Planet Of The Fakes

There are two planet earths. One of them is the complex, morally challenging world in which we live,threatened by ecological collapse. The other is the one we see on the wildlife programmes. We love theseprogrammes not only because they show us how curious the products of evolution are, but also because theyremove us to a parallel planet, the Garden of Eden before the sixth day of creation, when God went and messedit up by making Man.

Natural history programmes lie more frequently than any other documentaries. They film animals in cages andpretend they have been filmed in the wild. They import tame predators, and release them to hunt wild prey.They cut between uneventful sequences to suggest that animals are interacting. Most of the soundtrack is addedto the film in the studio: the noise of antlers clashing is likely to be the noise of technicians duellingwith broomsticks.

All this technical trickery, while dishonest, is harmless enough. But there is a far more serious anddangerous lie, which informs almost every sequence the programmes show. Except for a few shots of animalsdoing amusing things in people's gardens, and, occasionally, an indigenous person, stripped of his t-shirt,wildlife programmes present the natural world as a pristine wilderness, unaffected by humanity.

Some of these falsehoods are brought to us by the most trusted man on television. Sir David Attenborough,is, as everyone knows, an excellent broadcaster, and he appears to be a sincere and decent man. He has never,as far as I am aware, told a lie on television. But, for much of the past 50 years, he has allowed the camerato lie on his behalf.

His programmes' invocation of a fantastic, untainted world is dangerous for two reasons. The first is thatthey suggest that ecosystems remain largely intact. Attenborough has made one, fine series about environmentaldestruction. But those programmes belonged to the world we inhabit, compartmentalised and far removed from theother world he shows us. Their message has been undermined by almost every wildlife documentary he has made.Last week, for example, he explained how the harvest mouse has made its home in cornfields; but omitted theobvious development of that idea: the species has, in the past 50 years, been devastated by agriculturalchange.

He shows us long, loving sequences of animals whose populations are collapsing, without a word about whatis happening to them. Indeed, by seeking out those places, tiny as they may be, where the habitat is intactand the population is dense, the camera deliberately creates an impression of security and abundance.Attenborough cannot tell us that this is false, for if he did so his fantasy planet would collide with the onewe inhabit, and his prelapsarian spell would be broken.

More dangerously still, many of his hundreds of millions of viewers believe in the world he creates, andwhen they go abroad they expect to find it. There is a massive and well-financed industry devoted to ensuringthat they will not be disappointed.

The construction of wilderness has always been a key component of the colonial project. Almost everywherethat European settlers went, they either proclaimed the land they seized to be "terra nullius" or,by expelling its people, ensured that it became so. The land which many of the richest colonists sought wasthat which harboured great concentrations of game.

The Normans, for example, were obsessed by hunting, and many of them joined the invasion of 1066 simply tosecure new reserves. Hugh le Gros Veneur ("the fat hunter"), seized vast tracts of Lancashire, whichhis descendants, the Grosvenors, or Dukes of Westminster, own to this day. William I established several"forests", or royal hunting estates, whose inhabitants he cleared. This is one of the reasons whyboth "forest" (a word which has come to mean a place where trees grow) and the habitats of big wildanimals have taken their place in our mythology of wilderness. The great "wildernesses" of Scotlandwere established for the same purpose and by the same means 700 years later.

But these reserves were tiny by comparison to the wildernesses the British colonists made in East Africa.At first the land they seized was set aside for hunting, but as the game ran out, they began to preserve itfor the camera rather than the gun. After the Second World War, Bernhard Grzimek, "the father ofconservation" in East Africa, announced that he would turn the Serengeti in northern Tanzania into a vastnational park. This land, which is possibly the longest-inhabited place on earth, was, he declared, a"primordial wilderness". Though there was no evidence that local people threatened the wildlife,Grzimek decided that "no men, not even native ones, should live inside its borders." His approachwas gleefully embraced by the British. Thousands of square miles of savannah in Kenya and Tanzania wereannexed, and its inhabitants expelled. Only the whites could afford the entrance fees to the reserves, so onlythey were permitted to enter the new, primordial wilderness.

This project was, from the beginning, assisted by wildlife films. Grzimek's documentary, Serengeti ShallNot Die, generated massive enthiusiasm for his ethnic cleansing programme. Joy Adamson, who was one of themost viciously racist and brutal characters ever to carve a career in Africa, used the status afforded by herbooks and the films they inspired to wage war on the indigenous people. She drove the eastern Samburu out oftheir best grazing lands to establish what she called a "conservation project" (in reality anattempt to rehabilitate her pet leopard). She described the Samburu as "squatters" and renamed theprominent features of the land she had stolen after her pets. When she was murdered in this artificialwilderness, the inquiry was delayed for months by a surfeit of suspects.

Today, conservation officials in Kenya often concede that traditional grazing could be permitted in theparks and reserves without driving out the wildlife. But the local people must continue to be excluded becausethe tourists "don't expect to see them there". The tourists don't expect to see them there largelybecause the television shows them that healthy wildlife habitats are places without people. By presenting thenatural world as something apart from humanity, it creates the impression that conservation means exclusion.If those who seek to venture through the back of the television and into the world which Attenborough has madefind that it is, in fact, very much like our own, with all the conflicts and difficulties which arise whereverhuman beings live, they will complain. So the primary task of conservationists in the former colonies is toconvert the real world into the virtual one which the tourists have seen on TV.

David Attenborough has become, in two respects, godlike. He can, in the eyes of all who worship him, do nowrong. And he has created a world which did not exist before. He's a fine man, but for 50 years he hasperpetuated one of humanity's most dangerous myths.

George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at theDepartment of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at theUniversity of East London and the author of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows,Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, UK.