PBS Nature: Running with the Beest

The annual wildebeest migration, in which 1.3 million thirsty animals cross the crocodile-infested waters of the Mara and Grumeti rivers that straddle the Kenya-Tanzania border in East Africa, has been called one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, and small wonder. Tourists from all over the world pay thousands of dollars to be able to see one of nature’s true marvels, and perhaps the truly remarkable thing is that, despite decades of drought, predation, and increasingly erratic rains, the migration carries on much as it has done since the Pleistocene era.

As Running with the Beest, the opening episode of PBS Nature’s 41st season, shows though, all is not well in nature’s showpiece event. This is not Disney. It’s not The Lion King. And the very thing that helps sustain the natural circle of life in one of the most impoverished regions of the world — much-needed foreign exchange from overseas visitors that goes toward funding conservation programs in a developing nation that otherwise might have little incentive to set aside large tracts of grassland for wildlife — is a growing worry for the local Maasai guides who make their living from ecotourism.

Running with the Beest, could have taken the conventional view of countless other wildlife programs, with dramatic images of wildebeest crossing rivers and playing a game of chance against hungry crocodiles that lie in wait, and there are scenes like that. Beest provides important context, though, that other programs might shy away from. Tourist vans descend on the rivers by the dozen, often blocking the routes the wildebeest are most comfortable with, based on previous experience of river crossing. So the wildebeest take chances and cross the rivers in unfamiliar places, where the riverbank may be too high or the swim too treacherous. Some wildebeest end up breaking their legs from an awkward fall down a cliff they might not otherwise have jumped from, or are trampled in mass stampedes driven by panic. These scenes are hard to watch, but it’s important that viewers know. Tourism carries with it its own responsibilities, and not all tour companies are alike when it comes to ethical practices around wildlife.

There are two voices of conscience in the program, Maasai guides Evalyn Sintoya and Derrick Nabaala, and it’s clear from the opening moments that they have a deeply felt attachment to the land and the animals that live there.

“I’m telling you, when you see that migration,” Sintoya says in Beest’s opening moments, “you know it’s just like an overwhelming thing to see, it’s amazing. The movement, the noise … It’s just a spectacular thing. It keeps ringing in your mind when you see it with your naked eye.”

“Wildebeest are beautiful,” Nabaala adds. “When you see them, they're special, they’re unique.”

“I’m very proud to come from Mara as a Maasai,” he adds, moments later. “I feel proud when I look back into this beautiful area, and I see animals.”

It’s all about perspective, however. Tourism is vital — but how much tourism is too much? It’s a question that has echoes all over the world, wherever tourism encounters remote, pristine regions of the planet. It’s a question being asked halfway around the world, on the climbing routes up Mt. Everest or in the tiger reserves in India and Nepal.

Running with the Beest also examines the problem of poaching with wire snares, predominant in the western corridor of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park, where fast-growing agricultural communities sprawl up to the park boundary. Beest follows rangers on patrol as they hold the line against thousands of wire snares, possibly an inevitability wherever fast-growing human communities live alongside protected wildlife areas.

In the end, though, it is the tourist issue that is the most nettlesome and the problem many viewers are likely to remember the most.

“A big challenge now in the Mara is too much crowded, and I hope people will realize that, try to give these animals space, try to respect their way, try to give them a distance,” Sintoya says. “Responsibility starts from us. Each one of us in the tourism sector, we should stand and have that responsibility and respect the way of these animals. Take a stand. Be you, and make an example.”

Running with the Beest, is worth a look, if only because it shows a side of wildlife tourism rarely shown in other nature programs, if ever.

It’s also a study in just how resilient so many of these wildebeest are, despite being the butt of ridicule and jokes. For, as Running with the Beest shows, the annual migration is still a going concern. For now.

PBS Nature: Running with the Beest premieres Wednesday, Oct. 19, on PBS at 8E/7C, and on the PBS app.

Derrick Nabaala / Photo by Jo Scofield ©Atlantic Productions

PBS Nature / Photo by Adam Bannister / ©Atlantic Productions

Lion: The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride

The key events in Lion: The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride, filmmaker Pamela Gordon’s docu-study of the most closely followed, most filmed pride of wild lions in film history, took place in 2015. The story, though, goes back nearly 30 years, and in many ways continues to resonate to this day.

