Centre for Environmental Humanities – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Frozen Empires revisited

Posted on February 1, 2021March 30, 2023 by janet.crompton

Image taken from the front cover of Adrian Howkin’s book – Frozen Empires

The recent release of the paperback edition of Frozen Empires: An Environmental History of the Antarctic Peninsula, offers an opportunity to revisit the arguments I made in this book and reflect on how it continues to shape my work in Antarctica and thinking about environmental history. The book sets out to frame the mid-twentieth century Antarctic sovereignty dispute among Argentina, Britain, and Chile as an environmental history of decolonization. Through a strategy I refer to as asserting ‘environmental authority’, Britain used the performance of scientific research and the production of useful knowledge to support its imperial claims to the region as a territory known as the ‘Falkland Islands Dependencies’. Argentina and Chile both contested Britain’s claim, and put forward their own assertations to sovereignty based on a sense that this was their environment as a result of proximity, geological contiguity, and shared climate and ecosystems. In the contest between British assertions of environmental authority and Argentine and Chilean ‘environmental nationalism’ it was the imperial, scientific vision of the environment that largely won out. There was no genuine decolonization of the Antarctic Peninsula region, or the Antarctic continent more generally. Instead, the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which remains in force today, retains pre-existing sovereignty claims in a state of suspended animation (‘frozen’ in the pun of the treaty negotiators) and perpetuates the close connection between science and politics across the Antarctic Continent.

Much of my work since researching and writing Frozen Empires has focused on the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys on the opposite side of the Antarctic continent. I am a co-PI on a US National Science Foundation funded Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project, collaborating with scientists to ask how historical research might inform our understanding of this unique place. The McMurdo Dry Valleys are the largest predominantly ice-free region of Antarctica and since the late 1950s have become an important site of Antarctic science. Geologists are attracted to the Dry Valleys by the exposed rock, geomorphologists by the opportunity to study the glaciological history of the continent, and ecologists by the presence of microscopic ecosystems. The close connection between politics and science that I identified in the Antarctic Peninsula is also applicable to the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys. The two most active countries in the region, New Zealand and the United States, can both be seen as making assertions of environmental authority to support their political position. A major difference is that now I find myself on the inside of this system, working with scientists to help produce the ‘useful information’ that is being used for political purposes.

Working as more of an insider in a system I critiqued in Frozen Empires raises a number of awkward questions. Can I retain a critical distance? Am I contributing to the perpetuation of an unequal system? What might the decolonization of Antarctic research look like? These questions are not easy to answer. Not infrequently I find myself looking back on the lack of inhibition I felt while researching and writing Frozen Empires and wishing for something similar in my current research. Academic collaboration by definition leads to entanglements, and these entanglements increase complexity. It is much easier, for example, to write critically about the imperial history of Antarctica than to convince scientific colleagues that this imperial history continues to have an impact on contemporary scientific research.

But for all the messiness and difficulties involved in collaboration, there are also tremendous opportunities. I have learned a lot about how science gets done through working with the McMurdo Dry Valleys LTER site, and I have learned about working as part of an academic team. Place-based studies offers an ideal opportunity for interdisciplinary research, and I think it is vital to have humanities perspectives represented in these collaborations. It takes time – often more time than expected – for effective collaborations to develop, and this process involves a significant degree of mutual learning. Researching and writing Frozen Empires fundamentally shaped what I bring to the table as an environmental historian in the McMurdo Dry Valleys project, and I remain convinced by its argument for imperial continuity. But the process of engaging in collaborative research has unsettled at least some of my earlier positions, and the book I’m writing on the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys will likely be quite different to Frozen Empires.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Adrian Howkins, Reader in Environmental History, University of Bristol.

It has been reposted with kind permission from the Bristol Centre for Environmental Humanities. View the original blog.

Thinking with salmon about ecological ruin, ontology, and decoloniality

Posted on December 11, 2020March 31, 2023 by janet.crompton

Salmon anatomical plate drawing. Source: University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections (Sp Coll RQ 271)

If you carried out a survey of what people think is the most important thing that we can do to stem the tide of ecological ruin sweeping the planet, challenging Euro-Modern ontologies of nature (beliefs and ideas about reality, or ‘nature’s nature’) probably wouldn’t emerge as a number one priority on the list. In a time of crisis, where time literally feels like it’s running out and the apocalypse is already here for some people, carrying out this kind of philosophical reflection might feel like ineffective political strategy. Yet a challenging of our assumptions about ontology is precisely what a growing chorus of theorists and activists are calling for. For my PhD project, I want to examine how heeding these calls might allow us to better understand the nature of the ecological crisis we are facing.

