Planet of the Fakes
by George Monbiot
Dissident
Voice
December 18,
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.
George Monbiot is Honorary
Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the
Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London. He writes
a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper of London. His articles and contact
info can be found at his website: www.monbiot.com