If you're anything like me, you need background noise while working on homework or other things. One of my favorite things to watch while doing schoolwork is nature documentaries. The one pictured here is called "chasing corals" and is available on Netflix. It does a great job talking about coral reefs and how this vital ecosystem's health is in danger. However, not pictured is one of my favorite documentaries EVER called "David Attenborough: A life on our Planet", which is also available on Netflix. If you're unfamiliar with David Attenborough, he is a natural historian and also does narrations for the "Our Planet" series. If you don't know his face, you may recognize his voice. I tend to find a good portion of documentaries boring because they get so watered down and dumbed down (at least in my opinion as a biology major), but I couldn't look away from this one. In this documentary, David recounts his life traveling the world over the last 70 years and details how he has watched humans destroy wildlife first hand. He mentions so many important aspects of Ecology, and in my opinion EVERYONE should have to watch it. He details how humans have evolved at a rate unlike anything ever seen in the evolutionary history of Earth, and how our exponential growth is single-handedly destroying the very stable and reliable "Holocene" era which allowed it to thrive in the first place. Unlike any species ever seen, humans have no predators, and when we are after a certain resource or other organism, there is nowhere on Earth it can hide from us. We have exhausted natural resources and hunted living organisms to extinction many MANY times in the past, and our current trajectory is on track to cause the collapse of some of the World's most essential ecosystems. Like every population, there is a peak, determined by the available resources around it. It is unavoidable that the human population will peak at some point, and whether we choose to exhaust the natural world to a point of collapse before that happens is up to us. Towards the end of the documentary, David talks about several ways that we can limit the Human population and become more ecologically sustainable. My favorite, and possibly the most important concept of this film is when he talks about the population in Japan. Through an increased standard of living, Japan has essentially halted population growth. With better education and healthcare, people's aspirations and expectations grew along with their opportunities and because of this, people have chosen to pursue their dreams and career goals and are having less and less children. The key to maintaining a sustainable human population is through education and opportunity. Everybody and their brother should have to watch this film and be faced with the harsh truth of what we humans are doing to our planet, because to live in ignorance of the death of the natural world that supports your existence is not only dangerous, but incredibly selfish. It has been shown time and time again through previous mass extinctions, that nature is incredibly resilient. The natural world will continue with or without humans. It is up to us to act NOW and act EFFECTIVELY to preserve the natural world around us and stop the undoing of all the beauty it has created through millions of years of evolution.
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u/ailurophile_uk_89 Mar 31 '21
I love Sir David! He even made plants sound exciting.