Editor’s Note
Afew nights ago I watched David Attenborough’s latest, A Life On Our Planet, with my family. Attenborough, who’s 94 years old, called the documentary his “witness statement” for the environment. In it he outlines the decline of our wilderness in one lifetime — his. In 1937, when Attenborough was 11 years old, 2.3-billion people lived on the planet and 66% of the world’s wilderness remained. Today, the world’s population has more than tripled and our wild spaces have shrunk to 35%.
“Although as a young man I thought I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world,” says Attenborough, “it was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying.”
He outlines some damning statistics, not least of which is that humans and our domesticated cows, chickens and other animals account for 96% of Earth’s mammals by weight. This probably symbolises great progress for some but you can’t help feeling broken-hearted when these statistics are contrasted with images of birds, beasts and sea creatures, and forests, mountains and ice landscapes of exotic and extraordinary beauty, that may no longer exist in a few years’ time. Ah well, they’ll say, we can do without ’em and the ones that never knew ’em won’t know the difference.
“Shifting baseline syndrome” is a phrase coined in 1995 by biologist Daniel Pauly when he was in the fishing industry in the Philippines. He was troubled by the inability of humans to understand that sea life was rapidly diminishing: “One fisherman might remember his nets teeming with bluefin tuna, while his grandson has never seen a single one,” he says. No doubt what our children experience of the planet they’ll consider “normal” — like wild animals existing only in humansanctioned theme parks.
When we’d finished watching the film, I noticed that my teacup was balanced on a book I’d randomly pulled from the shelf, The Superior Person’s Book of Words by Peter Bowler. It flipped open on “K” and the first entry is “kakistocracy” — government by the worst citizens. For reasons that can only be speculated on, there’s no word for government by the best citizens.
It’s been a nerve-racking week. Let’s see where it leads us.