Disappointing. Dispatches: Conservation's Dirty Secrets (Channel 4, Monday 20 June) did not lift the lid on the twisted porn shame of trans-gender pandas. Nor did it trawl the suspiciously fishy laundry basket of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
Hawkish homunculus Oliver Steeds spent most of the show on a bizarre rant about how elephants aren't worth saving from the poachers. The oddly militant host seemed to have stumbled in from a coalition Cabinet meeting on what could be cut from Austerity Earth. If God had asked him to sort the Ark, Steeds would have cast off with an empty hull, a groaning barbecue and an ivory-topped walking stick.
A more legitimate target was found in the big businesses hijacking conservationist ideals to 'greenwash' questionable exploits in the developing world, just like they've hijacked sport, the arts, sex and your childhood (not necessarily in that order). We met Conservation International, a shadowy body that dishes out hooky accreditations to a who's who of polluters.
More villainous still was Fiji Water, the bottled elixir beloved of celebs like Will Smith, Al Gore and some girl who could have been Jessica Alba but might also have been the dead-eyed marionette in the Transformers movies. Its 'Saving the Fijian rainforest' slogan derived, we learnt, from the brand owners having planted 1.4 square miles of forest on the island barely enough to offset a party popper. Likewise, the claim to be carbon-negative turned out to be "forward-looking" in much the same way that I'm a triple Pulitzer Prize winner with just three more to go until it's true.
There's plenty to be said about how companies rely on our naïveté (and lack of genuine interest) to make spurious claims of ecological sainthood. But this show didn't say it. Instead Steeds went back to the admittedly harrowing possibility that a starving lion, robbed of its territory, might get feisty with a tribesman's pet goat.
Not all companies lie about their green credentials. Not all those claims are toxic spin. But if this azure orb of seven billion souls will soon be scorched to a cinder, we may as well go up with some pleasant PR flannel warbling fuzzily in our ears.
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Hawkish homunculus Oliver Steeds spent most of the show on a bizarre rant about how elephants aren't worth saving from the poachers. The oddly militant host seemed to have stumbled in from a coalition Cabinet meeting on what could be cut from Austerity Earth. If God had asked him to sort the Ark, Steeds would have cast off with an empty hull, a groaning barbecue and an ivory-topped walking stick.
A more legitimate target was found in the big businesses hijacking conservationist ideals to 'greenwash' questionable exploits in the developing world, just like they've hijacked sport, the arts, sex and your childhood (not necessarily in that order). We met Conservation International, a shadowy body that dishes out hooky accreditations to a who's who of polluters.
More villainous still was Fiji Water, the bottled elixir beloved of celebs like Will Smith, Al Gore and some girl who could have been Jessica Alba but might also have been the dead-eyed marionette in the Transformers movies. Its 'Saving the Fijian rainforest' slogan derived, we learnt, from the brand owners having planted 1.4 square miles of forest on the island barely enough to offset a party popper. Likewise, the claim to be carbon-negative turned out to be "forward-looking" in much the same way that I'm a triple Pulitzer Prize winner with just three more to go until it's true.
There's plenty to be said about how companies rely on our naïveté (and lack of genuine interest) to make spurious claims of ecological sainthood. But this show didn't say it. Instead Steeds went back to the admittedly harrowing possibility that a starving lion, robbed of its territory, might get feisty with a tribesman's pet goat.
Not all companies lie about their green credentials. Not all those claims are toxic spin. But if this azure orb of seven billion souls will soon be scorched to a cinder, we may as well go up with some pleasant PR flannel warbling fuzzily in our ears.
More from this column
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