Celebrating The Diversity Of Our Planet: Doyen Of Nature-TV Is 90 Not Out
Prof. Kumar David
It takes mastery and achievement to become an icon. In broadcasting in English (the one international language I am fluent in) there are a few. Walter Cronkite (1916-2009), CBS News anchor in the 1960s and 1970s, was called “the most trusted man in America” because he took responsibility for what he said – he, not CBS made decisions at a time of Vietnam-era lies in American officialdom and media. Then there was “Letter from America” by Alistair Cooke which ran from 1946 to 2004 (the longest running speech radio programme in history) on BBC Home Service, Radio 4 and the World Service. It was a 15 minute letter he read on a topical issue, sometimes poignant, sometimes humorous always informative. There were nearly 2900 letters which stopped less than a month before Cooke died at 95. It seems that one must be a nonagenarian to be certified as an institution. David Attenborough made it on 8 March 2016; Queen Elizabeth crossed the touchline on 21 April.
Attenborough, the world’s most influential figure in nature broadcasting, visited Lanka before his January 2003 documentary where he mentions the island (I am not sure of dates and he may have come again after the tsunami), but one thing to vouch for is that not much has changed in the last 10 million years. Wikipedia has this gem: “In Sri Lanka he spent time with a troop of toque macaques – one of the most studied groups of monkeys in the world. It has been discovered that the creatures are born into a class system in which position brings privileges”! It has also been observed that the servile classes squirm for favours before the ruling monkeys.
To commemorate his 90th birthday the BBC is releasing an app that will feature more than 1,000 clips of his work studying the natural world. The Story of Life app, which will be available free worldwide, will include clips from his earliest work Zoo Quest, through Planet Earth, to Frozen Planet. We will discover hundreds of animals and environments and the man himself thinks: “Knowing and understanding the natural world is one of the greatest gifts that humans can possess. If we lose our connection with nature, we lose ourselves”.
Conservation and environmentalism, not evangelism
Attenborough’s ability to share his enthusiasm and love of wildlife with his audience has popularised conservation. Though he is not confident of how much of the world’s wild places, forest cover and exotic species will be left in fifty years, the power of his images and narration builds positive vibes all over the world. “The future of life on earth depends on our ability to take action. Many individuals are doing what they can, but real success can only come if there’s a change in our societies and our economics and in our politics. I’ve been lucky in my lifetime to see some of the greatest spectacles that the natural world has to offer. Surely we have a responsibility to leave for future generations a planet that is healthy and inhabitable by all species”.
Ninety and still not out of the woods
He is an agnostic who says: “It never really occurred to me to believe in God”. He opposes creationism and ‘intelligent design theories’ and in 2002 with leading clerics and scientists opposed their inclusion in the UK school curriculum. They called for “creationism to be banned from school science curricula and for evolution to be taught widely”. In a programme on Darwin he flatly declared “Evolution is as solid a historical fact as you could conceive. What is a theory is whether natural selection is the sole mechanism”. Sexual selection of course was known to Darwin, the full title of whose second great opus was The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. It is interesting that recent work has shown that sexual preference for blue eyes, blond hair and tallness, and for lactose tolerance motivated by the economic benefits of animal husbandry, have aided the propagation of these traits in Europe in the last 10,000 years, an evolutionary blink of an eye.
