'Canada's Al Gore'

" [David Suzuki,] embraced by Canada as a national icon [is] seen as the guru of the environmental movement here. [He has championed] unpopular causes -- global warming and other environmental issues -- long before they became fashionable..."

"Suzuki, inevitably, is called Canada's Al Gore [but] the background of the two men could not be more different. Whereas Gore is a patrician born to wealth and politics, Suzuki's father labored in the dry-cleaning business and chafed under the racism of the day."

" He and a handful of others, including his wife, Harvard instructor Tara Cullis, gathered in a lodge and started the David Suzuki Foundation, a nonprofit organization committed to environmental change. The Vancouver-based organization is now the premier voice for the green movement in Canada."

" most Canadians have embraced the wiry, bespectacled scientist who was game enough to pose at age 63 in nothing but a fig leaf for a publicity shot. In a 2004 nationwide CBC vote for 'Greatest Canadian,' he came in fifth -- and the four ahead of him were dead. Women in a Maclean's magazine poll voted him the man with whom they would most like to be stranded on a desert island.

He has garnered near rock star status with sell-out crowds and squealing fans. But Suzuki himself takes it all with an impish twinkle. There is none of Gore's polished reserve. Suzuki is animated, profane and passionate about his topic."