At Core Of Netflix/David Attenborough Nature Series: What Loss Looks Like

[hatrack]

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But what makes this series stand out from those previous efforts is that Our Planet plays notes of an elegy. We’re living in an age of staggering wildlife loss due to human development, overfishing, deforestation, and climate change. This series doesn’t let us forget that. Humans have caused staggering amounts of wildlife loss. Our Planet doesn’t hide from it.

The second episode contains the saddest scene perhaps ever shot in a nature documentary. It focuses on an enormous gathering of walruses that have been forced onto a tiny stretch of dry land due to the shrinking sea ice in the Arctic. Every inch of the land is covered with walruses, so some — and remind you, these animals weigh a ton — take to climbing up to a tall cliff to escape the crowd. When it comes time to feed in the ocean, they can’t climb down. And so they fall — awkwardly, painfully, all 2,000 pounds of them — down the steep cliff. It’s heartbreaking, and you feel the invisible presence of humans pushing them off.

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Though other scenes (in addition to the heartbreaking walrus cliff dive) do convey a visceral sense of loss, I wish there were more of them. So much of this series is pretty much a clone of the Planet Earth and Blue Planet series that came before it. The scenes that attempt to visualize loss can feel tacked on, but they are also the most original and impactful moments of the series. In the third episode, on jungles, Attenborough pivots from the amazing adaptations of Borneo’s carnivorous plants to a simple time-lapse animation from space, showing how the island has lost half of its forest in the past 50 years. The fourth episode on shallow seas lingers on dying, bleached corals in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

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https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/4/8/18296178/netflix-our-planet-david-attenborough-wildlife-diversity-loss

[JHan]

1. I'm prepping myself for this when I watch.

It's so fucking heartbreaking.