Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie

Comparisons to An Inconvenient Truth are inevitable for this Canadian production—largely a filmed multimedia "Legacy Lecture" in Toronto given by David Suzuki, a geneticist and popular college academic and eco-activist who rose to celebrity on the long-running CBC science program The Nature of Things. Suzuki likens human population growth to bacteria overrunning a test tube, using simple math to demonstrate that even though ample food, space, and resources might seem to exist, an exponential birth rate could exhaust everything in a mere generation or two. Humanity itself has become a "force of nature" capable of changing the planet—mostly for the worse, although Suzuki hopes his audience will adopt the example of Canada's "First Nation" Indian tribes who hold long-term environmental views. The documentary also takes viewers through Suzuki's biography: his Japanese-Canadian family in British Columbia was sent to internment camps after Pearl Harbor (their property confiscated), while other relatives were lost forever, to deportation followed by the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings. While urgent, Suzuki's apocalyptic message is not presented in a polemical manner, making it more likely to be listened to by a wide range of viewers. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)