Specifically, my project is building upon decolonial scholarship and activism that emphasises the role that the politics of ontology has played in bringing about intertwined social and environmental injustices. Within the history of Western philosophy, the study of ontology has mostly consisted of making assessments of the reality of the world. Decolonial theorists such as Arturo Escobar, Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser have challenged these dominant philosophies of ontology by destabilising the very idea that we live in a singular world or universe. Instead, these thinkers have argued we live in a world of many worlds they call the pluriverse, in which there exists multipleradically different ontologies. Decolonial theorists have documented the political currents of power that exist between pluriversal worlds, diagnosing Euro-Modern ontologies as predicated upon a dominance of culture over nature and therefore ecologically ruinous, as well as violent and colonising, supressing any ontology that does not align with its firmly held principles of rationality and individualism. In this sense, for proponents of the pluriverse, environmental justice begins with a dismantling of the systems of power through which Euro-Modern ontologies have violently dominated others.

Decolonial activism and scholarship has emerged primarily from Latin American and Indigenous geographies, and as such most of the literature examines thought coming from these worlds. However, I am intrigued by Escobar’s (2020) suggestion that it is possible to bring about decolonial and ‘nondominant’ Wests – that another Europe is possible. To think about how insurrectional decolonial ontologies of nature might arise from within Europe, I’m turning to a perhaps surprising companion: the salmon.

Salmon farming in Norway – image credit Gerd Meissner from Pixabay

Salmon are playing a complex role in the theatre of contemporary Anthropocene politics. An enchanting creature that travels thousands of miles using ancestral memory as its guide home, salmon ways of life are becoming increasingly threatened as rivers and oceans are warped by the toxic infrastructure of modernity. Activists, scientists, Indigenous communities, fishers and nature-lovers have all documented the alarming rate at which wild salmon and other water-dwelling creatures are being threatened with extinction. As salmon are simultaneously caught by trawlers, domesticated in industrial salmon farms, bred in hatchery pens to boost depleted wild stock and subject to increasingly stringent conservation laws, they sink deeper and deeper within the folds of Euro-Modern logics.

However, as well as being indicators of the logics of modernity, salmon are also sources of hope. Fisheries have been highlighted as some of the most hopeful sites for fostering nondominant ontologies of nature within Europe. Salmon have swum in European rivers and oceans for millennia, meaning there are deep historical cultures of angling and caring for salmon that we might turn to as examples in the struggle to bring about fair and just ecological relations. Elsewhere, efforts to articulate alternative communal economic arrangements and relocalize food have found fisheries to be potent and generative sites of experimentation (see, for example Elinor Ostrom’s influential work on the commons).

For my PhD project, I am proposing that we let salmon, the injustice they materialise and the hope they symbolise, act as a guide. Following salmon in the UK and across Europe, both as they emerge in present material entanglements and in historic flows, leads us to a dizzying array of political ecologies of extraction and conservation in which we find unfolding conflicts over use, meaning and access to salmon. It’s my suggestion that a detailed study of these political ecologies and the different queer and historic ontologies emerging within them could serve, in its own small way, as a crystallising political narrative for bringing about environmental and social justice. As Environmental Humanities scholars have shown, bringing about environmental justice will not just be about new technoscientific technologies or acts passed in parliament: it will be, in part, about what kinds of stories we tell. I say let us listen to the stories of the salmon: stories of ancestral struggle in the face of the ever-encroaching logics of modernity, stories of resistance in the face of power and domination, so that we might have a better understanding of the problem we must ourselves struggle against.

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This blog is written by Austin Read, a PhD candidate in human geography at the University of Bristol. You can follow Austin on Twitter @austin_jread. This blog was reposted with kind permission from the Centre for Environmental Humanities. View the original blog.

“Between the Insect Hordes and Ourselves”: Imaginaries of insect declines from the 1960s onwards

Posted on December 11, 2020April 4, 2023 by janet.crompton

A still from Bee Movie (2007), directed by Simon J. Smith and Steven Hickner

‘According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.’ You might recognise these words as the opening from the animated film Bee Movie (2007). The film is as known for its memes as its compulsive heteronormativity. If you are unaware: not only are there many happy nuclear bee families, the star of the film, Barry, is a male worker bee. On top of that, the human woman with whom Barry takes on the honey industry and fights for equal bee rights appears to develop some warm feelings for him. Needless to say, Bee Movie is fun but not a cinematographic masterpiece.

