Abstract
This chapter discusses the relationship between cable television repre-sentations of nature and biology and the influence they wield over public understanding of environmental networks. The metaphors, delivery, content, and orientation of such programming are driven by what Kenneth Burke calls an “occupational psychosis,” a collective orientation that mirrors the economic principles of the culture in which such “edutainment” has been produced. More specifically, the author is interested in how cable nature pro-gramming leaves us with nature entertainment as a product — a distinctly commercialized thing to be consumed, a franchise to be capitalized on and expanded. Just as Disney did before them, the anthropocentric nature pro-grams discussed in this essay reflect an ideal that giving the audience what it wants — by tapping into the ideological orientations like war, conflict, and competition they already possess — is more profitable than representing nature from the stodgy seat of orthodox biological science. Moreover, the chapter addresses the outcomes of representing nature as a product and how this affects public attitudes about nature and the environment.
The nature documentary, as a genre, has a long mass media history and has taken on a range of forms, from the anthropomorphized Disney wildlife film shorts of the of the mid-twentieth century to the twenty-first century cable animal serials that represent what I like to call the “Savannah Gladiatorial Games.” In between, there
are many subgenres, each with its own signature and each employing some greater or lesser degree of scientific authority, depending on the intended audience and purpose of the program. Consequently, each generic form conveys a particular set of rhetorical messages, some more exacting in the rigors of production than others, but all geared toward an attempt to bring us closer to nature in some vicarious way.
In our high-tech, largely urban and suburban culture, the natural world is seen as something remote and uncommon, and this sense of remoteness contributes to the public’s inability to understand nature in terms that aren’t corrupted by this orien-tation. While some nature documentaries try very hard to act as a corrective to this alienation from nature, others perpetuate the myth that nature is ours to conquer, control, and transform into a human image. Yet other programs seem orchestrated strictly for their entertainment value, a kind of reality TV for the wilderness, while still others are written for political, scientific, or educational purposes. All such pro-grams carry ideological assumptions that, when critically unpacked, reveal some very important motives and objectives on the part of the producers, directors, and play-ers in these natural dramas, and provide a fascinating cross section of the American mind-set concerning the natural world and our relationship to it.
While there are seemingly countless cable programs dedicated to animals, there are just as many dedicated to natural phenomena like severe weather and natural disasters. One show, Whale Wars, is less about whales per se, and more about the personalities of the ecological soldiers who protect them from the rav-ages of whale poaching. The Deadliest Catch, likewise, tells us virtually nothing about the Alaskan king crab or its behavior (except that it is a difficult species to fish for) but all about the dangers to humans while fishing for them in the Bering Sea under extremely cold and hazardous weather conditions. In both of these shows, the focus is on the drama among the humans — not the animal that has gathered them together towards a common goal. The narrative revolves around such questions as: Will the new deck hand work out? Should we board the whaler or merely try to scare the ship off? Will we reach the catch quota and make a profit? There are other programs that focus on the human theatrics of being in an unfortunate “natural” situation, be it severe weather, an inhospitable environment, or a confrontation with wild animals. This category of programs is one that is not strictly anthropomorphic (assigning to nature human attributes), but anthropocentric, that is, centers on human individual and social troubles in wild environments or under extreme conditions and, most significantly, maps our behaviors and expectations onto natural contexts.
To help theoretically frame this idea of how we receive representations of nature relates to how we, as members of a capitalistic, technological society, tend
to also frame the world within terms that reflect the interests of production and consumption. In Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke borrows John Dewey’s notion of “occupational psychosis” to explain this concept, noting that
“the term corresponds to the Marxian doctrine that a society’s environment in the historical sense is synonymous with the society’s methods of production”
(38). In its most primitive form, occupational psychosis reveals itself through a preoccupation with the main source of food for a self-contained group (Burke uses the example of “tribes”), such that this form of sustenance manifests itself symbolically and conceptually in everything the tribe does. If fish are a staple for a given tribe, fish and fishing become a major — even central — topic of con-cern running through the culture: art, religion, music, dress, and so on. In more developed civilizations, the occupational psychosis becomes more complex and abstracted, such that members of society are often unaware of the origins of their worldview, despite the fact that they voice that worldview symbolically through their language all the time. If wealth, technology, and ownership are central to our economy, we will routinely express ourselves in terms that reflect these inter-ests, including in our choice of entertainment.
Therefore, it is theoretically important for this essay to notice how the two most dominating American orientations of science and capitalism are philo-sophically couched in a common assumption about the materiality of the world;
both are concerned with the physical, objective “reality” of human existence, and therefore, how nature can be understood and manipulated for physical ends.
Nature programming, then, must submit to certain epistemological “truths”
that shape how such knowledge is presented in a media venue tethered to an economic imperative that forces nature programming into generic categories for prescribed viewers. Such attitudes have political and educational ramifications for how the general public perceives debates that concern the natural world, how we understand the science behind these debates, and the policies we make to address our most pressing environmental problems.
