In the end, the BBC declined to broadcast the last episode of Sir David Attenborough’s Wild Isles tale of ecological disaster and breakdown, tucking it away under an ‘extras’ slot on the iPlayer streaming service. Possibly the broadcaster shied away from the numerous unsourced, dubious claims, along with the promotion of organic farming practices that would quickly lead to shortages of food, followed by widespread economic and societal dislocation and ultimately death. Or it may have stepped back from promoting a bird-watching group, Flock Together, that determines membership based on skin colour and plays into the increasingly popular ‘the countryside is racist’ woke trope.
At the BBC, Attenborough is allowed to present unsourced claims as gospel truth, seemingly without the requirement placed on regular BBC environment journalists to temper claims using words like ‘could’, and phrases such as ‘scientists say’. But an increasingly long history of far-fetched claims means that anything Attenborough says these days needs detailed sourcing and treating with a great deal of care.
Of course, there are laudable environmental issues raised by this series, which was co-produced by the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) in collaboration with the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). Sea-dredging for shell fish, unsustainable fishing, unnecessary use of pesticides and soil conservation are all significant ecological concerns. But Attenborough and his campaigning colleagues are aiming much higher. Tight restrictions on food production and rewilding on a global scale, along with the promotion of the collectivist Net Zero political agenda, no less. However, some ecological concerns are more equal than others. Few worries are raised by green political activists about the millions of bats and birds killed every year by wind turbines. Nobody is talking about the alarming recent increase in beached whales off the U.S. North Atlantic coast, at a time when widespread offshore wind farm sonar surveying is taking place.
Within two minutes of the start of the last Wild Isles episode, Attenborough stated that, “one quarter of all our species of mammals are at risk of extinction”. The extinction claim appears to come from work produced in 2020 by a group of British conservationists led by the Mammal Society for Natural England. Attenborough’s claim more or less repeats the heading on the press release. The actual extinction figure refers to 11 of 47 mammals native to Britain. But, elsewhere, the Mammal Society note that there are around 90 species of mammals living in Great Britain. The extinction claim highlighted on the BBC programme seems to refer only to animals classified as ‘native’, or “our” as Attenborough puts it. If one takes in the late arrivals, a distinction that seems somewhat disingenuous anyway, the percentage figure drops by over a half.
How reliable is the claim that even 11 species are facing extinction? Few details about methodology in the original survey seem to be available. A link to a PDF of the original paper produces type too small to read. In the press release, there is a note of “population estimates” and “quantitative analysis” undertaken by computer models.
Attenborough also repeated his improbable claim from the first episode that 60% of British flying insects had disappeared in just 20 years. The Daily Sceptic investigated this claim on March 19th, making the point that such a loss would have led to obvious signs such as lack of pollination and an accumulation of detritus, some of it rather unpleasant. The story seems to have emanated from ‘citizen scientists’ counting bugs trapped on car number plates. I noted that it could be argued that roads regularly swept by increasing numbers of cars provided the least reliable information on countrywide insect abundance. The story was followed up a few days later by Ross Clark in the Spectator. He raised similar concerns, calling the claim “extremely dubious” and adding that its methodology “raises multiple red flags which should be obvious to anyone with the most basic grasp of science”.
A basic grasp of arithmetic might be useful in another Attenborough claim that one third of birds are at risk of extinction. This claim appears to have been taken from one of the programme’s collaborators, the RSPB. It states that almost 30% of British bird species are seriously threatened with extinction. But closer inspection of the paper that produced the findings shows that only 245 species were assessed. Elsewhere, the RSPB states there are 405 species of birds to be found in the U.K.. Do the sums and the extinction percentage figure again falls by around a half.
Possibly some bird species are currently struggling – it happens in nature – but overall the birds seem to be holding their own. In pre-publicity for Wild Isles it was claimed that 38 million birds had vanished from British skies in the last 50 years. This number came from a 2020 RSPB report, but missing was the information that the latest figure was similar to the total in 2012. In fact the RSPB noted that in terms of total breeding bird numbers, “the period of relative stability that began in the 1990s is continuing”.
