The veteran naturalist lays the blame for Earth’s increasingly fragile ecosystem on humans, yet the stunning visuals in Netflix’s Our Planet add little to the genre

Ben Macdonald / Silverback/Netflix

A young Philippine eagle sits atop the rainforest canopy, noisily badgering its mother for food. “The chick is very demanding,” says David Attenborough, wryly. But the bird is soon fending for itself, risking death as it flaps precariously along a branch 70 metres high. Finally, we are treated to the soaring sight of its first flight or, as Attenborough puts it, the day when “confidence suddenly matches know-how”.

Our Planet, Netflix’s flagship nature series, is classic wildlife TV, with sumptuous visuals and engaging narratives. But what makes it interesting is another strand, where satellite images document the rapid loss of rainforest in the Philippines and Borneo in recent decades. The young eagle survived its first flight, but there is barely enough habitat left for such a super-sized bird of prey to flourish.

Fragility is the link: how wildlife and ecosystems fare in the face of human pressure, something primetime nature series have only recently begun to touch on. “The stability of nature can no longer be taken for granted,” says Attenborough in the first of the eight episodes.


Huw Cordey/Silverback/Netflix

The threats to the planet are legion, and the series duly covers everything from the disruption of the weather systems that animals and plants rely on to poaching and deforestation, Arctic sea ice loss and ocean acidification.

It is also rich with wonders. There is New Guinea’s twelve-wired bird of paradise, which uses its wire-like filaments to tickle the face of a potential mate. And there is a great montage of tropical forest ants killed by fungi that turn them into zombies. “But,” says Attenborough (and there are a lot of buts in Our Planet), “the diversity of the world’s rainforests is falling at an alarming rate, and that is because of us.”

The series brings home the consequences for us too, from the role forests play in regulating Earth’s climate, to the foods and medicines they furnish us with. Frustratingly, though, the role of the viewer is unexplored, which leads to an odd feeling of disconnect. We see the contrast between monocultures of palm oil plantations and the richness of primary forests. Attenborough warns that the result is the young orangutans we see could be the last generation in the wild. But the show stops short of blaming our demand for the myriad products we buy that contain palm oil.

fishing boat : Gisle Sverdrup/Silverback/Netflix

Similarly, the effects of climate change feature throughout, but the dots are never fully joined to expose humans at the heart of the pressure. The “frightening pace” of change in the Arctic is examined, from loss of sea ice to spectacular footage of glaciers calving and a huge stretch of Greenland ice breaking away. The carbon emissions, fossil fuel companies and human consumption behind such rapid changes, however, are absent.

The degradation of habitats created by humans is mostly off-screen, too, with a few exceptions, such as a bleached coral reef.

This aside, there is plenty to like in Our Planet. The diversity of locations and whirlwind tour of the globe puts many a Bond film to shame, and the production is lavish, with a score by turns elegiac, comic and stirring.

There are stunning shots, from long, tracking scenes of big cats hunting, to close-ups of abseiling caterpillars and deep sea worms’ jaws emerging to bite urchins. Haunting footage of wolves and forests in the areas around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster illustrate nature’s ability to rebound.

Description:Attenborough : Keith Scoley/Silverback/Netflix

At 92, Attenborough remains a master broadcaster, as at home narrating the light relief of dancing birds of prey as he is explaining our unsustainable fishing practices. Kids will love it.

Ultimately, though, it is unclear what Our Planet adds to the genre. Most of the species it shows have been covered extensively before, and there is no deep delving into any particular habitat, as in Frozen Planet, or detailed coverage of a species, as in Dynasties.

For a show meant to shine a light on “our” impact on nature, people and our responsibility are rarer than the desert elephants and bluefin tuna the show so beautifully depicts.

Our Planet, Netflix, from Friday 5 April 2019