Jokes aside, the 2007 film is a good indicator of an influx of documentaries, memoirs, novels, and poetry collections starring the Western or European honeybee. Perhaps I’m being too critical here. This influx does excite me in a way, as it shows that insect life and decline has become part of a broader conversation. But, with this awareness of insect decline in our cultural imagination comes a sting in the tale. In this case, the sting is an almost obsessive focus on the European honeybee in an age of overall insect decline and what Elizabeth Kolbert (2014) popularised as the sixth extinction. There are thousands of known species of bees all over the world—not to mention other bugs—and yet a select group of people continue to talk, write, film, draw and campaign for the European honeybee. (Are you familiar with the concept of bee-washing?)

In response to these stories, I started thinking about the following: why is there so much creative work on the honeybee? Insects make up the most biodiverse and largest class of described (and estimated) species in the animal kingdom. And while many of these—not all—are indeed facing decline or even extinction, the European honeybee is not one of them.

What started out as a general interest, quickly evolved—metamorphosed!—into my doctoral project on insect decline. Inspired by Ursula Heise’s (2016) work on the cultural side of extinction, I started asking the following: what kind of narratives do people create when talking about insect decline, and how do they tie in with other and older insect stories, our broader cultural memory? Is there an explanation to be found for this honeybee hyperfocus when it comes to narratives of insect decline? Thinking about these questions, I kept returning to Donna Haraway, who wrote that ‘it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with … It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’ (12) Haraway’s keen (if not overcited) observation also applies to the case of insect decline. When looking at creative storytelling—of which there is a lot—we’re not just considering entertainment or aesthetics. Even with something as seemingly banal as Bee Movie, it does matter what stories we tell to tell the story of insect decline. So why do people contribute to this, for lack of a better word, honeybee extravaganza?

An assortment of contemporary honeybee stories

My project become more than a chance to get deep into the problem with honeybees and other charismatic microfauna. Thinking about tiny critters (instead of charismatic megafauna) created the opportunity to engage with and tease out some of the broader questions in the fields of critical animal and extinction studies. Between all the reading and writing and talking and plotting out of the work that needs to be done, theories and ideas and random shower thoughts keep falling into place, and I have a red thread or two running through the different chapters of my thesis. Watch this space.

For now, I do want to say that one of the more rewarding elements of my research so far has been the deep dive into care ethics. My understanding of the concept has both expanded and gained new focus, and my deep dive into care and conservation has opened my eyes to the possibility of care as a violent practice (Salazar Parreñas 2018). One of my current challenges is to see how care, understood as ‘a vital affective state, an ethical obligation and a practical labour’ (Puig de la Bellacasa), is reflected in the poetics of insect decline. What does a poetics of care look like when we let ourselves become subject to, as Haraway (2008) phrased it, the ‘unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning’ (36). What happens when we allow ourselves to pay careful attention to the other-than-human life around us and start to care?

Assorted Coleoptera in the University of Texas Insect Collection

Another thread is that of the different (temporal and spatial) scales of extinction and the limits of our empathy for other-than-human animals. As Ursula Heise (2016) and Dolly Jørgensen (2019) so effectively argue in their monographs on the topic, extinctions come to matter once they reflect upon our own (human) pasts, presents, and futures and we can emotionally engage with them. And like these different pasts, presents, and futures, extinction isn’t singular. It is easy—and to a certain extent even useful—to put it all under the label of the sixth extinction. Still, I am increasingly convinced that such labels obscure the differences and intricacies people need to be aware of in the face of the sixth extinction—or rather, extinctions.

There are local extinctions, global extinctions, extinctions completely missed or forgotten (by human eyes), even desired extinctions. Communities respond to and engage with different species and local and global extinctions in different ways. Especially when something tricky like shifting baseline syndrome ensures that some communities aren’t aware of local extinctions or declines in the first place, while passionate campaigns for charismatic megafauna put certain species on the global agenda and in the public eye. I’m not saying this is always a bad thing (I’m just as passionate about the survival of the Malayan and Sumatran tiger as the next person).

I am, however, saying that it is worth researching how attention and care are directed and, ideally, can be redirected in times of need. And insects—in all their creeping and crawling diversity, with important ecosystem functions such as pollination, prey, and waste disposal—have turned out to be an excellent group to consider these questions.

