Our Planet II 2.1

The lives of desperate seabirds in an ocean of plastic

For all the moments of grace and majesty in the opening hour of Our Planet II — and there are several, from the tiny murrelet chick on Vancouver Island so small it trips over twigs on its trek toward the shore to the Kalahari lions working together to take down a cape buffalo five times their size — one sequence stands out.

The lonely vigil of a scruffy, disheveled albatross chick waiting days on end on the remote Pacific island of Laysan for its mother to return from the sea with life-giving food is likely to leave an indelible impression on anyone who sees it. Survival against terrible odds is a recurring theme in World on the Move, the first hour of Netflix’s four-episode follow-up to 2019’s Our Planet, hosted and narrated with familiar urgency by David Attenborough. Even if the albatross chick should survive its early-life fight against slow starvation, dangers await. When it finally learns to fly on its own, ungainly and awkward on its maiden flight across the sea — more hop-and-jump than actual flying — swarms of tiger sharks, thousands of them, exact a deadly toll on albatross chicks that haven’t learned the life skills yet needed to survive at sea.

The real challenge, though — and the message that drives Our Planet II in its entirety — is that humans have made the chick’s fight for survival all the more daunting. “There is now so much plastic in our oceans that it reaches the most remote islands on Earth,” Attenborough says. Pictures say more than words, though, and the accompanying visuals — of the tiny chick dry-heaving, opening its beak wide, and struggling to regurgitate plastic crud its mother has mistaken for food — are impossible to ignore. Or forget.

Plastic, the detritus of our all-consuming lifestyle in a world driven by the insatiable pursuit of financial profit at any cost — is destroying the planet, piece by gaudy,

brightly colored piece.

We know this, of course, but it’s quite another to see it with our own eyes, in such wrenching, heartfelt detail.

These Attenborough-voiced programs are not a dirge, though. Without the moments of beauty and grace and dignity, there would be little reason to watch. Our Planet is a cautionary tale, but there is reason for hope, rooted in nature’s resilience and humankind’s collective potential for course correction.

World on the Move focuses on the migratory patterns of insects, birds, and land animals as they embark on often life-threatening journeys to feed themselves and their newborns, mate and breed, and find new homes. It’s a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, featuring lions, walruses, and polar bears, among countless others, and it’s a marvel to witness. The cinematography is astounding, some of the finest of the entire Planet Earth canon, and is reason alone to watch. Cutting-edge drone technology allowed the size of the migrating megaherd of buffalos in the show-opening sequence to be counted for the first time — and revealed the herd to be more than 5,000 strong.

A sequence following a swarm of locusts in Ethiopia, filmed during the 2020 pandemic, shows locusts crossing entire continents in a wave of destruction … stopped only by ever-more-deadly pesticides.

The circle of life is fast becoming a doom loop, which is important to know if we are to have any hope of overcoming obstacles of our own making. Our Planet is vibrant, urgent — and disarming in its simplicity. It’s nature programming at its most earnest. And timely.

Next: a look at episode 2, Following the Sun.

Netflix/Silverback Films

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Our Planet II 2.0

Netflix’s follow-up to 2019’s Our Planet marks one of Sir David Attenborough’s finest hours

“The dangerous temptation of wildlife films,” Doug Peacock wrote in Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness, “is that they can lull us into thinking we can get by without the original models — that we might not need animals in the flesh.”

Our Planet, Netflix’s ambitious, eye-opening paean to the wild world, now back in a four-episode second iteration, was always going to be different from the David Attenborough-hosted nature series we’ve become used to seeing.

All the classic signatures are there — Sir David’s emotional, evocative narration; the wonder, the astonishing, at-times jaw-dropping cinematography — but this time, the emphasis was going to be about the changing world and how we humans are forcing many of those changes, just by our presence.

It’s a fine line to walk. As Attenborough himself once said, in a profile on the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes, about his early programs, no one wants to be told the Earth is going to hell and it’s all our fault.

Our Planet II opens with a hunt: lions in Botswana’s Kalahari down a cape buffalo from one of the largest known herds of buffalo on the planet.

From the air — visually, one of the big differences between Our Planet II and the original is that the latest edition relies heavily on drone technology, which has advanced dramatically in just five years — the sight is stunning … there could be thousands of buffalo down there. Literally. It’s a full-on mass migration, and that’s unique to that part of Africa. Buffalo normally gather in herds of 20 or so, and stake their claim to a particular territory. They move around, but not like this. This is unique.

