Geneticist, broadcaster, author, and social critic David Suzuki is one of the loudest voices in the global green community, and is surely the elder statesman of Canadian environmentalism. Suzuki adds to an already impressive body of work with The Legacy, framed as a photo-illustrated “last lecture,” because the septuagenarian host of CBC’s The Nature of Things is facing reality: “Now that my parents are gone and I too have become an elder, my mind turns to my own mortality. I hope I can approach my death with the dignity and acceptance my father did.”

A tie-in with Suzuki’s (carbon-weighty) world tour, The Legacy recapitulates and condenses decades of advocacy work. Writers repackage their oeuvres all the time, but how they do so is just as important as why. In this regard, The Legacy falters in significant ways. For one thing, although it is about the length of a novella, the book somehow manages to be internally repetitious.

No one could argue with Suzuki’s overall message, or indeed, with the many cogent points he makes. However, even well founded passion for the natural world – and distress at the uncontestable destruction our species is wreaking on it – could do with less anger and more warmth (and even a touch of levity). Citizens are bombarded with “do-this” and “don’t-do-that” imperatives every day, and resent being talked down to. In The Legacy, Suzuki pounds the podium less than in his 2009 essay collection, The Big Picture, but seems intent on taking himself every bit as seriously as a graduate student canvassing for Greenpeace.

Despite this stridency, he does close the book with a gentle, eloquent observation: if there is hope that humanity can change in time, it will be due to our love of the natural world, not just scientific understanding. Anyone would do well to leave behind a message like that.