Sources

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016.
—. When Species Meet. U of Minneapolis P, 2008.
Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinctions: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. U of Chicago P, 2016.
Jørgensen, Dolly. Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging. MIT Press, 2019.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Bloomsbury, 2014.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Salazar Parreñas, Juno. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Duke UP, 2018

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Eline D. Tabak, PhD researcher in English (University of Bristol) and Environmental Humanities (BSU). This blog outlines her SWW DTP-funded project. You can follow Eline on twitter @elinetabak and see more of her writing and work at www.elinedtabak.com. This blog was reposted with kind permission from the Centre for Environmental Humanities. View the original blog.

Eline D. Tabak

Mourning auks: Creative expressions of extinction in an era of ecological loss

Posted on December 7, 2020March 31, 2023 by janet.crompton

Looking at your hearts, suspended in their jar, I try and imagine the two of you still alive. I know that if you were anything like your closest living kin, you would have bonded for life. You lived a long time, and it would have been a relationship that had gathered and deepened over years. By the time you came together this final time, the congregations that were so important to your kind were already a thing of the past. Perhaps you were aware of how empty your world had become. Although you were alone on that low rock, it could be that you were accompanied by the memory of the multitude that had once been. By this point it was already too late. There were too few of you to recover what had been lost. Even so, maybe you would have nodded to each other and tried to make the best of it. Maybe you would have started showing off, just as those before you had always done; turning your heads from side to side so the bright white around your eye would have caught the light. Maybe then, with an exuberance tinged with grief, you would have thrown your heads back and let out an ecstatic cry; the vivid yellow inside your mouths shining like a beacon, mimicking the sun.

Catastrophic anthropogenically-driven biodiversity loss is a defining problem of our time, with hundreds of extinctions observed every year, and many more occurring unnoticed. Reacting to the scale of this issue, extinction studies researchers have called for new interdisciplinary responses interrogating what extinction means, why it matters, and how it is narrated.

‘Mourning Auks’ is an innovative practice-led project examining how artful geographic methods and outcomes can contribute to these vital questions. Over the next four years I plan to explore what novel and affective modes of engaging with anthropogenically-driven species loss can be generated through creative articulations of the emotional dimensions of extinction, and how these can be communicated in public artistic and museum contexts.

In extinction studies, extinction is understood not as a singular, generic concept, but as something that exists through multiple specificities relatable to the diversity of lifeworlds being lost. This is generally explored via case studies, which employ critically-driven creative-academic storytelling to express the biological, cultural and temporal particularities of species, their unique phenomenal worlds, and the significance of extinction within multispecies entanglements. This narrative-based approach provides a form of witnessing that is attentive to others in the face of irreparable loss, that counters human exceptionalism, and creates new ethical and cultural modes that help to resist the destructive legacies of anthropogenically-driven extinction more broadly.

Unexplored potential exists for artistic methods to undertake and communicate these extinction-orientated case studies. Through a case study on the now extinct great auk, my practice-led project will explore and analyse ways of engaging broader audiences with this field. It aims to expand the affective reach of these essential attempts to re-articulate contemporary species loss, and its ethical and socio-cultural imperative.

Fig. 1 Alca Impennis by John Gould, from The Birds of Great Britain, Vol. 5 (1873). John Gould/Public Domain

The great auk was a flightless seabird that was once found in the cold coastal waters of the North Atlantic. These birds nested in huge social colonies on isolated islands, which they returned to every year. These remote skerries provided protection from terrestrial predators. However, they became increasingly vulnerable after technological advances in ocean-going vessels brought European sailors into close proximity to these breeding colonies, which they ruthlessly exploited for food on trans-Atlantic voyages.

My research will begin with analysis of the ‘Garefowl books’, a substantial, underexploited resource held in the Cambridge University Library collections. These manuscript diaries, kept by the Victorian ornithologist and egg collector John Wolley, record interviews with witnesses who were amongst the last to see the auks alive, and who took part in the final hunting parties to their breeding places. Close reading of this material will inform studio-based experimentation utilising artistic methods drawn from archival impulses in contemporary art (see the works of John Akomfrah and Tacita Dean, amongst many others). Following on from Brian Massumi’s 2014 book What Animals Teach us About Politics such ‘playful’ creative practices can be seen as animal in origin, and provide a continuum with animal life (see Merle Patchett’s Archiving). In this context, these textual encounters with the auk’s disappearance offer the means of both interrogating the socio-cultural practices that drove their extinction, and of generating sympathetic multispecies re-alignments.

