WildFilmHistory.org – A Review

The WildFilmHistory.org site offers a remarkable set of resources for anyone who wants to learn about the history of wildlife filmmaking. However, the nature media have developed a very particular way of representing nature which tends to be promoted as being the way of representing nature, ie., ‘nature itself’. With two partial exceptions, the archive takes almost no critical distance from this dynamic.

By Nils Lindahl Elliot

The WildFilmHistory.org website offers an archive of natural history filmmaking: in the website’s own words, the site offers an ‘online guide to the pioneering people and landmark productions behind one hundred years of wildlife filmmaking’ with ‘ground-breaking films, “behind the scenes” photographs, essential production information, and specially crafted learning resources, as well as a unique collection of personal memoirs from key industry players’(1).

The following review introduces the institutional context within which WildFilmHistory has been generated. It then describes the structuring of the site from a practical, user-oriented perspective. It concludes by offering a discursive analysis of WildFilmHistory.

1. About Wildscreen

Let us begin with a brief institutional contextualisation of the website. Wildfilmhistory.org is the result of an initiative of a British non-profit organisation called Wildscreen. Wildscreen’s official remit is to ‘promote an appreciation of biodiversity and nature through the power of wildlife imagery’(2). The organisation is at once an expression of, and a key agent for, the formalisation of a field of interaction (3) constituted by the practices of wildlife TV producers, and of the organisations that commission their work and/or support their filmmaking.

Wildscreen began as the organiser of Bristol’s Wildscreen Festival, a biennial trade show in which natural history filmmakers talk shop, award prizes for the best natural history documentaries, and engage in a variety of activities that promote the public image of the field. In time, Wildscreen has acquired additional functions; one of these involves the establishment of public archives of the nature media’s TV programmes, and WildFilmHistory.org is one such archive.

As noted earlier, the website makes available a variety of historic materials relating to the production of natural history documentaries. Like all archives, WildFilmHistory not only makes available certain resources, but organises and presents them in a particular way. The present review offers an analysis of the latter aspects.

2. A Tour of WildFilmHistory

The structuring of the archive is simple, but effective: WildFilmHistory allows its users to obtain textual, or multi-mediated materials in one of four basic categories:

• the historic film clips themselves, which can be accessed by name, or by date;
• brief biographies of filmmakers, whose names are archived in alphabetical order;
• ‘oral histories’, which are videotaped interviews with about 30 figures in the above mentioned films, and which can either be played onscreen, or read via a PDF-based transcription;
• and finally, a list of ‘key events’, which is essentially a timeline of selected events in the history of wildlife filmmaking.

The various entries are illustrated with a collection of still images. This collection is itself a valuable resource. The various aspects of the archive can be accessed in one of three ways: via a browsing list on the homepage; via the banner; or via a useful search function. The fact that the collection is web-based means that the omnipresent Google can also be used to search for entries.

Unfortunately, the four categories listed above do not offer the possibility of searching via subcategories; for example, one cannot ask for a listing of photographers or camerapersons, and one cannot request a listing of all films about, say, the Serengeti. The search function can of course be used for either request, but it will simply list every item in the website that includes the search term, however incidentally.

That said, the four categories listed above do include clickable cross-referencing, which means for example that if the entry on David Attenborough mentions, amongst other series, The Private Life of Plants, then users can click on the title to go that series. There is also a column on the right-hand side of each biographical entry which lists any available film clips, and oral histories produced by or with that person.

The quantity and quality of the entries varies considerably. This is arguably to be expected in so far as there may be more or less information available about one or another producer; and in so far as the archive may have procured varying numbers of clips for viewing. As the user goes through the various biographical entries, it is nevertheless apparent that WildFilmHistory is still very much a project in the making. Many of the biographical entries have no more than a photograph of the person in question—presumably such entries are still under construction. There are also some names which don’t appear on the list, but which have made their mark in the field: to name just two examples, the contemporary producer, Mike Linley; and Étienne-Jules Marey, who was arguably as important to early early filmmaking as was Edweard Muybridge.

Of course, anyone determined enough can always find one or another entry that ‘ought’ to have been included in an archive such as this. What is more interesting from the point of view of this review is the fact that the archive gives no account of its own logic of selection. It would be absurd to suppose that any archive is an entirely rational endeavour with an exact logic that can be traced via each and every document. But the opposite argument can and must be made: no archive is ever a purely arbitrary selection of materials, and so it would be good to have some kind of page that explains in some detail what the curating team was trying to achieve, what constraints they faced, some of the known limitations, and so forth.

