Beyond the 'Balance of Nature': Pastoralists' Alternative Perspectives on Sustainability

David Attenborough’s mission to restore the balance of nature in the documentary, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement, is at once inspiring and concerning. What if the balance of nature doesn’t exist? What if this mission is misplaced? The film is full of the familiar tropes of nature documentaries, once again repeated with Attenborough’s familiar gravitas. Human beings have overrun the world. Wilderness has been destroyed. Stability and balance – the ‘security and stability of the Holocene’ – have been upset. Our singular world – invoking the iconic picture of ‘only one earth’ (Ward and Dubos 1972) seen from space – becomes threatened. Catastrophe and crisis are the impending result. Unless of course ‘we’ (a rather generic humanity) can restore stability through protecting biodiversity; in his words, ‘rewilding the world’. Those of us brought up on Attenborough’s amazing natural history programmes have got used to the standard storyline, centred on a Malthusian narrative. Too many humans can damage the awe-inspiring, pristine nature depicted in the films. Yet, unlike most of his previous documentaries, this one goes a step further. An hour of the now-familiar narrative culminates in some tragic yet bizarre imagery of dying walruses in front of an appalled Davos audience. And then the argument shifts. In this very personal testimony, a 93-year-old Attenborough argues how we have to rediscover how to be sustainable: moving from being ‘apart from nature to being part of nature’; ‘working with nature rather than against it’. In guarded tones for sure, a more critical perspective is offered: one that identifies capitalism – without naming it here, although he does so in a BBC interview1 – and the structural relations of politics and economy as the driving forces behind the destruction of the non-human world. The inevitability of the countdown to doomsday can be challenged, he argues, even if ultimately by some odd techno-utopian solutions such as remote-controlled drones harvesting forests. Nature will and must endure, he proclaims: stability will be restored, with or without humans.