Planet of the fakes: Wildlife TV shows portray a phoney Garden of Eden,
but the reality is built on ethnic cleansing
By George Monbiot
There are two planet earths. One of them is the complex, morally
challenging world in which we live, threatened by ecological collapse.
The other is the one we see on the wildlife programmes. We love these
programmes not only because they show us how curious the products of
evolution are, but also because they remove us to a parallel planet, the
Garden of Eden before the sixth day of creation, when God went and
messed it up by making man.
The construction of wilderness has always been a key component of the
colonial project. Almost everywhere that European settlers went, they
either proclaimed the land they seized to be terra nullius or, by
expelling its people, ensured that it became so. The land which many of
the richest colonists sought was that which harboured great
concentrations of game.
The Normans, for example, were obsessed by hunting, and many of them
joined the invasion of 1066 simply to secure new reserves. Hugh le Gros
Veneur ("the fat hunter"), seized vast tracts of Lancashire, which his
descendants, the Grosvenors, or Dukes of Westminster, own to this day.
William I established several "forests", or royal hunting estates, whose
inhabitants he cleared. This is one of the reasons why both "forest" ( a
word which has come to mean a place where trees grow) and the habitats
of big wild animals have taken their place in our mythology of
wilderness. The great "wildernesses" of Scotland were established for
the same purpose and by the same means 700 years later.
But these reserves were tiny by comparison to the wildernesses the
British colonists made in east Africa. At first the land they seized was
set aside for hunting, but as the game ran out, they began to preserve
it for the camera rather than the gun. After the second world war,
Bernhard Grzimek, "the father of conservation" in east Africa, announced
that he would turn the Serengeti in northern Tanzania into a vast
national park. This land, which is possibly the longest-inhabited place
on earth, was, he declared, a "primordial wilderness".
Though there was no evidence that local people threatened the wildlife,
Grzimek decided that "no men, not even native ones, should live inside
its borders". His approach was gleefully embraced by the British.
Thousands of square miles of savannah in Kenya and Tanzania were
annexed, and its inhabitants expelled. Only the whites could afford the
entrance fees to the reserves, so only they were permitted to enter the
new, primordial wilderness.
This project was, from the beginning, assisted by wildlife films.
Grzimek's documentary, Serengeti Shall Not Die, generated massive
enthusiasm for his ethnic cleansing programme. Joy Adamson, who was one
of the most viciously racist and brutal characters ever to carve a
career in Africa, used the status afforded by her books and the films
they inspired to wage war on the indigenous people. She drove the
eastern Samburu out of their best grazing lands to establish what she
called a "conservation project" (in reality an attempt to rehabilitate
her pet leopard). She described the Samburu as "squatters" and renamed
the prominent features of the land she had stolen after her pets. When
she was murdered in this artificial wilderness, the inquiry was delayed
for months by a surfeit of suspects.
Today, conservation officials in Kenya often concede that traditional
grazing could be permitted in the parks and reserves without driving out
the wildlife. But the local people must continue to be excluded because
the tourists "don't expect to see them there". The tourists don't expect
to see them there largely because the television shows them that healthy
wildlife habitats are places without people.
Paradise is the founding myth of the colonist. Unable to contemplate the truth of what we do, we extract from our fathomless collective guilt a story of primordial innocence.