From The Daily Beast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/11/sir-david-attenborough-enough-with-the-creationists-and-climate-change-deniers.html
Nico Hines
02.11.14
Sir David Attenborough is one of the great naturalists of our time, celebrated for decades of peerless documentary making, an infectious love of the animal kingdom and that distinctive and enthusiastic whisper. Once criticized by campaigners for his reticence to address contentious issues, Attenborough is no longer willing to speak in hushed tones.
Sitting opposite the kangaroo enclosure at London Zoo, he told The Daily Beast he had lost patience with the “ignorance” of creationists, polluters, and climate change deniers. “To simply say that you must accept unquestioningly what you learned at your mother’s knee is not the act of an intelligent person,” he said.
It was a rare flash of frustration from a man who has spent more than 60 years in the public eye. He now walks with the aid of a stick but thanks his “lucky stars” that he is still making wildlife documentaries at the age of 87. As I arrived to meet him, he was describing to a former colleague how a cameraman had recently asked him to look directly into the lens while filming a segment instead of turning to face the creature that he was holding in his outstretched left hand. “How could I be so disrespectful?” he said. “No one wants to look at me.”
But we have been happily looking at him since the 1950s. In the U.S. Attenborough is perhaps best known for the Life on Earth series that was broadcast on PBS in the 1980s, on the other side of the Atlantic he is an institution, recently winning a BBC poll to find the greatest living British icon. His work has often been diluted for an American audience, with his masterful narrations for Planet Earth and Life re-recorded by Alec Baldwin and Oprah Winfrey before they were broadcast on the Discovery channel. There have also been accusations that the U.S. network sought to downplay climate change in the shows.
In fact, Attenborough says he has finally grown sick of America’s attitude to climate change. “I think it’s very sad that people won’t accept evidence for what it says—it’s extraordinary that one of the wealthiest, materially advanced societies in the world can support irrational myths in that way,” he said. “That they should do it privately is up to them but since what they do effects that whole world it’s pretty serious that they should not accept that humanity has been responsible for these changes that are absolutely evident to everyone else.”
Continue reading at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/11/sir-david-attenborough-enough-with-the-creationists-and-climate-change-deniers.html