3. On the discourse of WildFilmHistory

Let us give credit where credit is due: the WildFilmHistory.org site offers a remarkable set of resources for anyone who wants to learn about the history of wildlife filmmaking. It is clear that an enormous amount of work has gone into the project, and the result is a website that makes readily available a number of fascinating cinematographic/ televisual clips, as well as quite a lot of useful information about the filmmakers. The oral history project is innovative, and as noted earlier, the collection of stills is also significant. Given these strengths, it is to be hoped that the limitations mentioned in the previous section of this review reflect the newness of the project, and perhaps also the finite nature of the resources that can be devoted to what is potentially a very expensive venture. In time, and given further funding, WildFilmHistory will perhaps develop into an even more interesting and complete archive.

What will be more difficult to address unless there is a sea change at Wildscreen will be the conceptual or discursive limitations of the archive. As noted at the beginning of this review, any archive is, as archive, at once a matter of a collection of certain ‘contents’, but also, a matter of a certain logic of selection and combination, or what might be described as a social dynamic of classification and framing (4). Put differently, any archive reflects not just the personal perspectives of its curator(s), but also, the codes and discourses of the institutional contexts that they work in. In the case of WildFilmHistory, the context in question is the one associated with Wildscreen, but more generally, with the organisations and the field of interaction that I described earlier as the ‘nature media’.

This review is not the place for a detailed account of the nature media, their strengths and limitations (5). It suffices to note that the nature media have developed a very particular way of representing nature, one which is nonetheless promoted as being the way of representing nature, ie., ‘nature itself’ (6). With two partial exceptions, the archive takes almost no critical distance from this dynamic. The two exceptions are some of the comments made by some of the filmmakers interviewed in the oral histories; and a learning resource which is titled ‘Ethics in wildlife filmmaking’. In the former case, some of the filmmakers refer to the commercial pressures they face (see for example, the comments made during the oral history with Andrew Buchanan). In the latter case, a Powerpoint presentation lists a number of the technical ways in which the documentaries take what might be described as ‘poetic license’ in order to achieve certain audio-visual effects. These range from the somewhat dubious use of editing continuity effects, to the unacknowledged substitution of captive animals for wild animals.

While welcome, these exceptions are somewhat marginal thanks to their location in the archive. Anyone wanting to obtain a critical perspective would have to troll through reams of transcripts, and/or download the sizable Powerpoint file. But more importantly, anyone who does so would still not find a truly reflective, and ideologically critical take on the misleading notion that the documentaries merely ‘show what there is to save’; or on the direct and indirect ways in which commercial imperatives structure the filmmaking of a field which is nonetheless regarded as being a form of science communication, or an instance of public service broadcasting.

What the user will find instead is a celebration of the field, and its many notable achievements. Certainly there is much to celebrate; a significant part of the success of the nature media undoubtedly lies in the extraordinary skills of the filmmakers, and the resources which their organisations have managed to both attract, and deploy in the representation of wildlife. Given this selfsame success, it is a shame that WildFilmHistory has not been structured in a manner that is more critical of the above mentioned issues.

This could have been achieved in at least two ways: first, by using some of the existing research about the representation of nature in modern culture to develop narratives that offer deeper historical perspectives on the social, cultural and of course economic motivations of the existing forms of filmmaking. Such narratives might be developed in short clips, in standalone webpages, in Powerpoint presentations, or indeed, by asking more probing questions with the producers themselves. Another alternative might have been more interviews with scholars who can offer truly critical perspectives. While the references to Derek Bousé are welcome, several other scholars might also have been referenced; some of the names that come to mind are Jane Arthurs, Barbara Crowther, Gail Davies, Meryl Aldridge, or Simon Cottle. A much longer list might be suggested if one goes beyond natural history filmmaking sensu stricto to consider a variety of cultural issues pertaining to the social representation of animals.

Of course, some of the critical perspectives might raise hackles amongst some producers, and might also require additional funding in order to be obtained. If the latter problem is the more important one, then a second alternative would be to at least direct users to alternative perspectives via annotated bibliographies, via bibliographical comments in the biographical entries, or next to some of the cinematic entries. These (or other similar steps) would alert users about some of the deeper ethical issues raised by the filmmaking practice. They might also help to develop the site into an arena where the producers themselves might find a genuinely critical space in which to reflect on the past, and so innovate in the future.

