Commodification, yes — thanks for supplying the essential missing concept here. But as you say, there may be some value in shows like Animal Planet and Sierra Club wall calendar eco-porn if it leads people to support conservation measures.

I think I heard a beautiful thrush song in your video. Swainson’s or Hermit?

Lee’s River – Glad those were useful. It’s always nice to find such solid support for my own semi-informed bloviating.

Jo – Interesting. That “yuck” reaction speaks volumes about our alienation from nature and from our own bodies, I think.

Harry – Thanks for the lengthy and solid response. I certainly don’t have a problem with that kind of filmmaking as long as viewers are informed about its provenance, though in many cases I think that could be done right within the narration. I’m actually more bothered by the naive expectation of many viewers that the camera is a passive mirror of reality, and that any attempt to impose a storyline detracts from the authenticity. This is I think closely related to the assumption that nature and artifice have nothing in common, and that therefore the proper role of wildlife photographers and filmmakers is to depict a world in which humans have little impact. It’s that kind of assumption that feeds the idealizing objectification at the heart of eco-porn.

On the whole I agree with him; for example, in the scene mentioned in one of those links where David Attenborough demonstrates the spitting of a spitting cobra, does it really matter that the cobra was from a snake farm, and put there just before filming? The important thing is surely that it enabled them to get great footage of it spraying him with venom. Given that he came prepared with a welder’s mask that had been treated to show up pink in the presence of venom, I don’t suppose anyone watching thought it was just a chance encounter.

There’s certainly a question about whether you can ever completely rely on behaviour being ‘natural’ in a captive animal, even if it’s just coral spawning in a fish tank; and also there’s an issue about the extent to which you are misleading the viewers — it might be more honest to have just filmed the cobra sequence at the snake farm instead of staging it in the bush, for example — but on the whole I think that they are using all their ingenuity to find ways to get footage they couldn’t otherwise get, rather than trying to cheat. That’s the BBC, at least: there have been some genuinely appalling examples of faked wildlife documentaries.

I think it’s good that in recent series they have had a little feature at the end of the show explaining how things were filmed, because it helps demystify it a bit; and they are quite open about the fact that they might film spider behaviour in a university lab somewhere rather than in the field. Of course those sections probably don’t make it to the US, because part of their function is to fill up the time that will be used for ads when the series is sold to other countries.