Angry in the Great White North

Quadra Island is home to 2,550 people. It is 410 square kilometers in size. That comes out to 6 persons per square kilometer. Not bad if you are looking for some peace and quiet from the raging chaos that is Kitsilano, a neighbourhood in Vancouver:

David Suzuki: I love Kitsilano and Vancouver, but there are too many people and too many cars. I think we can have greater density if we made the city much more hostile to cars. The cars have made our city unattractive, and thus I like to spend more of my time in a smaller place at Quanta [ed, Quadra] Island where we also have a home.

Kitsilano is home to about 40,000 Vancouverites, living in 6 square kilometers of space. A lot more crowded than Quadra Island.

Obviously with all those cars and people in Kitsilano, David Suzuki needed a better place to live. Crowded living conditions is for suckers.

So David Suzuki buys a bit of land on Quadra Island. And what a bit it is!

When we purchased Tangwyn, the agent took great pains to inform us it could be subdivided into three pieces. "You could sell two and pay for all of it," he said, as if that were an incentive and option. It wasn't. We are privileged to claim to own what was once First Nations land and would like to see it become a part of a larger entity, the forest. Subdividing it into smaller parcels that would be sold off to be developed further will not do that. Somehow we have to find a way to maintain the integrity of wild areas.

Privilege. Claim. Ownership.

David Suzuki talks like a Medieval lordling.

He speaks of protecting this piece of First Nations land on which no First Nations person (or anyone else but members of the Suzuki household) lives.

And "Tangwyn"? It's not even a First Nations word. It's Welsh and it means "blessed peace" (David Suzuki's wife has Welsh ancestry).

So on the one hand, the rest of us are disgusting for living in a detached home that might be 30% larger than what our grandparents owned:

Or hear it from green priest David Suzuki, who last year told a Ballarat audience of wildly applauding town planners it was "disgusting" that we live in bigger houses than did our grandparents.

"What kind of world is this that regards this as progress?" he shouted.

On the other hand, David Suzuki gets an award from the Royal Bank and uses the free money to buy land (no mortgage!) on an exclusive island, land that is big enough to turn into three large properties but won't let anyone else live on it. And we're all to move into multi-unit housing no larger than what our grandparents had, perhaps smaller.

Meanwhile back in Kitsilano, the people who make an average household income of $66,000 per year can only dream of living it up on Quadra Island. But since David Suzuki is protecting his land on behalf of some Native spirits and the forest, I don't expect anyone living in Kitsilano will be invited to move into a home built on some part of Suzuki's three-lot property.

Now to be fair, David Suzuki says he is no environmental saint:

Still, Suzuki admits, "I am not a living example of what a truly environmentally proper person would do. Every environmentalist I know is struggling with this reality."

Yeah, keep struggling with what to do with Tangwyn, Suzuki. And let us know how that titanic battle with living the lifestyle of landed gentry works out. I bet all those folks living in apartments in Kitsilano are pulling for you.

Check out what Canadian bloggers have written about David Suzuki
Results will open in a new window.