Notes

1) http://www.wildfilmhistory.org/index.php, accessed 13 March 2009.
2) see the Wildscreen website’s home page at http://www.wildscreen.org.uk/, accessed 13 March 2009.
3) Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice, translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
4) Bernstein, B. (1990) The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Routledge.
5) See for example Lindahl Elliot, N. (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge International Library of Sociology. See also, Lindahl Elliot, N. (2009) Observing Wildlife on Barro Colorado Island: Environmental Education and the Challenges of Transmediation, forthcoming
6) For an account of this dynamic in the natural history documentaries themselves, see the cmcee.org blog entry titled ‘Showing to Save? A Critique of Natural History Documentaries on Television’ at http://cmcee.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/showing-to-save-a-critique-of-natural-history-documentaries-part-1/

Copyright © 2009 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved. The following is the bibliographical information for anyone wishing to cite this text:

Lindahl Elliot, N. (2009) ‘WildFilmHistory.org – A Review’. Bristol: Centre for Media, Culture & Environmental Education.

This review is part of a new section of the cmcee.org website.

The Peter Scott Debate: is it really ‘animals vs. people’?

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

On Tuesday 21st October, the Great Hall in Bristol University’s Wills Memorial Building hosted the 2008 Peter Scott Debate. Organised by the Wildscreen Festival and Bristol’s Festival of Ideas, the debate considered the motion that ‘People must be kept away from endangered animals’. Those arguing the case for the motion were Valmik Thapar, an author and tiger conservationist, and Will Travers, CEO of the Born Free Foundation. Those against the motion were Mary Mavanza, of the Goodall Institute, and Professor Bill Adams, of Cambridge University. Each of the participants had the opportunity to make the case for or against, and then the large audience was able to ask questions. A ‘verbal vote’ was taken on entry to the hall, and members of the audience were given a chance to vote with slips at the end of the debate.

The motion was so flawed that it should have been easy for Adams and Mavanza to win over the audience. Indeed, a majority of those who gave their ‘verbal vote’ at the beginning of the debate were reportedly against the motion. But alas, Thapar and Travers won the debate. Thapar made the plausible argument that tigers had to be kept separate not just for their own safety, but for the safety of local inhabitants. He also suggested that in India, business entrepreneurs would exploit any weakening of the boundary to colonise the remaining wildlife sanctuaries. By contrast, Will Travers adopted a more hegemonic stance when he argued that endangered animals could be kept separate so long as, in effect, local communities were paid (via jobs and public services) to support the wildlife havens.

Given these arguments, Mary Mavanza and Bill Adams should have had a field day deconstructing the politics of each of their oponents’ arguments. The ‘people vs. animals’ frame given by the organizers of Wildscreen—and promoted quite explicitly by Thapar— set up an opposition that, as Adams noted, was patently false, if not absurd. People are, of course animals—a point that sociobiologists quoted by natural history documentaries are always particularly keen to make. But even the most policed game reservations do not really segregate ‘people and endangered animals’: they segregate some people from the animals. It is seldom if ever really a question, in this sense, of creating a true ‘no go zone’ for people—the problem is often to exclude people whose forebears have inhabited newly formed parklands for hundreds, if not thousands of years. In many such cases, people who have been ‘local inhabitants’ have suddenly found themselves reclassified as ‘poachers’. As Adams and Mavanza noted, successful conservation requires local inhabitants not just to be ‘included’ in conservationist enterprises, but to be the architects, managers, and protectors of biological reserves. To do otherwise is to return to the colonial or post-colonial institutions that have long haunted Africa. It is also to reproduce, however tacitly, the kind of nature/culture opposition that is arguably at the heart of the environmental crisis.

How, and why then did Thapar and Travers win the day? I suggest that at least four aspects played a role in the victory.

First, Wildscreen (and presumably the co-organisers, Bristol Festival of Ideas) succeeded in framing the event in such a manner that Adams and Mavanza had to argue against what was a negative proposition, but which was transformed linguistically into a kind of ‘false positive’: people should be kept away from endangered animals (the proposition might alternatively have been formulated as ‘endangered animals cannot be segregated from people’). I am reminded, in this sense, of the insightful analyses offered by Gunther Kress and Robert Hodge (see for example, the second edition of their Language as Ideology, Routledge 1993) and other critical discourse analysts.

