Speaking Animals

Notes on the Human Voiceover in Wildlife Documentaries

Abstract

Nature conservationists have often credited wildlife documentaries with doing much to awaken public environmental concern. But these assertions have given too little critical thought to what I take to be a central problem: the failure of such programs to address what we might term issues of ideology. Wildlife documentaries present a view of the world in which such issues are deliberately kept underdeveloped, and are isolated conceptually from other· social and political domains. We need then to ask the following questions: In what ways do these documentaries serve to legitimate existing human relationships with the nonhuman? And how do they affect our perception of, and our willingness to take action on, environmental problems?