Seven Worlds, One Planet, BBC 1, BBC iPlayer, narrator David Attenborough.

There are countless wildlife programmes harkening back to the mists of time, but there’s only one David Attenborough. He’s the gold standard of natural history and been doing it a very long time. There he is onscreen, popping up in Borneo in 1964, when it was mostly jungle, now it’s not. There are wildlife sanctuaries, as soon as you say that you know something has gone drastically wrong.

Here we have it, Seven Worlds, One Planet, has a didactic purpose. Tarzan might have been king of the jungle, but it was Attenborough’s clout and pictures of a whale losing its baby because of plastic bags that led to revolution at home. Plastic bag use is shops is down something like 98% and that’s the Attenborough effect. What he’s telling us now is global warming is killing us, killing the planet and killing the wildlife we are meant to protect.

We can’t because Malthus was right and the clock’s ticking. Mankind scores high in every score in Robert Hare’s Psycopathy Checklist (Revised).

‘Glibness’. In Asia, walruses like to rest on ice, but when there’s none they need to rest on rock.  The problem is congestion. On the Siberian costs tens of thousands of walruses scramble up cliffs and rocks to get a space. Most of them weight a ton, literally and aren’t designed for hard landings. Polar bears find them easy pickings on land. A rare event, polar bears congregating together and walruses congregating together becomes the new normal. We can glibly say, It’s only a walrus. Until there were none.

‘Grandiose sense of self-worth.’ God above, man below, the steward of all. Aye, right. God can just fuck off. Because we’re the real deal. We’ll do what we want, when we want because we are God. Animals are there to be ate.

‘Need for stimulation’. This reminds me of when the great race was on to cover America in train tracks. Just for fun passengers used to get on a train, stick a rifle out the window and shoot buffalo.

‘Pathological lying’. See moron’s moron in the Whitehouse as basic role model for it wasnae me and if it was, it still wisnae me. David Attenborough is trying to bring a bit of sense into the argument. He’s talking eons, when what is now India collided with the Himalayas pushing them up five miles, above the clouds, creating snowfall and microclimates. Nobody’s listening, we’re too busy telling lies.

‘Manipulation’. The Paris Agreement in December 2015, 195 countries adopted the first ever, legally-binding, global climate reduction deal. The biggest fossil fuel debtor walked away, said there was no such thing as global warming. See moron’s moron above.

‘Lack of remorse’. When the last Sumatran rhino dies and we no longer hear its jungle song, will we care? I think not. See ‘Glibness’.

‘Shallow affect’. No crocodile tears, no tears at all. No crocodiles.  Our emotions are skin deep.

‘Lack of empathy’. Empathy is usually described as putting yourself in another’s shoes. Bit clichéd. Attenborough tries to make us care by showing large-eyed baby orangutans clinging to their mother and climbing the tallest trees to get the best food. He tries to humanise them. See ‘Lack of remorse’.

‘Parasitic lifestyle’.  In The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, his boss CJ always ended his monologue with a story ‘I didn’t  get where I am today…’ Mankind is the world’s greatest parasite. There’s around 7.6 billion of us. Rising to 10 billion, soonish. But we account for only 0.01% of all species but have destroyed around 83% of all mammals and 50% of all plants, from fungi to fish we’re in the dock.

‘Poor behavioural controls’ Poor behaviour is mandatory around animals, plants, fungi and fish. Any kind of red tape is anathema to us. See moron’s morons ripping up almost 100 years of incremental improvements in taking care of the environment. I’m proud to say John Muir was Scottish. He was ‘Father of the National Parks’ in America. The moron’s moron has a smidgen of Scottish blood in his veins, but there the link ends.

‘Promiscuous sexual behaviour’.  Out on the desert-like Indian plateaus garishly coloured lizards fight for the right to have sex. Mankind doesn’t do much fighting for sex, but we do a lot of procreating. See ‘Parasitic lifestyle’.  

‘Early behavioural problems’. Man has always been a killer. Mass genocide of the American Indian, the aboriginal Australians and the murder and enslavement of black Africans is just a taster.

‘Lack of realistic, long-term goals’. We agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Then we didn’t. We disagreed about agreeing and up the ante to 2 degrees Celsius. See runaway global warming – it’s not going to wait.

‘Impulsivity’. Mankind isn’t impulsive. We just do what we want when we want. Other species can also be red-blooded and impulsive, but usually it’s tied to a short-term goal. See ‘Lack of realistic, long-term goals’.

‘Irresponsibility’. Science is a noun and a verb. A body of knowledge and a methodology. Only man has the language of how stupid and irresponsible we are. We face planetary disaster yet we’d much rather the world burns than change. Science tells us this is going to happen. See ‘Impulsivity’.

‘Failure to accept responsibility for our own actions.’ In the frozen Kamchaka peninsula, brown bears waking after hibernation seek out active volcanoes. Mankind does that too, see moron’s moron.

‘Short-term marital relationships.’ Mankind is pretty good at that and we’re getting better. The moron’s moron’s only been married three times. One of them might be fake news. See ‘Parasitic lifestyle’.

‘Juvenile delinquency’. Mankind has had two global conflicts. The third one really will be apocalyptic. When nations fight for enough water to feed themselves, when every stream and river becomes a conflict zone and those higher up the pecking order control the waters of those below (see the Ganges river, for example) then juvenile delinquency really could come to blows.

‘Revocation of conditional release’.  Yeh, the Paris Agreement of 2015 was ratified, but in 2018 the perennial re-offender and moron’s moron walked away. He’s still on parole. Let’s hope it’s prison time for him, personally, soon.

‘Criminal versatility.’ Mankind has committed every kind of crime against our planet I’m tempted to start spouting like Donald Rumsfeld about ‘the known knowns’, 'the known unknowns' and 'the unknown unknowns’.

Only David Attenborough can explain what we’ve done to our Blue Planet. We massacring it with criminal abandon. That’s the didactic element of Seven Worlds, One Planet. Some known known is sure to complain about a waste of taxpayer’s money. See Grandiose Sense of Self Worth, but watch Attenborough and learn. Mankind scores 20 out of 20 on the Psychopathy Checklist. We are not to be trusted. We fuel not only our own doom, but mass species extinction and we blame somebody else.  There’ll be no walking away this time. No Seven Worlds. No nothing.      

 

Comments

A good article! You say what needs to be said, in a way we can easily understand!

cheers david.