Planet Earth’s plastic cancer
The BBC’s brilliant wildlife cameraman tells how rubbish is ruining the natural world and why he’s backing our campaign
DOUG ALLAN is the cameraman behind some of the most celebrated wildlife scenes in television history. Sir David Attenborough, his long-time collaborator, says of him: ‘Wildlife cameramen don’t come much more special than Doug.’ They don’t come much more knowledgeable about the perils facing marine life, either. Here, in a passionate essay in support of the Mail’s Banish the Bottles campaign, the 65-year-old Scot says plastic waste in our oceans is destroying the creatures he adores.
TRUDGING along the beaches of Orkney, camera at my side, casting around for the shot that would do justice to the rugged majesty of these islands, I began to wonder why the task was such a challenge.
You can’t go wrong filming in Orkney, surely. The place, like so much of my native Scotland, is a film cameraman’s dream. But something was frustrating me almost every time I framed up views of the jagged coastline.
The problem was bottles. Dozens of them, of every colour, dotted along the high tide marks of beaches facing the prevailing winds, encroaching on so many views and ruining them. What an eyesore. And how utterly avoidable.
I was filming for the three-part BBC Two series Britain’s Ancient Capital: Secrets of Orkney, tracing Neolithic roots stretching back 5,000 years – and reflecting that for all but the past few decades of that time, these beaches would have been bottle-free.
Here I stood, laden with technology the Neolithic civilisations couldn’t have imagined, yet surveying our own depressing legacy of glass and plastic bottles, cans, containers and assorted garbage half-buried in the sand.
That was last summer. The summer before that I was the biological consultant for a wonderful art project in Bristol that used recyclable plastic bottles to create the ‘sea’ in which two humpback whales fashioned from willow strips were swimming.
The art installation at the city’s dock was a fantastic project to be involved in, not least because some of my most memorable assignments as a wildlife cameraman were spent swimming with and filming whales.
And the footage from Tonga in the South Pacific of the 45ft humpback and her playful calf which appeared in Sir David Attenborough’s first Planet Earth series? That was mine.
I have filmed at both Poles too, and in a good deal of the oceans and seas and lands that lie between them. In a long career as a wildlife cameraman, working with Sir David for 25 years and many others besides, I have seen the challenges marine animals face just to stay alive in their natural environment.
The last thing they need is thoughtless litterbugs tossing unnatural enemies into their world too.
That is why I wholeheartedly support the Scottish Daily Mail’s Banish the Bottles campaign and wonder, frankly, why no one thought of this before.
OF course, the answer is they did. Back in the 1950s when I was a boy growing up in Dunfermline, I would collect lemonade bottles to return to the local shop. That wasn’t the only option. The picture house would let you have a seat at the Saturday matinees in exchange for half a dozen returned bottles.
So Saturday mornings would find me picking them out of hedgerows and gutters on the way to the cinema. At the time it may not have been immediately obvious to me that I was recycling litter – I thought I was getting into the pictures for free – but it must have been clear to the bottler Barr’s that this was what was going on.
And yet the practice – years ahead of its time if we think about it now – dwindled into extinction.
The main reason for that, no doubt, was the proliferation of cheaper, lighter plastic bottles and cans – containers which could not pass through industrial dishwashers for re-use as often as the drinks manufacturers pleased.
These were vessels fit at best for the bin but almost as frequently tossed away with barely a thought for what happens next.
Well, I have seen what happens next and the effect of plastic bottles on our planet’s wildlife is far more devastating and widespread than that of glass.
Tossed or washed into rivers and streams or dumped at beaches, these bottles can float for months, even years, often being mistaken for prey by marine wildlife. That is why fish and mammals become snagged in plastic that ends up biting into their bodies.
Larger creatures swallow bottles and other plastic debris whole. In January last year, 29 sperm whales were stranded on shores around the North Sea. When 13 of those which beached near the German town of Tönning in Schleswig-Holstein were cut open, their stomachs were filled with plastic.
The state’s environment minister Robert Habeck said at the time: ‘These findings show us the results of our plastic-oriented society. Animals inadvertently consume plastic and plastic waste, which makes them suffer, and at worst, causes them to starve with full stomachs.’
Some 416 pilot whales are currently stranded at farewell Spit
on South Island, New Zealand. Three-quarters of them were dead before rescuers could reach them. We await news of the cause.
