Energetic Promulgation: David Attenborough’s ‘A Life on Our Planet’
“We have become accustomed to an impoverished planet.”
This… is a *sobering* read.
Attenborough’s thesis is that the planet’s stability and sustainability rely solely on its biodiversity, which we as a species have utterly decimated in the last century alone with ramifications that become more and more urgent with every passing second. One need only look to today’s headlines to see evidence of that fact. Turkey, Lebanon, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Siberia are all on fire. Wildfires are seasonal occurrences in dense forest and bushland but this year, like last year in Australia and California, has seen unprecedented devastation due to record temperatures that are the direct result of catastrophic climate change precipitated entirely by humans. An occupational hazard has in a few short decades escalated into a global environmental cataclysm.
The first half of this book is appalling, tantamount to an elegy so embittering it’s almost unbearable. The second half is a battle cry that could not be more empowering. As he puts it, we are the first generation able to fully understand the extent of the problem, and the last generation able to do absolutely anything about it.
Perhaps most horrifying in an overwhelming roster of horror is the impact of humanity on the oceans, from wiping out all large fish species to the spike in temperature unlike anything seen before in the history of the Earth absorbed almost totally thus far by the water. For the filming of Frozen Planet he mentioned how camera crews were seeking out vast ice shelves only to discover they were now open ocean, and when they followed the walruses, tens of thousands gathered on just this one beach, which was one of the only ones left for them, but it was now a sheer cliff, and because they could smell the water below they would take the shortest route to get to it.
“The vision of a three tonne walrus tumbling to its death is not easily forgotten. You don’t have to be a naturalist to know that something has gone catastrophically wrong.”
We’ve eliminated a trillion trees since deforestation began. 70% of birds alive today are domesticated, the vast majority being chickens… globally we eat 50 BILLION of them each year, with 23 billion alive at any one moment… many fed soy-based feed derived from deforested land, which is indeed the second biggest driver of deforestation after beef production (via cattle pastures), for which we now cut down 15 billion trees per year with four fifths of our global farmland dedicated to meat production over an expanse of land quite literally equivalent to both North and South America.
These are just some of the facts that burn brightest and most painful in the first half. The second is dedicated to what in deepest iciest hell (thinking of the bit Satan is submerged in when Dante reaches the last circle in The Divine Comedy) we can do about it.
Attenborough frames these solutions around Oxford economist Kate Raworth’s new ring of twelve environmental and social justice factors she added to the earlier wheel of planetary boundaries, The Doughnut (2017), viewable in a slick graphic on her website: water, food, health, education, income & work, peace & justice, political voice, social equity, gender equality, housing, networks, and energy.
There are three vital pistons to the engine that will blast us out of this abyss in my view like the three packets of fuel Marty and Doc chuck into the belly of the time train in Back to the Future III: environmental economics, science, and storytelling.
For perhaps the only objective victory in climate activism ever, we can look to the latter.
It’s something I had very little awareness of until reading Falter by Bill McKibben. In the opening chapters he identifies global warming as the most serious environmental threat, along with nuclear war, facing the planet today, but suddenly makes the matter-of-fact comment that the destruction of the ozone layer has been all but solved. Further research revealed that sure enough after widespread bans of the harmful chlorofluorocarbons emitted by the likes of aerosol sprays and fridges in the 80s and a protocol signed by every country in the world as of 1996, a study undertaken in 2016 confirmed the dissipation of the ozone layer had, indeed, halted, and a return to 1980 levels will be achieved by 2050 thanks to more reactive and so shorter-lived chlorofluorocarbon alternatives like hydrofluorocarbons.
I vividly remember the ozone scare from the noughties, and in a world drowning in the ceaseless and paradoxical noise of apocalyptic headlines compounded with the overwhelming idiocy of climate change deniers, it’s a near-inconceivable thought that an internationally-coordinated campaign to battle an environmental crisis was not only heard on a global scale, but actually solved the problem.
Another older yet no less impactful tangential example of the efficacy of narrative would be the development of the first vaccine against a contagious disease. This is credited to Edward Jenner following his childhood observations of the apparent immunity to smallpox in local milkmaids (due to having first caught the milder cowpox, which inoculated them against the deadly plague, hence vacca, the Latin word for cow, becoming the etymon of vaccine). Jenner had the opportunity to treat a cowpox victim in 1796, so extracted pus from the lesions on her hands, and injected them into his gardener’s 8-year-old son, before following it up with two shots of smallpox. Ethical considerations aside, the boy experienced no symptoms whatsoever, proving his immunity.
But Jenner didn’t invent inoculation. The method had been pioneered literally centuries earlier in China, as recorded by Wan Quan in 1549, where powdered smallpox was blown up people’s noses to equip their immune systems with the means with which to beat the odds. The first reports of these writings reached London in 1700 via the East India Company and again between 1714 and 1716 from Turkey, by which point the practice was also found in Africa, Persia, and possibly India. The wife of a British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire actually performed the process on her children in 1718 and 1721, therefore securing the attention of King George I, who (in another stunning display of British ethics) authorised further experimentation on the occupants of Newgate Prison… The use of cowpox was also not Jenner’s discovery, with an inherited generational knowledge of the connection between occupational proximity to cattle and disease prevention widespread by at least the 1770s, apparently contributing to ethereal milkmaid tropes throughout art of the era. Indeed tests were carried out in England and Germany as well as a significant programme of inoculation administered by Johnnie Notions in the Shetland Islands in the 1780s…
The reason Jenner succeeded in communicating and popularising his findings where all else failed? Storytelling. He published his work in 1798 and within two years it had been translated into all the major European languages and reached the US. By 1980, the disease had been eradicated from the planet, the only human disease that boasts that fact, with the World Health Organisation characterising Jenner’s publication and “subsequent energetic promulgation” as the “watershed” in the control of the virus “for which he, more than anyone else deserves the credit”.
And that’s the power of words. Of energetic promulgation…
So, as demonstrations continue to rage in the run-up to COP26 in October, what if we refused to let an 18-year-old Swedish girl stand alone against the onslaught of a world conditioned to keep scrolling? What if we stood alongside her instead? What if we were just as loud? What if we were louder?
It reminds me of something Emma Watson said in an interview with Paris Lees for British Vogue: when disaster strikes that’s when artists get to work i.e. we must tell stories so effectively that peace becomes possible, or rather war becomes impossible.
Similarly, when it comes to the narrative of climate change, the grand existential threat of our age, we must tell stories so effectively that action becomes possible, or rather inaction becomes impossible.
“Words lead to things.”
— Climate justice writer Mary Annaïse Heglar on the Hot Take podcast, June 2021
