In David Attenborough's warning about the Earth's future, a lesson for liberals who have failed to unite for the planet's cause

Joining the Dots  is a fortnightly column by author and journalist Samrat in which he connects events to ideas, often through analysis, but occasionally through satire. *** At the age of 94, Sir David Attenborough is an institution in himself. The legendary British broadcaster is in the news these days for having broken actress Jennifer Aniston’s Instagram record by gaining a million followers on the platform in four hours and 44 minutes. He joined Instagram, a new medium for him, after 60 years of radio and television, Attenborough explained, because he wanted to communicate to people that “the world is in trouble…continents are on fire, glaciers are melting, coral reefs are dying, fish are disappearing from our oceans…the list goes on and on.” When Attenborough was born in 1926, the Earth was in considerably finer fettle than it is now. The planet’s human population was then below two billion; it has now exceeded seven billion. There were still great forests, homes to many and varied animals, in India, Southeast Asia, South America and Africa. Most of the world’s great rivers still flowed free and unfettered to the seas. Plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous scourge of nature that is filling the oceans, had not yet been invented. Miners had not reached the farthest ends of the planet in search of oil and metals. There was still no industrial mining of rare earths. The intervening 94 years have changed the planet, and life on it, almost beyond recognition – and perhaps beyond redemption. It is this worry that seems to have driven Attenborough, who all his professional life shied away from activism, into finally taking a clear and unambiguous stand. His Instagram account is called ‘A Life on Our Planet’, after the name of his latest documentary that is scheduled to premiere on Netflix on 4 October. Speaking about it, Attenborough told Anderson Cooper, host of the US TV show 60 Minutes, that the documentary is his “witness statement” that a “crime has been committed” against the planet. Concern that humanity will be among the victims of this crime, turning it from ecocide into suicide, has been gradually building up around the world. The first major global conference to address the concern, attended by 172 countries of which 108 were represented by heads of state or government, was the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. Now 28 years on, the state of affairs, by and large, is no better. Not only are we seeing continents on fire, glaciers melting, coral reefs dying and fish disappearing, we also have a growing problem around the world of very powerful people, such as the current presidents of the United States of America and Brazil, among others, denying that there is a problem at all. It’s as though the house is on fire but half the people in the house say there’s no need to try and put it out, because there’s no fire. Perhaps this would be a mere annoyance if that half of the people were not adding further fuel to the conflagration while restraining the fire brigade. What makes it worse is that they are the ones in charge, the ones holding the house keys. That the keys of power have been handed over to that lot in country after country is driving not only those individual countries but the planet as a whole to its doom. People elected to give those individuals the keys. They came to power by winning elections in democratic countries. They have been able to bring more numbers together in their support than their rivals are able to muster. The reason for this is that they have been able to craft a story that unites a larger group than their opponents. This is a crucial ability to winning and holding power. Tens of thousands of years before what we call human civilisation began, there were other human species that shared this planet with our remote ancestors. Homo sapiens drove them into extinction. The reason that they were able to do so was not physical strength or even individual intelligence. Neanderthals were bigger, stronger and probably smarter than sapiens. One to one, the Neanderthal would probably win in a fight – but wars are not fought one to one, they are fought in groups. The key to sapiens’ success, according to historian Yuval Noah Harari in his book of the same name, was their ability to compose fiction, which enabled them to combine into large groups. Ideologies and religions, like borders and passports, are human fictions. Cows and pigs don’t have those things. There is nothing natural about them. No baby is born spouting the collected works of Karl Marx. However, babies do grow up to become liberals or conservatives, Hindus or Muslims or atheists, straight or gay, and so on. No doubt a lot of their beliefs and identities are decided by the accident of birth, in a particular family, place and time, but there is also the influence on each and every person of the wider universe of stories – old and new – to which they are exposed. Religions that swept across the world over the centuries were powerful stories that united large numbers of people. Ideologies, such as Marxism, Maoism and capitalism, were similar. So were nationalisms. What has happened around the world in recent years is that the ability of some types of stories, such as those rooted in religion, nationalism and the pursuit of corporate and personal profit, to unite large numbers of people, has outstripped the ability of other stories to bring people together. The stories on the liberal side of the argument, which spring from ideas of equality and emancipation, have ended up dividing that lot internally into ever smaller factions. As a result, their less divided opponents have won victory after victory in countries around the world. This is not a small matter. As we know from the example of the Neanderthals, being bigger, stronger and even smarter is not enough to save a species from extinction if it lacks the crucial ability to combine in large groups – an ability that springs from belief in shared stories, which weld disparate individuals into imagined communities. Neanderthals and sapiens did not have countries and democratic politics 70,000 years ago, but conservatives and liberals do. The group with the story that unites the largest number of people in every country is the one that determines the fate of that country. In the aggregate, they also determine the fate of the world, and of all creatures great and small that live on it. If today’s liberals keep failing to unite in larger groups than their rivals, they will eventually join the Neanderthals in the dustbin of history. That would be worth only a few tears if it were not for the fact that lions and tigers and elephants, fish and birds, coral reefs and trees, may all join them there. As Attenborough says in the trailer of A Life on Our Planet, “our planet is headed for disaster”. It is up to all of us to shake off our collective apathy and save it from damnation.