Halfway through his green agitprop, Attenborough suddenly highlighted the activities of Flock Together, a bird watching group from Hackney for “people of colour”. The programme airs complaints that access to wild spaces “is far from equal” and people of colour were “more likely to face prejudice in the countryside”. This idea that the countryside is somehow racist is becoming increasingly fashionable in woke circles, with the Leverhulme Trust about to send in ‘hate crime experts’ to investigate ‘rural racism’. In last week’s Spectator, Douglas Murray skewered the notion that Britain does not sufficiently resemble a country “you, your parents or grandparents” left. Murray noted that if his grandparents had left for Jamaica, he might still find the place dominated by Jamaicans.
In his time, Attenborough has been a brilliant natural history presenter. But his recent years have been tarnished by a willingness to read out Thunberg-style claims of ecological disaster prepared by politically inspired eco-warriors with an obvious collectivist and increasingly woke political agenda.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
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The resume suggests that the book is an important work and deserves to be widely read. Regrettably, our society is now so polarised – reason and the culture of discussion are now so corrupted – that the book will chiefly be preaching to the converted: only those already sympathetic to the argument will be likely to buy the book. Those who need to read it will steer clear. Still, the book will provide ample material for individuals wishing to alert the silent majority to the fact that society is going through a revolution as radical and as destructive as the Communist revolution which took over Russia and China. It’s frightening, and it’s frightening that people don’t perceive that this urge to ‘deconstruct’ western (i.e. Christian) civilisation is essentially the destruction of civilisation tout court.
They don’t perceive it so far for the simple reason that their sources of information have been slanted and the institutions they trust have been suborned. Beyond that, the shadow of illegality hangs over serious dissent with a host of lesser, informal penalties – ie, “debanking” – in the wings.
With everyone afraid, moreover, dissent is an excuse for ostracism; and because nobody likes admitting to living like a cowardly louse, those still comfortably inside the tent pretend that it is just as big as it was and pitched in much the same place, whereas in fact it has become a narrow and marginal indoctrination space.
Snobbery is very helpful here, for the isolated dissenter – jobless, impoverished, lonely – is easily made out as a failure or a “low-life”.
Worst of all, the process is multi-generational; all the coordinates of who is “in” or “out” have been subtly tuned towards Marxist insanity over decades. Look at the progress made in selling perverted, deviant and sterile forms of sexuality. From toleration of abnormalities we have been pushed in fifty years – as Lionel Shriver notes in the Spectator – towards the promotion of those abnormalities and beyond – into the emasculation of little boys and the equivalent mutilation of little girls.
Nothing can better reflect the left’s basic premise that reality and nature are illusions fostered by “ideology” from which it will “liberate” us – with the surgeon’s pitiless scalpel if necessary.
And at a deeper level, this is what happens when the life of the mind is so privileged over reality, nature, culture, feeling, the mass, the nation, tradition and family that it seeks to live not only independently of those structures, but actively against them. To answer the question so often posed among right wing thinkers – what has fathered “woke”, Liberalism or Marxism? – the answer is BOTH, for Marxism is what happens when Liberalism runs to seed.
I shall certainly be buying a copy of this book. Well done for writing it.
But if I may offer my own in-a-nutshell refutation of “woke”, it depends on a trick, which confuses identity with “supremacy” where whites are concerned; and allows pretensions to supremacy to masquerade as mere “identity” where non-whites are concerned.
And the supremacy / identity confusion is just one of woke’s lies; by “whiteness” the wokestapo in fact mean whites, a people whom they aim to destroy; by “fragility” they mean any white person’s attempt to resist defamation; by “positive” discrimination they mean discrimination and so on.
Their poisonous perversion of language and morals has seeped so deeply into the minds of the idiot “bourgeoisie” and our corrupt establishment that vicious brutality – such as that taking place in northern town against white girls, or that taking place in South Africa against white farmers – is ignored or even excused.
The left, intellectually bankrupt and infiltrated by fourth phase Marxism, is now no more than a gnostic and narcissistic exercise in self-mutilation. In its vile decadence, it has taken control and unless it is swiftly removed from power we are finished. In short, we need a new 1989 to remove a corrupt, Marxist uniparty from office and start the rescue of our civilisation.