The world is changing, Attenborough tells us in his narration, and wildlife must change with it if it is to survive.

We must change, too, whether we like it or not.

We, too, may soon bear witness to human mass migrations on a sweeping scale.

In some ways, we are already seeing it, with the migrant crossings across the Mediterranean. Just last week, hundreds of refugees, many of them from drought-stricken countries in sub-Saharan Africa seeking a better life in southern Europe, drowned at sea, so many that one NGO official described the Mediterranean as a ‘mass graveyard’ — this after an overcrowded boat carrying as many as 750 refugees capsized off the coast of Greece. Most of the victims drowned; at last count, little more than 100 survivors were plucked out of the ocean.

Without saying so in so many words — Attenborough makes no mention of climate refugees per se — Our Planet draws parallels between the natural world forced to co-exist with a world of our own making and an uncertain future for all life on Earth, and not just wildlife.

Over the coming days and weeks, I’ll review each episode of Our Planet II in sequence, with anecdotes from behind the scenes. The entire season is now streaming on Netflix, but there are moments here so wrenching and powerful they need to be absorbed slowly, over time, with time left between hours to think and reflect. This is not binge-viewing. Quite the opposite. The four hours stand alone by themselves, each on its own, and that is the way they need to be seen.

Much has been made of Netflix’s eclectic, high-profile series, some of which have become staples of popular culture, from Stranger Things to Squid Game and Lupin, but for me, the Our Planet series is the most important, the most meaningful, and the biggest reason for being. It’s not just a prestige documentary — it’s a living testament to life on Earth, and what remains of it.

Next: an in-depth look at episode 1, World on the Move.

Netflix/Silverback Films

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Earth Day

During the pandemic, the famed ethnologist and conservationist Jane Goodall sequestered herself in her childhood home in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England. Goodall, who first stepped into Tanzania’s Gombe National Park to observe chimpanzees just more than 60 years ago, was hard at work, broadcasting her mission to millions of viewers across the globe. In a teleconference interview with Vogue, she talked about how she was putting the finishing touches on her new collaboration with the wellness brand Forest Remedies: a kit of four essential oils—ginger and ylang-ylang from Madagascar, citronella from Togo, and frankincense from Somaliland—of which a percentage of the proceeds will be donated to the Jane Goodall Institute. “The more we can provide people with products that they want to use that are produced in a sustainable way, the better,” Goodall said at the time. She turned 89 on April 3, just 20 days ago.

Earth Day is acknowledged once a year, but in truth — especially now, in 2023 — every day should be Earth Day. “I understood why those who had lived through war and economic disasters,” Goodall wrote in Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. “and who had built a good life and a high standard of living for themselves, were rightly proud to be able to provide for their children those things which they themselves had not had. And why their children inevitably took those things for granted. It meant that new values and new expectations crept into our societies, (leading to) the materialistic lifestyle of so many people in the Western world today.” Our onslaught on nature is not down to a lack of intelligence but rather a lack of compassion for future generations and the health of the planet: greed and selfishness for short-term personal gain. The rest is thoughtlessness. We can do better, Goodall reminds us. We must do better. It is well past time. 

Attenborough

Seemingly ages ago — though in truth it was no more than 20 years — David Attenborough told the US news program 60 Minutes that no one sitting at home wanted to be told that the world is going to hell and it’s all their fault. In his older age — Attenborough was born in the same year as Queen Elizabeth II — he has changed his tune somewhat. His most recent programs, from Our Planet to A Life on Our Planet, have marked a pronounced shift toward environmentalism and the existential issues of humankind’s impact on the natural world, from climate change and habitat loss to overpopulation, dwindling biodiversity, species loss, overconsumption, and the looming Sixth Mass Extinction. Over a broadcasting career that spans half a century, he has witnessed the decline of the living world.

“I would much prefer not to be a placard-carrying conservationist,” he has said. “My life is the natural world. But I can’t not carry a placard if I see what’s happening.” He is now an activist, ardent and committed, the voice of conscience for a Westernized society driven by profit and the need to consume more and more with each passing tick of the doomsday clock. Attenborough: “Immensely powerful though we are today, it’s equally clear that we’re going to be even more powerful tomorrow. And what’s more, there will be greater compulsion upon us to use our power as the number of human beings on Earth increases still further. Clearly, we could devastate the world. As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the universe where there is life. Its continued survival now rests in our hands.” #truth