As nature films go, Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride is more of a film exposé than family entertainment — more 60 Minutes than The Wonderful World of Disney. It’s warm and quite beautiful in parts, but also gritty and unblinking in its pursuit of the truth.

Nature programs often tell us a comforting lie, that wildlife, left to its own devices, is doing just fine. The truth, of course, is quite different, and what is happening away from the camera, behind the scenes, bares scant resemblance to the pictures of idyllic family scenes featuring playful cubs straight out of The Lion King.

That truth, today more than ever, comes down to human-wildlife conflict in some of the most pristine, untrammeled wilderness areas remaining on the planet.

At the heart of Marsh Pride is the conflict between wild lions and the Maasai cattle herders who live alongside them, and in some cases among them, in a time of ever-expanding human settlements and rapidly advancing climate change.

The two don’t mix easily, if at all, and so, when Marsh Pride opens with the mass poisoning of lions some viewers have been following since BBC’s Big Cat Diary in 1996, no one who follows the environmental scene as it is today can be surprised at how this story ended. It’s all part of a seemingly never-ending cycle: Lions, becoming hungry in their natural home, kill cattle, the lifeblood of Maasai communities, and so the Maasai kill lions, out of revenge and to prevent losing more cattle in future.

The story from the lions’ point of view is dire, though. In just 20 years, more than half Africa’s population of wild lions has been wiped out. Just 20,000 remain. There are fewer wild lions today than there are rhinos. Elephants, also endangered, number some 400,000, 20 times as many. Clearly, lions are in trouble.
Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride is no dirge, otherwise most people wouldn’t find a reason to watch. The program shows the Marsh pride during their halcyon years when individual lions with anthropomorphic, too-cute-by-half names like Scruffy, Tatu, Sienna, White Eye and Bibi became staples in British homes tuned to BBC’s weekly Big Cat Diary, a real-time nature program as cinema verité. These scenes go a long way toward explaining why lions matter.

The marsh pride itself is named for an unlikely oasis of swampland and year-round water at the southern edge of the often dry reserve, where the Mara borders Tanzania and the much larger Serengeti National Park to the south. Life, when things are going well, is near bliss, for lions and filmmakers alike. Marsh Pride borrows heavily from Big Cat Diary for these scenes of familial bliss — 26 years later, many viewers will be seeing this footage for the first time, even those living in the UK — but as we know, the world is changing and it is hard to know how, or even if, wild lions will remain, when confronted with an ever-expanding human population and the growing climate crisis.

“We’re at a point in the world where we need to decide if our future includes lions,” filmmaker Gordon said in a recent press interview. “I want a world with big cats in it. Poisoning them not only affects the lions but all the animals around them. I’m hoping viewers will see the importance and move in the direction of change.”

We’ll see.

Lion: The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride premieres Wednesday, Sept. 14, on PBS at 9E/8C and on the PBS app.

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The Green Planet: Human Worlds

Human Worlds, Wednesday’s final hour in Mike Gunton and David Attenborough’s bravura natural history series about plant life on Earth, doesn’t have the last word — at least, not exactly — but it arrives at an opportune time. The natural world is ablaze with wildfires, and it doesn’t take an advanced degree in climate science to know that human activity in our increasingly technological age is not helping.

In South Korea, just weeks ago, a fire started in the coastal county of Uljin that posed a threat to the Hanul Nuclear Power Plant. In Morocco, wildfires have burned through the provinces of Ouezzane, Tetouane and Taza, In France, wildfires burned through 50,000 acres in the southwestern region of Gironde, only a month ago. In Greece, this month, multiple fires have raged near the cities of Athens and Megara, as well as in the western Peloponnese and on the islands of Salamina and Lesbos — Lesbos ironically being a sanctuary and the first point of land for countless refugees fleeing war, drought and famine in even more parched parts of the world.  Elsewhere, wildfires have broken out recently in Tuscany, in Italy, in Slovenia and Turkey, as well as Portugal and Spain. Across the Atlantic, Canada has not been spared. The Oak Fire in the US, just west of California’s Yosemite National Park, has forced the evacuation of 4,000 people, in a part of the continental US not known for its population density. A fire in New Mexico’s Santa Fe County had burned through 350,000 acres as of July 15. The list goes on.

