DAVID REID / SILVERBACK/NETFLIX
About 16 minutes into the first episode of Our Planet, Netflix’s blockbuster nature series narrated by veteran English broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough, the camera cuts from a jaunty flamingo caravan to a lone fluffy chick who couldn’t keep up with the flock. Clumsily, it treks across a vast African salt pan, its stick-thin lower legs encumbered by an Ugg boot–like crust of salt. While we never learn its fate, we can assume it didn’t make it.
It’s heartbreaking to watch, but that’s a familiar feeling for fans of the nature documentary genre, which for decades has exposed the often harsh realities of our natural world. The only difference here, and in an increasing number of films that have come out in recent years, is that climate change is being positioned as predator, and every living creature on earth, including humans, its prey.
That last distinction is a subtle change, but an important shift from early environmentalism, which asked humans to do their part as protectors of the environment. Separating the issue into an us-versus-them binary allowed room for debates over whether loggers’ livelihoods were more important than preserving the spotted owl’s habitat. Now, finally, the so-called most intelligent species on the planet is starting to wrap its large brain around the concept of interdependence, and how the death of our environment spells the death of us.
This approach appears to be working. In April, a market research company called GlobalWebIndex reported a 53 percent drop in single-use plastic by consumers in the U.S. and UK from the previous year, attributing this change in behavior to “the Attenborough effect,” citing the broadcaster’s wildly popular 2017 BBC series, Blue Planet II, which focused on marine life and urged viewers to make more sustainable choices.
Scaling that impact was a major impetus behind the longtime broadcaster’s new partnership with Netflix for Our Planet. When the series launched on April 5, it was immediately streamable 24/7 in 190 countries. While it wasn’t a complete poach—Attenborough is on board to front another ambitious series, One Planet, Seven Worlds, for the BBC later this year—the move highlighted an overall shift in the industry, fueled by filmmakers frustrated over the old-school notion that nature docs should avoid controversial topics for fear of turning viewers off, and instead rely on majestic footage to inspire change. As the situation on the ground gets more dire, many are reluctant to rely on that logic.
While Attenborough’s Our Planet received almost unanimous praise, it was not without its detractors. A Canadian zoologist questioned his claim that global warming led to a disturbing scene in the series’ second episode in which walruses plummet to their death off a steep ledge on the Russian coast of the Chukchi Sea, suggesting that subsequent footage of a polar bear poking around their carcasses indicates they might have fallen while trying to flee the predator. In the scene’s voice-over, Attenborough attests that they wouldn’t have climbed the cliffs if they weren’t trying to escape the crowded 100,000-plus walrus Woodstock on the beach below—the only place left to rest near their hunting grounds due to retreating ice.
This reframing of the narrative as “man-made phenomenon versus nature” brings up another ethical question. If humans are behind climate change, and documentarians are humans, is it their duty to rescue their subject in the event that a human-caused crisis is threatening it?
“Normally our film crews do not intervene to try to save animals’ lives,” wrote Will Lawson, a director of the BBC’s Dynasties series, in an essay called “A Film-maker’s Dilemma.” “We know that such situations are rarely simple and a well-intentioned act could, for example, upset a complicated social system, or alter the balance of a predator-prey interaction.” But while his team was filming a group of mother and baby emperor penguins for the Dynasties series, a brutal storm swept the flightless birds into a ravine whose walls were too steep to climb. “We had come to the conclusion that this situation was extremely unusual,” Lawson wrote. “We could do something very simple, which would not do any harm and could help some of these birds survive.” The crew spent a few minutes digging steps into the ice.
What follows is an almost unbearably adorable, Oscar-worthy, feel-good ending to what could easily have been one more environmental tragedy, set to an uplifting orchestral score that could be soundtracking countless viral videos at this very moment.
Some might argue this move signaled a Baby Shark–ification of a respected genre—an algorithmic play for likes disguised as a positive evolution born out of empathy. Others would say the time has passed for such debates. “I’ve been in this business a long time,” Our Planet producer Keith Scholey has said. “And when I started, yes, we were concerned about individual species being in trouble, but now there is an overwhelming feeling that the whole system is breaking apart, and that is terrifying.” But there’s a way forward, he insists. And if we act now, we just might be able to save us from ourselves.