Here’s a brief sound snippet recorded a few minutes ago. I’ll post something longer in due course, because I think it’s worth recording the ambient sound.

Can anyone identify any of the creatures here?

ABC chair Maurice Newman, who is not a climate scientist or even any kind of scientist at all, is pleased to hear more non-scientists talking about climate science. I reckon that apart from being a tool he’s way out of line.

He clearly has no clue about how the ABC, as the national broadcaster, should be helping the public understand this complex issue. And by speaking directly to staff about how they should be covering a specific highly-political issue he’s undermining the role of managing director Mark Scott.

Yesterday Newman (pictured) told ABC staff that the scientific consensus on climate change and anthropogenic global warming was “conventional wisdom” and “group think”.

Judging by the ABC News report, Newman’s speech was riddled with contradictions. He contrasts “wisdom and consensus” with “other points of view”, as if he does understand that there are those with actual knowledge of the field, versus those who just have an opinion.

But later…

“I’m not a scientist and I’m like anybody else in the public, I have to listen to all points of view and then make judgements when we’re asked to vote on particular policies.”

No, Newman, you don’t listen to “all points of view”. You only listen to those who know what they’re talking about.

If I need medical advice, I might seek a second opinion from another doctor, maybe a specialist. But I don’t seek out the views of a kitchenhand, a hairdresser and an architect. For “balance”.

Similarly, if I’m after an understanding of climate science, I ask climate scientists. If I’m the national broadcaster, then I find a good science broadcaster who can turn the complex jargon into a clear narrative. That’s what broadcasters do, and maybe Robyn Williams or one of his colleagues is up for the job.

Climate change is one of the most important issues facing us globally. Even if you still “have an open mind” and are “waiting for proof either way” — and what would that proof have to look like, Mr Newman? — you owe it to Australians to present a clear, reasoned perspective. And that’s not about “balancing” properly-developed scientific knowledge with every swivel-eyed serial fabricator with a media profile.

You owe it to Australians to have the ABC weigh up the validity of these points of view and present the best consensus you can — not just dump an unsorted mess onto the public’s laps and expect them to sort it out.

Yes, the ABC and its staff should be free to say, in their own voices, that some opinions are wrong. They shouldn’t live in fear of being branded “biased” simply for applying rational analysis. That the ABC has become so cowed through endless political attacks is disturbing. As its Chair you should be encouraging greater boldness, not this enfeebled “balance through mindlessness”.

It is outrageous that you’re suggesting we waste more of the public’s time and money on these self-promoting fuckwits. Their little repertoire of cherry-picked factoids has been comprehensively debunked so many times already, and our climate scientists have better things to be doing with their time.

Even if you have doubts, the risk analysis is so simple even a merchant banker and “close personal friend of John Howard” could understand it. If you don’t get it in that 10-minute video, try the follow-up.

The risk of not acting on real climate change vastly outweighs the risk of having spent money on addressing climate change which then turns out to be false — because the worst that’ll happen is we end up with a safer, more efficient society anyway.

Or if an amateur video isn’t your thing, try today’s piece in The Drum, Climate debate: opinion vs evidence, where Stephan Lewandowsky explains why your notion of “balance” is just plain wrong.

And once you’ve done that, Mr Newman, butt out. Directing the ABC’s staff is the Managing Director’s job, not yours. Your job is to somehow move beyond the blatantly political nature of your appointment and ensure the proper corporate governance of the ABC. For all Australians, not just your old mates at the Australian Stock Exchange.

[Update 9.30am: I've just discovered that there were more of Maurice Newman's comments on last night's edition of PM.]

Sea Shepherd of course claim it was a deliberate attack. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. Thing is though, guys, if you don’t want to be involved in a collision at sea, don’t fucking well deliberately put your boat so close to another.

I won’t say any more about this specific incident today. I have other things to do, and I’ve already written about my opinion of Sea Shepherd two years ago — along with plenty of references to material which points out that things are all much murkier than Sea Shepherd makes out.

If you’d like to comment on this issue, do please do so after reading the material over at my original post. I’m very interested in separating out the emotion-laden rhetoric and the zealotry surrounding whaling from the practical environmental and legal issues, and I think Sea Shepherd are a noisy distraction.

So, I’ll close comments on this post, and you can comment over there.

