Dissent Magazine - The Lost Art of Looking at Nature:
By John Cairns - The Bodleian Libraries, CC BY 4.0
“In the late 1970s, when Attenborough was working as a manager of BBC2, he produced two major series about the history of humanity: Civilisation and The Ascent of Man. Both were successful, but he wanted to make a series that would give the spotlight to natural history. In Life on Earth, he became the host and traveled the world presenting a narrative about the evolution of species. In one of the show’s most famous moments, he appears in a leafy thicket next to a giant gorilla. He goes off script and, in an ad-lib commentary, whispers, “There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know.” He gives the naturalist’s explanation for why this is so: we have the same sensory apparatuses and live in comparable social groups, so these apes offer our best chance at achieving cross-species understanding. It is this aim that sets his work apart. Close observation of a gorilla offers the “possibility of escaping the human condition and living imaginatively in another creature’s world,” he says, crouched in the greenery. It’s an almost radical idea, to show humanity all the corners of the world, emphasizing that it belongs to other creatures.
Perhaps we love Attenborough because he is an advocate and practitioner of a special way of seeing and relating. His interest in the natural world begins not with the gaze of an empath, for whom another’s feelings become real because he feels them himself, but with the humility of an observer content to be an outsider.”