If the formulation of the motion began to set a certain discursive train in motion, other aspects of the debate gave the train further momentum. Thapar proved to be a formidable orator. His arguments rang out like pistol shots, and he did a superb job of combining a sense of moral outrage—how could anybody suggest anything but the separation of people and endangered animals—with bona fide arguments in favour of keeping tiger sanctuaries. Most convincing was his argument that to do otherwise would be to give carte blanche to rapacious developers, who would be only too happy to take over the existing sanctuaries in India. The combination of moral outrage and pragmatism probably helped to mobilize a powerful ‘structure of feeling’ (I use the term coined by Raymond Williams); and this in turn may have led members of the audience to overlook the issues which I noted earlier—for example, no one seems to have really dwelled on the issue of generalisation. Such is, of course, the nature of the peculiar genre of the debate, for which often what matters most is not the quality of the argument, but the manner in which it is performed.

If Thapar’s performance was strong, Adams’ and Mavanza’s was, by contrast, rather weak. In fairness, both faced an uphill task for the reasons mentioned earlier. But they also faced the difficult task of critiquing a politics that has only recently begun to be questioned beyond academic, or near-academic contexts. It is, nonetheless, a shame that Mavanza and Adams did not mobilize equally powerful rhetorical devices to undermine the arguments in favour of separation. Either participant might, for example, have begun by referring to the incredibly problematic history of virtually any of the major parks or game lodges in Southern Africa.

I would speculate, finally, that a fourth factor may have involved at least a part of the audience’s ideological affiliation. I am assuming that a significant proportion of the attendees were delegates to the Wildscreen Festival, a biennial natural history filmmaking jamboree in which the producers of wildlife documentaries come together to talk shop. Since the 1960s, the documentaries’ aesthetic has depended on creating the illusion of a wilderness without humans; would the filmmakers really have voted against their own aesthetic? In this field as in others, an aesthetic is never ‘just’ an aesthetic; a case might well be made that the entire industry effectively both reproduces, and relies on the ideological opposition of human and non-human animals. It is, in this sense, no coincidence that Thapar himself is a producer and presenter of documentaries for the BBC and other nature media, and that his specialism lies in the conservation of what is arguably the most charismatic of the endangered predators.

For all of the above reasons, the debate was an opportunity created—credit goes to the organizers—but also missed.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

Showing to Save? A Critique of Natural History Documentaries (Part 2)

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

The ducklings fall for what seems like an eternity before hitting the water some 20 metres below. Their fluffy little wings spread ineffectually, they tumble over and over to the Allegro of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik until they hit the water in a slow-motioned splash. The scene is shown repeatedly and from several different angles, giving audiences ample opportunity to judge for themselves the extraordinary nature of the ducklings’ plunge.

If this were a traditional blue chip documentary, the programme’s viewers might well expect the presenter to describe the biological raison d’etre for this, the remarkable behaviour of some ‘exotic’ species of waterfowl. But alas, the ducklings are no more (and no less) than members of the not exactly endangered Anas platyrhynchos, commonly known as the Mallard. Moreover, their plunge takes them not from a tree to some swamp in, say, North America, but from a nest in the balcony of a high-rise apartment building in innermost London to one of the many fountained ponds in the Barbican Centre. As Alan Titchmarsh, the presenter of the series puts it, ‘The ducklings, though you can bet your bottom dollar they don’t realise it, are enjoying one of the many benefits of city life. It may be a long way to fall, but it’s also a long way for any predator to climb…although this place was designed for us, the ducks have found a way to take advantage of it too…’

The above scene is shown in ‘Urban Nature’, one of nine programmes broadcast last autumn in the BBC and Open University’s Nature of Britain series. In sharp contrast to most blue chip nature documentaries, ‘Urban Britain’ specialised in the representation of what might be described as a ‘recombinant’ ecology. As defined by Sarah Whatmore and Steven Hinchcliffe, recombinant ecology ‘refers to the biological communities assembled through the dense comings and goings of urban life, rather than the discrete and undisturbed relations between particular species and habitats that are the staple of conservation biology’. The authors note that ‘…there is a growing recognition of the importance of this “recombinant ecology” to what makes cities livable and to the attachments of civic identity and association. Critical here is the extent to which this ecological fabric is constituted as a public good or urban commons, including leisure spaces such as parks and allotments; feral spaces such as abandoned railway sidings and derelict land; and remnant spaces such as waterways and woodlands’(1).

