Birthday wishes and a request to Sir David Attenborough

Sir David Attenborough, who turned 99 on Wednesday, is no stranger to the wild and the unusual. This birthday greeting is a plea from the desolate landscape of higher education and for the planet he loves — save the social sciences and humanities! Help them to learn and communicate about our beautiful planet.

Attenborough’s work brings to us the interconnectedness and the delicate balance of Life on Earth. These television series, books, lectures and documentary films reveal our Planet Earth, igniting in us a spirit of oneness with nature, a sense of awe and humility, and a combination of deep respect, love and valour. They amplify our need to know how different we are as a species. Our exosomatic urges of accumulation and control that build our social systems contradict and steadily destroy the endosomatic needs and expressions of diverse life forms, the dynamic earth systems that shape and co-evolve within this Living Planet. Those like Attenborough concerned about and communicating on nature, environment, wildlife to the public, are a rare breed within our species. Knowledge and the act of knowing is central to all life on this earth. Cultivating that knowledge is, therefore, is not just a necessity for survival but also for the larger wellbeing, sustainability, diversity and justice for all. Through this birthday greeting we acknowledge and celebrate the social sciences and humanities that are somewhat unappreciated today in the modern university system.

All living beings know freshwater systems. In the paternal guard for a baby lily-trotter, courtship of the elegant Clark’s grebe, the cool trap constructed by an alligator, or the alarm among scientists who note that only a third of the planet’s rivers reach the ocean, we see life. We watch and listen carefully when Attenborough’s films show freshwater life. Attenborough’s passionate communication raises a toast to knowledge; to the expertise vested with academics, experiential knowledge cherished and validated by indigenous people, and the multiple forms of knowledge exchanged and cultivated in nature.

Despite this passionate communication, critics point out how Attenborough downplays the massive negative impact that we, as one species, have wrought on our planet’s health and sustainability. George Monbiot (2018) accused Attenborough of generating complacency, ignorance and confusion about our environmental challenges. A concern that Attenborough has since addressed, telling us how the climate crisis is caused and how our planet matters.

Our need to know more about the social systems that interact with nature has never been so acute. Attenborough’s forceful narratives of nature’s principles, interactions and processes pay scant attention to the institutions or rules that govern social systems and economies. The exposé on planetary systems, whether in the Arctic ice or in the grasslands reveal no “natural capital” in these systems. How did we shift from being a part of nature to becoming masters of nature, enslaving and extracting, plundering and dumping, and now, starting to re-engineer the very biophysical foundations of life on earth?

Our social systems built on the institutions of private property and wealth, measured not in healthy happy communities but in monetary values, are at loggerheads with natural systems. Attenborough shows us indigenous people and animals sharing, exchanging, co-evolving in specific ecosystems; each group studying and validating their knowledge. Deeper social science investigations are necessary on our understanding of productive resources, on why we ignore the commons and govern both inappropriately. The global commons like the atmosphere and the oceans that are stretched to their limits with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, plastics, chemicals and other wastes demand that we revisit fundamental concepts like externality and profit. Every extractive industry, oil spill and toxic waste generation that kills life on earth and destroys the habitats for millions of our fellow living beings push us to revise our notions of crime and justice.

Attenborough’s communication about the natural world brings awareness and hope. This work makes it eminently clear that it is not enough to communicate simple and politically cleansed messages to policy makers about 1.5oC rise in temperature above the pre-industrial revolution days. At the planetary level all of us in developed and developing countries struggle with heat stress, forest fires, floods, other extreme weather events, loss of biodiversity and poor national capacities for adaptation and mitigation. We need the social sciences to research how governments and corporates devise ways to maintain their dynamic stability without losing control over the creation and concentration of wealth. Fundamental inquiry and learning about entangled social and natural systems must be promoted.

Ecological economists conceptualise the economy embedded in society which in turn is a sub-set of the environment. Their studies of complex relations between human households and nature’s households need the power and appeal of the humanities to effect change. There are terrains where the poor are forced into extractive industries, poaching and encroachment of wildlife habitats. Political ecology scholarship needs to reach and engage with international trade and rich countries that consume such extracted high value products. The voice of the social sciences and humanities are crucial for learning about and communicating our planetary stress. Concepts and theories in sociology, history, political science, linguistics, and behavioural sciences inform Attenborough’s stories about wildlife, landscapes and seascapes, even as the social sciences and humanities are being financially whittled down in universities across the world.

Your voice, Sir David, in support of the critical social sciences and humanities will go a long way to conserve and cherish life on Earth.

Rajeswari S Raina is professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University. The views expressed are personal