A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough provides a compelling account of the environmental impact of human activity and recommendations to reverse the effects. Attenborough develops a form of wildlife filming that takes audiences to inaccessible locations and gives them a close-up look at nature’s grandeur. I have chosen Attenborough documentaries as they show how willful environmental damage by humans will leave the planet barren and deteriorated, making it uninhabitable for millions of people and reducing wildlife ecosystems. A Life on Our Planet is a requiem and a final request, as it is a documentary about the various parties responsible for the climate change crisis.
The environmentalist takes viewers through his extraordinary career while highlighting all the drastic changes our planet has undergone. The paper explores how passive conservation is used in the film A Life on Our Planet to showcase the dangers of a dying ecosystem and reprieve measures to ensure the planet’s sustainability.
The documentary opens in the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl, where the audience is reminded of the horrific nuclear power plant catastrophe that rendered the area uninhabitable. The site’s symbolic significance is apparent, and using it as a staging element allows the documentary to concentrate on the tragic hubris of human mistakes. The movie is at its best when it more overtly ties itself to the narrator and compares changes in the globe’s biodiversity throughout one lifetime. A count of the global population and its environmental impact helps track how unbalanced the natural environment has gotten in the short period since Attenborough was a child. It is impressive to see how quickly the Holocene era’s calm gave way to the instability we experience now. This seismic change appears to be occurring in slow motion to humans, and Attenborough suggests it would have more significance if people understood what was happening.
The remainder of the movie takes a more detailed approach, hoping that the escalating ecological tragedies will lead to a call to action. Particularly scathing are the film’s critiques of over-farming, deforestation, and human imperialism in an otherwise dying world. The documentary’s bullet-pointed treatment of these subjects and the images that accompanied them led to a rambling speech that listed numerous reasons for resentment. Attenborough accompanies the film’s narration with astonishing nature photography that illustrates the dying ecosystem.
The film shows the empty oceans and dying coral habitats integrating the cinematography with images of gutted fish, frozen and stacked for the market. Attenborough narrates how more coral reefs will die from unprecedentedly high ocean temperatures. This process will affect the ocean ecosystem, which depends on the reefs for food and shelter (Beauchamp, 2020). Additionally, the producer contrasts thriving commercial agriculture with dwindling rainforest cover in cinematic images. The dramatic contrast shows the horror of a dying world as crops fail from insufficient rainfall spurred by deforestation.
As a piece of environmental activism, the documentary is objective as it highlights a comprehensive point-by-point rundown of the dangers of a fading world. The documentary states that deserts will expand into agricultural regions, causing crop failure due to global warming (Ehrlich, 2020). Some areas will have water shortages, and drier woodlands will result in more destructive forest fires. Attenborough emphasizes that farms’ topsoil is disappearing, resulting in lower crop production needed to feed the world’s expanding population (Morrow, 2020). The narrator provides evidence that the planet’s water cycle depends on the Amazon, where trees transfer water from one another across thousands of miles worldwide.
Attenborough wanders from crisis to crisis as he highlights how humanity is replacing the wild with the tame. Attenborough explains how the world’s animal population has shifted as wildlife has more than halved while the domesticated animal population has skyrocketed. Today, farming occupies half of the world’s productive land, leaving little habitat for wildlife (Earth.org, 2020). The film explains that species that were once common became scarce and hard to find as forests were cleared for agriculture. Additionally, Attenborough narrates how power plants and vehicles that produce planet-warming pollutants and the continued devastation of the world’s carbon sinks have continually warmed the planet.
Attenborough makes ominous predictions for the 2030s, 2040s, 2050s, 2080s, and 2100s. The film forecasts a crisis in global food production caused by soil exhaustion due to overuse, alteration to the global water cycle due to deforestation, and increased ocean acidity that will lead to decreased fish populations (Earth.org, 2020). Furthermore, it adds that the increased global warming would lead to the sixth mass extinction causing irreversible damage to the planet.
Attenborough’s argument is compelling because it moves away from the ruin to focus on what can be done to reverse the situation. The film shows that humans must face the climate crisis before it is too late and planet earth becomes inhabitable. Attenborough offers solutions, including stabilizing the global population, shifting to renewable energy sources, ending deforestation, and restoring diversity (Ehrlich, 2020). The film is a masterpiece as it shows that many people in this generation will not experience the effects of human practices; thus, it is up to us to take an active role in conservation. The documentary fails in political activism by withholding the corporations behind the oil palm plantations, excessive fishing, and deforestation in the Amazon. The film should have named the corporations responsible for most of the destruction to improve accountability
As a student in film studies, I plan on adopting Attenborough’s passive conservation to highlight the effects of climate change on the ecosystem. Passive conservation entails creating a film where you show people the problem and possible solutions as one way of engaging with the problem. I am passionate about conservation efforts as one can see the effects of the changing ecosystem, such as species extinction, flash floods, heat waves, and ravaging droughts that affect millions of people. Attenborough shows that filmmakers can quantify the positive change by highlighting how the change in biodiversity can affect the human population in the future.
Passive conservation entails engaging local communities affected by these changes in ecosystems. By adopting this filmmaking practice, I can show that the world is not as pristine as most nature documentaries perceive it to stimulate change. I feel an immense moral responsibility to help protect nature when filming. Nature photographers have daily encounters with rare wildlife and thus should aim to preserve their habitats. Humans have penetrated the most remote places affecting the wildlife that they rely on to maintain a balanced ecosystem. I feel that this exposure to conservation issues should instill a duty to help people favor wild animals and forests to reduce their extermination by humans. Passive conservation photography will help show people the impact of human activities on biodiversity and thus can help fuel behavior change towards more sustainable practices.
References
Beauchamp, C. (2020). David Attenborough’s witness statement: “A Life on Our Planet.“ Impakter. Web.
Earth.org. (2020). 4 key takeaways from David Attenborough’s “A Life on Our Planet.“ Earth. Web.
Ehrlich, D. (2020). “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet” review: IndieWire. Web.
Morrow, H. (2020). David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. Critterfacts. Web.