As an aside, the life and beliefs of Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson make for an interesting read too.

[Update 8 January 2010: To clarify, yes, comments are closed on this post — not to limit the discussion, but to ensure that all comments relating to Sea Shepherd are collected over on my January 2008 post. Sorry if there's been any confusion.]

A year-old post HUMMER to WANKER, originally a silly little piece of wordplay, has triggered a fascinating stream of comments today.

Does a suburban family of four — two adults and two children — really need a big vehicle like a Hummer to get around? I recall that as a kid we didn’t. A normal-sized Holden station wagon, which would even be considered small by today’s standards, did just fine for two adults and two kids and the everyday business of running a farm

Even with a farm, we didn’t need 4WD for the car. That’s what we had a tractor for.

If you want to have your two cents’ worth, do feel free to comment over at the original post.

Tanzania’s climate seems to be shifting dramatically. Reporting from a World Meteorological Organisation meeting, attended by meteorologists and climatologists representing 187 countries, freelance journalist Amanda Gearing writes in Crikey today:

More rainfall seasons have been failing since the 1980s, severely affecting food supplies of people who are mostly subsistence farmers on small farms.

“If (the short rains) fail it means their survival is threatened and this becomes worse when the second rain fails because it means the whole year is a total failure and we’ve had the government intervening more often to give food assistance to the people,” Tanzanian principal agro-meteorologist Deusdedit Kashasha said. “They produce on small farms which may not be enough for a year in a good season so if they don’t even have that small amount produced it becomes pretty dire.”

Australians are meant to know about drought. We’ll see soon enough, I guess.

[Update 26 May 2008: Quite a few commenters have decided to tear this article apart. Some are "the usual suspects", sure, but others...]

I’m still chuckling at the seriousness with which some people treat getting onto Techmeme. It’s true, I keep stopping typing to giggle. It’s embarrassing.

I’d never visited Techmeme until this weekend. Even then it was only because someone told me I’d blipped up there. It’s just another feed of what someone thinks is “important” in infotech, yeah? Who cares. It’s not as if it’s Reuters or BBC News.

It’s just more geeks telling geeks what geeks think other geeks should think about stuff that geeks think about.

But Jason Calacanis cares.

Jason Calacanis must care very deeply because he “joked” about it on this website, and over at TechCrunch he “joked” about getting pageviews. His fan club speculates that Duncan Riley and me and others are only attacking him to generate our own web traffic. Well, I can’t speak for Duncan, but no, I couldn’t care less about website traffic — especially the low-grade drive-by flamers that usually wash up here after being mentioned on high-traffic fan sites. That’s not why I’m here.

I’m attacking Calacanis because I reckon the business style he describes, the one championed by his defenders, is rotten to the very core.

But first, let’s talk about religion…

The Cult of the Internet Start-up

Attracting attention and scoring pageviews is very, very important to these guys — and for good reason. They’re fully indoctrinated into the Cult of the Internet Start-up. They must generate The Buzz.

Let us now read from their gospel…

… 19 Soon, our Labours will have produced The Beta. We shall ready ourselves to supplicate Our Great Saviour the Venture Capitalist. 20 He shall ask, “Doth thy Beta have The Buzz?” 21 If it does have The Buzz, He will see that It is Good, and He shall writeth The Cheque. 22 And there shall be much rejoicing.

23 And then cometh the Second Phase wherein — praise be to The Great Saviour! — we shall write the IPO. 24 If we still have The Buzz, the Shares shall Rise, and the land will overfloweth with milk and honey. 25 And there shall be much rejoicing…

Internet Start-upers are fundamentalists. Anyone who doesn’t follow their pathway of monomaniacal self-sacrifice (read: high-risk workaholism) in pursuit of the Nirvana of the successful IPO is branded a Slacker, even by The Prophet.

The Cultists truly believe that the faster-faster-VC-to-IPO chase to these glorious riches is the right and proper thing to do — and like all zealots, they think the ends justify the means.

Note also Bill Moore’s comment. “A few million (or 10s of millions, max) dollars a year” and being “very comfortable” isn’t enough for him. He talks a bit about “industry changing”, but soon gets back to the money, complaining if he’d get “only” 15% of $100M.

That’s 15 million dollars, Bill!