With the increasing popularity of so-called reality TV in the last decade or more, we can expect that most educationally oriented cable stations like Discovery, The Learning Channel, NatGeo, the Science Channel, and oth-ers would have to submit to the demographics that drive cable ratings for all channels. America’s occupational psychosis determines the framing of the con-tent for these education channels, which have been pressured to conform to an
“edutainment” format that meets the needs and preferences of today’s television viewer. The nature shows that air regularly on these stations reflect a confor-mity to “intense,” “extreme,” and “ultimate” themes, identifying superlative
characteristics in animals, environments, weather, or natural disasters that pro-vide the dramatic backdrop for the program’s content. A rather curious example of this kind of framing is a program shown on the History Channel called Serial Killer Earth, which is a clear case of an anthropocentric structure pitting humans against nature in a kind of planetary dragnet, such that it represents an anthropomorphizing of the earth itself and all the forces it can summon for human destruction. We need only look at the show’s title to see that calling the earth a “serial killer” is bizarrely inappropriate, but is deliberately geared to attracting an audience segment increasingly obsessed with murderers, serial kill-ers, and other social deviants. Strangely, this trend in cable formatting indicates a regression to some of America’s earliest attitudes about nature, a time when the first American settlers from Europe saw the frontier as uninviting, hostile, dangerous, and even freakish.
A quick glance at the episode titles and descriptions bears this out further.
The episode “Death by Dust Storm” features “apocalyptic dust storms” that “suf-focate cities around the globe”; it also features “a tornado chasing a family, nearly crushing them with their truck” and further mayhem as “Mother Nature con-tinues to wreak havoc,” as though she were a criminal still at large. In “Mudslide Massacre,” a twister “targets” a truck driver in Oklahoma and a volcano “smoth-ers” Indonesian citizens. The verbs used to describe these natural occurrences assign willful actions and motivated intent, but it is difficult to tell just how metaphorically the audience is supposed to take such narrative accounts. Even if viewers see the language only as a metaphorical shorthand, such a framing device elicits a sense of victimhood and helplessness at the hands of a sentient force, thus distorting the true unpredictability of climactic and geological events.
While scientists look to climate change as one factor in more frequently severe weather, the cessation of global greenhouse emissions and other environmen-tal measures will never eradicate catastrophic storms, tornados, or earthquakes entirely. The negative personification of physical phenomena promotes an odd association with the natural world as something to be feared and ultimately as something that cannot be stopped. Perhaps the strangest episode title is “When Lakes Attack,” conjuring images of lakes becoming animated through a super-natural transformation and striking out against enemy humans in some Lord of the Rings epic. The idea that we are at war with nature is implied in “Tornado vs. Airport,” as though there has been a deliberate battle arranged to determine a conclusive victor between these two “combatants.” The notion that the earth is conscious — and malevolent — seems misplaced in the twenty-first century,
harkening back to a time when superstition about natural forces ruled human attitudes about its relationship to us. But of course the most basic aim of such tactics is to increase ratings by attempting to quench American entertainment bloodlust and our fixation on all things violent and “extreme.” From a produc-tion and time slot perspective, shows like Serial Killer Earth must compete with other cable programming that adopts the same base attitude about what it is we want in our entertainment, so nature is transformed into an entity of ruthless evil. In a word, such programming becomes simple product, packaged to conform to the collective associations triggered by our culture of nationalism, ownership, law and order, and war.
The themes of attack, war, and battle reveal the colonial side of our occu-pational psychosis: Americans’ tendency to think in militaristic metaphors.
We have wars on everything — drugs, crime, women, poverty, Christmas, even God — and cable TV nature documentarians seem to be tapping into this cul-tural orientation. Some TV documentaries, such as NatGeo Wild’s Caught in the Act, are reminiscent of gladiatorial games. The animals are usually exotic (giraffes, hippos, tigers, lions, rhinos) and large, pitted against one another in incongruous ways (a giraffe attacking a rhino, for example). Crossing the generic boundary between nature documentary and high-contact, extreme sports, there is an ancient Roman quality to the spectacle, with its focus on the exotic, the spectacular, and the violent. We are a society that loves to see a fight, and what could be more exhilarating than witnessing two large, wild animals go after one another? Showcased in these episodes are themes like “Clash of the Cheetahs,”
“Elephant Battleground,” “Wild Dog Attack,” and “Cannibal Octopus.” Most of the footage is provided by amateur photographers who serendipitously hap-pened to be in a prime spot to capture an unusual shot, but often it is of poor quality and compensated for by jerky, quick-cut editing and supplemental foot-age spliced in. Most episodes are not overly sensationalized, however, and many of the situations that have been “caught” on film are truly unusual or unexpected, like the video of a pride of lions attacking an adult mother hippo and, eventually, its calf (there is another example where a “coalition” of three cheetahs perform a similar assault on a wildebeest). It is uncomfortable to watch, and the narrative accompanying the video is supplied almost entirely by the person shooting the footage (in this case an amateur naturalist photographer living in South Africa) and generally avoids the temptation to moralize. For this series, then, there is an incongruity between interpretive vantage points. Whereas the photographer’s narration stresses how unusual just such a spectacle is (lions normally do not
attack full-grown hippos) and how surprised he was to have been able to capture it on film, the production mantra for the whole series, according to its website, is that it “teaches us that nature doesn’t always play by the rules.”
