Why We Will Always Need Nature Shows
It’s been a day at your 10–6pm job. Many pots of coffee were made, many keystrokes were tapped, many contacts were qualified in salesforce and once you’ve rattled home in the tin-can of the New York Subway with three dozen other people crammed in the car: all you want to do is watch TV while you eat.
This was the position I found myself in. I almost descended into the even grimier, drone-like world of Altered Carbon, when, BLESS, I remembered BBC’s Planet Earth II was on Netflix!
Giddy, I clicked to the first episode “Islands.” As soon as David Attenborough’s cheery-professor-like voice floated over a stunning image of an isolated island: I was TRANSPORTED.
I was soon “ooohing and awing” over the lives of lemurs, gasping and cheering as iguanas in the Galapagos made an all-out sandy sprint for safety while being chased by gangs of snakes! (that clip has circulated around Youtube, but rest assured the whole six-minute spotlight of their heart-pounding lives details even more of the chase).
I grimaced watching bear and bobcats tear into live and dead prey. I cooed with delight watching a sloth swim and marveled at the technology of our camera’s today allowing stupendous views of eagles in flight. The seeming unfairness of life, like colonist crazy ants who attack those cheery red crabs, or the desert Ibex’s precipitous — it’s STEEP — climb down to water, detail the highs and lows of animals all over planet earth.
Maybe I just get excited about the catharsis of watching Komodo dragons fight or flamingos parade in the way the rest of the world looks forward to the next episode of This is Us.
For me, nature shows serve the purpose of not just educating us about species or habitats that are rapidly disappearing, but also the sheer enormity of our world that, digitally, seems so close, jittery and intangible. Few places transport you from a screened reality like snow covered peaks, baby bear cub roars or soaring albatross.
We’re outnumbered on this planet, so its fitting the fastest, strongest and best equipped creatures of earth’s most hostile environments get some binge time.