Perhaps reflecting this trend, ‘Urban Britain’ forms a part of an innovative group of natural history documentaries whose programmes explore a nature that was once almost unthinkable as nature to many wildlife documentaries producers. Some producers might point to the numerous films that have been made over the years about the foxes or the tiger-like tabbies that live in cities. But such documentaries have frequently reproduced the dualisms I mentioned in the first part of this post by portraying animals as wild states of exception in an otherwise urban setting. If I understand the work of Whatmore and other researchers, the point is not to romanticize a ‘wild nature’ in an urban space—a reproduction of the nature-culture divide by other means—but to conceive of an altogether different and ‘hybrid’ geography, one that involves neither a wild urbanity nor a domestic wilderness. In Whatmore’s words, it entails ‘a relational achievement spun between people and animals, plants and soils, documents and devices in heterogeneous social networks which are performed in and through multiple places and fluid ecologies’(2).

Many of the scenes in ‘Urban Britain’ begin to embody—perhaps I should say ‘en-creature’—this way of thinking. This in so far as the programme considers the ecology of urban pigeons and peregrine falcons, describes the return of otters to Newcastle’s industrial River Tyne, or represents the numerous creatures found in urban homes: the silverfish (Lepisma saccharina) that feed on the starch of book bindings; the woolly bears (the larval form of Anthrenus verbasci) that have a taste for the natural fibers of carpets; or the caterpillars of the ‘dreaded clothes moth’ (Tineola bisselliella). While any one of these species might have been the subject of a far more ecosystematic account, there is a lot to be said for the fact that ‘Urban Britain’ considers all of these as being constitutive of a metropolitan nature.

Outside those same homes, the documentary reflects on the adaptation of robins to the nocturnal ‘diurnality’ made possible—indeed forced—by streetlamps, and also notes the extraordinary diversity of that ‘fourth room’ in English middle class homes, the well-kept urban garden. Indeed, perhaps the most significant statement made by Alan Titchmarsh—one of several Attenborough successors introduced by the BBC’s Natural History Unit over the last years—is that ‘Metre for metre, our urban gardens have more species than a patch of Amazon rainforest, making them the most biodiverse habitat on the planet’. While the Amazon rainforest is not necessarily the best yardstick for biodiversity, the statement is symbolic of the extent to which this episode turns, or seems to turn the logic of the more traditional documentaries on its head.

There is another feature of The Nature of Britain that also marks a change vis-à-vis an older kind of documentary. Directly after each episode was broadcast last autumn, and taking advantage of its huge web capacity and its Freeview digital terrestrial TV channels, the BBC offered follow-up contents that enabled viewers to ‘find out what you can do for wildlife wherever you live in Great Britain’(3). Of course, the distribution of inter-related contents across multiple media has long been part of a BBC strategy to develop corporate ‘synergy’ on the back of the massive investment required by blue chip series. But in the case of Nature of Britain, this strategy seemed particularly appropriate in so far as it could be said to atone for the paradoxically placeless and timeless nature of the blue chip series. After Life on Earth, it became almost a rule that the series should transform viewers into ‘motionless voyagers’ (4) following a transcontinental itinerary—a tradition that Attenborough himself helped to introduce when he was still a producer. More recently, the combination of different media has allowed producers to encourage viewers to do some of their own actual traveling and local nature watching. While issues can be raised even with respect to some of the most local forms of ecotourism, the practice certainly marks another change with respect to the spatiality of the blue chip documentary series.

* * *

Earlier, I spoke of an innovative group of documentaries. I might have used the expression ‘new generation’, but two sets of considerations led me to use a somewhat less sweeping term.

