Listening to some of the younger speakers at Cop26 Looks as if the children are putting the adults to shame!
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Admin please?
I’ve typed out David Attenborough’s introduction to his book ‘A Life on Our Planet’, an introduction which I think is worth reading for anyone who is interested.
Can I upload this as a Word Document or is what he has written copyright?
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Check in the book to see if it’s copyrighted or has been published under a creative commons license.
@james ?
I believe original writing is automatically copyright of the writer (but might be explicitly put under a ‘commons’ licence) - but I doubt if David or his publishers would object anyway - especially if you’re recommending people buy the book.
I think the usual practice is to add a note saying ‘if this is a breach of IPR please let me know and I’ll remove it’.
As to file format - not sure but you could always convert it to a .pdf or image file, which I know works.
Go for it!
Another typically robust article by George today…
I will - thankyou! Thought that maybe just uploading the intro. wouldn’t be objected to - it’s in the best of causes. If the word doc. doesn’t upload I’ll try something else.
Attenborough.docx (16.1 KB)
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Thank you for doing this
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My last quote from David Attenborough’s book - don’t want to chance my arm…
“If every nation were to set profit, people and planet targets for itself as New Zealand does, offer a standard of living for its population as high as Japan’s, embrace the renewable revolution like Morocco, manage its seas like Palau, farm plants as efficiently and sustainably as some are doing in the Netherlands, eat meat rarely like the people of India, encourage the wild to return as Costa Rica has, and build nature into its cities like Singapore, the whole of humanity would be able to achieve a balance with nature. But it will take every nation, and those with the greatest footprints to make the biggest changes. It won’t work if some countries make the transition and others don’t.”
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He left out stop industrial food production using known harmful products, incidents of heart disease, strokes, cancers, auto immune diseases will reduce taking the strain off health services.
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David Attenborough mentioned ‘embrace the renewable revolution like Morocco’. See the possible results that could come out of Morocco…
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There is already a UK company setting up a PV solar farm in that part of the world and laying undersea cables to the UK.
There are many vigorous campaigners for what you have cited – you’ll find plenty on the internet.
David Attenborough is one of the world’s Supermen but he can’t cover everything, but he has at least suggested that we can “ farm plants as efficiently and sustainably as some are doing in the Netherlands – and eat meat rarely like the people of India”, both of which support healthy living which in turn could take the strain off the health services.
Not found any evidence that eating meat would take the strain off the health service.
Also I believe after watching and listening to both sides of the argument that farming livestock and growing vegetables should co exist for the benefit of all of us and the soil.
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He did say ‘eat meat rarely’ and didn’t mean don’t cook it. 
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I agree that done right mixed farming like this - not actually that far from pre-chemical farming - can be both sustainable and humane; however, it’s one solution that might well be optimal in some places, and does not exclude other strategies - in other places rewilding or switching away from keeping livestock altogether will be optimal. The effects of any sustainable solution though are likely to include more expensive meat and - both because of cost and consumer choice - most people eating a lot less meat.
Agreed, the inverse is also true with growing vegetable crops. The reduction of pesticides is a benefit.
Learnt the other day that Monsanto when they invented glyphosate (roundup) also filed patents for it to be used as an antibiotic! Problem is it kills everything, good and bad bacteria but leaves e coli etc alive so you have a shot immune system and a prolific pathogenic killer.
Thankfully it never made it into use.
He suggested ‘eat meat rarely like the people of India’.
Yes noted, I was replying to your adfitional comment.
Here’s my central worry…
There are few public ‘climate change deniers’ left now; the climate scientists seem to have got the message of impending climate breakdown across, and most politicians now pay at least lip service to curtailing it. But when you look at what they are actually doing, it amounts to little - too little! Why?
Part of the answer is the familiar fear that drives all political conservatism: radical change might disrupt existing power and wealth, destabilise the status quo, so has to be resisted. This fear almost inevitably infects ‘world leaders’ - who get to be leaders precisely via existing power and wealth relations.
But there’s also a deeper problem, which George Monbiot is one of the few pointing out: the failure to think ecologically. Ecology is about looking at whole systems and how they interact internally and externally (in Bonzocat’s ‘Morocco’ video, how covering the Sahara with solar panels could solve one problem, but probably create a much bigger one). This means understanding, say, humanity’s over-exploitation of fossil fuels (halting which, as Monbiot points out, would solve the climate problem overnight) in the context of our over-exploitation of all resources.
This is a failure on multiple levels. Climate science focuses on one kind of pollution, often at the expense of others (eg. chemical-based agribusiness might well be endangering even more human lives than climate change, through the propagation of eco-systems collapse).
Moreover, most scientists tend to think in silos (as Kuhn points out, this is a fundamental characteristic of ‘normal science’), and so often seem unable to move to a ‘whole system’ point of view - eg. linking ecology with economics, history, etc, and broaching difficult questions like how the currently dominant legal/financial infrastructure incentivises over-exploitation of resources, or why curtailing this will lead to the collapse of the banking system.
Or to put it bluntly: why capitalism is not sustainable.
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It was nearly always the case that management filtered down how we must accept change, embrace change etc etc. All this whilst refusing to change anything in their world. No change their then.
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