David Attenborough Speaking with Obama on Climate Change
Interesting conversation between the famous natualist David Attenborough and Barrack Obama. Anyone that has watched the BBC Life series will know that this botanist is one of the truly great people on this planet. What I love about David is his complete commitment to nature, to educate people about nature and his great passion to pre-serve it. He is greatly admired and you can see when he speaks that he is intense and natural himself. He is a voice for harmony and responsibility for nature. We live in interesting media climates that generate focuses on problems that generate great fear rather than inspiring populations around the world to come together to face the real issues of lack of peace and imbalance with natural systems. We go on about jobs and I am having conversations about unemployment and living in a way where need equals want. That is how I live. People believe the mantra of jobs, making money, standards of living and ignore the fact that the very lifestyle we call civilised is destroying the earth. I work full time on peace and I allow inspiration to move my life. I am technically unemployed. I have made many efforts to find work that serves society and promote my own work in conflict resolution and inner peace but I find society not ready or my life is meant to be like this for now as I develop self determination, self inquiry and self responsibility and learn to be alone. The aloneness is critical as I can hear within myself what my true needs are, my true wants and tune into what my life is for rather than bringing distractions in to make me fill gaps, to keep entertained, to keep up and to belong. I found the latter to be a waste of time and my intent is to recalibrate with natural earth systems by recalibrating with my true nature. We are all birthed from nature, we came into a world that had no economic structures, that was a living sphere some call Gaia. A living system where the abundance of nature was all around us. Moreover, it fills our lives with joy as we look upon an ocean, a forest, a flower, smell the air and eat foods carefully nurtured by nature to ripeness. We live in a veritable Eden but we are so brainwashed in our own lives, the things we think are important and keeping up with the Jones’s as they say, that we have forgotten our true nature.
I see a mirror between Obama and Attenborough, both are kind men, both want to see change, both are leaders. The difference is that David can be free to simply speak truth as he understands it, Obama’s world is very different he has to be mindful to balance truth with other interests as there are many who still beat the drum of economics and have absolutely no idea of the game they are playing with. The feeling I get is Russian roulette, we are playing a game of bluff, we are going down the route of business as usual, still unable to face our own deep fears long conditioned by centuries of indoctrination, not unlike a cult mentality. I smile at the group think and I know as we lose species, we lose treasures like the Great Barrier Reef, we see ice caps melt, we see water issues, pollution and chemicals altering the natural patterning of our system, until it hits us economically we will be like ostrich’s with heads in the sands ignoring the reality forming around us. I do not choose to join in the collective amnesia, I choose to look at it and take responsibility. I see not working economically as a duty in this moment as I am not harming the earth like others, I am spending time along to work out peace, deeply reflecting on my part, I am educating others, communicating like in this blog. This is my service to humanity, this emerges from love. David Attenborough spent a lifetime following his love, nature. From love great awareness has emerged like the pearl from the harsh oyster. I send my own tribute to this wonderful man and to Obama who I feel is in resonance.
A small overview from Wikipedia:
Sir David Frederick Attenborough /ˈætənbʌrə/ OM CH CVO CBE FRS FLS FZS FSA (born 8 May 1926)[2][3] is an English broadcaster and naturalist.
He is best known for writing and presenting the nine Life series, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, which collectively form a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on the planet. He is also a former senior manager at the BBC, having served as controller of BBC Two and director of programming for BBC Television in the 1960s and 1970s. He is the only person to have won BAFTAs for programmes in each of black and white, colour, HD, and 3D.
Attenborough is widely considered a national treasure in Britain, although he himself does not like the term.[4][5][6] In 2002 he was named among the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote.[7] He is the younger brother of director, producer and actor Richard Attenborough.[8] …
Beginning with Life on Earth in 1979, Attenborough set about creating a body of work which became a benchmark of quality in wildlife film-making and influenced a generation of documentary film-makers. The series also established many of the hallmarks of the BBC’s natural history output. By treating his subject seriously and researching the latest discoveries, Attenborough and his production team gained the trust of scientists, who responded by allowing him to feature their subjects in his programmes. In Rwanda, for example, Attenborough and his crew were granted privileged access to film Dian Fossey‘s research group of mountain gorillas. Innovation was another factor in Life on Earth’s success: new film-making techniques were devised to get the shots Attenborough wanted, with a focus on events and animals that were hitherto unfilmed. Computerised airline schedules, which had only recently been introduced, enabled the series to be elaborately devised so that Attenborough visited several locations around the globe in each episode, sometimes even changing continents mid-sentence. Although appearing as the on-screen presenter, he consciously restricted his pieces to camera to give his subjects top billing.
