COMMUNICATOR....
David Attenborough believes that TV plays a crucial role in maintaining a link
between people and the natural world.
By : NILAKRISNA JAMES
HAVING had the extraordinary
privilege of spending a week with David Attenborough in October last year
filming in Sabah for his BBC series Attenborough: 60 Years In The Wild, I
realised why producer/director Miles Barton described this iconic wildlife
presenter as “the master communicator”.
Everything Attenborough says
is pure gold and I could not miss the opportunity to capture some of those
brilliant observations which have made him an outstanding wildlife documentary
maker.
Attenborough spent 60 years
filming for BBC and this celebration of his life’s work explores six decades of
natural history broadcasting and how science – and the world – have changed in
that time.
Everywhere we went,
Attenborough had fans clamouring for an autograph or a photo opportunity. He
was unfazed by the attention and gracefully accepts that he may have had an
enormous impact as one of the world’s most celebrated spokesmen for wildlife
conservation.
We discussed the impact
climate change may have had on conservation. He admitted that, despite many
years of exposure to the subject matter, this is not something that he could
professionally comment on.
“Climate change is a recent
pre-occupation ... 60 years ago, nobody thought there was any problem about
species expiration,” Attenborough explained. It would have been irresponsible
of him, he said, to talk about climate change to his audience if he was not an
expert in the field.
“I am not a climate
scientist. I am a naturalist. I certainly talked about species conservation
which is a clear-cut thing … those things you have straightforward facts
about.”
With new species being
discovered so often in our Malaysian rainforests, I asked Attenborough if
there’ll be a never-ending desire to document these new discoveries. He
explained that “the problem is not finding new species; the problem is finding
a scientist who is significantly expert in that particular group who actually
knows it is a new species.”
The big names in wildlife
documentaries seem to have shifted their focus to document what Attenborough
says are “new behaviours” rather than new species.
Barton certainly agreed with
this, saying that rather than filming new things, they often filmed things in
new ways and that their cameramen would often surprise local scientists with
what they captured on film, shedding light on potentially new behaviour which
could be critical to species survival and conservation.
By the same token, as new
species evolve or are discovered, many more are becoming extinct. As a
conservationist, Attenborough is well aware of the various theories that
surround matters of species survival and extinction.
He is adamant that in as
much as the orang utan and rhinoceros, for example, depend on our help
directly, they are also dependent on us “not knocking down the environment in
which they live” and believes strongly that the answer simply lies in looking
after the environment.
Human encroachment
Yet Attenborough laments the
increasing human population, which he believes has trebled since he started
documenting natural history. Addressing the needs of humans has taken priority
over the needs of other species and human encroachment into spaces which could
have been left for the wild is all too evident.
60 Years In The Wild
producer/director Miles Barton says documentary makers now tend to film things
in new ways rather than film new things.
“They all want houses to
live in, quite understandably, they all want food, they all want to educate
their children … by and large, it’s all going to come from existing wild
country,” Attenborough said. “Why make all these palm oil plantations? Because
there is a huge appetite worldwide for what palm oil produces.”
Realising the sensitivity of
arguing about personal choices of curtailing human population growth,
Attenborough also believes that part of the answer in addressing this problem –
which would indirectly allow wild country to survive human encroachment – is
the need to raise the standard of living for women, allowing women to determine
their choices and their primary roles in curbing human population growth.
As a feminist, I was astounded
by his incredible foresight as he tells me: “The only source for hope that I
can see is that wherever women are in charge of their lives and not men in
charge of women’s lives, wherever that is the case, wherever women have
education and are literate and have medical facilities … the birth rate falls,
which is a very good reason why standard of living in other countries should be
raised and why Europe should help in that process.”
Attenborough is not one to
shy away from a controversial debate and I asked if Man being a more superior
species would naturally be the fittest to survive at the expense of other
species. He replied, “Only if you assume that human beings have no foresight.
“If they use foresight, they
can see that their survival, which is what we’re talking about, depends upon
healthy environments,” he explained. Does this assume that Man would be driven
by conscience? Probably by self-interest, he replied.
The eco-tourism factor
We explored the issue of a
nation’s economic self-interest and how eco-tourism could be both a mask for
profits and a genuine goal towards conservation.
Attenborough believes
strongly that had it not been for eco-tourists, many more species would have
gone extinct. In his view, there needs to be a careful balance of economising
visitor contact to the animals, allowing rehabilitative areas to flourish and
determining wildlife tolerance to such human exposure, for eco-tourism to
succeed.
“Eco-tourism is not just
about making animals available to people. They require very careful, very
skilled management and there’s a huge expertise in that. It isn’t just about
putting a fence around and charging people a few dollars,” he added.
So what brought Attenborough
to Borneo in the first place?
Perhaps the greatest insight
into what foreign filmmakers find so fascinating about the Malaysian
rainforests is Barton’s observation that Borneo simply has “fantastic animals
and fantastic locations.”
Barton added: “There is also
a mystique for the British audience. They still have an affection for Borneo.
(It) means something. It means somewhere exotic and exciting.”
Attenborough concluded:
“There are people who never see real wild creatures from dawn to dusk.
Television can play a really crucial role in maintaining a contact and insight
and understanding of the natural world.” (The STAR)
(NOTE
: NILAKRISNA is a lawyer, activist and former broadcast journalist).
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