There’s a word to describe that.

Greed.

If you’re on an average US, Australian or European wage, you’re already richer than 99% of the planet. But forget the top 1%. Even being in the top 0.01% isn’t enough, it seems. And anyone who isn’t this filthy greedy, anyone who isn’t prepared to treat people as disposable, exploitable objects along the way, is a “wimp” or a “wannabe”.

“There’s a Pig Loose in the Mosque! Sooooooooooooeeeeee!”

This discussion is heated because we’re not talking about subtly different ways of doing business here. We’re challenging the Cult’s core tenets. That greed is good. That the ideal is to grow fast and cash out, not build something of lasting value. That it’s just fine to burn people out along the way — collateral damage, I guess. That it doesn’t matter if your life is totally out of balance now because it’ll all sort itself out later.

Magically.

Somehow.

A few years ago I was discussing a couple of Internet start-up concepts with a well-respected VC-savvy adviser who paused and said:

You do realise you’ll be doing business with evil people? They don’t care about anything other than the return on their investment. As long as you deliver that, it’s fine. Just remember, though, they are evil.

The Cult of the Internet Start-up is evil. It’s selfish. It’s inhuman It’s amoral. Using the term “work ethic” to describe driving (or seducing) people into appallingly long work hours to the neglect of family and community and even self is disgusting.

This “grow now, worry about the consequences later” attitude is precisely the greedy, short-term thinking which has driven the world to the edge of an environmental disaster. But who cares, eh? You got your $100M — all of it! Leave someone else to clear up that mess, and plough on to the next “world-changing idea”.

Assuming you don’t die of a heart attack first.

Assuming you have a heart.

Calacanis’ original post exhibited the language of exploitation. Petty bean-counting to suck every last productive hour out of the meat-assets. He changed that wording quick smart, eh? But did he change his attitude?

TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington did a beautifully-written follow-up — though really the message was standard advice for any business: (1) hire the right people, and (2) don’t waste money, but avoid being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Some of Calacanis’ points were probably written in haste, like his statement “Fire people who are not workaholics” (he later changed it to “Fire people who don’t love their work”). Others were not controversial, like his advice to “Buy cheap tables and expensive chairs.” Overall, I get the impression that if he had spent just a few minutes editing his post, he would have had a 100% different reaction from readers.

Agreed. The reaction wouldn’t have been as sharp. But changing the surface PR spin is just spraying perfume to cover the underlying stench.

Arrington exhibits the same exploitative signs in a later comment.

“And I totally agree with you that for x duration you can work someone to death but the person needs to understand what happens once x duration is completed. There has to be downtime.”

No, they don’t need to understand that. Think of them as a goldfish. Goldfish will eat everything you give them until their little stomachs explode (or so I hear). The key isn’t to find a goldfish that knows when to stop eating. They key is to know when to stop feeding the goldfish, for their own good.

Once again, it’s about treating your staff as objects to be manipulated at your whim. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

“If you’re not like us, you’re a loser”

This is not the only way of starting a new business. It’s just one specific model — about fast growth and high risk. Without a doubt, it can sometimes produce astounding results. It can also crash spectacularly, leaving no survivors.

You can also build a business calmly, rationally, with solid foundations — and with respect for the people and world around you. A business which can weather the storms because the captain has a clear view from the bridge, accurate maps and a firm hand on the wheel — as well as a dedicated crew, of course.

Calacanis has been more measured since he encountered the criticism of his original post, but he’s still condescending when comparing the fundamentalist Cult approach to the truly enlightened 37signals.

You haven’t raised tons of money and you’re building a “lifestyle” business from what I gather (correct?) You’re not trying to displace Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. You’re not trying to build a service that gets to 100M monthly users, and you’re not on some aggressive timeline. You’re trying to build something that you enjoy working on and that helps people… correct?

When you take VC money and try to compete in a really aggressive space like search/research you’re faced with folks like Google, Wikipedia, about.com, Yahoo, eHow, DMOZ , etc. These are big companies with lots of resources… the way you beat them is to zig where they zag and/or out hustle them. So, if you want to compete in that space you’re gonna need to really work hard — you’re not going to do it working a four hour work week that’s for sure!

