Our Living World: A Peek at a Magnificent Planet Humans Don’t Really Deserve
By Liz Braun
Rating: B+
It’s hard to fault any nature series that seems intent upon education and conservation.
And that seems to be the intention of Our Living World, a new Netflix four-part documentary series highlighting the interconnectedness of all living things.
It has all the de rigueur elements of the genre — gobsmacking nature photography and enlightening commentary — in a package that includes both cute and ferocious wildlife, soaring overhead landscape shots, scenes of natural disasters and havoc and sequences of hopeful renewal.
The music is a touch obvious, getting particularly church-y and soaring for the renewal bits, but never mind. The series does a good job of connecting the dots between seemingly disconnected places and creatures.
The first episode notes that while humans tend to sideline nature, nature will find a way through regardless — thanks to a complex living network that spans the world. A brief look at Arctic reindeer, for example, reveals their crucial grazing/snow cover protection role that helps reflect the sun’s heat back into the atmosphere. What helps keep the Arctic frozen connects to sea currents globally and the underwater life those currents maintain. Cue the fabulous, colourful fish photos.
The ocean currents are linked next to the Kalahari Desert in dry season, where relief comes in the form of a thunderstorm in the highlands. In an oasis nearby, male rhinos throw down over their turf and their females, and even this ritual helps stir up the waters and prevent stagnation.
The action moves next to elephants and their contributions to bush fires, during which nutrients are released into the air and carried as far as the Amazon rainforest. In that location, a Brazil nut tree is the entree to talk about a vast underground network created by fungi, and the symbiotic relationship those fungi have with the trees. It’s the wood-wide-web, jokes the narrator, who happens to be Cate Blanchett.
Blanchett appears to have been directed to keep things down to a dull roar, perhaps so as not to detract from the visuals? Hard to say. Her dulcet tones are soothing sometimes but too low-affect at others.
Overall, there seems to be a careful balance here, with bits of science information mixed with entertaining (and beautiful) wildlife, birds, and fish visuals. There are a few hunter-and-prey animal scenes over the four programs, but nothing that would upset children.
Part two, “The Rhythm of Life,” is much of the same. A sense of timing is crucial to survival, and here’s the evidence: frogs jumping for an insect to eat, lions looking for meat and killing a buffalo calf, crabs fighting over burrows and mates, muskox scuffling, seasons changing, baby animals getting born, critters fighting over habitat. This program ends on a slightly darker note, putting it right out there that human activity and the resultant climate change are messing things up.
“Breaking Point,” the third in the series, partly emphasizes the damage being done to the planet, but also shows how life relies not just on the Earth’s gentle side but on its rage, too. That idea triggers footage of massive avalanches, wildfires, and volcanoes; luckily, each of those phenomena also creates good things in the physical world.
What’s not good are the warming oceans and the storms that result, storms so fierce that creatures (such as those ubiquitous lizards in Florida) have begun to adapt physically to manmade climate change. This program makes points about climate change, but makes them gently, showing tussles between polar bears and wolves (hitherto a great rarity) and explaining how pine trees withstand western pine beetle attacks in the Sierra Nevada Forest.
Or at least how the trees used to survive, before water shortages altered all that. Now as the pines dwindle and die, forest fires spring to life. The upside: these trees are now growing in latitudes once thought too cold for their survival. Beavers are moving into similar northern territory.
Otherwise, things are a tad grim, and Our Living World suggests we are suffering what some scientists call “the rise of slime,” due to global warming. The seas are full of jellyfish, who can survive the more acidic ocean, not to mention legions of rodents and swarms of insects on dry land. Nature’s network is at a breaking point.
Luckily, the final and fourth chapter is called “The Road to Recovery.” Here, the series puts forward various ways the planet can heal, including through re-wilding various animals that contribute mightily to the environment.
The goofy looking Saiga antelope, for example, once grazed in herds numbering in the millions all over Europe and China, maintaining the world’s largest grassland through their grazing and seed-spreading. They were decimated through poaching, but the effort to bring them back in numbers may save the steppe. The series shows how rejuvenating only 20 large animal species would alter the planet for the better. We need more elephants.
The series states that the species doing most for the planet’s health are those most at risk of extinction. Sadly, one assumes the inverse is also true. Nice planet. Shame about the humans.
Our Living World. Produced by James Shelton and James Honeyborne. Narrated by Cate Blanchett. Episode one airs on Netflix April 17.