Climate deniers insist human activity has little to do with climate breakdown, but no one can argue that cities keep growing as the human population grows. More people are moving to the big city from rural regions worldwide, and not just in the industrialized north or the developing south. It’s only natural, if in an unnatural way, that vegetation is adapting to urban areas — plants taking root in glass, steel and concrete, if you will. That is why Human Worlds is a fitting way to end a nature series about our green planet.

Climate deniers insist human activity has next to nothing to do with climate breakdown, but no one can argue that cities keep growing as the human population grows. More people are moving to the big cities from rural areas — worldwide, and not just in the industrialized north or developing south — and so it’s only natural, if in an unnatural way, that vegetation is adapting to urban areas … plants taking root in concrete, as it were. That is why Human Worlds is a fitting way to end a natural history series about our relationship with — and dependence on — plant life.

“The relationship between plants and humans is extraordinary,” Attenborough reminds us in Human Worlds’ opening moments. “We’ve been adapting to each other for as long as we’ve been on the planet.

“We rely upon plants for almost everything, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, much of the clothes we wear, and in some parts of the world, the very buildings in which we live.”

Human Worlds has moments of exquisite beauty — and ominous foreboding — propelled by some of the most astonishing time-lapse photography you’re ever likely to see.

“But that relationship is now changing,” Attenborough continues. “How it changes next will shape the future of our green planet.”

We ignore that at our peril. Human Worlds is a fitting coda to a remarkable series that is both eye-filling and thought-provoking.

The Green Planet: Human Worlds premieres Wednesday, Aug. 3 on PBS at 8E/7C, and on the PBS app.

©BBC Studios

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The Green Planet: Desert Worlds

Nothing grows in the desert, goes an old refrain on the late-night comedy circuit: That’s why they call it the desert.

That’s not exactly true, of course, though it makes for a good laugh line. The reality, as the fourth instalment of the aptly named The Green Planet shows, is that desert worlds are a virtual garden of vegetation: One simply has to know where to look. Of all the episodes in the eye-filling nature series so far, Desert Worlds is the most adroit at showing how the hardiest plants find extraordinary ways to survive Charles Darwin’s battle of the most adaptable, even though water may be scarce to non-existent and temperatures can swing from one wild extreme to another, all in the course of a 24-hour day. There are plants that cling to a tenuous existence by slowing their metabolism to a murmur over lengthy periods of time, while others slither and crawl across the parched land, in an endless search for water.

Some plants hibernate — literally — and come to life in explosions of color at the first hint of rain, while others adopt defensive postures to protect themselves from grazing animals, defensive postures that can involve anything from camouflage to razor-sharp spines. Desert landscapes, including those more aptly described as sandscapes, look harsh and unforgiving in the bright light of day, but look beneath the surface and you’ll find a world of hidden surprises. Desert Worlds opens in northern China, flowing over a sandscape of desert dunes — and, just when you least expect, a grove of trees that has survived more than a thousand years, linked together by a labyrinthine web of unde4ground roots. From China to Mexico in a heartbeat in TV time, the camera sweeps around the gentleman naturalist David Attenborough, now 90, wending his way on foot through a dune sea where it may rain once a decade. There’s a gentle peace and world-lived soul to the way Attenborough talks about the private lives of plants, and what’s truly remarkable is how, even after Planet Earth and a lifetime’s service at the forefront of BBC’s Natural History Unit, he has maintained an almost childlike sense of wonder at the mysteries revealed before him. Not unlike a desert wind, Desert Worlds moves gently but restlessly to the Atacama desert in Chile, then the Kalahari in southwest Africa, followed by the Sonora in the southwestern United States, and everywhere he goes, Attenborough finds something wondrous.

There are almost two thousand different species of cactus, for example, a fact that may come as a surprise to anyone who isn’t a career botanist, and every cactus has a story. These stories are what drives The Green Planet, just as it was stories that drove Blue Planet and Life on Earth before it. Nature is complex, magisterial and full of hidden surprises, and that’s why the stories in The Green Planet never seem tiresome of formulaic. Far from. Watching weeds grow may be the very definition of boredom, but one of Desert Worlds’ singular achievements is how it makes watching weeds grow in one of the driest, hottest, most rugged and inhospitable biospheres on the planet is as gripping as any Netflix cliffhanger.

