Monbiot Clashes with Attenborough

Nature documentary maker, Sir David Attenborough, gave an interview to The Guardian recently in which he chided environmentalists for emphasizing the dire predicament we're now in, calling it a "turn off."

It didn't take long for Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, to tear a strip off Sir David. Monbiot argues that, by downplaying these crises, Attenborough's lovely wildlife films breed "complacency, confusion and ignorance."

[Attenborough's] new series, Dynasties, will mention the pressures affecting wildlife, but Attenborough makes it clear that it will play them down. To do otherwise, he suggests, would be “proselytising” and “alarmist”. His series will be “a great relief from the political landscape which otherwise dominates our thoughts”. In light of the astonishing rate of collapse of the animal populations he features, alongside most of the rest of the world’s living systems – and when broadcasting as a whole has disgracefully failed to represent such truths – I don’t think such escapism is appropriate or justifiable.

It is not proselytising or alarmist to tell us the raw truth about what is happening to the world, however much it might discomfit us. Nor do I believe that revealing the marvels of nature automatically translates into environmental action, as the executive producer of Dynasties claims. I’ve come to believe it can have the opposite effect. 

For many years, wildlife film-making has presented a pristine living world. It has created an impression of security and abundance, even in places afflicted by cascading ecological collapse. The cameras reassure us that there are vast tracts of wilderness in which wildlife continues to thrive. They cultivate complacency, not action.

Wildlife film-makers I know tell me that the effort to portray what looks like an untouched ecosystem becomes harder every year. They have to choose their camera angles ever more carefully to exclude the evidence of destruction, travel further to find the Edens they depict. They know – and many feel deeply uncomfortable about it – that they are telling a false story, creating a fairytale world that persuades us all is well, in the midst of an existential crisis. While many people, thanks in large part to David Attenborough, are now quite well informed about wildlife, we remain astonishingly ignorant about what is happening to it. 

I'm a genuine Attenborough fan. I've bought nearly every wildlife series he's produced.  I watch them again and again. Yet Monbiot is right. Attenborough is no Gandhi of the wilderness. If he chooses not to present the grim reality of what is underway in the natural world, fair enough. He goes too far, however, when he criticizes others for doing what he's chosen to omit.