First, the traditional blue chip documentary series is very much alive and kicking. Last week saw the UK premier of Life in Cold Blood, the BBC’s latest wildlife extravaganza. Judging from the first programme, the culture of transcontinentalism continues to thrive in the BBC. Where ‘Urban Britain’ begins with Titchmarsh presenting next to some violin players outside the Barbican, the first episode of Life In Cold Blood begins with the redoubtable Attenborough framed in a bust shot with some marine iguanas in the foreground. True to form, Attenborough’s narration starts out by suggesting that ‘Reptiles and amphibians are sometimes thought of as primitive, dull, and dim-witted. In fact, of course, they can be lethally fast, spectacularly beautiful, surprisingly affectionate, and very sophisticated ’. Thereafter, viewers are shown a sequence that is structured along the lines of what I described last week as hyperkinetic representations. The sequence shows, amongst others, shots of chameleons’ tongues darting out, frogs wrestling, tortoises jousting, a crocodile catching a fish, a lizard showing its colours, and a cobra spitting venom at Attenborough’s face. In almost every shot, the animals are represented engaging in rapid, and what some might viewers might describe as ‘violent’ movements. Despite this—or perhaps for this very reason—Attenborough recognises towards the very end of the first programme that ‘amphibians and reptiles are not easy creatures to film. They certainly do interesting things, but they also spend a great deal of time doing nothing much’.

The first episode of Life in Cold Blood is also true to the traditional form in another way: with the exception of an Attenborough sitting, standing or crouching next to the different animals, the series producers have taken great pains to represent the different species in ways that decontextualise them from anything like a modern human presence. The documentary reproduces, in this sense, the kind of cultural and genre imagination that I mentioned in the first part of this post, and which conceives of nature as something quite separate from at least modern humans.

The same producers might well object that, towards the end of the documentary, there is a section titled ‘Under the Skin’ that acknowledges a human presence in at least some of the contexts that have been filmed. And indeed it is true that, in the mentioned section, the series does describe aspects of its own making. The section also represents, however indirectly, the displacements behind the documentary’s transcontinental itinerary to the extent that it shows Attenborough descending from an Air Madagascar plane. When it does so, the programme informs viewers that Attenborough is returning to Madagascar where he hopes to find the tiny dwarf chameleon (Rhampholeon kerstenii). This is a species that he sought on the same island as part of an episode of the Zoo Quest series, which was broadcast in the UK between 1954 and 1964. Although the programme doesn’t explain this, Zoo Quest’s formula was to accompany the curators of the London Zoo when they mounted expeditions to capture specimens for the zoo’s collection. As such, the series mediated between a first generation of TV animal shows, which did little more than show and talk about animals taken from the London Zoo to the BBC studios in the Alexandra Palace, and the current generation of documentaries which are ostensibly filmed entirely ‘in the wild’. ‘Under the Skin’ employs some clever editing and a seamless transition from black-and-white TV to colour TV to link the expedition in the early 1960s with its 21st century equivalent in Life in Cold Blood.

All of this is well and good. I would, however, suggest that the convention of locating the ‘making of’ after minute 48 of a 55-minute programme, and the use of the title (the only such title within the programme) mean that the ‘making of’ is separated off from the main programme by way of a symbolic boundary. That much is rather obvious; less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that this boundary generates a hierarchical relation between the contents: the first part of the programme appears to represent ‘nature as it really is’ or ‘ought’ to be, that is, the nature without humans, while the last part represents the representing, that is to say, the ‘this is how, and this is where, we represented nature’. The title ‘Under the Skin’ thereby marks a moment of classification that subtly disconnects the represented from the representers even as it re-establishes an apparently ‘objective’ relationship between the two. From this point of view, the ‘making of’ is not so much an instance of what Bill Nichols describes as a reflexive mode of representation, as it is an interactive mode of representation (5). Put differently, more than a self-critical acknowledgment of the effects of, and interests behind the programme-making, ‘Under the Skin’ is an invitation for audiences to join the filmmakers in celebrating their own technological prowess and ingenuity.

* * *

A second reason—a second set of reasons—why it would be misleading to describe The Nature of Britain as a sea change can be found in Nature of Britain itself.

First, ‘Urban Britain’ is just one of nine programmes, most of which continue to privilege a more traditional concept of nature. The introductory montages for the series, and the series’ overall emphasis on Britain as a ‘green and pleasant land’ reproduce the nature-as-countryside theme that has long been the motif for Arcadian representations of nature. It would be a mistake to dismiss the countryside as being little more today than a rural city—a stance that is implicit in some social theorists’ writing. But it nevertheless remains true that the nature-countryside homology is one that has led many otherwise critical observers to overlook the significance of what I described earlier as a recombinant ecology.

