http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=554
Planet of the
Fakes
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.
17th December 2002
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