The concept of a council of elders was David Suzuki’s brain-child. Recalling his original thinking on this subject during an interview published in the March 2011 issue of Common Ground, he said: “as an elder, we’re at the most important phase of our lives. We’re no longer driven by a need for fame or money or power or sex. We’re relieved of those things as elders. Our job, our responsibility now, is to look back on a lifetime of experience, of thought, and to distill from that some lessons we can pass on. That’s our job as elders, dammit, because we can speak directly from the heart. There are no hidden agendas and we can tell the truth. One of the most powerful groups in the peace movement were retired admirals and generals against nuclear war because they’ve gone through the whole system, but once they’re free of that, they’re retired, they can speak the truth. That, I believe is the role that elders have today. We’ve been very marginalized. When we started the David Suzuki Foundation one of the first things we did was to ask a group of elders to come and be a council of elders for the foundation. My idea was that it would be like the role of elders in indigenous communities. You know, they’re like rock stars in their communities. I thought, well, maybe if we had elders sitting here, as people go about their jobs here, they might sit down and have tea with Mary or Bob and talk about their experiences as elders.”
However, the inauguration of a council of elders was not in fact quite one of the first things that followed the starting of the David Suzuki Foundation, which was incorporated in 1990 and began to operate at the beginning of the following year, though it was certainly a project very much on David Suzuki’s mind. In 1992 he co-authored a book, The Wisdom of the Elders, in which he described the impact upon him of his immersion in aboriginal cultures where respect for elders was a traditional feature of life. But it was not until 1996 that he found someone prepared to take a lead in implementing his vision. This was Bill Paterson.