Environmental Protection: Nice-to-Have Luxury or Savvy Investment?
To their credit, the producers of Planet Earth give viewers the opportunity to get a glimpse of the stunning beauty of (what is left of) the natural world that is inaccessible to most humans. Planet Earth producers explore the different natural habitats such as the seas, caves, great plains, and forests in the first four discs. Thanks to the BBC, the producers have been able to mobilize top-notch talent and state-of-the-art equipment to accomplish this tour de force. Like other media productions made about the natural world over the last 30 years, Planet Earth helps raise awareness about nature’s beauty and diversity as well as the human footprint on nature. One of the greatest merits of the series is to market the huge economic value of the environmental services that nature renders scot-free to humanity, e.g., pollinating, cleaning water, cleansing the atmosphere, and restoring soil. But there is a downside to Planet Earth’s accomplishment. Jonathon Porritt, Chair, U.K. Sustainable Development Commission, rightly states in disc five that natural history programming has turned most viewers into passive voyeurs of nature rather than engaged co-habitants with nature. That type of programming can give people the false impression that because nature is captured on film, it is all okay out there. To their chagrin, Planet Earth producers knew that what they were capturing on film was often disappearing under their eyes. Russell Mittermeier, President, Conservation International, reminds his audience that Antarctica aside, only a quarter of the Earth’s land surface is still wilderness. For example, James Leape, Director General, WWF International, point outs that about half of the world’s forests have already been lost. Another example is that more and more species such as the Amur leopard, Walia Ibex, Saiga antelope, and Bactrian camels are on the edge of extinction because of their human predators. However, not everything has yet been lost. As Jeffrey McNeely, Chief Scientist, World Conservation Union, observes, about 12% of the land cover is protected area. To compound the challenge of environmental protection, M.A. Sanjayan, Lead Scientist, The Nature Conservancy, adds that 80% of the world’s biodiversity does not exist in national parks. To their credit, the producers of Planet Earth raise one controversial issue after another about nature conservation in disc five which is by far the most important of all five discs. Here follow a few examples for illustration purposes only: 1) Narrator Simon Poland provocatively asks the question: Is conservation only a wealthy Western concern, a luxury, a fantasy? Mittermeier acknowledges that wilderness protection, which was born in the West, has not necessarily spread worldwide. As Doctor Craig Packer, Ecologist, bluntly puts it, people who have high environmental ethics will have to put their money where their mouth is. Packer correctly points out that they will have a hard time convincing local people who have to feed themselves and their family that they can eat ethics. In Costa Rica, there are companies that are charging their customers an extra fee for the water bill they pay in order to compensate the farmers for the 300,000 hectares that they convert back to forest beyond the 500,000 hectares of national parks. Forests are water factories. 2) Poland also asks the non-PC question: Is population the greatest threat to wilderness? It is no coincidence that the natural world shrinks as human population grows. Ignoring population strikes Porritt as the biggest own goal that the environment movement has ever scored. There are currently over six billion people on this planet the number is expected to grow to nine billion by the middle of this century. These people need to be fed. In order to feed those people, humans need to convert some nature to agriculture, preferably where they destroy the least biodi
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Overview
With a production budget of $25 million, the makers of Blue Planet: Seas of Life crafted this epic story of life on Earth. Five years in production, with over 2,000 days in the field, using 40 cameramen filming across 200 locations, and shot entirely in high definition, Planet Earth is an unparalleled portrait of the "third rock from the sun." This stunning television experience captures rare action in impossible locations and presents intimate moments with our planet's best-loved, wildest, and most elusive creatures. Employing a revolutionary new aerial photography system, the series captures animal behavior that has never before been seen on film. The series features high-definition footage from outer space to offer a