No pride of lions prowls its streets, no shiver of sharks cruises its river, but the small English city of Bristol (pop. 380,000) has built a global reputation as a center of wildlife filmmaking and environ-mental activism. Once a thriving port that lost trade to Liverpool when ships became too big for its harbor, it is now a model for how uncompromising work can be a magnet for like-minded people.

When the BBC officially set up its Natural History Unit in Bristol in 1957, a core of wildlife enthusiasts, conservationists and media pioneers had already been working in the city and its environs, including Peter Scott, later a founder of WWF, the conservation organization that began life in 1961 as the World Wildlife Fund, and of the town's acclaimed Wildscreen nature film festival. Today the BBC unit makes more than 80 hours of television a year, seen in over 100 countries around the world. The man most identified with it, of course, is David Attenborough, whose decades of globetrotting have shown viewers gorilla colonies, cheetahs on the prowl and the jaws of great white sharks in series like Life on Earth and The Blue Planet. "I am just the tip of the iceberg," he says. "I am the public face of what is a very big body of work."

"If a nuclear bomb went off in Bristol, natural history film would be crippled," says Harry Marshall, creative director and co-founder of Icon Films, one of a cluster of independent companies that have sprung up in Bristol, many run by BBC veterans. Such a cataclysm would also wipe out a considerable number of British eco-activists. The Soil Association, Britain's leading voice on organic food and farming, founded in 1946, has been based in Bristol since 1985. Future West, which promotes sustainable development through a range of economic and educational programs, is based there, too; as are the Centre for Sustainable Energy, the Recycling Consortium and Schumacher U.K., the "small is beautiful" society named for the economist and philosopher E.F. Schumacher. There's a branch of the recycling project called sofa (Shifting Old Furniture About) and a massive Edwardian tobacco warehouse that the City Council recycled into the $1.8 million create Centre (Community Recycling, Environmental Action, Training and Education). Hannah Durrant, a project development officer for Bristol City Council, sees a "honeybee effect," in which environment-related activity has attracted more people with similar skills and concerns, who then "began to look around to see how they could improve and protect their own surroundings." (For visitors, the city's harborside has been home since 2000 to @Bristol, a state-of-the-art nature and science center that features a living tropical forest, a variety of exhibitions and multimedia displays that explain nature's mysterious forces.) Twenty organizations now have offices in the create Centre, while the ground floor is given over to space for exhibitions, conferences, an art gallery and a café. Next door is the Ecohome, a two-story, solar-heated building meant to inspire others in the use of environmentally friendly construction materials and techniques. And inspiration abounds in Bristol's natural-history films, though the industry has been stretched by the proliferation of TV channels and greater emphasis on ratings. "If natural-history television is to survive," says Marshall, "it will have to accept the most important survival rule: Adapt or die." That's a lesson Bristol has learned well.