According to the journalist, by excluding negative aspects such as extinction and habitat degradation from his documentaries, Attenborough presents a false image of nature.
Anyone who loves nature cannot help but love David Attenborough, perhaps the world's best-known science communicator and pioneer of natural history documentaries. For decades Attenborough has narrated the lives of wild animals with passion and an abundance of detail; his documentaries have by now won over the general public too, as the great success of the Planet Earth II series attests, thanks in part to the use of ever more sophisticated technologies. George Monbiot, British environmentalist, writer and journalist, author of the splendid essay on rewilding, Feral, certainly loves nature, yet he believes that Attenborough is not doing it any great service — indeed, that he is even betraying the living world he loves so much.
In an op-ed published in the Guardian, Monbiot argues that the British broadcaster has betrayed the natural world by excluding negative aspects from his documentaries, such as extinction and habitat degradation, and in doing so presenting a distorted and false image of nature.
For his part, Attenborough, in a recent interview given on the occasion of the launch of the new BBC documentary series Dynasties, stated that emphasising negative aspects — such as the impact of habitat loss, climate change and pollution — could be counterproductive. "It would be irresponsible to ignore these threats," the naturalist said, "but at the same time I think we have a responsibility to make programmes that look at everything else as well, and not just at this."
Given the catastrophic speed at which animal species are becoming extinct — according to a new report by WWF, between 1970 and 2014 we caused the disappearance of 60 per cent of vertebrates — Monbiot considers Attenborough's approach, aimed primarily at entertainment, unjustifiable. "For many years wildlife documentaries have presented an unspoilt living world," writes the British daily's columnist, "creating an impression of safety and abundance, even in places afflicted by widespread ecological collapse."
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This way of portraying nature — zooming in on the small unspoilt corner while keeping the surrounding degradation out of frame — generates complacency rather than action, according to Monbiot. "Many documentary makers know that they are telling a false story, creating a fairy-tale world capable of reassuring us in the middle of an existential crisis."
Monbiot recalls that, during the period when he worked for the BBC, an environmental series he had proposed — dedicated precisely to the destruction of the natural world — was rejected from the outset. "If you asked me who has done more to frustrate environmental action in this country, the BBC or ExxonMobil, I would say the BBC," he wrote. Monbiot acknowledges Attenborough's great merit in having informed people about animal species and their behaviour, while leaving them ignorant of the environmental crisis under way — a crisis never truly explored in depth and, on the contrary, treated superficially, as in the case of the series The truth about climate change. "He told us nothing about the driving forces behind the climate crisis," Monbiot said. "The companies extracting fossil fuels are mentioned only as part of the solution."