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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