Media, Ecology and Conservation

Using the Media to Protect the World's Wildlife and Ecosystems

Jon Blewitt, Sir David Attenborough, Harriet Nimmo, John Blewitt

• Publisher: Green Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781900322638
• eBook ISBN: 9780857840134
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Biological Sciences

The second book in The Converging World series, Media, Ecology and Conservation focuses on global connectivity and the role of new digital and traditional media in bringing people together to protect the world's endangered wildlife and conserve fragile and threatened habitats. New media offers opportunities for like-minded individuals, community groups, businesses and public organisations to learn and work cooperatively for the good of all species. One of the key themes of this book explores the important issue of how new information and communication technologies mediate the natural world, and our understanding of our place in it. By exploring the role of film, television, video, photography and the internet in animal conservation in the USA, India, Africa, Australia and the United Kingdom John Blewitt investigates the politics of media representation surrounding important controversies such as the trade in bushmeat, whaling and habitat destruction. The work and acheivements of media/conservation activists are located within a cultural framework that simultaneously loves nature, reveres animals but too often ignores the uncomfortable realities of species extinction and animal cruelty.

Chapter One

Animals in human culture

The world about us

There are many ways of understanding the world, just as there are many ways of ignoring what is becoming increasingly apparent to us all. Climate change, often referred to as global warming, has now been generally acknowledged as largely being the result of human activity – specifically of industrialization, economic growth and development, and consumer lifestyles that increasingly demand more resource and energy use without due regard to their overall ecological consequences. Our turbulent climate is leading to unseasonal and untypical weather patterns, ‘natural’ disasters and geographic shifts in both flora and fauna as desertification increases and the Arctic ice melts. In fact, by treating the world and all that is in and on it as the property of human civilization, we (that is, homo sapiens) have set ourselves apart from the world rather than being a part of it. The world is converging in many ways: climate change, resource depletion and species extinction will affect everyone, from the poorest to the richest, although the richest will probably fare much better. The ideology and practice of economic development is arguably the dominant global worldview, but human culture is neither uniform nor totally materialistic. Some cultures, philosophies and religions, such as Buddhism and Jainism, view homo sapiens as intimately connected with other life forms and global ecological processes that of themselves demand our humility. Respect for the sentience and life force of other creatures is a cultural thread that runs throughout human history. Vegetarianism was discovered by Western colonialists in their encounters with the ancient cultures of the Hindus, Jains and Buddhists in India, and although viewed as somewhat radical or eccentric for many years in Christian Britain, vegetarianism is no longer seen as either exotic or cranky (Stuart, 2006). Although other religions have also shown respect for other creatures and the natural world, many critics have frequently pointed out that sacred texts have sometimes been instrumental in shaping a mentality that holds the world as having value only in so far as its resources can be either directly used or can be transformed into some kind of commodity and exchange value. ‘Progress’ and ‘development’ have frequently ignored the traditional ecological wisdom of those ‘ecosystem peoples’ – indigenous or tribal peoples in India, South America and elsewhere who have been, and continue to be in many cases, sensitive stewards of the physical environment, articulating what are today recognised as sustainability values and living sustainable lifestyles often deeply informed by religious or spiritual values.

