MONBIOT ATTENBOROUGH DEBATE ON DOCUMENTARY THEMES

[Guest guest]

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/12/17/planet-of-the-fakes/

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,861483,00.html

Planet of the Fakes

<http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/12/17/planet-of-the-fakes/> Posted

December 17, 2002

 

Wildlife programmes on television, David Attenborough's among them,

perpetuate the dangerous myth of wilderness.

 

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 17th December 2002

 

There are two planet earths. One of them is the complex, morally challenging

world in which we live, threatened by ecological collapse. The other is the

one we see on the wildlife programmes. We love these programmes not only

because they show us how curious the products of evolution are, but also

because they remove us to a parallel planet, the Garden of Eden before the

sixth day of creation, when God went and messed it up by making Man.

 

Natural history programmes lie more frequently than any other documentaries.

They film animals in cages and pretend they have been filmed in the wild.

They import tame predators, and release them to hunt wild prey. They cut

between uneventful sequences to suggest that animals are interacting. Most

of the soundtrack is added to the film in the studio: the noise of antlers

clashing is likely to be the noise of technicians duelling with broomsticks.

 

All this technical trickery, while dishonest, is harmless enough. But there

is a far more serious and dangerous lie, which informs almost every sequence

the programmes show. Except for a few shots of animals doing amusing things

in people's gardens, and, occasionally, an indigenous person, stripped of

his t-shirt, wildlife programmes present the natural world as a pristine

wilderness, unaffected by humanity.

 

Some of these falsehoods are brought to us by the most trusted man on

television. Sir David Attenborough, is, as everyone knows, an excellent

broadcaster, and he appears to be a sincere and decent man. He has never, as

far as I am aware, told a lie on television. But, for much of the past 50

years, he has allowed the camera to lie on his behalf.

 

His programmes' invocation of a fantastic, untainted world is dangerous for

two reasons. The first is that they suggest that ecosystems remain largely

intact. Attenborough has made one, fine series about environmental

destruction. But those programmes belonged to the world we inhabit,

compartmentalised and far removed from the other world he shows us. Their

message has been undermined by almost every wildlife documentary he has

made. Last week, for example, he explained how the harvest mouse has made

its home in cornfields; but omitted the obvious development of that idea:

the species has, in the past 50 years, been devastated by agricultural

change.

 

He shows us long, loving sequences of animals whose populations are

collapsing, without a word about what is happening to them. Indeed, by

seeking out those places, tiny as they may be, where the habitat is intact

and the population is dense, the camera deliberately creates an impression

of security and abundance. Attenborough cannot tell us that this is false,

for if he did so his fantasy planet would collide with the one we inhabit,

and his prelapsarian spell would be broken.

 

More dangerously still, many of his hundreds of millions of viewers believe

in the world he creates, and when they go abroad they expect to find it.

There is a massive and well-financed industry devoted to ensuring that they

will not be disappointed.

 

The construction of wilderness has always been a key component of the

colonial project. Almost everywhere that European settlers went, they either

proclaimed the land they seized to be " terra nullius " or, by expelling its

people, ensured that it became so. The land which many of the richest

colonists sought was that which harboured great concentrations of game.

 

The Normans, for example, were obsessed by hunting, and many of them joined

the invasion of 1066 simply to secure new reserves. Hugh le Gros Veneur

( " the fat hunter " ), seized vast tracts of Lancashire, which his descendants,

the Grosvenors, or Dukes of Westminster, own to this day. William I

established several " forests " , or royal hunting estates, whose inhabitants

he cleared. This is one of the reasons why both " forest " (a word which has

come to mean a place where trees grow) and the habitats of big wild animals

have taken their place in our mythology of wilderness. The great

" wildernesses " of Scotland were established for the same purpose and by the

same means 700 years later.

 

But these reserves were tiny by comparison to the wildernesses the British

colonists made in East Africa. At first the land they seized was set aside

for hunting, but as the game ran out, they began to preserve it for the

camera rather than the gun. After the Second World War, Bernhard Grzimek,

" the father of conservation " in East Africa, announced that he would turn

the Serengeti in northern Tanzania into a vast national park. This land,

which is possibly the longest-inhabited place on earth, was, he declared, a

" primordial wilderness " . Though there was no evidence that local people

threatened the wildlife, Grzimek decided that " no men, not even native ones,

should live inside its borders. " His approach was gleefully embraced by the

British. Thousands of square miles of savannah in Kenya and Tanzania were

annexed, and its inhabitants expelled. Only the whites could afford the

entrance fees to the reserves, so only they were permitted to enter the new,

primordial wilderness.

