VA N M AG .C O M/C I T Y
City Green Legacy Thirty years after her speech at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (a viral hit before viral hits existed), Severn CullisSuzuki has taken the helm at the David Suzuki Foundation.
Green Power
For almost a decade and a half, Severn CullisSuzuki lived on Haida Gwaii. Now she’s back, and ready to fight. by
Nathan Caddell
PATRICK SHANNON
BC ent
M I S S I N G M I D D L E S O LU T I O N S / I WA S A T E E N AG E S P Y / B E AC H B U N N I E S
Big Plans Larry Beasley helped create the Building Community Society to address housing issues in the Downtown Eastside.
Severn Cullis-Suzuki saw her bat signal in the air and knew it was time to come home. The former Vancouverite and her husband, Haida member Judson Brown, had spent 14 years raising their two children on the remote archipelago that is Haida Gwaii when she saw smoke from the California and Alaska wildfires billowing through the air in the summer of 2020. Some signs are just too literal to ignore, it seems. She decided then that, after working for nearly a decade and a half to help restore the Haida language, she had to return to the city and make her mark in the fight against climate change. “It was kind of like a wakeup call, a reminder,” Cullis-Suzuki remembers. “I hadn’t forgotten, but it was a real slap in the face that climate change is coming and that it’s going to affect everywhere on this planet. So I had this real feeling of, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to get back in the fight.’”
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