Planet Earth

Planet Earth is a BBC production that is exquisitely beautiful and tragic. In a series of eleven or so episodes their crew attempts to capture what is majestic about the land we live in but rarely see. Watching these episodes gets me very motivated to amass money and travel before every single one of these amazing habitats is destroyed or altered permanently. Even as a child I was obsessed with endangered animals, I had one of those wildlife notebooks where they send you new cards each month about more animals which will possibly disappear. Come to think of it, it really is a rather morbid fascination for a child to have, but at the time I was really only interested in the animals, the possibility that they would eventually disappear seemed distant and unlikely as most things seemed to me as a child.

Some of the scientists are clearly in love with these animals, as are some of the cameramen. Somehow some of the crew is uncaring or extremely detached when it comes to some of the animals chances of survival. There's a clip during one of the episodes concerning conservation where a man talks about how interesting it will be to see whether the polar bear evolves in the next 50 years in order to adapt to the total disappearance of its habitat, the polar ice cap. Interesting is such a banal word anyways, but the scientist says it with a lot of fascination, and almost pleasure. "Wow, they still survived after we fucked up the whole planet they are now in Canada and eating people. Interesting." There's a total emotional disconnect in some of these people, but I guess that is because of what they are dealing with on an everyday basis. If I told most people ( at least those who haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth) that the polar bear would be extinct in 50 years they would probably be shocked. On the other hand, for these biologists it is rudimentary.


The primal energy that these animals exude is awe-inspiring. It seems almost impossible to look at the world in such a way and not immediately become concerned with our impact upon it. So now I'm sitting here wondering what can anyone do about it? Are thousands of beautiful, amazing creatures going to have the life sucked out of them for rich white men who want to get the last drop out of their oil fields, not to mention poor non-white men attempting to quickly industrialize in order to compete in a global economy and being blamed for desecrating the wilderness simply because the whites already did their part in the destruction about 200 years ago?