Given the current state of affairs, our planet undoubtedly needs us all to live, work and behave as if we were all ecosystem peoples, even though it seems that most us in the developed and developing worlds are not – and remain most reluctant to change our ways in any radical sense. So, in using the world as a resource, by exploiting, killing and consuming other creatures for food, fashion, furniture or fun, we, homo sapiens, are also directly responsible for the extermination of other species at a rate that is as great, if not greater, than that of the last mass extinction, which occurred in prehistoric times. Current extinctions are generally running at about 1,000 times the natural or background rate that scientists would have expected. Indeed, it has often been remarked that wherever human society develops, and particularly where Western colonialists have intervened to develop or otherwise exploit new lands, the lives and habitats of other creatures are soon destroyed. After Captain James Cook had paved the way for the European settlement of Australia, much of the flora and fauna of that continent, including the Aboriginal peoples who were themselves categorised as fauna, were threatened and in some case eradicated. Alan Moorhead’s classic history of the European invasions of the South Pacific between 1767 and 1840 is aptly named The Fatal Impact. Today, even iconic creatures that have become either official or unofficial national symbols, such as the Indian tiger, the American bald eagle and the African elephant, have shared the same experience and possibly the same fate. Many familiar creatures are likely soon to be as dead as a dodo – so much so that ‘Lonesome George’, the last surviving giant tortoise from Pinta Island in the Galapagos, has become an icon and subject of a number of television documentaries on modern conservation’s struggles against the relentless pressure of human encroachment (Nicholls, 2007).

If we need reminding of how bad things have become, then a quick glance at the latest edition of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species will provide us with much important and depressing information (IUCN, 2009). The headline results indicate that 21% of all known mammals, 30% of amphibians, 12% of birds, 28% of reptiles, 37% of freshwater fishes, 70% of plants, 35% of invertebrates are either critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable. In most categories the statistics for the years 1996 to 2009 reveal a worsening situation, although there are instances where conservation efforts have successfully brought a species back from the brink. Many ecological restoration projects and others designed to save or reintroduce endangered species or protect habitats are real but reactive attempts to remedy a dire situation that, somewhat ironically, displaces indigenous ecosystem peoples just as economic development has frequently done (Dowie, 2009). The United Nations proclaimed 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity, and with the proclamation comes a range of targets aimed at reducing biodiversity loss. Unfortunately, according to the IUCN many of these targets are unlikely to be met and so species extinction and, more broadly, loss of biodiversity will mean fewer resources for us to exploit and a spiritually poorer, less interesting and less comforting place for ourselves to live in.

Quite simply, in killing other creatures we are killing ourselves, and in destroying their habitats though economic development, logging, urbanisation, human population expansion, pesticide use, pollution, industrial agriculture, beam or bottom trawling, over-harvesting, mining, quarrying and climate change, we are in danger that when the planet recovers, as James Lovelock’s Gaia Theory tells us, it will do so without us (Lovelock, 2006). Biologist E.O. Wilson has argued a loss of 90% in the area of a given habitat leads to a reduction of 50% in the number of species that a habitat can support, and this has occurred in far too many areas that have concentrations of high biodiversity. We are destroying nature’s capacity to bounce back. If artificial environments replace or crowd out natural ones, then the phenomenon known to biologists as ‘the death of birth’ will occur. We need other creatures and organisms for they provide useful ecosystem services: they colonise waste ground, cleanse water, enrich soil, provide us with food and even create the very air we need to breathe. Wilson (2001: 335) writes:

We should judge every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity. We should not knowingly allow any species or race to go extinct. And let us go beyond mere salvage to begin the restoration of natural environments, in order to enlarge natural population and stanch the hemorrhaging of biological wealth. There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.

Research undertaken for The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) reports published by the United Nations uses economic tools to demonstrate just how important the natural world and other species are to human well-being. Markets fail to capture most ecosystem values because nature is perceived as a public or common good, that is, ‘free’. This has led to over-exploitation, such as continuing deforestation and overfishing, which are serious problems that demand strict control and sound economic husbandry. For example, established Marine Protected Areas cover just 0.5% of the world’s oceans, but if they were extended to conserve between 20-30% it has been estimated that a million new jobs would be created and an annual marine catch worth up to US$80 billion could be sustained (TEEB, 2009). Pavan Sukhdev, the economist and banker who is leading the TEEB enquiry, has stated that the ratio of costs of conserving ecosystems or biodiversity to the anticipated benefits of conservation is in the region of 1:10 or 1:25. In some cases, the ratio may be as high as 1:100. An unpublished report for the UN by the London-based consultancy, Trucost, estimated that the combined cost to the environment by the world’s 3,000 most important corporations in 2008 was US$2.2 trillion (Jowit, 2010). Does money talk?

