Planet Earth: A Review

Photo courtesy of projectorreviews.com

As promised, here’s my review of BBC’s Planet Earth series.

This is quite an extensive series. One should take time to absorb and enjoy the stunning images of, what could have been, earth's last remaining wildernesses, and meditate on the import of what this documentary would like to convey. For someone who doesn't seem to have all the time in the world, what with work and leisure crammed in this hectic life, it's kind of funny how one is even able to come up with a review of a series of this magnitude.

Well, I tend to surprise myself sometimes.

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Five years in the making, Planet Earth is BBC’s most ambitious and expensive documentary on natural history to date. It showed never-before seen footages of wildlife and has used state-of-the-art technology, in some cases, to provide unobstructed views of the wild and their behavior. It’s filmed entirely in high-definition.

Some of the never before seen footages are:

•     Wild Bactrian camels filmed eating snow in the Gobi desert
•     An Amur leopard mother and cub in the forests of eastern Russia
•     A sequence showing a snow leopard attempting to hunt a markhor in north-west Pakistan
•     Arctic wolf and African wild dog hunts filmed from the air
•     The highest-ever aerial footage of Mount Everest and the Karakoram
•     Desperate lions hunting and killing an elephant at night
•     A piranha feeding frenzy filmed in the water with the fish
•     Unprecedented access to the dramatic Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico
•     The oceanic whitetip shark, a rare ocean wanderer

 

Wild Bactrian Camels photo courtesy of danzanravjaa.typepad.com

The series has eleven episodes, each featuring a global overview of the different biomes or habitats on earth: “From Pole to Pole”, “Mountains”, “Fresh Water”, “Caves”, “Deserts”, “Ice Worlds”, “Great Plains”, “Jungles”, “Shallow Seas”, “Seasonal Forests” and “Ocean Deep”.

After each fifty-minute episode, a ten-minute featurette shows a behind-the-scenes look at the challenges of filming the series  

It’s amazing to see the amount of biodiversity on our planet and how each one plays a key role to the natural cycles that has been in place for millenia. There is obviously a lot we need to know about our planet and a lot we don’t fully understand. The natural world is replete with mysteries we are yet to unravel and it is worrisome to know that, at the rate we are going, we may not have enough time to do that. Some of the damage may even be irreversible.

Probably the most compelling part is the companion to this set, Planet Earth – The Future, which takes a closer look at the issues involved, questions the ways in which we are meeting up the challenge, and presents the many sides to the environmental debate.

Amur Leopard photo courtesy of scienceblogs.com

 

Conservationists attribute the demise of our planet's ecosystems to overpopulation, mismanagement of natural resources and man's endless pursuit of development. This, coupled with an all-pervasive culture of self-gratification - a trademark of our modern generation's consumer lifestyle, has put pressure on the planet's resources, undermining natural foundations and thereby threatening our very own future.

Policy makers, especially those in the developing world, aspire for economic growth for their citizens, with the West as its model. The problem is that everyone wanted to live like the Americans, and if everyone is to be living that way, we would actually need three planets. Economic prosperity is often achieved at the expense of the environment. Industrialization brought with it grisly images of the wanton destruction of the natural world - denuded forests, polluted air and water, and the extinction of animal species.

So, how are we meeting up with the challenge?      

Some propose what is called sustainable development, and it's controversial. Some say it is a contradiction in terms, as we couldn't have any kind of development. We've gone much too far. What we need is a sustainable retreat.  

Others say this is the environmentalist's clever idea, thinly veiled under the cloak of development but that is no development at all, and only aims to hinder economic growth in the developing world.

Very often in policy-making, development and environment are traded-off against each other. It's either one or the other, where in fact it should be both - meeting human needs and protecting natural systems. This is the essence of sustainable development.

For many years, the conservation movement’s approach borders on the hard-line – fencing animals in, keeping humans out, incorporating militia-style rangers to boot. This has actually worked for years in the case of national parks and nature reserves, and is credited for saving the elephants, for example. But such hard line approach comes at a price. Locals are usually uprooted from their ancestral lands, drastically altering their way of life. Some say the system has to be re-engineered to make it more holistic to the human communities involved and to make them part of the solution rather than part of the problem – this, at least in cases where wildlife and humans can harmoniously co-exist.

Snow Leopard photo courtesy of bbc.co.uk

This brings us to another trend in the conservation landscape: eco-tourism.

We can only preserve a wilderness area in its pristine state for long, and I think we should be doing that in any way we can. However, there are cases where conservationists had to, and/or inevitably, would have to deal with the human element. In such cases, the communities who live side-by-side with the wild should be educated and should realize that protecting and investing in conservation could actually be good for their bottom lines.

One downside seen in this tactic however, are the swarms of tourists who would be flocking in these eco-tourism spots, which could have a drastic effect on the environments involved - disturbing habitats and the animals’ natural dispositions along the way. This means some form of regulation needed to be put in place.  

Eco-tourism is a work in progress. Despite the seeming drawbacks however, this new phase in the conservation arena is hailed as something promising.

Then there is the issue of ethics in the field of conservation, especially in the area of trophy hunting. The very idea of trophy hunting or gaming seems repulsive, but those who are involved in this activity feel otherwise. In fact, they feel they are doing conservation's bidding by keeping the health of these animals' population in check. Their logic is that they wouldn't allow population of these animals to get depleted as they are the ones who would also suffer in the long run. In effect, they should be protecting these animals to some degree for their beloved sport to continue.

Whitetip Shark photo courtesy of bushwarriors.wordpress.com

As can be clearly seen, there is no one solution to our environmental problems and the extinction of species. All these proposals have to come together to make it work. It's not just in the area of policy-making, or population control, or sustainable development, but has to go far beyond that. Everybody's involved. Everyone should be involved. It should become part of our psyche and should appeal to us by any means possible - through culture, the arts, music, poetry, science, etc.  

Some sectors in the field of science are preserving gene samples from these nearly extinct creatures with the view of, perhaps someday, being able to recreate life. We all know, however, that the issue of cloning has been hotly debated for many years, same with the issue of captive breeding, which argues on leading animals to domestication, making them vulnerable, inadequately incapable of adapting to their natural habitats.   

Creating awareness through the media is very helpful in furthering conservation's cause. Seeing the beauty of nature on our television screens builds that much-needed appreciation of the wonders around us. Conservationists hope this would incite people to act in ways that would benefit the planet. However, according to some, this approach has a tendency of making people become passive voyeurs of nature, falsely thinking that everything is doing just fine.  

We should therefore have a more responsible media in that it wouldn't just showcase the beauty of nature but engage people more in the issues involved. Individual efforts, when combined, can be a force of nature in itself.

Lastly, world religions (or a part of it), though generally being criticized for coming in quite late in the game and of being nothing but a passive bystander as the industrial juggernauts lay waste to our planet, are also making an appeal to people by preaching that we have a moral responsibility of protecting the earth. They say we were given responsibility as stewards of this planet and that we are part of a system that is big and mysterious, and that we don't yet fully understand.