I’ll gloss over the fact that one of his differentiators is that 37signals is trying to build something “that helps people”, compared to his megalomaniacal goal of “displace Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc”. 37signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson quite rightly takes exception to all this.

[W]e’re not building a “lifestyle” business. We’re just building a business. To take the sound bytes [sic] from the recent Wired article, a multimillion dollar one that doubled in revenues last year…

So please don’t make the choices we’ve made about treating our employees one of a “lifestyle” (aka “small timer”, “toy”) vs “real” business. That somehow only those happy hippies who are not going for the gold can afford to hire whole people with a life outside of work. That’s bullcrap.

I very much do believe, though, that taking VC money with loads of strings attached will put hard pressures and increased stress on the decision making. And that in turn can lead to a culture where long hours and no walking outside for coffee can be seen as good, patriotic practices.

What I take the most offence to, though, is the dichotomist split between the workaholic go-getters who gets the quick cash and the lame waiting-in-line nine-to-fivers who get a gold watch after 30 years. What a crock.

We launched Basecamp four years ago. We built it off a 10 hour/week technical time budget. It’s very possible to build a “real”, multimillion dollar business that has high growth without resorting to the workaholic path.

Mr Calacanis, failing to comprehend that there are paths other than your own is fundamentalism. Even when you pretend to accept that there are alternatives — but still wrap your words in condescension.

Cult Myth #1: “It’s OK, I choose to work this way”

No it’s not OK. If you’re immersed in one specific highly-focussed environment for almost your entire waking life, then your decisions will not be made with a sense of perspective. You are not what DHH calls “a whole person”.

Vast slabs of the social fabric which informs good long-term, ethical decisions simply won’t be on your radar.

And then there’s the guys who say, “Well, I can work 16 hours a day for 7 days a week and it doesn’t do me any harm.” Well bully for you. I bet your dick’s bigger than mine too, eh? This isn’t a contest to see who’s the biggest martyr. It’s about who can achieve the most, not suffer the most.

Remember, Patty Hearst was there “voluntarily” too.

Cult Myth #2: “This is what makes America great”

This is the most toxic myth of all — wrapping your obsession in the flag.

No, this attitude is what makes America look like it’s populated by arseholes. Ignorant, arrogant, self-righteous, self-centred arseholes who consume everything in sight and dump their crap on the rest of the world under the delusion that their way is the best and only way. A nation that only now is starting to realise the mess it’s in.

What actually made America great — past tense — was the visionary foresight of its founders, the political geniuses who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. At the time they knew they were creating some special — not just for the moment, but for all time.

God Bless America.

She’d better, because a clear-headed America will be needed to help face the challenges of the future — the very near future. And an America retreating into medievalism and stubborn arrogance is not what the world needs.

Fighting the Good Fight

So, this is why I refer to Jason Calacanis as a prick. His ill-thought-out wording in an essay intended to convey good advice — and some of it is good advice, let’s not forget! — exposed this smelly underlying attitude of winner-take-all exploitation and devil take the hindmost.

I strongly believe this to be a dangerous, toxic, anti-human attitude and it’s infecting others. It must be fought vigorously and with passion.

Calacanis and his defenders reckon that workaholic exploitation is the only way to “change the world”. It’s not. There’s also clarity of vision, a really good idea, and well-planned execution. It’s the difference between beating one’s opponent with serried ranks of massed foot-soldiers, or using snipers.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/religion/john_calacanis_evil_cult/feed/ 22 http://stilgherrian.com/politics/world_population_explosion/ http://stilgherrian.com/politics/world_population_explosion/#comments Sun, 27 Jan 2008 02:26:57 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/politics/world_population_explosion/

Yeah I just said that it’s the wrong sort of day for numerical analysis. However I stumbled across these numbers and had to draw a graph immediately.

The world’s population reached 1 billion people in 1804. The second billion was added by 1927. And so it goes. In 1999 we hit 6 billion, and current estimates are that we’ll hit 7 billion in 2013.

You all know the drill from here…

A small proportion (us Australians, Americans, Europeans, Japanese and some others) chew up the vast majority of the world’s resources and are dumping our shit everywhere. We know we need to stop. But those other billions reckon they’ve had the rough end of the pineapple for too long and now it’s their turn.

