[VegChat] The Passionate Eye: Climate Change

[Edelweiss D'Andrea]

http://www.cbc.ca/bigpicture/planet.html

The Passionate Eye is featuring a documentary by Avi Lewis tonight (now,
actually) at 10 pm. It's not too late to catch next week's episode, the
second part. Here's an article on Attenborough:


It's serious – Attenborough says stop climate change
Long a sceptic, David Attenborough tells Stuart Wavell why he is now certain
the planet is warming up and issues a call to arms


Like many of the animals he observes, David Attenborough is a creature of
habit. For half a century he has marked out his territory in natural history
films with a remit to explain what he calls “the glory of life”. Heavy
sermonising is not his way. A leopard does not change its spots. Its cough
is discreet.
Admiration for the veteran broadcaster, 80 earlier this month, has been
tempered by chiding voices of late. An estimated 1 billion people have seen
his programmes, so why, ask critics, can’t this most mesmerising of
presenters use his platform to more outspoken effect? They thought he could
have made the green message more explicit in his last series, Planet Earth.

This week we shall see a different Attenborough. He goes critical, assuming
the mantle of a wrathful prophet as he enters the battle for the planet
against climate change.

Attenborough had remained silent on the subject of global warming during the
debate on its validity. “I was very sceptical,” he admits. His outlook
changed when climatologists showed him graphs linking the increase of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere with rising temperatures.

“I was absolutely convinced this was no part of a normal climatic
oscillation which the Earth has been going through and that it was something
else,” he says.

The result of his conversion is a two-part BBC1 documentary starting on
Wednesday as part of the corporation’s Climate Chaos season, in which he
looks at the future impact of global warming and discovers what steps can
save the planet from dramatic change. It is another luminous production by
the BBC’s natural history unit, but this time infused with a stark warning.

Attenborough discovered a compelling reason for sounding the alarm. “How
could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I knew about this and I did
nothing?” According to colleagues, he also feels a strong public obligation.
“He’s very aware of the trust people hold in him,” says one.

I put this to Attenborough, described recently as the most trusted man in
Britain after Rolf Harris. The label sends him into a paroxysm of laughter
that leaves him gasping: “Quite so . . . thank you . . . I don’t think I
need to say any more.”

But he does, veering off to blame himself for his part in the parlous state
of the planet. “We are now realising the consequences of the things which we
did: things that I did as a boy, things my parents did,” he begins. What can
he mean? Yes, burning fires.

“The carbon from the open fire that my parents burnt is still up in the
atmosphere and will remain there for 100 years. Absolutely innocently and
unwittingly over my lifetime and my parents’ lifetimes, we have been
stacking up and thickening the carbon dioxide layer. We didn’t know but now
we do. No one could blame my parents for having a coal fire but they could
blame me.”

Attenborough agrees there is little, “if anything”, we can do to reverse
this backlog of carbon dioxide for the next 100 years. So what does he think
of the assertions of Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish academic who says we should
resign ourselves to a temperature increase of 2C over the next century, by
which time a replacement will have been found for fossil fuel?

While acknowledging that a new energy source is “a real possibility”,
Attenborough takes issue with Lomborg. “If we don’t take stock now, and even
if we get to this paradisiacal situation of having consequence-free energy,
the carbon dioxide ‘tanker’ will still go sailing on for another 100 years.”

The new BBC season is distinctive for the way it shows a whole range of
climate indicators, from the examination of anaesthetised polar bears that
are declining in numbers to climate modelling, all told by the top
scientists in their field.

Cameramen record the plight of Pacific islanders on Tuvalu, driven from
their homes by the highest tides they have seen. The scene shifts from the
stricken trees of the Amazon to deserted villages in China, where sandstorms
and drought have affected thousands of lives.There are disturbing images of
rapidly retreating glaciers in Patagonia and the devastating effects of
coral bleaching in the warming seas around the Great Barrier Reef.

The carbon “footprint” of an average American family is shown as black
blocks floating over their heads and expanding with the decisions they take.
Attenborough explains how seemingly “trivial” measures such as only filling
the kettle with the amount needed, wearing a pullover when it’s cold and
turning down the thermostat by one degree can produce immense savings.

For the presenter such prudence is no cause of self-congratulation: it has
acquired a moral dimension. “The moral attitude of the Old Testament, which
was that the world was there for us to plunder and we could take what we
liked from it, has governed our thinking until now.
“What we need to recognise is that the world is not there for plundering. It
is a moral issue for us not to waste energy. I’m old enough to remember the
war, when it wasn’t that we thought it would make a difference if we left
food on the plate, it was wrong to waste food. And it’s wrong to waste
energy.”