They (until it happens to them personally) would typically hand wave and excuse away what is happening now in South Africa as “karma” for the past injustices of apartheid and imperialism, of course. But two wrongs do NOT make a right. Evil + Evil = Twice the Evil.
“But those big bad white folks started it!” is basically their argument. One that would have miserable failed the kindergarten (Reception) test. It’s NOT about who “started” it, but rather it is who is mature enough to stop it. The onus is on everyone to STOP THE MADNESS!
Also, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”, according to the ultimate authority on very literal decolonization himself, Mahatma Gandhi. If you fight fire with fire, everyone ultimately gets burned.
“Decolonisation” has nothing to do with slavery or colonialism. It’s simply a war on white European people and culture, because white European people and culture have achieved so much more than everybody else, and continue to do so. I’m not saying this because I’m a white European, it’s just an observation based on people across the globe voting with their feet and coming to countries based on white European people and civilisation. “Decolonisation” and those who advocate it pose an existential threat to white European people and civilisation. The end of this will be ugly. I will be long dead, but it will be brutal and bloody.
I hate to agree with such a bleak and depressing outlook, but I’m afraid you may be right.
“Even King Charles argued that the history of transatlantic slavery should be given the same national importance as the Holocaust.”
Why? 6 million Jews and many others were murdered in the most callous and brutal way in less than 10 years. What is the similarity with the Atlantic Slave Trade? The Jewish populations of a few European countries was almost wiped out, while the black population on both sides of the Atlantic has only grown.
Maybe the 25 million Whites enslaved and murdered by the Musulmans can also be given the same importance as the Holocaust.
Can we decolonise the UK of Indians, Muslims, Asians and Africans? Or is that racist? Even if it is I don’t care. Why are Whites colonising parts of the world ‘racist’ and not the reverse? We can also conclude that decolonising curricula of whiteness is also racist given it attacks a skin colour and related culture. This is called a logical deduction.
Racism is the new anti-racism. Destroying your health is the new protecting your health. Abusing children is the new caring for children.
Self destruction is the new normal.
Who would want the west to self-destruct? That’s what we should be asking.
Follow the money.
As with Covid, Climate hysteria and transhumanist ideology, I don’t believe that any of this is organic. It’s an ingenious systematic disassembly of an entire culture by people who don’t think there’s any longer a place for western ideas.
This is what asymmetric warfare looks like.
We always believed that WW3 would be nuclear; in fact it’s biological and, as with critical race theory, psychological. Why bomb a country when you can get it to tear itself apart.
The figures and percentages quoted in this article come from the same provenance as all such – they chart the march of Puritanism. It’s a seesaw equation – for every extra percentage point of righteous indignation there’s an equal and opposite point lost to ‘having a laugh’. It’s a reminder of the famous definition of Puritanism: ‘the continuing suspicion that someone, somewhere, may be happy’.
Indeed, it is basically thinly-veiled, warmed-over Puritanism at best. With perhaps some neo-Victorianism thrown in for good measure as well. UGH.
White people are an invention of the American chattering classes, same as black people, by the way. Obsessed with their custom navel-gazing, they simply haven’t yet managed to understand that a world outside of the USA which is materially different from it exists and they wouldn’t want to know about, anyway. For an American university professor who genuinely believes US forces liberated Auschwitz where they found heaps of dead bodies, that is, who remembers that US forces liberated the starving inhabitants of some concentration camp after the people who had fed them were forced to flee because of said American forces, and who remembers that a concentration camp was called Auschwitz, hence, they must both be the same — Only small-minded people would worry about getting the names correct when the big picture is all that matters! — I may be a (privileged) white person. To someone from England, I’m an Are you Polish? guy, something the professor is quite unable to understand.
Decolonize the world! is a slogan of American and America-centered academics unwilling to accept the fact that the systematic American abuse of black Americans is their very own contribution to the history of human atrocities. The sons and daughters of God’s own country cannot be guilty themselves. They also certainly haven’t reintroduced aimless torture into the judical process and never burnt any witches!
BTW, has Puerto Rico meanwhile been decolonized? And how independent are the Philipines really? Asking for a friend …
There is only ONE race: the HUMAN race.
An inverted pyramid hierarchy of dominance is still a hierarchy of dominance, the same old “power over” dominator model of social interaction. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.