 

This project was, from the beginning, assisted by wildlife films. Grzimek's

documentary, Serengeti Shall Not Die, generated massive enthiusiasm for his

ethnic cleansing programme. Joy Adamson, who was one of the most viciously

racist and brutal characters ever to carve a career in Africa, used the

status afforded by her books and the films they inspired to wage war on the

indigenous people. She drove the eastern Samburu out of their best grazing

lands to establish what she called a " conservation project " (in reality an

attempt to rehabilitate her pet leopard). She described the Samburu as

" squatters " and renamed the prominent features of the land she had stolen

after her pets. When she was murdered in this artificial wilderness, the

inquiry was delayed for months by a surfeit of suspects.

 

Today, conservation officials in Kenya often concede that traditional

grazing could be permitted in the parks and reserves without driving out the

wildlife. But the local people must continue to be excluded because the

tourists " don't expect to see them there " . The tourists don't expect to see

them there largely because the television shows them that healthy wildlife

habitats are places without people. By presenting the natural world as

something apart from humanity, it creates the impression that conservation

means exclusion. If those who seek to venture through the back of the

television and into the world which Attenborough has made find that it is,

in fact, very much like our own, with all the conflicts and difficulties

which arise wherever human beings live, they will complain. So the primary

task of conservationists in the former colonies is to convert the real world

into the virtual one which the tourists have seen on TV.

 

David Attenborough has become, in two respects, godlike. He can, in the eyes

of all who worship him, do no wrong. And he has created a world which did

not exist before. He's a fine man, but for 50 years he has perpetuated one

of humanity's most dangerous myths.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,862394,00.html

Attenborough defends his views of life on earth

 

 

Thursday December 19, 2002

The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>

 

George Monbiot accuses me of propagating fakes on the grounds that every

natural history programme I make is not about ecological politics and

conservation (Planet of the fakes, December 17).

 

There is a science called zoology. People study it at universities because

they are deeply interested in the nature of other animals, the way they live

and the processes of evolution that have brought them into existence. The

present BBC 1 series, The Life of Mammals, is I hope catering for the same

interest among viewers.

 

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The last series for which I was responsible, The State of the Planet,

assessed the present ecological crisis. The final programme in the Mammals

series, which deals with the great apes, examines among other things how it

is that one of them, mankind, has come to dominate the earth. But to suggest

that every natural history programme should be devoted to this aspect of the

natural world, or indeed must always make reference to it, is like

suggesting that human beings are only interesting or worthy of television

documentaries if they are sick and injured.

David Attenborough

London

 

· The uncritical relationship between conservation and the wildlife media

has a tragic impact on subsistence and traditional communities. Conservation

that excludes people from their environment smacks of colonialism. Some

estimate that over 1 million people have been displaced as a consequence of

conservation in Africa. The relationship between humans and their ecosystems

has been key to the maintenance of the environment. The Maasai for example

are semi-nomadic livestock keepers who live harmoniously with wildlife,

including elephants that break down the bush increasing grazing to other

animals and cattle.

 

Conservationists and the wildlife media must explain this critical

relationship and stop ignoring the thousands of people pushed off their

lands and into poverty.

Mike Sansom

Coordinator, African Initiatives

 

· Many of George Monbiot's own beliefs owe more to myth than to fact. He

believes traditional grazing does not damage wildlife, yet up-to-date

science shows that it does. He is also wrong to think that inhabited

tropical ecosystems are " very much like " those where the western television

viewers live. Tropical systems contain far more species within narrow

geographical ranges and these are at higher risk of extinction. Meanwhile,

the human population is declining in several western countries.

 

The history of Africa shows that some pastoral tribes themselves have not

been averse to what Monbiot would emotively call " ethnic cleansing " of the

previous inhabitants, and all pastoralism is recent in the timescales over

which the wildlife has evolved. Monbiot's myths, if perpetuated, will leave

everybody with an impoverished - and perhaps more unstable - world.

Clive Hambler

Oxford