Sir David Attenborough Unpacks the New discovery+ Docuseries "A Perfect Planet"

As exquisite images of the tide rolling in animals pursuing prey and lightning striking a mesa fill the screen he announces quotThere is only one planet in the universe as far as we know where there is life The Earth our home the perfect planetquot Just hearing Attenborough39s dulcet tones while this perfect planet is shown somehow improves the lives of many of us on it The first two episodes of the fivepart series Volcanoes and The Sun produced by BBC and Discovery stream on discovery beginning January 4 Oceans drops on January 10 Weather premieres on January 17 and Humans on January 24To promote the series Attenborough recently met via Zoom with a handful of outlets from around the world including MediaVillage Surely there are few better reasons to wake up at 400 am on a frigid winter morning than to engage with the father of wildlife documentaries Speaking from his home in front of wellstacked bookshelves Attenborough stressed the urgency of action to reverse the destruction of EarthquotEverybody understands worldwide that we are at a crucial point that our planet is poised close to real big disastersquot Attenborough warned quotWe can stop them but if we are going to stop them we have to understand what they are and how they work And that is what the series doesquotSeries producer Huw Cordey a producer of the phenomenal Planet Earth who was also on the Zoom explained that this series four years in the making eventually captured 3000 hours of footage It began with about six months of brainstormingquotSeries like this require ambition so you have to think bigquot Cordey explained quotWhile we weren39t looking for lowhanging fruit we also weren39t looking for the most obscure story The story had to fit the narrativequotAs expected it39s the sort of spectacular nature documentary where viewers will want to share newfound knowledge Did you know there are more than 1500 active volcanoes on this planet Or that volcanic islands make up just five percent of the planet39s lands but are home to 20 percent of its speciesThe series brims with fascinating nature stories such as this one revealed in The Sun Fig wasps teeny insects just 007 of an inch long pollinate figs beginning with the female burrowing into the fruit shearing off her wings laying her eggs then dying Wingless males emerge after five weeks and mate with their unhatched sisters reaching them with a telescopic penis twice their body length The male then sacrifices itself to invading insects allowing the females to fly away and begin the process anew in another fig treeAs A Perfect Planet traverses the globe the documentarians travel close to the North Pole to chronicle scenes of musk ox remnants of the last ice age During the Zoom call Attenborough revealed he is content never to revisit the two polesIncidentally no one says quotarctic wolvesquot quite like Attenborough Within those three syllables are a soliloquy of possibility encompassing current dangers and ancient instincts When a lone wolf faces a herd of musk ox composer Ilan Ishkeriamp8217s score builds to a crescendo as the fight escalates When the action ebbs the music is but a whisper allowing the audience to collect itselfThis is part of the artistry of this series In the Weather episode a droplet of rain splashing off a tree frog is so lush it feels like a special effect When fire ants craft a raft to ride rather than drown in a flood sweeping the Amazon rain forest viewers will find themselves rooting for the industrious insects Yes you really can cheer for antsTraversing Africa we see the desert sculpted by winds and baked in the kiln of the sun In the southern part of the continent where the Zambezi River flows across six countries gigantic crocodiles stealthily wait to pounce out of the river and chow down on flocks of redbilled queleasThe hightech camerawork a result of skill and patience yields mirific shots Panoramas of parched riverbeds looking like Godamp8217s jigsaw puzzle of animals pushed further to find food of ice shelves crashing into the seas share a common enemy amp8211 us In the final episode weamp8217re reminded that we are the culprits of destructionIn Humans we see Attenborough as a young man delighted to be frolicking with animals quotThe planet I saw as a young man has changed beyond recognitionquot he says as the film cuts to him today a man who looks terrific at 94 quotHuman activity is now so dominant it is disrupting the forces of nature and the vital habitats that life needs to survive on EarthquotToday humans release carbon dioxide faster than the cataclysmic explosions that extinguished life in the pastquotThe first thing I keep reminding myself of is that there are three times as many human beings on this planet since when I first made a television programquot Attenborough told us looking exasperated referencing when he began at the BBC in 1950 quotThis is not something that happened over eons of history It is happening right now and if we donamp8217t sort out how we deal with it we are going to be in big trouble The answer is of course that we can sort it out Itamp8217s easy enough if we all behave in certain ways But to start with you have to recognize the problem and that is what this last program showsquotIn the final episode Senegalese women plant trees to stop the spread of desert Some 12 million trees have been planted and the goal is to create a 5000mile green wall across AfricaquotRight now we have the capacity and knowledge to stop the damage we are doingquot Attenborough stressed quotBut what we donamp8217t have is time My inspiration and hope for the future lie with the next generationquotThat hope is bolstered by an odd assist the pandemic which has forced people around the world to stop and take stock Working on A Perfect Planet during the time of COVID helped focus the seriesamp8217 missionquotThe pandemic has exposed our vulnerabilityquot Cordey asserted quotThis series is about how the world works and how perfect it really isquotAttenborough considered the timeliness of the series dropping nowquotThe remarkable thing about it is that it has made a lot of us suddenly become aware of the natural world in the way that we have not been beforequot said this man who arguably knows more about the natural world that just about anyone quotIn our busy lives we have been running around moving here there everywhere And now many of us are stuck at home and some of us are lucky enough to have gardens and birdsong This pandemic started last spring remember I have never listened to as much birdsong in my life and I think that applies to a lot of people We realize our dependency emotionally and intellectually on the natural world in a way we have never done beforequotClick the social buttons above or below to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Sir David Attenborough Unpacks the New discovery+ Docuseries "A Perfect Planet"

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Sir David Attenborough Unpacks the New discovery+ Docuseries "A Perfect Planet"

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Jacqueline Cutler

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