There’s a memorable moment, midway through the program, when the scene flashes back 40 years to The Living Planet, in which a younger, more svelte Attenborough, stands in California’s Mojave Desert, searching, in his words, “for one particular plant,” the creosote plant, Larrea tridentata.

The scene then flashes forward to present day, and Attenborough is standing over that very same bush. In 40 years, it has grown precisely one inch.

Watch Desert Worlds and you may never look at the desert the same way you again.

The Green Planet: Desert Worlds premieres Wednesday, July 27, on PBS at 8E/7C and on the PBS app. The final episode, Human Worlds, airs on Wednesday, Aug. 3.

©BBC Studios

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The Green Planet: Seasonal Worlds

A ghostly green light, the aurora borealis, weaves and bobs through a slow dance above a dark winterscape of ice and snow in the opening moments of The Green Planet’s third hour, Seasonal Worlds, a subtle reminder that, even in normal times, our green planet is a world of climatic extremes — extreme heat and bitter cold, blinding light and extreme darkness. And yet, plants grow here too.

“This is the boreal forest,” David Attenborough says, in an almost reverential hush, “the largest forest on Earth, 750 billion trees, smothered by snow throughout the winter.”

It is hard to watch these gentle, serene images of a quiet, almost haunting beauty and not think of the conflagration of wildfires that, right now, as this episode of The Green Planet makes its US debut on public broadcaster PBS, is scorching its way across wide expanses of Western Europe, just as they have in recent summers across western Canada and the United States, and deep into Siberia. The true boreal forest, the line of trees that separates the temperate forest from the Arctic expanses, is the northernmost boundary of an extraordinary world, Attenborough reminds us, as he stands in an oversize blue parka and a tiny red woollen hat on the edge of the Arctic Circle. It’s a world dominated by relentless change, the gentleman naturalist tells us, and the change is not limited to just human-caused climate. Change is the very definition of a season world — winter is not like summer, and the plants and animals that live here have learned to adapt.

By now, midway through the series, The Green Planet’s template is clear. Eye-filling visuals, much of them captured from drones gliding over an endless canopy of green, coupled with a lush symphonic score and Attenborough’s familiar dulcet voiceover, features few stylistic surprises, but one of the great joys of The Green Planet is the way it reveals hidden surprises in the seemingly familiar: Nettles that sprint, brambles that hook their quarry — yes, plants can be predatory, too — and creepy crawlers that literally creep and crawl. “Soon, every inch of space and patch of light is tamed,” until, of course, it isn’t. Predatory plants, indigenous and invasive alike, stalk their prey and move and suffocate it, captured by time-lapse photography, in the same way a snake may stalk and suffocates an unwary rodent. Plants don’t have brains the way we think of brains, but it’s hard not to watch The Green Planet and not imagine that there is a kind of self-awareness at work — a virtual Little Shop of Horrors of tales of survival and adaptation. Thermal cameras alert the viewer to temperature swings inside a flower and the air immediately around it — the secret of pollination, and how it works. A later sequence shows how wildfires can lead to regeneration, given the proper conditions, and not everything is always as it seems.

Season Worlds holds its lens to nearly every temperate region on Earth, from Australia to the lower Arctic, from the Cape Province of South Africa to the coastal old-growth forests of Western Canada — dandelion wine and daffodil wine in equal measure. The cumulative effect of Seasonal Worlds is soul-stirring and life-affirming. At its best, and there are moments in Season Worlds that equal anything in the series, The Green Planet is a welcome balm for a troubled world, and a timely reminder that humankind — all of us — must do everything we can to protect and preserve nature’s bounty. The hour’s final scenes, filmed in California’s giant redwood sequoia forests, are enough to bring a tear to the eye.

The Green Planet: Seasonal Worlds premieres Wednesday, July 20 on PBS at 8E/7C. New episodes bow  Wednesdays through Aug. 3, on PBS and the PBS app.

©BBC Studios