And we’re surprised when they get stroppy about it.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/politics/world_population_explosion/feed/ 0 http://stilgherrian.com/politics/whaling_discussion_continues/ http://stilgherrian.com/politics/whaling_discussion_continues/#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:09:14 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/politics/whaling_discussion_continues/ My piece about Japanese whaling chief Hideki Moronuki is generating some interesting discussion. I’ve just posted a long comment. Worth a read, even if it’s not about Heath Ledger. Oh, and you can always subscribe to the comments feed to ensure you don’t miss any of the action.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/politics/whaling_discussion_continues/feed/ 0 http://stilgherrian.com/personal/david_attenborough_1984/ http://stilgherrian.com/personal/david_attenborough_1984/#comments Sun, 20 Jan 2008 02:16:25 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/personal/david_attenborough_1984/

Last night’s final episode of Michael Parkinson‘s long-running TV chat show should have been much better, given the stellar cast. The one stand-out for me was David Attenborough. Something he said reminded me of a conversation we had 24 years ago. I’ll share that episode shortly. But first, here’s the interview we did…

Sir David Attenborough hardly needs an introduction. He was in Australia promoting the TV series and book The Living Planet when I spoke with him. His previous series Life on Earth was the UK’s highest-rating ever at that time. The Living Planet looked to be heading in the same direction.

Attenborough has been a TV producer almost as long as the medium has existed.

From 1965 to 1969 he was Controller of the then-new BBC 2, followed by four years in another executive position. After 8 years behind a desk he decided he’d had enough of computers, accounting and unions, and returned to life as a producer — a decision, he says, that wasn’t hard to make.

I had the good fortune to spend half an hour with Attenborough in his hotel room. I was his ninth interview for the day, and the greying gentleman in his fifties was visibly tired — particularly tired, he said, of being asked questions like “What’s your favourite animal”. But as I set up my equipment we chatted and, once he realised that I knew his work and knew what I was doing, his eyes began to sparkle just like on TV.

Our interview covered conservation, the making of Life On Earth and some remarkably prescient observations about the changing nature of TV programs.

David Attenborough: The BBC had at that stage been doing a series of series, that is to say had instituted the program format, of 12 or 13-part one-hour series, about some major aspect of life. Kenneth Clark did Civilisation, and [Jacob] Bronowski did The Ascent of Man and so on. And it was pretty obvious to anybody that one of the natural subjects to do was natural history.

Kenneth Clark did a marvellous program, but the Venus de Milo doesn’t hop off her pedestal and do a courtship dance. But birds of paradise do. So natural history is actually easier to make a series about than Civilization. It was obvious someone had to do it, and as a matter of fact I was rather alarmed during the few years after Civilization had been established, as it were, as a series that someone was going to do it before I had a chance to. Fortunately nobody did, so I was able to have a go at it when I did resign.

Stilgherrian: What about the style of the program, in terms of it being the personal Grand Documentary approach?

David Attenborough: There are advantages and disadvantages of having a personality, a narrator in vision.

The disadvantages are obvious: you get fed up with the bloke, you may not like him, he has to work in English and that limits translation and sales overseas.

But on the advantage side, it does mean that people can identify with what’s going on. And it also makes it clear that what’s being said is fallible.

One of the great problems about doing television on this grand scale, so it seems to me, is that if you’re not careful it looks like this is the be-all and end-all, and the only way and the only statement and the absolute truth and it’s Big Brother that’s Telling You From the Television that This Is the Way Things Are.

Now there are very few things in life like that. Two and two does equal four, but even then there are a couple of mathematicians who’ll tell you it doesn’t necessarily follow. But certainly on the natural history side, in zoology, things are changing. And so there’s an advantage in actually having it clear that this is one person’s view at one particular time.

Nonetheless I have an obligation to not grind axes, and not take extreme positions without making clear that they are contentious. What I was trying to do as best I could was to represent the way the world sees, at this particular moment, zoology. I wasn’t saying contentious things; they were as objective as I could make them. But even then, they’re fallible.

Stilgherrian: On that point of contention, both Life On Earth and The Living Planet are soft-sell approaches to ecology. Do you think you could have taken a harder line?

David Attenborough: They’re not soft-sell approaches to ecology. They’re soft-sell approaches to conservation issues, which is a very different thing.

