"I'm against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage"
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Attenborough’s objection to “huge globalisation” isn’t a cranky nostalgia for local markets; it’s a moral rebuke aimed at the narrowest justification for an enormous reshaping of life on Earth. The qualifier matters: he’s “against” globalisation “on the basis of economic advantage.” He’s not pretending the system has no upsides. He’s questioning why efficiency and profit get to be the trump card that steamrolls everything else - ecosystems, labor standards, cultural autonomy, resilience.
The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost bureaucratic, which is where the power sits. Attenborough’s public persona is patient, evidence-led, and quietly alarming. By choosing the language of a boardroom (“economic advantage”) rather than the language of activism, he makes the critique harder to dismiss as sentimentality. It’s an argument in the opponent’s dialect: if the pitch for globalisation is “cheaper, faster, more,” then we should audit what’s been priced out of the spreadsheet.
The subtext is ecological and civilizational. Globalised supply chains aren’t just trade routes; they are extraction routes, carbon pipelines, and incentive structures that reward externalizing damage. “Huge” signals scale beyond governance: decisions diffuse across borders, accountability evaporates, and consequences land on communities with the least leverage.
Contextually, Attenborough has spent decades translating planetary complexity into stories people can feel. This line compresses that project into a simple provocation: if our main argument for remaking the world is economic advantage, we’ve already admitted we’re willing to lose almost everything else.
The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost bureaucratic, which is where the power sits. Attenborough’s public persona is patient, evidence-led, and quietly alarming. By choosing the language of a boardroom (“economic advantage”) rather than the language of activism, he makes the critique harder to dismiss as sentimentality. It’s an argument in the opponent’s dialect: if the pitch for globalisation is “cheaper, faster, more,” then we should audit what’s been priced out of the spreadsheet.
The subtext is ecological and civilizational. Globalised supply chains aren’t just trade routes; they are extraction routes, carbon pipelines, and incentive structures that reward externalizing damage. “Huge” signals scale beyond governance: decisions diffuse across borders, accountability evaporates, and consequences land on communities with the least leverage.
Contextually, Attenborough has spent decades translating planetary complexity into stories people can feel. This line compresses that project into a simple provocation: if our main argument for remaking the world is economic advantage, we’ve already admitted we’re willing to lose almost everything else.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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