“My parents had never been to Japan,” David Suzuki states on-screen.

It’s a key scene in Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Story. Following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor during the Second World War, Suzuki and his Vancouver-based family were interned by the federal government because of their ethnicity. He was not accepted by Canada, the country of his birth, or by fellow Japanese Canadian kids, who could speak Japanese because their parents came from Japan. He could gain neither acceptance nor a sense of belonging. So what did Suzuki do? As he tells it in the documentary directed by Vancouver-raised and Toronto-based Sturla Gunnarsson, he went to “the swamp”, where his love of all things natural was born.

As Gunnarsson tells it, the discrimination Suzuki experienced during his formative years adds to the layers of complexity that make up his life, a life the filmmaker witnessed in close quarters during the filming of the movie, which opens in theatres on Friday (October 15).

“Each of the transitional moments in his life all have to do with creation flowing from destruction,” Gunnarsson—whose credits include the 2005 medieval epic Beowulf & Grendel and the 2008 documentary Air India 182—told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview from Toronto. “So the destruction of his [Vancouver] home led to the creation of a naturalist. He made his career as a scientist at the Oak Ridge National Lab [in Tennessee], which was ground zero for the Manhattan Project. They enriched the uranium. So his career was made at the place that produced the uranium that was dropped on the land of his ancestors, you know, and it’s just like that every step of the way.”

This may explain why, at 75, Suzuki cuts to the chase. For example, he’s convinced that the Green party, by its very existence, lets other political parties off the hook on climate change.

“The problem is that when you have a Green party, the other parties act as if, well, ”˜The environment is their issue and we’ll focus on the economy and other things like that,’ which is total bullshit,” Suzuki told the Straight prior to the Vancouver International Film Festival special presentation of the film on October 6. “We need to have a point at which the underlying ecological principles are everybody’s issue.”

In the end, though, Suzuki says humankind likely will not avert a climate catastrophe.

“I think it’s not looking good,” Suzuki said. “Jim Hansen, the climatologist who blew the whistle on climate in 1988, said it was happening and we had to do something. He testified in Congress last year, and he said, ”˜If we don’t want all hell to break loose, we’ve got to cap it [greenhouse-gas emissions] at 350 parts per million.’ We’re at 389 and on our way to 500.”

After the VIFF screening, Suzuki softened a bit in front of the audience, urging them not to give up on keeping climate on the agenda. The war and the internment are over, and Japanese Canadian families won redress in 1988. But the sense with Suzuki, now a proud grandfather, is that the real fight is just beginning.