I also plan to draw the narratives surrounding the auks’ disappearance into emotional geographic frames. These examine spatialisations of emotion in relation to landscape, including those relating to death, such as mourning and grief. Study here is mostly restricted to human contexts, and my project aims to develop this to explore the affective geographies of sites of extinction-driven absence.

Fig. 2 An eighteenth-century sketch of Geirfuglasker by Guðni Sigurðsson. Geirfuglasker, a now submerged volcanic island off the south coast of Iceland, was one of the great auk’s breeding colonies. National Museum of Iceland/Public Domain

In recent re-interpretations, avian philopatry has been re-conceptualised as other-than-human ‘storying-of-place’ (see Thom van Dooren’s excellent book Flight Ways). Hypothesising this for great auks gives their breeding sites potency as places, not just because they were invested with history and meaning for the auks, but because these became the traumatic sites of their extinction. In this context, I plan to undertake fieldwork at some of the auks’ historical breeding colonies, and at those of their closest living relatives. Here, imaginative curiosity towards these species’ remote, liminal, and aquatic geographies will inform a creative enlivening of the great auks’ historical lifeworld, providing the basis for further artistic experimentation centred on site-specific place-making exercises. These will attend to how landscapes are matters ‘of [other-than-human] biographies, attachments and exiles’ in which ‘absence, loss and haunting’ abound (Wylie, 2007: 10), and will survey the more-than-representational emotional aspects of extinction.

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This blog is written by Milo Newman, PhD candidate in human geography. This blog introduces his project on creativity and extinction. Milo’s research is funded through the AHRC South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. You can follow Milo on twitter @_milonewman and see more of his work at www.milonewman.com. This blog has been reposted with kind permission from the Centre for Environmental Humanities. Read the original blog.

Milo Newman

Research and teaching in the midst of climate crisis

Posted on February 11, 2020March 31, 2023 by janet.crompton

Bristol Climate Strike September 2019. Image credit Amanda Woodman-Hardy.

I became a co-convenor of the PSA Environmental Politics sub-group in 2019, against the backdrop of the rise of Extinction Rebellion and the increasing impact of the environmental movement. The convening team decided to reflect this in our workshop on ‘Activism and Academia in an Age of Environmental Breakdown’ at Nottingham Trent which aimed to not only bring together activists and academics but to critically reflect on the intersection between the two and try to explore how to hold academic events in this time of climate crisis.

As anyone who’s organised an event knows, finding a convenient date is half the battle. Balancing the start of term dates for myself and the other co-convenors was difficult and the date of 20th September 2019 was one of the few that worked for us all. But surely holding an event on environmental activism on the date of the global climate strike was contradictory? After much discussion, we decided that the fit between the theme of the conference and the strike could provide a rich source of discussion and that we should try and explore this. So we arranged for the lunch break to include time for anyone who wanted to, to attend the demonstration being held in the nearby city centre with directions provided.

Some participants also mentioned that they would be attending the workshop as part of their strike action, with one participant wearing a strike arm-band. Registration was free and we were clear that people could attend for whatever time they could, to further support people coming along as part of their strike activities. Participating in a climate protest, whether by labelling attendance at the workshop as such or briefly joining the main demonstration, while at the same time critically analysing both the protest and the intersection of activism and academia blurred the objectivity of the workshop, to say the very least. But bringing our practice into the workshop and openly discussing how they intersected, in addition to ensuring that no activism was compulsory, grounded our discussions and prompted each participant to reflect on how they experienced the intersection of both their research and their action.

The current wave of climate action and the groups that are spearheading it, such as the school strike movement and Extinction Rebellion, are distinct in the way that they are driven by young activists. Initially, we recognised this through a panel on youth engagement, with excellent speakers such as Dr Sarah Pickard presenting their work on young people’s political activism. However, this felt disingenuous and was not representative of the movement nor the agency of the young activists driving it.

So we reached out to young climate activists around the globe and asked if they would like to record a video to be shown at the conference which explained why they got involved with the climate strike movement and how the networks they were part of were organised. (We took advice regarding data protection and gained the consent of their parents when necessary.) Hearing directly from these activists from across Europe and America brought balance to the panel, ensuring that we weren’t just discussing youth activism, but listening and responding to them and their work directly. This activist engagement was also reflected in the speakers we invited to the conference and the call for papers.

