29 July 2023 , 17:06
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TV naturalist Chris Packham had to call in the cops again over vicious online trolling of his partner and step-daughter. Police are investigating a vile tweet sent to his partner, Charlotte Corney, 47, who owns The Wildheart Animal Sanctuary, and his stepdaughter, zoologist and TV presenter Megan McCubbin, 28, in May.
Chris, 62, who won a libel case in May against a website that accused him of fraud and dishonesty, said: “The content of the tweet was about violence to women and it was also racial, racist and xenophobic. I am lucky that Charlotte and Megan have grown to be robust and understand I cannot stop doing what I do, so we have had to learn to deal with that type of abuse because it’s only going to go on and get worse.”
But Chris has defied hate campaigners, including those who put a car bomb outside his home in a terrifying arson attack in October 2021, by having the remains of his fire-damaged gates transformed into a unique coffee table. Recalling how balaclava-clad thugs torched a Land Rover outside his New Forest home, which exploded into flames that set fire to his gates and fence, he said: “The message for them is clear. They won’t win, they’re never going to win.
Chris Packham poses with his partner Charlotte Corney as he arrives at the High Court in central London (AFP via Getty Images)“When the gates were burned, the texture of the burned wood was actually very beautiful with an iridescent bluey black colour. When we took them down to replace them, I kept the gates, cut them up and had them made into a low coffee table for me to put my books on in the lounge. It’s symbolic because I’ve got to find something good out of that bad and turn all of that negative into something positive.”
Chris, who has just released a companion book to his BBC series Earth and is keen to promote the dangers of climate change, is also supporting the appeal against sentence of jailed Just Stop Oil activist Marcus Decker, 34, who he visited in HMP Highpoint last week. German citizen, Marcus Decker, 34, was jailed for two years and seven months for scaling a bridge on the Dartford Crossing on October 17 last year, alongside another JSO protestor, Morgan Trowland, 40, and has launched a petition, which Chris is backing, against his deportation.
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Both men’s appeal was heard at The Court of Appeal on Friday, but no decision will be given before July 31. Branding Decker’s sentence “draconian”, Chris said: “I think it’s grossly unjust the fact that he’s been given such a long sentence when those people are sacrificing their freedom for the message.
“Marcus is a highly intelligent, well-motivated young man, and his action didn’t hurt anyone. It was peaceful. He’s been basically victimised by a system that’s trying to repress our human right to protest and that’s a very dangerous precedent. He’s become a totemic symbol of that.”
Marcus Decker was jailed for two years and seven months for scaling a bridge on the Dartford Crossing on October 17 last year
Morgan Trowland also scaled the bridge (PA)Chris also condemned “global governments” for “doing nothing” to address climate change, as wildfires rage through Greece and its islands. “It’s all over the world,” he said. “China has records broken, sea temperatures on the west coast of the UK have gone through the roof, Antarctic sea temperatures are off the scale - this is really scary stuff.
“But it’s not as scary as our government and other global governments doing nothing to address it. They are failing us, everyone in the world, our children and our grandchildren.”
With July on track to be the world’s hottest month on record, he continued: “We are as a species being caught with our pants down despite the fact that the teacher has been telling us we need to put a belt on for some time. In 1970 there was 69% more wildlife globally than there is now so there is no question now that I’m going to see even more of that wildlife disappearing. But all is not lost if we act.”
The Just Stop Oil protestors caused gridlock when police closed the bridge (PA)Chris worries about the future for his stepdaughter, Megan - whose mother Jo McCubbin he was in a relationship with for 10 years. “I worry about Megan’s future and what’s the world going to be like, if she ever gets to my age?” he said.
“We have really quite ugly conversations about where’s the safest place in the world going to be. It’s a really depressing conversation to be having with a young person who’s starting their life in adulthood.
“I want people to develop an appreciation of how wonderful our world is, how unique it is, and yet at the same time, how fragile it is,” he said. “We are very lucky to be here as a species, it’s almost serendipitous. We ought to value the planet more than we clearly are and value life and ourselves a bit more frankly.”
The full series of Earth is on BBC iPlayer and the companion book, Earth, is out now (William Collins, £25).
A passage from the introduction of Earth
The planet you are sitting on right now was, as unbelievable as it seems, slowly pieced together by the collision of endless cosmic scraps over millions upon millions of years. Formed by nothing more than the force of gravity, dust became rock, rock became boulder and boulder became a molten lump so vast it would pull itself into the near-perfect sphere that we know and inhabit today.
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But although this was the beginning of our planet’s story, it was far from the beginning of a world that we could recognise today. At its birth there was no life, no ever-changing sky, and there were no oceans.
This was a planet born out of a series of endless cosmic collisions, and in its early years it was still reeling from the violence of that creation. To understand how it would become not just a planet but a home, we need to weave our way through the events of this young, hostile world’s early life, as it hurtled from one catastrophic event to another.
At times it seemed as if there would be no life-filled future for Earth, as again and again it faced the prospect of becoming a sterile world, choked by conditions that had become too extreme – whether too hot, too cold or just too toxic – to allow anything to survive. And yet, despite everything that was thrown at it, life would ultimately conquer and flourish.
Our planet has created every living thing – including you and me. Today, we see all of this beauty, but we also take it for granted. This is a living, breathing, life-sustaining planet that is more fragile than we like to admit and more indifferent to us than we want to acknowledge.
The full series of Earth is on BBC iPlayer. The companion book, Earth, is out now (William Collins, £25)