its place and its integrity. The problem is that Suzuki wants the moral and emotional force of theological commitment combined with the epistemic authority of science. He claims both simultaneously, and the combination is not intellectually honest.
