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At age nine, she started saving the planet. What does Severn Cullis-Suzuki want to be when she grows up?

Text: GUY SADDY

IN ONE SMOOTH MOTION, SEVERN CULLIS-SUZUKI SWINGS her lithe body up onto the huge piece of driftwood. The log is grand, its bark worn smooth by the elements to reveal an exotic burl. "This log has been here my whole life," she says. Its permanence is comforting, an anchor to the past. The Vancouver skyline looms in the distance: a soaring collection of green glass buildings playing counterpoint to the Coast Mountains. It is a place where nature rubs up against progress, as if the two forces were the tectonic plates that are imperceptibly shifting underneath us. From her perspective here at this Kitsilano beach, near the home of her famous father, David Suzuki, what Severn Cullis-Suzuki sees is change.

She is pretty, but not as striking as in photographs I've seen. Her walk is more athletic than graceful. But here today, dressed casually in jeans and a suede shirt, her hair tucked into a small ponytail, Cullis-Suzuki is right in her environment. "These rocks?" she says, pointing to an odd collection of stones. "They're totally out of place." She's right. Misguidedly dumped there to help staunch erosion, among the natural sandstone that hugs this shore, the huge grey rocks are as out of place as pork in a vegetarian restaurant.

Severn Cullis-Suzuki, environmentalist, turns her attention back to the horizon. "This city has changed so much in four years," she notes, her eyes set on the distance. Or perhaps on the future.

Although she is only 23, fresh of out Yale with an undergraduate degree in ecology and evolutionary biology, her resumé is almost too good to be true. The United Nations Environment Programme's Global 500 award bestowed upon her at 13. A decade-old public speaking career. Participation in a variety of United Nations forums. Helping shape the Earth Charter, a blueprint for environmental health produced by a committee headed by Mikhail Gorbachev. Writing for Time magazine. Induction into Vanity Fair's Hall of Fame.

But she is best remembered for one thing. In 1992, then only 12, she went to the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and delivered a simple yet passionate speech to a roomful of international decision makers and dignitaries. "I am just a child," it appealed, and ended 360 seconds later in a flurry of applause. Al Gore approached her after and said it was the best speech he'd heard in Rio.

It took just six minutes to transform David Suzuki's little girl into a powerful media personality in her own right. It was a galvanizing moment and the font from which her current celebrity flows. If anything, it is the legacy of this speech that will make Severn Cullis-Suzuki the new poster girl of the environmental movement. It is a leap she seems poised to make.

Perhaps.

At 8:45 a.m. at the Surrey Arts Centre in suburban Vancouver, Severn Cullis-Suzuki steps from the wings and walks slowly, almost shyly, to the mic. "Do you think I could have the house lights up a little bit?" she asks. After some warm-up remarks to an audience of public service workers here for an annual staff forum, she settles in. She tells of her time spent with the Kayapo, a remote Amazonian tribe. She talks about the importance of eating locally produced food and of how environmental problems must often be framed as social issues. She brings up the "intellectual shrinkage" of global culture, the inexorable result of allowing whole societies to be crushed by the juggernaut of development - entire languages, she notes, have been lost. Her hand bangs the podium and the mic picks it up. "Sorry!" she says, laughing. "I'm getting a little excited."

She goes over like dessert. By any measure, she is a natural public speaker, comfortable in front of a crowd, seamless in her presentation. Much of this speech, I later discover, is culled from other presentations. But that, too, is the mark of a pro.

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