Did Sir David Attenborough cleverly expand his message?

Jul 1
5 min read

Sir David Attenborough seated on reef with sea in background. — Sir David Attenborough seated at the Great Barrier Reef during filming for his Great Barrier Reef series. PHOTO: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade - www.dfat.gov.au.

Throughout his life, centenarian Sir David Attenborough has won remarkable respect. With a flare for expression, the British broadcaster has spent his life introducing us to the magnificence and mystery of our planet and its natural history. He has awakened us to the multitude of heart-rending mortal threats dealt by humans’ callous and ignorant behaviour.

In Are We Changing Planet Earth, Attenborough’s famous, two-part TV documentary series in 2006, though there is no mention of the need to quit fossil fuels nor to do so as fast as possible, he did suggest the need to find solutions.

One solution was that CO2 be stored under the ocean floor. The second was to get the Chinese to reduce their enormous emissions. There was in both a sense of urgency even desperation, pointing out the distraction from and delay in the transition to renewable energy sources. Attenborough placed blame on China and Chinese consumers, although the historical fossil fuel burners were in the West. He was open to the idea that we had to act on the excessive emissions.

For a long time during his acclaimed career, Attenborough has maintained “professional neutrality” in order to unveil the beauty of nature and its living species, but not to save it.

An aha! moment came after Attenborough heard a lecture in 2004 by American atmospheric chemist, Ralph Cicerone. The prior focus of his programs on the “magic of nature” then shifted toward climate change and its urgent reckoning afterward.[1]

In 2013, he attacked overpopulation and over-consumption. "We have a finite environment — the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist".[2][3] At the 2018 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (COP24) in Poland, Attenborough said climate change is "our greatest threat in thousands of years," “…a man-made disaster of global scale"[4]. In 2019, he warned against inaction: "the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is “on the horizon".[5] "We live our comfortable lives in the shadow of a disaster of our own making. That disaster is being brought about by the very things that allow us to live our comfortable lives." (from A Life on Our Planet).[6][7] In Glasgow, 2021, the theme was still there: "We now understand this problem. We know how to stop the number rising and put it in reverse. We must recapture billions of tons of carbon from the air”. If humanity is a force powerful enough to destabilize the planet, "surely, working together, we are powerful enough to save it".[8]

Professor Ralph Cicerone, lecturing. — Prof Ralph Cicerone lecturing on climate change in 2004 at the University of Liège. Sir David Attenborough was in the audience. PHOTO: World Cultural Council.

With oratorical skill he warned over and over again of the greatest crises of centuries. In 2018 he declared, “Our careless use of fossil fuels has set us the greatest and most urgent challenge we have ever faced. If we do make the transition to renewables at the lightning speed required, humankind will forever look back on this generation with gratitude, for we are indeed the first to truly understand the problem — and the last with a chance to do anything about it.”[9] In 2021, repeated, "Our burning of fossil fuels, our destruction of nature, our approach to industry, construction and learning, are releasing carbon into the atmosphere at an unprecedented pace and scale. We are already in trouble. The stability we all depend on is breaking."[10] He would stress this repeatedly.

One could fault Attenborough for never addressing the force behind climate change, the source of instability, or the power driving that over consumption, namely the fossil fuel producers. Was it not they who cleverly and relentlessly induced our addiction to coal, gas, and oil, pulling us deeper into an abyss of chaos, poverty, weather extremes, an extended and permanent loss and damage for centuries to come? Why did he never expose the vested interests and the power relations of fossil fuels giants, including their unholy alliance to politicians and wars. One could go so far as to say that like the narcotics agents targeting drugs and drug addicts, rather than the drug overlords, he unwittingly went after the consumer or what was consumed, rather than attacking fossil fuels producers.

One could also find fault that he never critically addressed the carbon sequestration, essentially the return of spent carbon into the ground it came from-–an idiotic, perpetual motion machine in reverse because it means that the more carbon we burn, the more machines and energy we need to recapture spent carbon to return it to the ground—until we enter the epoch of renewable systems, which remains more and more elusive. Fossil fuel giant Exxon has made carbon sequestration a favorite proposal, likely sought to divert and win time to sell more carbon, setting back the transition to renewable energy sources for decades or longer.

But if Attenborough had pointed a shaking fist at the fossil fuels industry as the source of the apocalyptic destruction, would he have achieved such a successful media outreach to tens of millions, or would he have been slanderously sidelined, like Greta Thunberg has in recent years? Could he have continued to be a trusted spokesperson for science?

Behind this approach, did Attenborough conceal a quiet but brilliant strategy for maintaining his role as a public educator that purposefully avoided exposing the culprits of climate change– until later in his career? Could it be a case that the perfect would have been the enemy of the good. Or it could be a case that he was one step ahead than behind the powerful fossil fuel Goliaths?

The strategy of encirclement, namely to do in the fossil fuel complex by slowly surrounding it and driving it out of existence, could have been in the back of his mind especially in later years. His 2020 a Life on Our Planet gives “a vision of the future.” There is an eloquent clarion call to action, “The advent of the Anthropocene could yet mark the beginning of a new and sustainable relationship between ourselves and the planet. It could be a time in which we learn how to work with nature rather than against it, a time in which there would no longer be any great distinction between the natural and the managed, for we would become the attentive stewards of the entire Earth, calling upon nature’s extraordinary resilience to help us bring its biodiversity back.”[11] Attenborough's tenacity, eloquence and passion to reach out exposing ever closer the culprit without singling it squarely out could be seen, “It is crazy that our banks and our pensions are investing in fossil fuels, when these are the very things that are jeopardising the future we are saving for.”[12][13]

If Sir David were to take on Fossil Fuels, his legacy in the years to come could well be precisely the inspiration needed to not vilify consumers, but to take on the primordial fossil fuel interests who victimize those consumers, knowingly and heartlessly delaying the energy transition.

Did Sir David Attenborough cleverly expand his message?

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