Or consider the footage of a lion attacking a mongoose, a creature perhaps one-fiftieth the size of the lion. The mongoose, caught helplessly in the claws of the lion (which appears to be playing with it more than attempting to eat it), fights back viciously in its terror and takes the lion by surprise. When the mon-goose escapes the big cat’s clutch, the smaller animal lunges at it until it finds an opening and scurries heroically down a tunnel. The narrating photographer is amazed at the mongoose’s tenacity, and declares that “nature always teaches me something new.” Amazing as the footage is, again the lesson is consistent with the defining rule of survival — in this case, which was more threatened and which had the most to lose. This should not strike one as particularly “new.”
For the lion, the mongoose was little more than a morsel, and its casual toy-ing with the small creature indicated its lack of commitment to such a modest meal, as it could have crushed it with its jaws or ripped it open with its claws any time it wanted. For the mongoose, it was a mortal battle for its own existence, and it unleashed a fury borne of the desperation to save its own life. While it is indeed surprising that it escaped, the evolutionary law of the jungle remains unbroken — survive any way you can.
Assigning such rules to the wild is one way of engaging our occupational psychosis, since it reflects our desire to superimpose moral order onto a system that is intrinsically amoral. Steven Jay Gould, in an essay called “Nonmoral Nature,” argues that this is a conceptual mistake, since it reflects more about our need to impose ethical meaning onto nature than it does any scientific reality about how nature actually operates (60). But still other popular nature programs of note highlight the preoccupation with warlike scenarios and life-threatening situations. NatGeo airs a program called Dangerous Encounters, where herpetol-ogist (reptile specialist) Dr. Brady Barr locks horns with dangerous wild animals like crocodiles, snakes, wild boars, and sharks. Animal Planet features shows like I Shouldn’t Be Alive, a survivalist drama whereby the ordeals of people who have survived natural horrors are interviewed and their stories are recreated, and Swamp Wars, in which, according to Animal Planet’s website, “Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Venom One battles the alligators, constrictors, and other lethal animals that threaten South Florida.” The Discovery Channel airs programs like Man vs. Wild, another survivalist show with host “Bear” Grylls going “face to face with the grueling task of navigating remote locations, sharing invaluable survival
strategies along the way.” The Science Channel runs Monster Bug Wars to empha-size the brutality of the insect world, where “a host of ruthless bugs as bizarre as they are lethal slug it out in real-life battles to the death. Witness epic encounters between swarms of marauding assassins, and vicious one-on-one clashes where only one bug survives.”
While such portrayals may make a certain practical sense if cable markets are competing for viewers, it also marks a symptom of social malaise about our collective condition. There is a disturbing pessimism running through our cul-ture that seems to embrace the dark and the unpleasant, at least when it comes to our choice of visual distractions, as is evidenced by the sheer number of horror movies, violent action movies, violent thrillers, and war movies released in any given year. To map this collective fetish onto nature programs seems odd, to say the least, but perhaps the most important question is, what does it do to public perception about nature when it is portrayed as a battleground, or on a more per-sonal level, a sentient fiend bent on human destruction? As a symptom of limited scientific literacy and misinformation about scientific discoveries, it appears that programs like Serial Killer Earth and Swamp Wars are exacerbating an already perilous condition by treating the human-nature relationship as a warlike strug-gle for dominance instead of as a reciprocation, a kind of symbiosis between human and environment that contributes to the health of both. On a primal level, it is not hard to understand this attitude, since harsh environmental con-ditions, unpredictable climate, and violent natural forces have always been part of the challenge to our survival, harkening back to a more ancient occupational psychosis. (It is little wonder that, extending from this, primitive and modern religions alike have attributed to natural disasters a sign of a god’s displeasure or a manifestation of God’s will.) But what the more militaristic man versus nature metaphor suggests is a rationalization for our control over nature, not a capitulation to the gods or a recognition that these powerful forces are part of our natural condition, not a separation from it. In typical American binary fash-ion, our relationship with nature — with the earth — is a battle that must have two sides, a front, and an objective. This is neither a superstitious attitude nor a strictly rational one, but it has an internal logic given the assumptions implicit in the militaristic framework that contains the relevant anaologies (we fight to win, there is a good guy and an evil enemy, there is a threat that must be preempted, we must summon our technology, victory equals dominance).
Perhaps one of the main reasons such representations have potentially hazardous outcomes is linguistic, that is, pertaining to aspects of our language
system in which we have lost the capacity to distinguish from the purely literal;
hence we mistake the metaphor for the thing itself. According to Chris Hedges, author of Empire of Illusion,
We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from real-ity. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this level. (44)
Hedges’s statement may help explain why the producers of cable television nature shows have opted to portray natural phenomena in such a blatantly uneven
Hedges’s statement may help explain why the producers of cable television nature shows have opted to portray natural phenomena in such a blatantly uneven