In time, of course, these plastics do break down but only into smaller pieces, some of which are so tiny as to be microscopic.
That’s how they find their way into the ocean’s food chain, as small fish contaminated with plastic are preyed upon by bigger fish and so on.
Think, too, about the way that many whales feed – by filtering plankton through their baleen plates, which trap the food while allowing the water to pass through.
Along with the food, they are trapping microplastics – toxins introduced to the ocean by human heedlessness.
The problem is certainly not restricted to European countries. In fact, with the exception of the North and South Poles, there are very few beaches in the world that remain unaffected by man-made plastic debris.
The Indian Ocean is one of the worst I have seen. Rivers of non-biodegradable trash flow into it from Africa to the west, India to the north and Malaysia and Indonesia to the east.
A year or so ago I was filming in Chagos, one of the most remote tropical archipelagos in the world. The place is undeveloped and attracts hardly any tourists but is extraordinarily rich in nature.
MANTA rays and whale sharks swim among these islands along with sperm, pilot and killer whales. The archipelago has one of the most diverse breeding seabird communities in the ocean and also provides ideal nursery sites for nests of green and hawksbill turtles.
I was there as part of a Living Oceans Foundation coral reef survey team and was devastated to see the beachlines, in a place so sparsely populated, plagued with exactly the same problem I saw in Orkney and that I see on beaches all over the world.
It leaves the cameraman with a troubling dilemma to be sure. What do you film? The picture postcard scenes depicting a tropical island idyll and nature at its most bewitching? Or do you film the uglier but perhaps more realistic side?
There is an unwritten rule when shooting for ‘blue chip’ pure wildlife series such as those often narrated by Sir David Attenborough, that we try to avoid getting anything man-made in the frame, be it a fence or a chimney or a road curving into the middle distance.
But when I am filming on a litter-strewn beach, I sometimes start thinking, hang on, this is not really life. It’s a tiny fragment of the big picture which might set the challenges of the creature in question in a different context altogether.
As wildlife programmes move forward, perhaps we have to start including these grim shorelines in our shots even if they do offend the natural aesthetic. Otherwise we risk ignoring one of the greatest perils in many animals’ life struggle.
There is another way forward, of course, one which I would much rather see become a reality. That is to embrace the idea of putting values on plastic bottles and to see it for what it is – a complete game-changer.
The example of other nations such as Germany and Finland, where the bottle return rate is 98.5 per cent and 96 per cent respectively, illustrate the dramatic room there is for improvement in Britain, where less than 50 per cent of plastic bottles are recycled.
The message from these figures is crystal clear. Putting even a small monetary value on plastic bottles means they end up in recycling centres rather than in seas and oceans killing animals.
WE have come a long way in challenging the ignorant, lazy attitudes of the litterbug. Most people would not think of putting their waste anywhere but the bin.
But developed countries like our own need to go further. We have the infrastructure and the resources to launch a plastic bottle return scheme – and, it would seem the overwhelming support of the population too.
Furthermore, it is much easier to push developing countries into doing something if our own country is doing it too.
I have been extremely fortunate to have spent so many years showing people the wonders of the natural world. Lucky, too, to have got out of it alive sometimes. I once woke up in a tent to see the silhouette of a polar bear through the canvas. Then I realised why I had woken up. The bear was playing with my feet.
But in the past few years I’ve been moving further into the realms of issues and education, working with coral reef science conservation groups such as Living Oceans Foundation, making films about the research they have been doing and hoping that governments take heed of the findings.
I am also a speaker for the Royal Scottish Geographical Society – reminiscing about a life behind the lens while trying to draw attention to the issues close to my heart, such as climate change in the polar oceans and the challenges facing our waters generally. Plastics are central to that.
I suppose I felt it was time for me to pan the camera round a bit, to show the extent to which human behaviour encroaches on the natural world, to contribute in my own way to people’s awareness of their planet and how we impact upon it.
For too long we have accepted environmental pollution as the cost of doing business. But we have been doing so for so long we tend to overlook the opportunities to avoid pollution.
Plastic bottles are a classic example. As we manufacture them by the billions, we harm the environment at both ends of the process. We deplete the planet’s resources and pump waste into the atmosphere in producing them. Then we allow the container to wreak havoc with our wildlife for decades.
The solution is gloriously simple and cost-neutral. Scotland should not hesitate to grasp it.