Abstract
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the BBC’s NHU changed its treatment of environmental programmes from acting as a neutral observer of wildlife to taking a more active role in environmental debates. This shift can be related to changes in the life sciences’ relationship to the environment with the emergence of the biodiversity movement in the 1990s, and the development of what has been called an endangerment sensibility. These changes in the life sciences conflated conservation activism with the biological study of biodiversity. But could the endangerment sensibility be a consequence of the repeated exposure of life scientists to wildlife documentaries?
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Notes
- 1.
Richard Brock, 2007, Oral history interview. Wildscreen.
- 2.
George Monbiot, ‘David Attenborough has betrayed the living world he loves’, The Guardian, 7 November 2018. Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/07/david-attenborough-world-environment-bbc-films. Last accessed 3 April 2019.
- 3.
Lucy Mangan, ‘Our planet review—Attenborough’s first act as an eco-warrior’, The Guardian, 5 April 2019. Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/apr/05/our-planet-review-david-attenborough-netflix-eco-warrior-activist-bbc. Last accessed 5 April 2019.
- 4.
See for instance G. Monbiot, 2018, ‘David Attenborough has betrayed the living world he loves’, The Guardian, 7 November 2018. Available Online at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/07/david-attenborough-world-environment-bbc-films. Last accessed 14 April 2018.
- 5.
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Gouyon, JB. (2019). Afterword. In: BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19982-1_10
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