Tuning into the second series of Planet Earth for the sake of its wondrous small-screen lustre, the purview is soon apt to take a murky turn. For David Attenborough, venerable narrator, would have us all back to the dark ages through his incessant endeavour to make us protect and preserve.
The mere thought of in anyway protecting the environment is anathema to he who would passionately deny climate change. After all the first pages of the Bible tell us that man is made in God’s image, and that he has given us ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’.
One hardly needs to read further, but it doesn’t take a good steward of the Bible to be more than a little dubious when it comes to what this newfangled breed of scientists have to say. So when Attenborough takes us unwittingly to the Arabian Peninsula, and his mellifluous, sage-like voice attempts to lull you into caring about a desert goat, best be on alert.
These animals are certainly adorable, with their doey eyes, tiny mouths, and delicately cloven feet. Called Nubian ibex, they boldly inhabit only the steepest of cliffs. But just as the Nubian ibex struggles for a foothold amid such lofty peaks, so it is for the climate change denier who is all but blinded by science, struggling to get a foothold amid a tangled web of statistical deceit.
When we start thinking of animals as cute – just like the Nubian ibex – we are on a slippery slope. Our considered rejection of the scientific consensus is in danger of becoming sun-baked. We must remember that all of nature is for man to dominate, and far from becoming flabby and soft, like our forefathers we must pillage and hunt.
We should not empathise with or dote on the Nubian ibex, but instead commandeer their best attributes, cautious and nimble, eschewing the climate change lobby as they throw their stones. It is they who will eventually crumble. Of course if the slopes they climb on were slippier still, the Nubian ibex would plummet to their deaths, which would be an awful shame, because they are terribly cute.
