A herd of African elephants rely on the memories of the older matriarchs to lead them on the long and dusty journey across Botswana, back to traditional waterholes. Photo © Ben Osborne, from Planet Earth by Alastair Fothergill (University of California Press and BBC Worldwide Americas)
We're all familiar with that oft-heard admonishment favored by parents on bright (and sometimes dim) days to turn off the TV and go outside. Take a walk, get some fresh air!
This is surely sound advice. Communing with nature is a healthy ritual that revives our fundamental connection to the world around us. But this is a complex relationship too, characterized by our attempts to establish dominion over the Earth, to manipulate it, and put it to our use. And we've been very successful. As more of us move into the city—in America that rate is about 1.4 percent a year—our walks are inevitably on concrete, our fresh air often tinted with the flavors of the city, and our green space sequestered, enduring in backyard plots and on balconies. We have tamed the wild. Ours is not so much the Great Outdoors as the Not So Bad. More and more it would seem that our best way of experiencing nature at the grand scale is by going back inside and turning on the TV.
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The recently aired BBC/Discovery production Planet Earth unfolds to a very grand scale indeed. A sweeping spectacle, covering all manner of life and natural phenomena in an 11-episode series, Planet Earth is every bit the modern epic. "This is your world," the introductory credits illume. "Prepare to see it as never before." This advice, tantalizingly anticipatory as it is, never seems uncalled for. The cinematography and soundtrack, a feast of color, light, and sound, borrow shamelessly from the Hollywood formula. Cinematic devices like slow motion and time lapse pair with dramatic, suspense-filled, and character-driven narratives to create the scope and pace of the silver screen.
Our cultural moment—one of ever-increasing awareness about the environment, the threat of climate change, and the importance of biodiversity and conservation—is information rich. These issues have reached us intellectually (thank you, Al Gore), and people are consequently aware of their importance; they comprehend them. The issues haven't, however, reached us emotionally. Planet Earth does. This is our world, as we've never felt it before.
As the opening credits of each episode remind us, Planet Earth was five years in the making and involved 2,000 days of shooting, in 204 locations. The evident commitment to the venture is admirable, and the technology behind it has been used to spectacular effect. All of the footage was shot with new high-definition video technology and attendant state-of-the-art instrumentation, resulting in a wealth of "firsts" for the series. Incredibly powerful lenses allow for intimate and crystalline vistas, some never-before filmed. Time-lapse photography reveals rhythms and patterns otherwise undetectable, tailoring nature's ceaseless story to enlightening narrative arcs. Images from space not only bring an arresting sense of scale to the planet's colossal distinguishing features, from the Andes to the Amazon, but continually reinforce the whole as we witness the wonder of its parts.
The result is that we are consumed by the spectacle while simultaneously marveling at the fact that we're actually able to witness it. A pride of lions mounts a rare and desperate midnight attack on an African elephant; thousands of bats emerge from their cave, forming a giant cylindrical swarm that takes on the surreal appearance of an inverted milky way. These images are magical. The music, a tide of violins, trumpets and bassoons, artfully scores every bit of latent emotional weight in each of them, and we are completely transported.