“That’s what people do when they find a special place that wild and full of life, they trample it to death.”
The film cameraman lived through two Siberian winters in a homemade wooden shack, all in the hope of landing a few seconds of footage of the rare and elusive Siberian tiger in its natural habitat, during the eight hours of daylight a Russian winter affords. He got his footage n the end, no more than 90 seconds of which made it into Netflix’s groundbreaking Our Planet nature series, narrated by David Attenborough — presumably in the warmth of a heated production studio. Even at that, the footage the cameraman got was through the aid of a camera trap, which needed to be checked every day, without fail, in waist-deep snow and sub-Arctic winds. The tiger footage was one of many highlights in a series of highlights for the award-winning Netflix series, still considered one of Attenborough’s crowning achievements in his years of recording the grace and beauty of the natural world.
Siberia is just one of the many regions around the world hoping to boost wildlife tourism and gain much needed foreign exchange, but without the environmental ruin and degradation caused by forestry, mining, oil and gas exploration and, let’s face it — despite what the hunting lobby would have you believe — trophy hunting.
There’s just one problem.
As nature programs get better and become more proficient at showing off the wonders of the natural world, tourists’ expectations are being raised to unrealistic levels, all in the hopes that they will see with their own eyes what moved Sir David — and countless viewers of Our Planet — on such a deep, existential level.
It simply can’t be done — certainly not with a wild animal as shy and elusive as the Siberian tiger — not even with astonishing luck. Hundreds of thousands of tourists take in the great East African wildlife migrations every year, but few of them are lucky enough to witness the sights considered good enough to make the final cut of Planet Earth, The Hunt, Dynasties, Seven Worlds One Planet, or any number of other nature programs deemed good enough to air on the BBC, or PBS and Discovery in the U.S.
Meanwhile, local driver/guides in wildlife tourism countries like Kenya and Tanzania make most of their money off tips, and so they’re driven to more and more reckless behaviour to ensure their clients get the photos and video they want, which — driven by TV nature programs — is already heightened by unrealistic expectations.
The irony, of course, is that seeing an animal, any animal, in its wild habitat is a memorable and potentially life-changing experience. And so word-of-mouth feeds into the cycle — especially in these climate-affected times, as wild habitats disappear and rare animals become even more rare, before vanishing altogether.
Most tourists are there for no more than a few days — no living in a wooden shack through two Siberian winters for them. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.
Nature never makes promises.
©Pen Ash-Pixabay