Here, there, and everywhere

I agree with David Attenborough’s lament about the growing divid between people and nature. But I take a bit of exception to his notion that it’s urbanization, a fact of life for most humans today and even more tomorrow, that cuts us off from the wild.

I wouldn’t be blogging if I agreed with that. To say, as Attenborough does, that the urban is only rats and pigeons is a perpetuation of the fantasy that nature is only out there, where most of us will never get. It’s a question of focus: if there were a few eye-candy documentaries about the wildness found in cities, instead of hours of shows about marvelously exotic, fantastically distant nature….

Actually, I don’t think that’s necessarily a good idea either. We might pay more attention to the world around us if we were not spending so much time watching representations of it on television, or on other devices.

Attenborough’s latest epic is Frozen Planet. The U.S. distributor, the trash-ladened Discovery networks, has decided not to show the final episode about radical climate change, the very warming that is thawing the ice, because they’re afraid of the insane clown posse of Republicans, carbon industry goons, know-nothings, and science-denying fundamentalists (sorry for the redundancies). Shame on the BBC for giving them that option. Voice-for-hire Alec Baldwin is narrating the American version (Attlenborough’s too foreign for Discovery’s audience, evidently), which makes me think we should coin “baldwinized” as an updated synonym for bowdlerized.

12/6/11 UPDATE: Discovery is now telling the world that they will broadcast the final episode of Frozen Planet. An online petition may have had some influence, or else they figured out the obvious, that the deniers and liars and fools only watch Fox anyway.