The success of Life on Earth prompted the BBC to consider a follow-up, and five years later, The Living Planet was screened. This time, Attenborough built his series around the theme of ecology, the adaptations of living things to their environment. It was another critical and commercial success, generating huge international sales for the BBC. In 1990 The Trials of Life completed the original Life trilogy, looking at animal behaviour through the different stages of life. The series drew strong reactions from the viewing public for its sequences of killer whales hunting sea lions on a Patagonian beach and chimpanzees hunting and violently killing a colobus monkey.
In the 1990s, Attenborough continued to use the “Life” strand title for a succession of authored documentaries. In 1993 he presented Life in the Freezer, the first television series to survey the natural history of Antarctica. Although past normal retirement age, he then embarked on a number of more specialised surveys of the natural world, beginning with plants. They proved a difficult subject for his producers, who had to deliver five hours of television featuring what are essentially immobile objects. The result, The Private Life of Plants (1995), showed plants as dynamic organisms by using time-lapse photography to speed up their growth.
Prompted by an enthusiastic ornithologist at the BBC Natural History Unit, Attenborough then turned his attention to the animal kingdom and in particular, birds. As he was neither an obsessive twitcher, nor a bird expert, he decided he was better qualified to make The Life of Birds (1998) on the theme of behaviour. The documentary series won a Peabody Award the following year.[24] The order of the remaining “Life” series was dictated by developments in camera technology. For The Life of Mammals (2002), low-light and infrared cameras were deployed to reveal the behaviour of nocturnal mammals. The series contains a number of memorable two shots of Attenborough and his subjects, which included chimpanzees, a blue whale and a grizzly bear. Advances in macro photography made it possible to capture natural behaviour of very small creatures for the first time, and in 2005, Life in the Undergrowth introduced audiences to the world of invertebrates.
At this point, Attenborough realised that he had spent 20 years unconsciously assembling a collection of programmes on all the major groups of terrestrial animals and plants – only reptiles and amphibians were missing. When Life in Cold Blood was broadcast in 2008, he had the satisfaction of completing the set, brought together in a DVD encyclopaedia called Life on Land. In an interview that year, Attenborough was asked to sum up his achievement, and responded:
The evolutionary history is finished. The endeavour is complete. If you’d asked me 20 years ago whether we’d be attempting such a mammoth task, I’d have said “Don’t be ridiculous!” These programmes tell a particular story and I’m sure others will come along and tell it much better than I did, but I do hope that if people watch it in 50 years’ time, it will still have something to say about the world we live in.[25]
However, in 2010 Attenborough asserted that his First Life – dealing with evolutionary history before Life on Earth – should also be included within the “Life” series. In the documentary Attenborough’s Journey he stated, “This series, to a degree which I really didn’t fully appreciate until I started working on it, really completes the set.”[26]
I will highlight some interesting observations from this important discussion. He speak of the problem of the Great Barrier Reef, rising water temperatures and acidification. Obama speaks about investments and acknowledges the interconnectedness of our planet. Attenborough speaks of working together and global solutions. China and US are important players in this global picture given their consumptions. Attenborough speaks about the fascination of nature and that children are always interested. Adults seem to lose this. David sought to understand how the natural world works. He is a specialist in zoology. He went into the Navy. He didn’t believe he was cut out for science. He went into televisions and found this love. Obama speaks of growing up in Hawaii and the impact the environment had on him. He speaks of his children being more aware. David said that the letters he gets from kids bring tears to his eyes and young people feel humanity has no right to destroy the planet. Obama explores whether humanity can get ahead of these problems and reverse them. David Attenborough says if we find ways to store power from renewal resources he says this is a huge step that will help in solving the problems on the earth. Obama speaks of his time in Africa and that there was not an incentive to protect nature he speaks of economic incentives. David is concerned about population growth. Obama speaks of girls education and empowerment as a solution and that they will have less children, smaller families and stabilising populations. David says you need literate informed population and birth rates falling. Obama sees the internet as a powerful tool for people to learn more.
David’s statement that is picked up in the heading of this video is “Natural World is Part of Your Inheritance” is the same as saying it is your real wealth. We keep looking for the gold in money not in natural life around us, from which we sprang. We tend to see inheritence in material wealth and status but the real wealth is the unity of nature.