{"id":4144,"date":"2019-11-18T12:17:30","date_gmt":"2019-11-18T12:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/?p=4144"},"modified":"2019-11-18T12:17:30","modified_gmt":"2019-11-18T12:17:30","slug":"seven-worlds-one-planet-why-david-attenboroughs-latest-series-disappointed-me-laura-thomas-walters-writes-for-the-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2019\/11\/18\/seven-worlds-one-planet-why-david-attenboroughs-latest-series-disappointed-me-laura-thomas-walters-writes-for-the-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Seven Worlds, One Planet: why David Attenborough’s latest series disappointed me’: Laura Thomas-Walters writes for The Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

As someone who has researched the prominence of climate and ecological breakdown in David Attenborough\u2019s documentaries, I was disappointed by the first episode of the legendary filmmaker\u2019s latest series,\u00a0Seven Worlds, One Planet<\/a>. Although I was enthralled by nail-biting scenes of uncertain survival, like his previous work, it betrays the natural world<\/a>\u00a0by showing it as mostly untouched by human impacts.<\/p>\n

His last documentary, the Netflix production Our Planet, had taken a small step forward in this regard. Along with colleagues from Newcastle, Bangor, and Oxford, I analysed scripts from Attenborough\u2019s last four documentary series, and\u00a0we found that<\/a>\u00a0Our Planet discussed both conservation threats and successes more often than his previous work. Nearly 15% of the total word count of the Our Planet scripts focused on what is not well with the natural world. While this was only slightly more than Blue Planet II at 12%, talk of human impacts was woven into every episode rather than being the subject of a dedicated final episode.<\/p>\n

Our Planet also shared conservation successes in every episode. While Blue Planet II devoted slightly more of its overall script length to such issues, again this was mostly concentrated in the final episode and not incorporated throughout the series.<\/p>\n

\"Our
Our Planet mentioned threats to nature (red) more than Attenborough\u2019s previous three series, and shared positive tales (blue) throughout the series.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

However, while Our Planet contained a few visually shocking scenes\u00a0(walruses spring to mind)<\/a>\u00a0that prompted discussion of climate breakdown in the media, the series \u2013 like those before it \u2013 was almost bereft of scenes that directly showed the\u00a0abundant ways<\/a>\u00a0in which humanity has devastated the natural world.<\/p>\n

A sideways step<\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

The first episode of Seven Worlds, One Planet showed visually breathtaking scenes of the harshness of Antarctic life, but yet again for the most part nature appeared devoid of human influence. Admittedly, it is more difficult to directly depict the effects of humans on a continent where no humans actually live, and hopefully later episodes will be bolder. But even in this episode, melting ice and calving glaciers were mentioned only briefly, and these changes to the climate were rarely explicitly highlighted as caused by human actions.<\/p>\n

The exception was a vignette in which we were shown an abandoned whaling station, and told how humans caused whale numbers to crash, before their recovery following a whaling ban. This reflected a common theme of success stories in the episode \u2013 scenes capturing the struggle of albatrosses and penguins against the effects of climate breakdown also ended in triumph.<\/p>\n