Ecology is simply the study of communities of animals and plants. That there are issues to do with conservation, whether you should knock down forests or not, is certainly a major point. But I think it would have been wrong on every single program, having said “this is the desert” or “this is the forest” or “this is the woodland”, to end off by saying “and it’s in danger and mankind is knocking it down”. Simply because in the end it will go against you.

People will say, “For heaven’s sake, can’t I look at a bird of paradise without being told I’ve got to feel guilty about it?”

So I decided that the right thing to do was to concentrate that issue in the last program. Because the last program deals with what’s happened in the world since the Neolithic revolution of the last 10,000 years, and deals with the latest environment on earth, which is of course the City. And it looks at what mankind is doing with the rest of the world.

Stilgherrian: Filming the series was very much organised before you went out and even shot a foot of film. Do you think that might have been stifling to the style of the final presentation?

David Attenborough: Certainly not! Had I thought that I wouldn’t have done it!

The point is that there are many different types of natural history program to be made. No, perhaps not many, perhaps about three. I’ve been making natural history programmes for 30-odd years, and the majority of them are of two of the types.

Either you go into some particular part of the world, say Borneo, and you travel around Borneo and show what you happen to find, which is a kind of glorified adventure story. Or else you show one particular animal and trace it through its life cycle.

But if you actually want to summarize, let us say, the biology of the jungles worldwide — so it’s the South-East Asian jungle, and the African jungle, and the New Guinea jungle, and the Brazilian jungle — and want to look at what makes a jungle a jungle, which is a perfectly valid biological concept, it would be wrong to simply put in what you happen to come across.

What you should do is look at all the work that’s been-done by people who’ve studied jungles, who have worked with great care to distil the principles which govern life in jungles, and then seek to illustrate that as best you may.

You will want to know how you will actually link something in Brazil with something in West Africa, for example, because they may be examples of convergent evolution or something of that kind.

It’s a different kind of program. Now this doesn’t mean to say that you ignore better ways of saying things if you come across them. But it also means you don’t run down blind alleys or pursue will-o-the-wisps, or get distracted from the main thesis that you’re trying to advance.

Stilgherrian: Going back to the style of the production again, it’s a personal viewpoint and the program’s presented as that. Did you consult much with other zoologists and biologists and so on in making the series?

David Attenborough: Yes. I mean you have to do the job in a finite time. You can’t go on forever. So I wrote the programs, which after all are not very contentious, are not very advanced. They’re fairly straightforward elementary material in an ecological sense.

I write it, then discuss with the directors how we shall film it, and what’s in it, and whether it’s the right kind of shape. And when we’ve agreed on that, we take it apart and look at each one of the sequences and say “Right, who’s the world authority on that particular organism?” That’s not too difficult to find out. And having found that out, you get in touch with him and ask him whether in fact you’ve got that right. You may have got that wrong. [laughs]

You also ask him whether that’s the best example he knows of. He may well say, “Well, that is a good example, but it’s rather a hackneyed example”, which wouldn’t be surprising because I wouldn’t have heard of it unless it’s already been published. And he may well say, “I’ve recently come across a completely new species which shows this particular proposition in much greater detail and rather more dramatically. Why don’t you film that? I can tell you where to find it and what it will do and how it fits into your general thesis and so on.”

That kind of research is done all the time with all the organisms.

Stilgherrian: In that sense the TV programs are almost a video book.

David Attenborough: Well, to some degree they are. Of course visual stimulus is a very much more powerful thing than the word, and if you put on a picture which is of absorbing interest, people tend not to hear the words that are being spoken. You have to be very careful about how many words and what kind of words you put in to accompany the pictures.

Similarly, the converse is the case when it comes to the book. You can’t put enormous numbers of pictures in the book, but have a lot of opportunity to put in words. So what the television programme lacks in words, you make up in the book, and I would like to think that the two are complementary to one another.

Stilgherrian: I read recently that now you’ve made 25 programs, Life On Earth and The Living Planet, you think we should look at re-shaping TV programs and see whether we can do something different. Do you have anything in mind?

David Attenborough: Only that I think the whole pattern of television is changing. It’s certainly changed very much in Britain, or is about to.

