How David Attenborough and the catastrophist crew have humanity wrong

Attenborough is holding two separate, simultaneous and irreconcilable ideas in his mind. On the one hand we are not part of nature, and on the other, we will behave just like every other plant and animal in nature and just keep doing what we are doing until circumstances stop us.

But we are not like every other animal.

If we were like any other animal, then the carrying capacity of the world might be 1.6 billion – what it was in 1900 – or maybe that was already an overshoot. But that would ignore our ability to harness energy and fertiliser from fossil fuels, and improve the quality of our crops and distribution systems, so that now we can support 7.7 billion.

Every other species is shaped by rationing of resources, so their numbers wax and wane as they thrive and die. We apply intelligence so that now we can thrive in just about any circumstances, and as we get richer not only do we increase the resources available to us, but we adapt our breeding so that populations stabilise, or even decrease, without cataclysmic over-grazing and depletion of resources.

Unfortunately the Attenborough view of the man's place in the world predominates and permeates our world. Millenarian catastrophism is everywhere, laced through our books, our movies, our conversations, our classrooms, and even our legislatures.

As a result we are rushing back to old technologies, and old ways of living, on the basis that "natural", meaning like all the rest of nature, is better than "artificial" being the human contribution to nature. That is potentially disastrous. If humans were to behave like other animals there truly wouldn't be enough room on the planet for all of us.

We need to redefine humans as part of the natural realm, and wrench the definition away from the Attenboroughs of the world. If we wish to ensure that mankind is not a deadweight on nature, but rather its observer, chronicler and sustainer, then we have to jettison the idea that we are, and should behave like, dumb animals.

Humanity's moral, scientific and technological achievements are not the nadir of creation, they are, to date at least, the perfection of it. Man must ascend much further yet, for nature's sake.

At 94 Attenborough will be relieving the world of his own weight soon, but our collective weights must go on.