Second, even if the episode titled ‘Farmland Britain’ does at times consider an intensely cultivated nature, and even if ‘Urban Britain’ shows stunning images of British cities, the programmes still mostly exclude flesh-and-blood, and above all talking people and their vernacular knowledges. The point here is not to idealise such knowledges, or to imply, as some have, that such knowledges ought to be privileged over scientists’ as part of an allegedly radical critique of the political economy of expertise. It is to suggest that, so long as the programmes only show a presenter and/or a scientist or two, it is easier to leave intact what Raymond Williams once described as a romantic ‘structure of feeling’(6) with respect to those places that, as the programmes repeatedly acknowledge, have been transformed by humans for many hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Third, the Nature of Britain series illustrates the tendency of the wildlife documentaries to depoliticise nature. This might seem like a particularly glaring claim to make: surely the problem is that in everyday life, nature is ‘politicised’, and so the documentaries quite rightly work to remove nature from all the ‘politicking’? Perhaps an example taken from ‘Urban Britain’ might illustrate why things are seldom if ever as simple as the latter stance implies.

One of the stories in the ‘Urban Britain’ programme refers to a colony of Kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla) that has taken to nesting in Newcastle Upon Tyne. This is a rather unusual behaviour, and the programme suggests that no other colony of Kittiwakes nests so far inland. In keeping with one of the anthropomorphic motifs that run through the episode, the programme portrays the Kittiwakes as yet another species seeking the ‘many benefits of “city life”’. Perhaps for this reason, the programme only just brushes the surface of the cause of the Kittiwakes’ unusual nesting location. As Titchmarsh puts it, ‘So why should these seabirds choose an urban high-rise so far upstream? The real appeal… is not so much the architecture, as it is the food. Kittiwake numbers on the coast have been plummeting because of food shortages, but the cleaner waters of the Tyne mean that here there is plenty to eat’.

One doesn’t have to be a critical discourse analyst to note that, in this narration, a combination of two linguistic transformations (7) make it more difficult to establish not just a cause, but also a causal actor with respect to the change in Kittiwake nesting practices. First, the sentence uses a relatively passive voice (‘Kittiwake numbers… have been plummeting…because of food shortages’, as opposed to ‘Food shortages have caused Kittiwake numbers to plummet’). But second, the substitution of a clearly defined actor by the apparently actor-less, or non-transactive ‘food shortages’ arguably has the effect of disconnecting concrete institutions and their practices from the change in the Kittiwakes’ behaviour. How different the statement might have seemed if it had said, for example, ‘Industrial fisheries in the North Sea have decimated sandeel stocks, and this is one factor that has forced Kittiwakes to breed in areas where they can still find fish…’

To be sure, anyone interested in finding out more about Newcastle’s Kittiwakes will soon discover that some in Newcastle do not share the rosy image conveyed by the programme’s representation. In the early part of the new millennium, the birds came to be regarded as a pest by the Gateshead Council. As the BBC Tyne website put it, ‘The birds are at sea feeding on fish offal discarded by trawlers and when they return in the spring to nest they may find that the City Council has netted off their nesting sites on the Tyne bridge.’ ‘They used to nest in the Baltic Flour Mills but have been driven off by the cultural aspirations of Gateshead. Gateshead Council provided a nesting tower but this has been moved down river.’ ‘As the residential development of the river banks gathers pace; “move on and take your mess and noise with you”, seems to be the message to these unfortunate birds’(8).

Clearly, both of these issues—the causes of the Kittiwake displacement, and the conflict over their nesting sites—are quite central to the Kittiwakes’ adaptation to Newcastle nesting sites. If one adopts a conventional perspective on documentary objectivity, the Natural History Unit’s glossing over or omission of these issues constitutes a significant form of ‘bias’: a bias in favour of what might be described as a ‘despite-a-few-problems-all-is-remarkably-well’ perspective that arguably pervades much of the series. The point is not to call for a cataclysmic perspective of the kind that has long been proposed by some environmentalists (though it might well be argued that such a perspective is now an accurate one at least when it comes to representing the possible consequences of global warming). Rather, the point is to suggest that a critical ecology calls as much for the celebration of the beauty of certain environments and their species as it does for the critique of environmental degradation and abuse. It is arguably only when conflicts such as those surrounding the ‘housing’ of Kittiwakes are critically analysed that it becomes possible to engage in the kind of environmental policy-making that escapes two equally problematic politics: a ‘gray’ politics that is driven by commercialism, and does not hesitate to exclude what its advocates label as a ‘nuisance’ nature; but also, a somewhat more subtle green politics that can only conceive of conservation as a matter of ignoring, or even removing people and their labour.