We wanted to ensure that activists and practitioners were included and highlighted this in both the name of the workshop and throughout. For example, the ‘Critical Reflections on Extinction Rebellion’ panel featured activists from the group as well as academics who study it, and representatives from a local wildlife NGO took part in another panel.

The NGOs represented were from Nottingham and the Midlands in part due to proximity to the conference venue but also because we wanted to reflect the context of the area we held the event in, to ‘think global, act local’. We endeavoured to match this with an engagement with the wider context of climate activism, with a discussion of activism and academic globally and in the Global South in particular. Deciding against a specific panel on this topic, we tried to reflect the global context throughout the day, such as including videos from young activists around the world and a specific reflection on this topic at the start of the roundtable led by a scholar of and from the Global South.

However keeping the balance between the local and the global was difficult, raising questions of whose voices are included and whose are heard.

Within the workshop, we wanted to reflect the growing trend of more inclusive academic conferences, a trend that is particularly prevalent within environmental scholarship. The roundtable at the end of the workshop was designed to facilitate this, with activities that paired up activists and academics for discussion and time for the group as a whole to talk together. This turned out to be one of the strongest aspects of the workshop – certainly, it was one of the most commented upon and more space for this discussion, even at the expense of time for the earlier papers, would I think have been welcomed.

Reflecting on the workshop now, while there are changes I would make, the attempt to not only bring together academics and activists but to embed that approach within the format of the day and its priorities was I felt worthwhile. To research and teach on environmental issues in the face of climate denialism and apathy as well as the increasing environmental collapse is a political act and we should recognise that in our forums.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Ashley Dodsworth, a lecturer in politics in SPAIS at the University of Bristol and co-convenor of the PSA Environment sub-group. Her research explores the intersection of the history of political thought and environmental politics, and environmental rights. She is co-editor of Environmental Human Rights: A Political Theory Perspective (Routledge, 2018). This blog was reposted with kind permission from the Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol. View the original blog.

Ashley Dodsworth

Exploring the Wildfilm Archive in University of Bristol Special Collections

Posted on January 28, 2020March 31, 2023 by janet.crompton

Bristol is widely seen as the ‘Hollywood’ of wildlife film-making and is famously home to the BBC’s Natural History Unit, formerly established in the city in 1957. The University of Bristol Library’s Special Collections has embarked on a 2 year project to preserve and promote the mixed-media ‘Wildfilm’ archive, supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust.

An example draft shooting script for the first episode of ‘The Living Planet’ (1984), working title ‘Planet Earth’, later re-used in the 2006 BBC series! [G. Lever]

I am the Project Archivist working to catalogue and re-package the material, making it available to search online and access in person at the Special Collections reading room. There are treatments, post-production scripts, dubbing cue sheets, filming trip planning, photographs, research and correspondence – documenting a given programme from conception to broadcast – as well as audience research reports, publicity and press packs.

A Radio Times cover from 1962 featuring Peter Scott for the ‘Look’ series [G. Lever]

A substantial part of the collection is audio-visual, including several hundred reels of 16mm film footage. Among the cans are films produced by Survival Anglia, the BBC, and renowned film-makers Niko Tinbergen (1907-1988) and Eric Ashby MBE (1918-2003). The archive also contains sound recordings, radio broadcasts and audio from talks and festivals. In Digi-Beta format there is a selection of the 150 most important wildlife films selected by BBC producer Christopher Parsons (1932-2002) and a VHS library collected by Jeffery Boswall (1931-2012), another BBC producer whose papers are also in the archive.

An example of 16mm film cans in the collection [G. Lever]

As evidence of method and technique there are two of the home-made sound-proof boxes made by Eric Ashby, enabling him to capture intimate footage of badgers and foxes in their natural state of behaviour. For further interpretation there are some unusual supplementary objects such as the penguin flipper, skulls and skin collected during filming in South America for ‘The Private Life of the Jackass Penguin’ (1973).