After all, television programs which we’re making now are derived very much from formulae and patterns that were originally hammered out in the 50s. And they were hammered out with quite a precise audience in mind, to be programs which were seen by a large number of people, all together, at one particular time, once. That couldn’t be reviewed, that couldn’t be hopped into at various places, that couldn’t be run backwards. That was how they were done.

Now broadcasting is rapidly changing. It is no longer that. It is becoming a thing that doesn’t have to be seen by a large number of people. They don’t look at it once, they may see it many times, because they can see it on videocassette.

They can see it when they want to see it. They can actually extract favourite parts from it. They can have different soundtracks to it on a video disc. They can play it backwards. We have completely different audiences and completely different techniques.

So I think it is a mistake simply to go on using the same shapes of programs what were designed for a quite different purpose.

Stilgherrian: Are there any examples of the new approaches to television work that you no of?

David Attenborough: No. No, I think that’s what we’ve got to do. I was lucky enough to be in the business — I joined in 1952 — when we were working out those things, and that was great fun.

I even remember working out elementary things like cross-shooting interviews: you didn’t actually place the cameras nearest to the people taking part, but shooting diagonally across them. And I remember actually working out that little technique. These days nobody would think of doing it any other way.

Well that was great fun, and I think it would be nice to have a go at working out the new lot.

Stilgherrian: You wouldn’t like to do any crystal-ball-gazing into the look of programs we can expect to see?

David Attenborough: No I think not yet, and I think that’s the problem.

[David Attenborough arrived in Australia when debate over building a road through Queensland's Daintree rainforest was in full swing. But he’d stated that he wouldn’t comment on that or any other individual issue. I asked why.]

David Attenborough: If I arrive in a continent which I don’t know well, and I’m asked about a particular conservation issue in an area I haven’t visited and I haven’t seen first hand, and I don’t know both sides of the question, I avoid making a remark about it. It seems to me to be a fairly bold, almost impertinent, thing to do.

If we’re talking about Australia, Australia is full of enormously knowledgeable ecologists, far more knowledgeable than I am about the issues, and far more knowledgeable about ecology than I am. I am lucky, or whatever, to have got some reputation through television — but it’s a very tinsel kind of reputation. The people who ought to be listened to are the people who’ve studied the place, who can actually speak with great authority.

I think it would be wrong of me to make a particular statement about what’s going on in Daintree. What I can do is to say that I actually have travelled in the Queensland rainforest several times over thirty years, and I know it to be a place of overwhelming beauty and interest, full of extraordinary plants and flowers, and orchids, and insects and mammals, and birds — above all birds! — and wonderful landscape. And I know it to be a great natural treasure. And I know it to be one of the last patches that are left in Australia.

I can also say that coming from somewhere like Africa, or indeed parts of Europe, the great problem is to do with population density.

In Africa there are vast numbers of people who desperately need a small patch of ground on which to grow corn for their children. Now that is a major problem. How do you deal with that and at the same time leave room for elephants?

But in Australia you don’t have that problem. In Australia you have a very low population density. So of all places in the world, it does seem extraordinary that there should be a danger that somehow humanity and the real natural treasures, the wildernesses, couldn’t in some restricted form co-exist.

Stilgherrian: One of the claims of the supporters of building a road through Daintree is that it’s just one road, it’s only 20 feet wide, it won’t make any difference. Is that a realistic attitude?

David Attenborough: No of course it’s not, and anybody’s who’s actually been in those areas knows that it’s not.

If you have cars roaring up and down a roadway it’s going to change the environment profoundly and in all kinds of ways, in terms of intrusion, letting in light, all kinds of things.

But I don’t want to talk about that particular issue because, as I say, I would be a false friend to the conservation movement if I actually started making statements so that people who disagreed with me could say, “There you are, that’s the kind of irresponsible statement, the glib reply which is made by somebody who’s never been there”. So I won’t fall into that particular trap. [laughs]

Stilgherrian: Alright then, looking at more global things, what do you see as the big issues for conservation?

David Attenborough: The overwhelming fundamental issue for conservation, which has to be grappled with at some time, is population growth.

A high proportion of the ills which face the world today come because mankind goes on producing enormous quantities of children. And millions upon millions of extra mouths will have to be fed next year, and the year after, and the year after.

Now how you deal w1th controlling population growth I do not know. China has adopted one way. India has adopted another way. Western Europe has adopted another way. But overall world population still continues to increase, and it’s a great worry.

