Conservation message in wildlife series (1 Viewer)

[JTweedie]

David Attenborough came under criticism from the likes of George Monbiot in the past decade or so for not being upfront about threats to the natural world in his programmes. Nowadays this message is much more overt in programmes. But even as far back as 1974 he was being questioned about it. I think there's room within schedules for programmes that don't have an overt political or ideological message through them as well as programmes that do. Here Attenborough talks about his goal being to share the pleasure he gets from observing the natural world and hoping that others would find this pleasurable and interesting too.

 

[Green Sandpiper]

Its a difficult one. Could and should he have used his position and standing to do and say more about conservation and other issues? Undoubtedly. Balance this, though, with how many people actively involved in conservation, and how many members of the general public who care about environmental issues, can point to his easily- accessible programmes as their gateway into the subject.

 

[JTweedie]

As well as the fact that many of the programmes are about specific things such as behaviour of individual species, so it makes sense to keep a narrow focus on what you're showing.

 

[Montereyman]

Content creators are aware that if they say anything controversial their programs will not be broadcast so they are forced to self censor. I am much more bothered by organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club that have become corporatel apologists for the oil and meat industries. Threre are comments that a certain species is nearing exinction do to habitat loss but never going the next step to say it is the clearing of land for palm oil plantations for soya farms or for cattle grazing. In terms of what an individual can do it is not communicated that reducing the consumption of meat is an important first step.

 

[jurek]

If anything, BBC and David Attenborough have too pushy environmental message, to the point of giving many people a lifetime trauma.

 

[Montereyman]

It is inconvenient as Al Gore said to confront reality and make people uncomfortable. Unfortunately we have global displacement of millions of people at the present time and widespread desertification and loss of plants and species going extinct. The Native American people had a sense of community and that decisions made by a chief should consider it impact for the next six generations.

Talk about a lifetimme of trauma I would think about the Pacific Islanders having their homes submerged or the people of Gaza undergoing ethnic cleansing by the Israeli military with the support of the United States and most other countries. Lossing every single relative in a matter of days - that is real trauma.

 

[Montereyman]

I started doing underwater photography in Monterey Bay in 1988 and by 1998 most of the rock fish species were fished out completely. Jacques Costeau stopped diving long before his death as the areas he has explored in the 1950's and 1960's had become desert thank to deep ocean trawling.

I feel sorry for children of today who will need to watch old film clips to see wild animals roaming free and not in cages in zoos. As others have noted we were given a garden of Eden and we have trashed it with vulture capitalism. There is the western notion that a company can own land and the ocean and the rivers and the air and them profit from it with no regard for anyone else today much less for future generations.

 

[JTweedie]

And the thing is, children will grow up thinking the scarcity of wildlife around them is normal. Shifting baseline syndrome - they won't know any better until they start reading about it.