The family keep threatening to take away my newspapers if I don’t clean up my language at the breakfast table. ‘OK, Fred,’ I said to the husband as he protested recently. He walked right into it (always marry a straight man, in more ways than one, ladies).
‘Fred?’ he said, obligingly.
‘As in Nile,’ I said, trying for hauteur but settling for triumph. And then for a while I really did try to moderate the flow of filth. But when I read George Monbiot blaming David Attenborough for the parlous state of the world’s wildernesses I swore like an Osbourne. It seems that Monbiot felt that, in constructing scenarios of wild animals in their habitats, Attenborough had deceived us into thinking that things are OK in the rainforests of the world. When I had exhausted the single syllables I started thinking whom else we could blame for the state of things. We could blame the Dalai Lama for the Chinese atrocities in Tibet; we could blame the Hollows Foundation for the eye problems of the Third World; and let’s not forget that the Enron thingy, the war in Iraq and global warming are all because of Michael Moore. Maybe Monbiot has despaired of denting the military industrial complex that really does the environmental damage, and has decided to just take it out on someone who, well, really doesn’t.
Watching Attenborough in his second series of The Life of Mammals (ABC Wednesdays at 8.30pm) I couldn’t help noting that tinge of sadness in him; he knows the fragility of what he shows us. His whole life’s work is to help us love the wild, to show us the wonders of our planet—whales making whoopee still wow me. How can people fight to protect something if they don’t even know about it? David Suzuki’s Cassandra approach would probably satisfy Monbiot but there are dangers in telling the dark side of the story all the time. Not that I don’t respect Suzuki and his programs, but too much bad news, and the punters are going to turn over to watch Funniest Home Videos.
Which must be pretty desperate for dinkum home vids if the one I flicked onto last month was representative: the night’s prize went to two brats brawling on a trampoline, and the presenter was promising $500 to anyone whose video even got an airing. (Trampolines must buy more Porsches per annum for orthopaedic surgeons