Within the first 10 minutes of Hostile Planet, National Geographic's stunning new television show that pairs the natural beauty you know best from Planet Earth with brutal twists reminiscent of Game of Thrones, you'll watch three fluffy baby geese jump off a towering cliff face. One gets dashed upon rock after rock as it falls. Another survives the fall but is immediately snapped up in the beak of a predatory bird. The third, however, waddles to safety with its parents, giving us all hope for the little family.

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The wild is just that. Animals have always clawed out existences. Evolution makes for murderous competition. But now, undeniably, humans have upheaved the system, and animals have to contend with rapidly progressing climate change, among plenty of other environmental ills.

"Hostile Planet is beautiful, but this is about real storytelling and about what it's actually like for both predator and prey, on the edge," says Bear Grylls, the TV survivalist who's famous for drinking his own piss, eating squirming bugs alive, killing a croc with Drew Brees, and now, narrating Hostile Planet. "The truth is, climate change has just made that edge even harder and even sharper for the animals' existence."

The six-part show, which premieres Monday night at 9 p.m. EST on Nat Geo, doesn't sit well in squeamish stomachs. There's a snow leopard who careens down a rock wall with a deer clenched in his jaws. In another episode, a baby gazelle gets ripped apart by cheetahs. But squeamishness doesn't just come from watching death after death. It also comes from knowing that we're to blame for an inescapable global disaster that's pushing animals to extremes. As Grylls sees it, his responsibility as a survivalist is to make sure people see it.

"The animals are the story tellers, and because their story is so heart-breaking, they are the best way of showing truth," he says. "I know what it takes to stay alive, and I am an amateur in comparison to them. I'm a rookie."

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Grylls insists there's still hope. He doesn't let climate grief weigh him down. But all the same, the message is clear: "It's like adapt or die. That is what Hostile Planet's showing." And humans have to adapt, too.

Grylls spoke with Esquire about filming a television show about climate change, showing President Obama its toll up close back in 2015, and what both humans and animals will need to survive.

He didn't want to make a "preachy" show about climate change.

I think that young people don't debate if climate change is happening. Young people want a solution and they want to know the truth. Older people debate it and argue about it. Young people know it.

But at the same time, we didn't want to make something that was preachy, and the best way to do that is just to show the effects of climate change on animals. And the effects of climate change is that everything is getting more extreme and less predictable. The rains that would routinely come to the grasslands to feed, to allow the whole cycle of life to work, are not coming, or they're six months late. The effect is devastating, and if you don't adapt, you die. The cyclones are getting more extreme, the winters are getting longer, the summers hotter, the flash floods less predictable. That's why when I say a lot of these animals are on the edge already, climate change just makes that edge a lot harder and a lot sharper and a lot more unforgiving—and most die.

A few can adapt, but the ones that find it hardest to adapt are the slowest evolved. Like hummingbirds, and all these amazing stories of life in the jungle—it's taken so long to evolve to be so brilliant and so in tune that their ability to adapt to a changing environment is much slower, and therefore, they probably won't survive.

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Grylls in "Mountains," the first episode of Hostile Planet. Nat Geo

Humans are more likely to survive our own mess.

We adapt the fastest; our brains are the biggest. But it means it's harder for the animals to keep up. The effects of climate change are of our making, so it's doubly unfair, in a way. We're the ones who adapt, and we're the ones who are causing it.

[Surviving climate change] is the same as the animals, we just have more resources to escape it, because we're lucky. But if you're a fisherman in Bangladesh, you maybe don't have the ability to escape it when the rains are less predictable and they're twice as severe. There's so many humanitarian disasters. It's because of more extremes and less predictable weather.

Grylls and Obama visit an Alaskan glacier in 2015. NBC Getty Images

It was important to show President Obama the effects of climate change up close for their 2015 episode of "Running Wild."

He was an open-minded, intelligent human being, and I remember asking him about [climate change]. He thought about it, and he'd go, "I let the science speak for itself," which is smart. The truth is, it does speak for itself, but he wanted to see it close up. He was going to Alaska, and he said, "But I actually wanted to see it. I wanted to see what's changing, and the effect it's having on our world." So, to be able to take him close-up and put his hand on a receding glacier to show the exponential pace. Geologically, it's pretty hard to show somebody movement in your lifetime. Geologically, everything's so slow. But I could stand with Obama and say, "Last year, it was there, and now you can't even see where it is, it's hundreds of meters over there." It's ridiculous. That was quite mind-blowing for him, I think.

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Working together is the most important thing we can learn about survival from animals.

Community. Working together. That whole thing of "together, you're stronger." The animals on that edge have had to figure out how to work together. They've had to get ever more resourceful. Ultimately, like with humans, survival is all about resilience. Never give up spirit. The emotional part for me of Hostile Planet is that resilience. Seeing it in vulnerable, beautiful animals.

Nat Geo filming the "Deserts" episode of Hostile Planet. Nat Geo

The snow leopard story was unlike anything ever filmed before.

People question: Did it exist actually? We not only filmed it, but we got it hunting in a way that is unbelievable. If you said as a large mammal you can fall 200 feet down a cliff and survive...that shows also how desperate they are for food. You can't afford to get injured, there's no medical clinic for you go to. You get a twisted ankle for a week, you're dead. Yet, three days later, it's limping but hunting again. It's ingenuity, the way they hunt: Courage to throw yourself down the cliff, and then resilience to get back up and do it again three days later. As a survivor, I look at that with my mouth open.

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People want more adventure, but they're also becoming more fearful.

I think as a society people are getting more and more fear-ridden. But I think people's thirst for adventure and access to adventure actually has never been greater. That's why there's so many of these adventure shows doing better and better. People want adventure in their life, but they're nervous to actually somehow go and do it. The solution is to do it. However small, just do it. Start it. Try, fail. Fall down.

Resilience is the most important survival skill—but fire is vital, too.

NGU. Never give up. Resilience, that spirit inside, it's the only thing. NGU. It is a skill. It's like a muscle, you've got to train it every day. But if you wanted a physical skill, fire sets us apart from the animals.