David Attenborough has fundamentally changed the way we look at wild animals and the environment, writes Morgan Richards.
Imagine a journey across the surface of the Earth. Take in the Galapagos Islands with its different species of giant tortoises. Fly over its rainforests, deserts, mountains and oceans. Consider its poison dart frogs and blind mole rats. See the fossils of extinct ammonites encased in limestone, the flash of turquoise on the underside of a hummingbird's wing and the tiny embryo of a red kangaroo developing inside its mother's pouch. Think of the texture of an elephant's hide, the colourful feathers of a bird of paradise and the wide eyes of a loris.
Now consider how it is you have come to know these diverse animals and environments, and the fragile interconnections that bind them together. If, like me, you're part of a generation who grew up with David Attenborough, chances are it was Attenborough who introduced you to these animals.
Life on Earth (1979) was the first in a long line of landmark wildlife series produced by the BBC Natural History Unit and written and presented by David Attenborough.
'Landmark' is the term used by those in the industry to describe big budget, multi-part television documentaries.
These documentaries didn't just visualise animals in a new way; they changed the way we looked at wild animals. For the first time viewers were shown a global vision of wildlife and nature. To audiences in 1979, it must have seemed as if the image of the blue planet—a fragile earth floating in deep space first captured during the Apollo space missions of the 1960s—was suddenly endowed with new depth and clarity. Watched by an estimated 500 million viewers, Life on Earth enabled people not just to see a broad survey of animal life but also to feel connected to a global ecology.
Rather than focusing on a particular species or exploring the ecology of a particular environment, as many wildlife documentaries had done before, landmarks had the space to develop and dramatise complex scientific ideas, weaving together footage of different species and environments from around the globe. Attenborough's skill as a presenter held the broader scientific narrative of the series, which focused on evolutionary biology, together.
His style of presentation, mixing the enthusiasm of an amateur naturalist with the calm authority of a scientific observer, had been honed in the era of live broadcasting, beginning with Zoo Quest in 1954. It was his talent for recalling facts and translating the complex world of natural history into easily intelligible sound bites that lay behind the success of Life on Earth. As Clive James once remarked, Attenborough possesses a 'gift for the simple statement that makes complexity intelligible'.
The sense of connection with wild animals and environments that Life on Earth made possible was partly a matter of timing; it took place at a moment when people were living increasingly urbanised lives, divorced from the countryside and the few places where natural environments were undisturbed by human industry, and when years of slowly building environmental awareness was starting to translate into concerted local and government action around the world.
It is no mere coincidence that this series emerged at the same time as the modern environmental movement, yet the cause of environmentalism is a recurring tension throughout the history of Attenborough's landmarks.
Environmental campaigner George Monbiot, for example, penned a searing critique of the wildlife genre's avoidance of environmental issues in The Guardian in 2002.
"There are two planet Earths," he wrote. "One of them is the complex, morally challenging world in which we live, threatened by ecological collapse. The other is the one we see in the wildlife programs."
He singled out David Attenborough for his harshest criticism: "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 dense, the camera deliberately creates an impression of security and abundance.'
In response, Attenborough defended his programs by citing The State of the Planet, his 2000 assessment of the 'present ecological crisis', a series that Monbiot had ignored in his critique. He also argued that the main focus of his other programs was 'zoology', an academic discipline that he clearly viewed as separate from environmental politics and conservation.
This episode sheds light on one of the central paradoxes of Attenborough's series. Attenborough's onscreen persona is invested with scientific authority and trustworthiness. He has been voted as Britain's 'most trusted celebrity' by the Reader's Digest, beating newsreaders and the Queen. But his programs represent a very particular brand of science: that which is already proven and beyond doubt. Safe science.
In spite of revolutionary discoveries in genetics, his series have largely focused on scientific theories from within the branch of biology that relates to the classification of animals and plants. The science that concerns Attenborough in Life on Earth is that of Charles Darwin and the systematising projects of other great European naturalists like Buffon, Cuvier and Linnaeus. Beginning with The Trials of Life (1990), later series have focused on ethology, or the study of animal behaviour.
This limited focus on uncontroversial topics in natural history explains why it was only in more recent series that Attenborough was able to deal conclusively with complex environmental issues. The State of the Planet dealt with species extinction, habitation destruction and global pollution, while the last episode of Frozen Planet (2011), in particular, explored the effects of climate change on the polar regions.
The structural shift that enabled Attenborough to explore the consequences of climate change was related to the broader transformation that allowed the world's news media to embrace climate change as a global threat.
It was spurred on by the release of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in early 2007. This report, based on a near consensus of the world's climate scientists on the causes and probable impacts of anthropogenic global warming, saw climate change gain recognition as a global environmental problem. As news media embraced climate change as a global threat and the science behind global warming became more solid, the wildlife genre's long-standing avoidance of controversial issues began to give way to more nuanced explorations of climate change and other environmental issues.
The critiques that Monbiot and others have levelled at Attenborough are, in some ways, justified, but Attenborough's series are unique and they deserve to be judged on their own terms. The global vision at the heart of Life on Earth and subsequent landmark series fundamentally changed the way we looked at wild animals and the environment.
As David Attenborough revealed when I interviewed him in 2012: "I think the environmental movement does owe quite a lot to television — that people are aware of what's happening in Africa. I mean, actually you've only got to go back to my father or my grandfather, who didn't even know — the world was limited to a few miles."
About the author:Dr Morgan Richards is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. She is currently writing a book, Wild Visions: The BBC and The Rise of Wildlife Documentary (Manchester University Press), which investigates the BBC's central role in shaping the wildlife genre in the UK and internationally.
David Attenborough's First Life is currently screening on ABC1 on Tuesdays at 8.30 pm
Published 15 October 2013