Planet Earth on DVDThese past few days I've been watching the monumental series called "Planet Earth." Took them like ten years to film, and it's pretty much a showcase of two seemingly opposite concepts: on the one hand, it's a very impressive technological achievement, to record all those very difficult sequences of natural environments and animal behaviors in High Definition. Sometimes they had to hide, crawl, jump, dive, climb and do all sort of onerous tasks besides waiting for days on end to be able to capture a few minutes of footage. So, in a sense, these DVD's are very much a celebration of what humans can do.
But, on the other hand, this documentary is a last chance to see many sights of our own planet that we would normally never see. Either they are perilous or remote, or both, but these landscapes are at one time titanic and dramatic, but also ephemeral and fragile. It is very apparent that our six billion-strong gang of furless primates (in appearance insignificant next to such a very wide wilderness) can tip the scales and unbalance the delicate juggling act that life plays on this planet, which is both cradle to life and a continuous threat to it.
I must confess that, at times, the images of the natural beauty are so brutal that they do make me weep. Every minute of this documentary I've been reminded very strongly of J. R. R. Tolkien's famous line, uttered by his fictional character, Galadriel, queen of the sylvan elves:
"All shall love me. And despair!"
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I have a hard time watching documentaries about nature, I generally find them very ideological, a sort of religious indoctrination: " Nature is GOOD and modern man is BAD (except for his high-tech video gizmos, those are of course GOOD). "
how are things in Texas, daniel ?
here in nyc my whole family is now under the same roof (that's unsual !), as my son got home late last night from his month-long trip to Beijing, see ya,
Hi, Ira!
Congratulations for having all the goslings in the reeds! (Told ya: been watching nature documentaries…) I hope y'all have a good time. Your son got back before the Olympics, no!! Ah, well, I hope he enjoyed his time there.
You know? Modern man is bad in the sense that he has taken himself out of the "family picture" of this world already. I really believe we, humans, have broken the cycle of natural selection already. Perhaps that's why we are basically the same species, unchanged for over 100,000 years. Well, the only change so far is skin pigmentation according to environment. Big deal: we still all the same race!!!
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