Stilgherrian: And for David Attenborough, what’s next?

David Attenborough: [laughs] I don’t know. Sweeping up after the series takes quite a long time. We were filming the last program while program number six was going on. The Living Planet has only just been finished really. And coming to Australia is one of the consequences of finishing it up. I have to go to America to do the same thing.

So I won’t, as it were — not that I want to get rid of it [laughs] — but I won’t shed the consequences of the program until about the middle of next year [1985].

Stilgherrian: You’ve already said that you won’t be doing a similar kind o program. If you continue working in programs, what would you like to do next?

David Attenborough: Oh, there are a number of little ideas which I’ve got in my mind. But I’ll let you know. [laughs]

[This is an edited version of an interview with David Attenborough recorded 22 August 1984. The original version was broadcast on Radio 5UV’s Science Journal on 29 August 1984 and subsequently on other community radio stations around Australia. I published a slightly different version in my zine Menu for a Palm Court Café in October 1985. Photograph of David Attenborough by Robin Goodfellow]

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/personal/david_attenborough_1984/feed/ 4 http://stilgherrian.com/politics/democracy_in_action/ http://stilgherrian.com/politics/democracy_in_action/#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2007 06:40:50 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/politics/democracy_in_action/ Global warming — no, I won’t cave into the Neo-Con’s re-branding of “climate change” — may be an important election issue. But, as with so many big issues, most voters wouldn’t have a clue.

Yesterday the Daily Telegraph asked people a multiple-choice question to see whether they knew what the Kyoto Protocol was. Nearly half got it right.

Respondents were asked to select a description of Kyoto from a set of multiple options: (a) A Korean car, (b) The treaty that ended WWII, (c) An agreement on carbon emissions and (d) A Japanese banquet dish.

Almost half of the people surveyed answered correctly… But close to half of those who answered correctly admitted guessing the response.

38% thought it was the treaty ending WWII.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Back when I was working for ABC Radio I did a vox pop the morning after a state cabinet re-shuffle, asking people to name any cabinet member, old or new. 80% didn’t know what a “cabinet” was, let alone any names.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/politics/democracy_in_action/feed/ 7 http://stilgherrian.com/ecology/most_terrifying/ http://stilgherrian.com/ecology/most_terrifying/#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2007 01:21:06 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/ecology/most_terrifying/

Yesterday Crikey reminded me about this video. I’d seen it before, but it’s worth seeing it again — particularly during the election campaign — and showing it to as many people as possible.

The message is simple. Perhaps we can never be 100% sure that global warming is primarily caused by human activity. However the risk of this being the case and us doing nothing about it far outweighs the risk of changing our behaviour and then finding out it wasn’t necessary.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/ecology/most_terrifying/feed/ 0 http://stilgherrian.com/enmore/bisexual_snail_orgy/ http://stilgherrian.com/enmore/bisexual_snail_orgy/#comments Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:50:14 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/enmore/bisexual_snail_orgy/

I was shocked. Early this morning every single agapanthus plant in our back yard was covered in snails. They’d climbed up onto the leaves — and they were having sex.

Hundreds and hundreds of snails engaged in a filthy hermaphroditic bisexual snail orgy!

I raced inside to get a camera. I couldn’t find The Good Camera quickly enough, so I grabbed my phone.

But the forecast is for a 34C maximum today — in October! The sun was rising, and so was the temperature. The snails were retreating.

I only had time to grab a quick, blurry image of this pair (pictured), going their separate ways after a morning of debauchery. Sluts.

]]> http://stilgherrian.com/enmore/bisexual_snail_orgy/feed/ 0 http://stilgherrian.com/marketing/greenwashing/ http://stilgherrian.com/marketing/greenwashing/#comments Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:08:39 +0000 Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/marketing/greenwashing/ I’ll just quote the source:

The term greenwashing applies when companies (or governments) spend more money or time advertising being green, than on investing in environmentally sound practices.

In business, greenwashing often means changing the name and/or label. Early warning signs that a product is probably toxic include images of trees, birds, or dew drops. If all three are on the box, the product will probably make your skin peel off in seconds…

Thanks to John Thackara at Doors of Perception, and to One Plus One Equals Three for the pointer.

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