Eric Ashby’s home-made box for insulating sound made by camera equipment [Helen Lindsay]

A dubbing cue sheet for an episode of the BBC’s ‘The World About Us’ [G. Lever]

It’s an incredibly exciting project to be involved in. I’m working alongside Peter Bassett, a producer with the BBC Natural History Unit who has acted as guardian and advocate for the collection and is a font of knowledge on the history of wildlife film making. Nigel Bryant, Audiovisual Digitisation Officer will join the project for a year to produce lossless digital preservation copies of selected material, enhancing the accessibility of audio-visual media in the collection and protecting the longevity of these fragile, obsolete formats. We’re confident the archive offers significant research value to a variety of disciplines and interests – from the history of media and television to environmental studies, anthropology, history, philosophy and music.

Consistently these films bear witness to changes in the natural world leading us towards today’s climate crisis, educating us about the animal kingdom and the landscape we inhabit, reminding us of our responsibility to protect it.

The artist Jody’s mural of Greta Thunberg on the side of the Tobacco Factory, North Street, Bristol [G. Lever]

The climate activist Greta Thunberg recently guest edited an episode of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. During a Skype interview with Sir David Attenborough, she said:

“When I was younger, when I was maybe 9-10 years old, the thing that made me open my eyes for what was happening with the environment was films and documentaries about the natural world, and what was going on, so thank you for that, because that was what made me decide to do something about it.”

The archive has its foundations in a project led by another Bristol based organisation, Wildscreen, founded in 1982 by Christopher Parsons. Wildscreen hosts an internationally renowned biennial festival on wildlife film (the 20th anniversary festival will be held later this year, 19-23 October 2020) and supports a variety of conservation organisations. It launched ‘WildFilmHistory: 100 years of wildlife film making’ in 2008, a Heritage Lottery funded project that led to a collection of material which now forms part of the ‘Wildfilm’ archive.

Another compelling aspect of the collection is a series of oral history films made by the WildFilmHistory project, spanning all facets of film-making from producers and cameramen to composers and narrators. The interviews capture both the professional and personal alliance between subject and interviewer, enabling discussion to draw out the working relationships behind the creation of pivotal series such as the BBC’s ‘Look’ (1955-1969) and ITV’s ‘Survival’ (1961-2001).

The content of interviews ranges from anecdotal to technical, covering the logistical challenges of filming in remote places, photographic technique, reliability of equipment, battling physical elements, ingenious ways of tackling technological limitations and reflecting on moments of fortune and failure.

It is a renowned ambition of natural history film-making to capture a rare species or behaviour on camera for the first time; paperwork in the archive documents how this is attempted and achieved, and the role narrative construction may have to play in documentary film.

In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum, Sir David Attenborough said:

“When I made my first television programmes most audiences had never even seen a pangolin – indeed few pangolin had ever seen a TV camera!”

There has been an astonishing level of cultural and technological change since the programme, ‘Zoo Quest for a Dragon’ was broadcast in 1956 on the BBC – then one channel with national coverage only recently extending beyond London and Birmingham. In his published diaries for the Zoo Quest series, ‘Adventures of a Young Naturalist’, Attenborough recollects the obstacles involved in locating species unique to regions of Guyana, Indonesia and Paraguay. Through such programmes viewers gained their first glimpse of far flung parts of the world, now increasingly accessible with the growth of air travel and the tourism industry.

Improvements in technology allow viewers to observe the animal kingdom from new perspectives. The archive spans an era during which television has evolved from black and white to regular colour broadcasting in the late 1960s, and the invention of cinematic IMAX presentation to home based on-demand UHD (Ultra High Definition) 4KTV offered by streaming services today. In the same speech, Attenborough says:

“The audience for that first series, 60 years ago, was restricted to a few million viewers… My next series will go instantly to hundreds of millions of people in almost every country on Earth via Netflix”.

As well as the BBC Natural History Unit, the archive contains material for Survival Anglia, Granada, Partridge Films and the RSPB Film Unit, and international networks like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and TVNZ.

There is a slim body of literature and theory on the history of wildlife film, but within the archive there is a unique collection of studies and published papers by academics tapping into this potential. Two excellent books are ‘Wildlife Films’ by Derek Bousé (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) and ‘BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough’ by Jean-Baptiste Gouyon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Some material relating to Granada’s ‘Zoo Time’ series (1956-1968) [G. Lever]

All this material is being described in a detailed catalogue, capturing key words such as species and filming locations to ensure relevant content can be found by anyone with an interest in the archive. When complete the full catalogue will be launched on the Special Collections webpage in the summer of 2021.

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This blog was written by Georgina Lever, a project archivist from the Wildfilm Special Collections at the University of Bristol. This blog has been reposted with kind permission from the Centre for Environmental Humanities. View the original blog.