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Exquisite Beauty

Interview with Alastair Fothergill

Alastair Fothergill is former head of the BBC Natural History Unit and award-winning producer of several groundbreaking BBC documentary series, including "Life in the Freezer" and "The Blue Planet." His latest series, "Planet Earth," a BBC/Discovery Channel/NHK coproduction, airs from 2006. See www.bbc.co.uk/planetearth

[©Planet Earth/Sue Flood]

SGI Quarterly: What was it that first got you as a child interested in life and animals?

Alastair Fothergill: We used to have a summer house in North Norfolk, and my father was a schoolteacher, so we had these long holidays. And I used to have weeks and weeks up there--it's 40 miles of nature reserve and endless mudflats. I used to just go off on my own on my bicycle. There's a bird reserve up there at Cley, and I used to work there on a voluntary basis. Then at school I had a fantastic biology master who was a very, very inspirational man. He had this battered old minibus, and we'd think nothing of leaving at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, driving five hours to Pembrokeshire in North Wales, spending five hours looking at peregrine falcons, then driving back again, and he was just wonderfully inspirational at the age of 13, 14 or so. It was absolutely clear to me--I didn't even have to half think about it--all I ever wanted to do was work with animals.

SGIQ: In the past years you've been traveling the globe widely in your role as producer on the BBC's flagship nature programs--if you had to describe life on planet Earth to a little green man, what would you say?

AF: It's funny because I've just finished making a TV series that in a sense tried to do that. . . . It still strikes me day in, day out, that it's absolutely exquisitely beautiful. I'm very fortunate, I've been to a lot of the classic wildernesses, but the reason I love nature, the one thing that on a daily basis confirms it for me is that it's beautiful at every level. For me there is as much pleasure, very honestly, in watching the blue tits that come to the nut feeder at home as there is in going to Antarctica. Every year when the swallows come back from Africa, it excites me as much as it did when I was 11 . . . it's breathtaking and that's what I love about my job--it's really about trying to distill that passion and share it with people, particularly the less fortunate who don't have the chances, and also people who frankly don't take the trouble to look at it.

SGIQ: In terms of the idea of interdependency with nature, how can people reestablish that connection?

AF: I think they're going to be forced to, because wherever you live, you have to drink water, you have to breathe oxygen. All the oxygen on the planet is created by the phytoplankton in the seas, and the trees, so any view that you can actually separate yourself from the natural world is untenable. People say that there is no wilderness left, but most of our planet is wilderness--98 percent of the living space on our planet in terms of volume is wilderness and nobody goes there--admittedly it's places like the deep ocean, like the Poles, like the desert, which are not very comfortable.

Humpback whales bubblenet feeding    [©Anne T. Converse]

But you're asking how can people who live an urban existence stay emotionally and intellectually connected. There's a number of things they can do. They can watch TV programs such as "Planet Earth," for example!

There is also real, real beauty in small things. For example, Tokyo has some of the most beautiful gardens in the world. . . . In Manhattan peregrine falcons are nesting on tower blocks--I saw a peregrine swoop down and take a pigeon on Park Avenue. . . . So the wonderful thing about nature is it's unbelievably resilient. It's there on your doorstep, but people don't notice it.

SGIQ: In all your experience, is there any particular moment you can describe when you felt, this is some kind of defining experience?


AF: This time last year I was down in Antarctica filming "Planet Earth," and I was surrounded by humpback whales trying to feed on krill, small crustaceans they like to eat. What they do is they dive down quite deep, and two of them swim up in a coordinated sort of ballet, and as they swim they release bubbles from their blowholes. Each one does half of a circle, and as the bubbles come up to the surface they create a curtain of bubbles, and the krill are frightened of it and concentrate in the middle of this circle of two curtains. On the surface you see the bubbles form a circle and suddenly in the middle of it these massive whales come up and grab this enriched soup. . . . That is exquisitely beautiful, and I was there in a tiny rubber dinghy, and it's frightening because the whales could easily upset the dinghy, and around you is this exquisite Antarctic scenery. That was special.

SGIQ: Is it a dog-eat-dog world, or is there cooperation and coexistence?

AF: There's a bit of both. I think ultimately we are driven by selfish genetics, but intelligent animals and intelligent people recognize that actually we are so interdependent that altruistic behavior is a selfish necessity--they're not opposite.

SGIQ: What about us as human beings in this beautiful world? What is your feeling about our position, our role?

AF: Clearly we are part of it because we are all dependent on each other; us on them as much as them on us if one chooses to make a boundary between them. The big problem is that, as it says in the first line of the series, 100 years ago there were 1.5 billion of us, and there are now 6 billion, and the supremacy of man on our planet is reaching a level which is absolutely terrifying. I think it's going to increasingly dominate our thoughts. It's about basic planetary survival. And even if you have absolutely no interest in or attachment to the natural world and would be very happy to live in a concrete box in a concrete city eating plastic food, it's gone beyond that--it's about water to drink and air to breathe. It's funny that those of us who have a passion and a closeness to nature will finally be listened to because it's about survival now. If it doesn't dominate the end of our life, it will absolutely dominate the lives of our children and that is something relatively new, because basically the damage to the planet has been done since the Second World War. It's frightening.

Do I think we're different from animals? I've made a lot of films about chimpanzees, and I think there are some very smart chimpanzees and some very silly people!

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