* * *

In my previous post, I suggested that a strong symbolic separation or classification of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ may be conducive to a problematic stance vis-à-vis the nature represented, but also the ‘own’ nature—the nature of the back yard, the nature that flows through one’s arteries and veins, or what I described above as a ‘recombinant’ nature. In making this point, I should nonetheless recognise that this is both a complex, and a slippery problem. Put simply, if one goes too far in the direction of the symbolic separation of nature and (human) culture, then the risk is that nature can be conceived as being so different from the self that the concept’s referents can be abused. This much has been clear to environmentalists for a long time. What is perhaps less obvious is that if one goes too far in the direction of denying any separation or difference between nature and culture, nature and humanity, then the scene may be set for three problems.

I will simply mention the first ‘epistemological’ problem: as Kate Soper has noted, one can only deny the nature-culture divide by re-enacting it: ‘Whether […] it is claimed that ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are clearly differentiated realms or that no hard and fast delineation can be made between them, all such thinking is tacitly reliant on the humanity-nature antithesis itself and would have no purchase on our understanding without it’(9).

The second problem involves suggesting, as at least one prominent sociobiologist has, that humans are really no different from ants. While such an argument might have some validity if one’s interpretive scale is a sufficiently cosmic one, this can be, and historically has been a way of smuggling into political discourse some of the most dejectedly determinist conceptions of the nature of humanity. I might add that it has also been a recipe for sexism, racism, ethnocentrism and just about every other ‘ism’ the reader may care to think of. If humans are (just) like ants, and if some biologist of immense standing can apparently show that ants are racist or sexist, then surely it must be normally for ‘us humans’ to do the same? (I refer to this dynamic as the circuit of anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism (10): first someone humanizes the animals, and then proceeds to animalise the humans!)

The third problem involves the danger of ‘incorporationism’: by suggesting that we are ‘at one’ with nature, it is all too easy to deny difference by engaging in a naively anthropocentric form of anthropomorphism. A strong case can, and perhaps should be made that this stance is not only preferable to the first, but that it forms something like a precondition for any form of human/non-human relation: on some level, we can only relate to non-humans, as humans. This point should however not lead one to overlook the fact that the ‘brute’ domination of outright opposition may be corresponded by the rather more subtle domination associated with assimilationism.

* * *

It is my hope that this and the previous post have begun to explain why natural history documentaries raise a number of issues for anyone who takes the time to consider their forms of representation in a critical manner. In this, as in the first part of the post, ‘in a critical manner’ does not mean ‘in a manner that criticizes’. It refers to the possibility—I would argue the need—for an analysis that goes beyond the extraordinary beauty and technological prowess of the programmes to ask questions about the nature of the nature that may be implied by the forms of representation chosen by the producers. It is only by asking such questions that it is possible to begin to debate the representational politics of these and other forms of mass mediation. Such a debate seems particularly urgent in light of the environmental crisis that we face, and which surely requires new, and rather more critical forms of environmental education.

* * *

By way of a coda: just how was the scene with the ducklings filmed?

References

(1) Whatmore, S. & Hinchcliffe, S. (2002) ‘Living Cities: Making Space for Urban Nature’, in Soundings: Journal of Politics and Culture. No. 22.
(2) Whatmore, S. (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces. London: Sage Publications, p. 14.
(3) see for example http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/nature/uk/natureofbritain/, accessed February 10, 2007.
(4) This is a term that I borrow from Noël Burch’s (1990) Life to Those Shadows. London: British Film Institute. For more on the subject of the documentaries as technologies of displacement, see Lindahl Elliot, N. (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge International Library of Sociology.
(5) Nichols, B. (1991) Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
(6) Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. London: Verso. According to Williams, a structure of feeling is a ‘lived present’, the ‘characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind’ (Williams 1977:132).
(7) for more on this subject, see Hodge, R. & Kress, G. (1993) Language as Ideology. 2nd revised edit. London: Routledge.

[8] in BBC Online – Tyne Online. http://www.bbc.co.uk/tyne/features/kittiwake/kittiwake.shtml, accessed February 11, 2008.

(9) Soper, K. (1995) What is Nature? Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 15.

(10) Lindahl Elliot, Mediating Nature, op cit.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved