The World Has Reached Peak Attenborough
If there may be anybody who attracts near-ubiquitous admiration in the UK, it’s David Attenborough. The naturalist has had a maintain on our eyes and ears with a outstanding stream of nature documentaries because the Fifties. Even into his later years, Attenborough—who’s now 96—has relentlessly continued to launch new documentaries and sequels to his universally praised exhibits about life on the planet.
His newest is Frozen Planet II—a follow-up within the sequence exploring the chilled reaches of our planet. If that doesn’t take your fancy, then additionally launched this yr are a smorgasbord of Attenborough-fronted documentaries about birdsong and vegetation, two choices about dinosaurs, and a sequel to 2018’s Dynasties, a form of documentary-cum-soap-opera that follows named animals as they battle to carry on to energy of their respective dynasty. Though he’s most carefully related to the BBC, whose Pure Historical past Unit continues to supply the vast majority of his documentaries, current Attenborough exhibits have additionally been commissioned by Apple TV+ and Netflix. If Earth needed to provide up a planetary spokesperson for the pure world, Attenborough is the odds-on favourite, and for good purpose: His softly intoned reverence for the pure world has impressed a way of marvel for generations. He has achieved greater than virtually anybody to deliver faraway landscapes into our properties in an unforgettable method, and to remind us that we’re destroying these stunning, fragile ecosystems.
However watching the primary episode of Frozen Planet II, there’s something—forgive me—that leaves me just a little chilly. The entire hallmark Attenborough-isms are there: ominous strings as killer whales stalk a seal atop some pack ice. Drone pictures of glaciers smashing into the ocean beneath the Greenland ice sheet. The staccato comedy of a Pallas’s cat—actually nature’s chonkiest fuzzball—because it plods after a rodent. It’s all stunning. It’s Attenborough, in any case. However on the similar time, this documentary feels unusually out-of-step with a planet on hearth.
In most Attenborough documentaries, nature is unspoiled, stunning. It’s elegiac strings overlaid on unbroken blankets of ice. It’s one thing that exists outdoors of abnormal human expertise—a some place else that hovers to date on the sting of my very own life that it would as effectively be plucked from the pages of a fantasy novel. People are there within the Attenborough documentary however seldom onscreen. They’re a looming damaging presence that exists simply outdoors of the pure system, however bearing down on it. If an individual does seem in an Attenborough documentary, it’s normally the comforting presence of the naturalist himself.
That is a technique to have a look at the pure world, but it surely’s not the one means. In her e-book Below a White Sky, the environmental author Elizabeth Kolbert describes the chaotic means that people are imprinted on nearly each ecosystem on the planet. It’s messy, and people are wreaking havoc in all places we step, however Kolbert dispenses with the parable that nature exists outdoors of humanity and that solely by stepping away can we proper the wrongs we’ve got wrought. To make certain, Attenborough doesn’t totally subscribe to this view both. Within the 2020 documentary A Life on Our Planet, he factors out that reversing local weather change would require people to undertake renewable know-how, eat much less meat, and take a look at different options. However he’s additionally a patron of Inhabitants Issues—a charity that advocates for decreasing world populations in order to ease stress on the planet. Protecting nature intact would possibly imply that we should always have fewer people round to take pleasure in it.
I’m personally not satisfied by this line of considering, however I do assume that wishing away people with the intention to deal with nature has two different unintended effects that we will see in Attenborough’s documentaries. One is that our destruction of the pure world is typically sidelined. Conservationist Julia Jones made this level in relation to Our Planet, the filming of which she noticed for 3 weeks in 2015. After the documentary was launched she criticized the documentary for referencing forests burning in Madagascar however shying away from exhibiting footage of the destroyed ecosystems. Later, Jones praised Attenborough and his groups for depicting the affect of people within the 2020 documentary Extinction: The Truth—a movie she praised as “surprisingly radical.”