Dear David Attenborough,
I recently had the opportunity to watch your latest documentary titled “A Life on Our Planet” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11989890/). I am grateful that you have committed your life’s work to sharing the natural wonders of our planet with viewers and trying to instill wonder for life within multiple generations of people. Your witness statement is a clear and unmistakable call to action. Your voice and expressions are clearly pained by what you have observed over your lifetime. I deeply appreciate that you understand what is occurring to the earth (not just intellectually, you feel it within you as well).
The approximately first ⅔ of the documentary is a must-watch by every single human living within agricultural and industrial societies. The case you have made is compelling. However, the approximately final ⅓ of the documentary, where you lay out a vision of the future, will not achieve your goals (as I interpret them). It is the final portion of your vision that I am writing about to you.
You make a strong argument for the rewilding of our planet but leave out of this vision the key species that is causing catastrophic harm to worlds biota—Homo sapiens.
Your dream (if I may call it that) is to create sanctuaries on land and in the oceans where wild beings can live outside of industrial exploitation. This sounds wonderful on the surface; however, it amounts to placing a figurative glass dome over wild places and excluding meaningful human interaction. I understand where this thought originates from (that humans must be excluded) because of how industrial humans relate with the rest of the world’s living beings. But, you have spent time amongst the indigenous people, and should understand that their method of conservation is in stark contrast with our nature-divorced methods.
They utilize a strategy that could be termed “reciprocal conservation”, a method of protecting life through use where all parties benefit in the long run. This kind of truly sustainable use of wildlife is far more effective because it maintains deep connections to the life you are wishing to preserve, allowing those humans to understand the full value of other-than-human persons. Preventing humans from this type of interaction only alienates people from the biology of their planet, which in turn develops apathy for protecting other-than-human persons.
Your vision for the future includes a tremendous amount of technology—all of which requires tremendous resource extraction, transport, construction, and maintenance. Technological fixes always create additional problems that require additional technological fixes. Important to mention here is that these technologies are deeply invested in a “cradle to grave” mentality, and do not rely upon organic materials that are fully recycled and truly renewable within intact ecosystems. We cannot solve our problems by using the same mentality and techniques that put us in this situation. The vision you espouse is a continuation of the idea of a technological savior and is deeply imbued with human hubris.
More machines and new devices are not going to bring us a greater understanding and empathy for our Earth Mother.
In fact, they do the opposite (i.e., ignorance and disinterest). It is important to mention here that collapse seems to be the only constant in agricultural societies, which is different from many aboriginal cultures who were still thriving until the era of colonization. Their living is a “culture of memory” and follows a participation ideology. This stands in unambiguous contrast with our “culture of progress” and control ideology.
In the beautiful documentary you helped create, I feel that you truly see the problems we face but did not follow them to their logical conclusions. You suggested developing all the countries to become industrialized because the growth rate of human population frequently goes to zero when this occurs. The problem here is that industrialized societies are also deeply nature divorced, and so long as a distinction between humans and the rest of life is maintained (which industrial humans believe in very strongly), they will always make decisions that favor humans in the short term. Written another way, they are egocentric and focus on the living adults (whereas indigenous cultures are ecocentric and have some focus on the unborn generations).
There was no discussion of our unending drive for greater and greater comfort and convenience, our desire to purchase our way toward higher social status, and the utter lack of personal culpability for the ecocide we commit as part of this industrial lifeway. With all of these facets of modern living intact, nothing will change regardless of what diet we choose or how we generate power. We will still have billions and billions of mouths to feed and still need to generate massive amounts of power to keep all those people comfortable and occupied with modern appliances.
Not until humans truly view themselves as part of the ecosystem, which can only happen if they are wild as well, will the fate of this planet be something other than a sixth mass extinction that is entirely the result of one species.
Human rewilding is a potential solution for our global dilemma. You used the word “tame” in the documentary to describe our landscapes (to distinguish them from wild landscapes). This word also describes our industrialized populations—or perhaps a better word would be domesticated. The differences between contemporary people and the hunter-gatherers we all originated from are evident and well-documented. For example, our modes of subsistence (i.e., our diets) are drastically different and the social hierarchy we experience could never be described as egalitarian. Perceptually, modern humans truly consider themselves distinct from and above the natural world they are enmeshed in. Society’s goal is clearly to transcend what it means to be human and strive for greater longevity (i.e., immortality) and complete control of our fates, which includes controlling the planet we live upon. We are, today, simply not interested in living as a species with biological norms (which humans do have) and remaining within the boundaries that the Earth has set for our species—though we always recognize balance is important in the populations of other species. We perpetually ignore these limits and push on ahead without much thought for the long-term consequences (such as the population of humans an area can sustain due to food, water, fuel, and other natural resources).
Industrialized humans (which you promote creating throughout the world as a solution) will never accept a life living in the forests, on the slopes of mountains, or along the prairies as another wild species that takes life and gives it back to the ecosystem as part of a reciprocal gift economy. They will never accept wildness. Without humans living as undomesticated species within the sanctuaries you wish to construct, you will maintain the alienation from nature that is so patently obvious today (and a core problem of our living). Of course, there is no strategy that can do more than prolong the inevitable with 7.8 billion people. Humans must live within their means and within the limits set by their local landscapes—as do other species that live upon this planet. Rewilding is a return, for those who can, to truly living as part of the web of life using the ancestral lifeways that are proven sustainable (something no industrial lifeway can ever tout). It is not about going backward in time, rather, it is a path forward viewing the world through the lens of indigeneity.
Despite our philosophical differences in our visions and how well those ideas likely will maintain both biodiversity and bioproportionality in the long run, I am thanking you again for your work. We live in a time when most elderly people “check out” of fighting for a clean world filled with life that the unborn generations can experience. You are still here, speaking on behalf of both other-than-human persons and people you may never meet. Your perseverance is a model that I truly wish more of our supposed elders would emulate. I hope my deep respect for your work comes through here, and that you know I speak of you as someone who cared for this planet enough to never stop advocating for wildness. I only hope your message can ultimately include human wildness as well. Please take care of yourself, the world still needs you for inspiration.
Arthur Haines
Wilder Waters Community