The World Conservation Strategy, first published in 1980, was a collaborative endeavour of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the WWF (World Wildlife Fund, now World Wide Fund for Nature) and the United Nations Environment Programme. It articulated many ideas and principles that have since been embraced by the term ‘sustainable development’. That is, development is understood by The World Conservation Strategy (1980: 1) as “the modification of the biosphere and the application of human, financial, living and non-living resources to satisfy human needs and improve the quality of life” and conservation as “management of human use of the biosphere so that it may yield the greatest sustainable benefit to present generations while maintaining its potential to meet the needs of and aspirations of future generations”. The 1980 strategy articulated three specific objectives:

• to maintain essential ecological processes and life support systems
• to preserve genetic diversity
• to ensure the sustainable utilization of species and ecosystems

As Beder (2006) writes, conservation has since been interpreted and practised in many different ways – not always successfully and not always presenting development and conservation/sustainability as equally valid or even necessary. There have been many debates as to what can and should be done. For some people, science and technology will solve issues of environmental degradation and species loss. For others, it will be the operation of the free market or efficient management practices by either private corporations or government or a combination of the two with a little help from their friends in the conservation movement. What is clearly the case is that animals and the natural world are variously perceived as a resource, as a source of significant commodity value and as possessing intrinsic moral or spiritual importance. A tiger is to be revered but also killed as a trophy or for its skin, becoming a mark of social or gender-related status, or because it has within it the ingredients for a medicinal cure to a variety of human ailments. Tigers are a source of national pride, of spiritual sustenance but also a source of income.

Animals and human history

Animals are part of human history; they have co-evolved with us, and have been domesticated and hunted by us for food and recreation. There have been menageries and zoos for centuries, animal worship and animal sacrifices for millennia, and real and imaginary communication between us and other species probably since time began. An animal’s appearance may offer good or bad omens depending on where, when and who you are. Anthropologists such as Richard Nelson (1983) and Brian Morris (2000) have shown how animals have become integral parts of human culture and consciousness in the Arctic lands of North America and in the African state of Malawi. Nelson’s anthropological research with the Koyukon people of Alaska in the 1970s documents a world and a people that have been significantly altered by development, but he was still able to see a qualitatively different world being lived. For the Koyukon, the human and natural worlds are closely linked through various shared spirits. Animals display human characteristics because animals were themselves humans in the ‘Distant Time’ – the time of myth and creation. The physical world has its own spirits but it is also sensate, conscious, alive, and as such requires respectful action and understanding that closely resembles practices of sensitive environmental, conservation and sustainability management. Neither animals or plants are over-exploited, and waste is avoided as being practically irresponsible and spiritually dangerous. Like other anthropologists and ethnographers, Nelson (1983: 239) concludes that “reality is not the world as it is perceived directly by the senses; reality is the world as it is perceived by the mind through the medium of the senses”.

Given this, the problem here is that each society sees its own reality as absolute and bases its own regulations and methods of dealing with the environment and other creatures accordingly. Anthropologist Tim Ingold points out that the environmental conservation practices carried out by peoples such as the Koyukon fundamentally differ from the more scientific, rational and technological practices of Western agencies and governments. For the West, nature is separate from and subordinate to humanity, whereas for the hunter-gatherers and other indigenous peoples, conservation is based on a deep trust and sharing of nature. When control is exerted by these peoples, it is control over human relationships rather than over nature itself. Ingold believes that the scientific West views this notion of sharing as metaphorical rather than as literal, and in doing so the West is perhaps diminishing itself by its own intellectual relativism. He writes (2000:76):

The distinction between the human and non-human no longer marks the outer limits of the social world, as against that of nature, but rather maps a domain within it whose boundary is both permeable and easily crossed…. For nature, we say, does not really share with man. When hunters assert the contrary it is because the image of sharing is so deeply ingrained in their thought that they can no longer tell the metaphor from the reality. But we can, and we insist – on these grounds – that the hunters have got it wrong…. I am suggesting that those who are ‘with’ animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed.