He can envisage a new reconciliation with nature and even new ways of living
that are not based on relentless growth. “I get very worried when economists
tell me that national economies are in terrible trouble unless they grow. It
sounds dreadful to me.”

This seems like a new, radicalised Attenborough, though in fairness he first
sounded a prescient warning about man’s folly 27 years ago. In the 1979
series Life on Earth, which relaunched his documentary career after a spell
as controller of BBC2, he said: “The fact remains that man has an
unprecedented control over the world and everything in it, and so whether he
likes it or not, what happens next is very largely up to him.”

In fact his concern dates to the 1950s, when as “a very junior squirt” he
was involved in discussions with Sir Peter Scott about the formation of the
World Wildlife Fund, as it was then called.

The focus, he recalls, was on individual species at risk, with campaigns to
save the giant panda and Javan rhinoceros. Later the disappearance of these
iconic creatures was seen to be only a symptom of the fact that whole
ecosystems were endangered.

In recent years he must have realised that global warming was affecting his
old haunts when he revisited them, I suggest. Not so, says Attenborough. “If
my job is to make films about the tropical rainforest, I go to where it is
and not where it isn’t. Whereas I would have gone back to certain parts of
Borneo in the 1950s, I don’t go there now because simple research shows I
won’t find what I want.”

This brings on another twinge of mea culpa. His work has taken him to some
very pleasant venues, he observes in guilty tones. “That’s what I do. I go
to all the nice places.” Almost as a disclaimer, he adds: “I vigorously
defend the right to do that when making programmes about the glory of life.”

After all, he points out, if you wanted to show the glory of the human body
you wouldn’t show people with serious diseases. But? “But that’s only part
of the picture and it’s about time that the natural history unit showed a
bit of the other side. Which is what this series is doing.”

Okay, we can all do our bit, but what about the Chinese? Although they now
consume only a tenth of the energy used by Americans, their future needs
will be prodigious. Fatalists use this as a pretext for doing nothing. I ask
Attenborough whether he agrees with Joe Smith, the documentary’s scientific
adviser from the Open University, that the Chinese are so worried by
desertification they are likely to embrace environmental solutions.

“Well, whoopee,” he replies. He doesn’t sound convinced, but insists he bows
to Smith’s expertise.

Attenborough will probably be called alarmist for embracing the
climatologists’ creed and spelling out the new realities so bluntly. He is
certainly sensitive to criticism that his programmes have depicted nature as
red in tooth and claw. “It’s an accusation I am well accustomed to
 fielding,” he says grimly. “The allegation would be much more serious if it
was suggested that we were portraying the world as a garden of Eden in which
the lion lay down with the lamb.”

He maintains that the time devoted to animals’ hunting and killing
represents only a small proportion of that given to filming “more innocuous
occupations”. The problem is that as urban dwellers become removed from the
real world, “we don’t see our own deaths, let alone animals’ deaths”.

Doesn’t he find the relentless imperatives of the wild depressing? “Well, I
don’t think it is. I eat steak and I have accommodated the thought that I am
part of a system that includes omnivores. I am to some degree a carnivore.”

Perhaps with his own mortality in mind, he reflects that a wild animal’s
death is preferable to the human variety. “In as much as everything dies, to
die violently and swiftly could be seen as a better prospect to look forward
to than a long drawn-out and painful death. We lose sight of that.”

The idea that he misrepresents nature continues to rankle. People go to the
butcher’s shop, he complains, and buy livers, muscles and kidneys. “They
take them away and eat them, and then complain that you have a shot of a
lion killing a wildebeest. I mean, there’s something odd going on there.”

So can we transcend our hypocrisy and steel ourselves to defeat global
warming? He confesses he doesn’t know, but scents change in the air. “If you
look back at the 1950s the idea that there would be a minister for the
environment would be ludicrous. And even 20 years ago people wouldn’t have
bothered to recycle anything. Now no government can get elected without a
“prominent green plank”, he observes. It’s something, even if not much, but
“Rome wasn’t built in a day”.

He has just returned from the Galapagos Islands where he was filming a
series on reptiles and amphibians that will allow him to say that his life’s
work is done. “I’d like, before I hang up my shorts — or my boots — to do
the one group I haven’t looked at. Then I’ll be able to look at a line of
DVDs on the shelf and say, that’s the complete set.”

For more details of the BBC series visit www.bbc.co.uk/climatechaos

Edelweiss D'Andrea
edandrea at magma.ca
613-247-9575