Speaking at a charity event in London, Sir David Attenborough said that there is no way to stop our ever-increasing population from ever increasing. The world has lots and lots of people and will have lots and lots more, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Because there are going to be more and more people, more of the world will be paved over. And so Attenborough urged action to preserve great expanses of nature—bogs, tropical forests mangrove swamps, and great mountains—that are at risk unless something is done to protect them soon.
Attenborough appealed to big business to take the lead in securing and protecting these lands. He said, “It’s not a mystery. Wealth empowers. And businesses have by no means been slow in helping.” He went on to say that he and other conservationists have appealed to multinational corporations for help many times before.
Now I have a lot of respect for Attenborough, and I don’t think he is entirely wrong. There are people in business who are working to improve the world. Bill Gates might be the best example of a man of big business doing good with his riches.
It is curious that Attenborough did not call on governments, at least in part, to work on large-scale environmental preservation. Is it that governments, even when they do the right thing, are slow to act? Does he see the example set by the U.S., one in which an entrenched two-party system gives us a government so frozen that an ocean of WD-40 could not loosen the cogs of the legislative and administrative wheels of this country?
Attenborough seems to indicate that the bad environmental track record of big business is in the past and exonerates large companies of their bad environmental track record when he said that these companies usually committed environmentally degrading practices out of ignorance. “They didn’t know any better,” he said.
Has David Attenborough seen a mountaintop removal mine? The people who run those mines know about the destruction they cause. They know better but continue to flatten Kentucky and West Virginia. Did Attenborough have the radio or television on while an underwater cam showed the world millions of gallons of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico? This spill may not have happened had BP and Halliburton not cut corners to try to save money. They knew better but risked men’s lives and the health of the waters in the gulf anyway.
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| Mountaintop removal in Appalachia, something that David Attenborough should see. Photo by Vivian Stockman. From the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition http://www.ohvec.org/ |
Big business also performs industrial harvesting of the world’s fisheries, depleting resources and scouring the ocean bottom until it is practically as lifeless as Death Valley. We know how harmful this kind of fishing is, but it continues. Big business hires PR firms and funds organizations like the Heritage Foundation to give the lie that the science of global warming is inconclusive. Big oil and big coal know the science, they know better, but they still fund the global warming denial industry.
As I said before, Attenborough is not entirely wrong. Conservationists need to work with big business, and I hope that I’m wonderfully surprised with the environmental successes sponsored by multinational corporations. He might also be right in saying that it was ignorance that led to some environmental problems that were caused by large companies. But just as there are more and more people, there is less and less ignorance about the harm large companies continue to inflict on our earth. And Attenborough should acknowledge this fact.
ref: David Attenborough urges business to protect nature from population boom Lewis Smith, The Guardian 1/18/2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jan/18/david-attenborough-big-business-population?intcmp=122
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