For Bruce Rich (2008) there is a lot to learn from ancient civilisations. In India during the fourth and third centuries BCE, the political realist Kautilya and the emperor Ashoka (a once-fearsome warrior who converted to Buddhism following the appallingly bloody battle of Kalinga) initiated a series of edicts which were carved into pillars of rock. These laid the foundation for a new moral and legal system, articulating values of religious tolerance, social welfare, environmental justice and animal welfare. On the Fifth Pillar Edict can be read a list of protected species including bats, tortoises, ducks, swans, rhinos and deer; in fact all four-legged creatures that are not needed for food or for some other important use should be protected. A number of practical conservation measures were identified, including restrictions on the harvesting of certain flora and fauna such as fish ponds and elephant forests. Chaff should not be burnt in the field, in order to protect animals and insects that feed off it. Throughout the text runs a deep respect for the lives and sentience of other creatures, combined with a well reasoned and ecologically intuitive eco-pragmatism: “Forests must not be burned in order to kill living things or without any good reason. An animal must not be fed with another animal.” As Bruce notes, if the latter injunction had been adhered to more recently, ‘Mad Cow Disease’ would not have occurred.

Historians such as Keith Thomas (1984), Harriet Ritvo (1989) and Keith Tester (1991) have shown how attitudes towards animals and the natural world have been altered in the West as the more ancient habits, customs, rituals, superstitions, knowledge and understanding have been replaced by a modernist sensibility. The development of the scientific mind led to the classification and categorisation of the natural world, the growth of hunting (killing) for fun and for sport, the exposition of various theories and interpretations of evolution and natural selection and a parallel emergence of a desensitised utilitarian and a morally conscientious appreciation of the putative rights and welfare of animals. It can be argued that the way we treat animals is an indication of how civilised and culturally mature we actually are, and it is salutary to relate this to the experience of increased urbanisation, industrialisation and the distancing of the human social world, of everyday life, from the natural environment. Animal rights, conservation and eco-system welfare are linked to how human societies understand themselves. The modern period has seen the slow decline of anthropocentrism as animals have become no longer simply an extension of the human world, no longer needed for transport or power. And even if animals are still eaten, the abattoirs have become discretely hidden from public view, the meat placed in plastic packages and even presented as a ready pre-cooked feast just waiting for the microwave. Thus concern for animals, either in terms of the welfare of individual non-human beings or for the future of whole species and the ecologies upon which they and we depend, relates to not only the world as we have shaped it but, reflexively, to how the world has in turn shaped us. Whether we support the policies and campaigns of animal rights organisations, put a bird box in our suburban garden, cuddle the dog or perceive the natural world through the spectacles of Animal Planet, National Geographic, Disney Nature or the BBC Natural History Unit, we do so primarily for social reasons. If we see the lion as king of the jungle or a creature under threat, ‘an endangered species’, then we are invariably saying something about ourselves as well as that non-human other. We apply schemas, conceptual frameworks, to our experience of the world, enabling us to cognitively organise and make sense of our experiences, which are themselves formative elements of our culture, facilitating communication, cultural transmission and patterns of social conduct (Bloch, 2005). In time, these cultural experiences may even shape the neural connections and networks in our brains. Finally, it should be remembered that animals are frequently perceived as a social problem or economic threats. Wolves have been systematically eradicated from many areas of the world because of the threats they pose to domesticated livestock, and the North American bison was driven to near-extinction in the nineteenth century as much to feed the growing industrial machine in America as to destroy the livelihood an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Harriet Nimmo
• Preface
• 1.: Animals in human culture
• 2.: Animals and visual culture
• 3.: Blue chip and beyond
• 4.: Films for conservation
• 5.: Image, truth and the imagination
• 6.: A mirror to nature
• References
• Index
• Copyright