It looks as spectacular as you would expect. Vast aerial sweeps across the Peruvian coast as millions of cormorants and boobies gather to feast on anchovies and breed, or across frozen tundra to watch herds of caribou head for the shelter of the forest in temperatures 40 degrees below freezing take your breath away. Then it catches in your throat, as you watch an orchid bee, in search of perfume to attract a mate, fall into a flower’s buckety petal and squeeze out of a tiny tunnel that deposits two sacks of pollen on its back; just as God, or a million years of evolutionary adjustments, intended. On every scale, it is amazing. You can only boggle at the endless precision of the natural world, and of the people who devote themselves to capturing its wonders.

This is Netflix’s first foray into nature programming – Our Planet, an eight-part, multimillion-dollar series, filmed by more than 600 crew members over four years in 50 countries and narrated by our very own David Attenborough. Produced largely by the team behind the BBC’s Planet Earth and Blue Planet, it looks very much like what they might have done next for Auntie if the Natural History Unit had given them their druthers (and Netflix’s budget). As with Planet Earth, it takes a different landscape every episode and fills the screen with incredible scenes. Lesser flamingos building mud mounds for their eggs and hatching thousands of chicks in unison. Eagles in combat in the air. Three of the 60 species of manakin birds doing their mating dances, each more jaw-droppingly complex than the last. The routine from the blue manakin – which involves four birds who practise beforehand, with a juvenile male standing in for the prospective lady – will have you revising your own sexual decision-making. You’ll not be charmed by a pint and a compliment again, I assure you.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Just as God, or a million years of evolutionary adjustments, intended ... an orchid bee. Photograph: Warwick Sloss/Silverback/Netflix/Netflix

Where it differs from BBC shows is in no longer ignoring or minimising the threats facing all the environments and animals on display. Hamstrung by the idea that any mention of eco-problems would make audiences switch off, and the broadcasters’ preferred strategy of hoping that sharing incredible sights around the world would inspire people to save them, nature programming has been taken to task for avoiding the issue, and not using their power to raise awareness of the dangers facing us all. Contextless stories don’t inspire us to change, after all; they just allow us to continue in our comfortable, fatal state of denial. Producer Alastair Fothergill has expressed frustration that he wasn’t allowed to include more on the subject at the BBC.

That they have power to raise awareness and do good was proved when Fothergill was, after the huge success of Blue Planet, permitted to go slightly off the beaten narrative track in the sequel and include some environmental warnings about the accumulation of plastics in the ocean, via scenes of a turtle entangled in it and a whale calf poisoned by their chemicals. It sparked a public debate and behavioural, plus possibly legislative, change. The BBC has just begun a season of films under the banner Our Planet Matters in recognition of the fact that their traditional approach has become – to borrow eco-parlance – unsustainable. Attenborough is due to front a film explicitly about climate change as part of it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest TV that may leave you jackknifing in pain ... the wildebeest migration in Tanzania. Photograph: Sophie Lanfear/Silverback/Netflix

But Netflix has stolen their thunder by procuring his first outing as an in-yer-face eco-warrior. Our Planet places clearer emphasis on the fragility and interconnectedness of all the species and eco-systems on display, and on the huge impact humanity has had on them in so short a time. “In one human lifetime,” says Attenborough in the opening minutes, “wildlife populations have fallen by an average of 60%. The stability of nature can no longer be taken for granted.”

Towards the end of the caribou scenes, he cuts the ground from under us by noting that the herd we are watching is 70% smaller than it was 20 years ago. And the awe-inspiring scenes of 75m tonnes of ice, a chunk the size of a skyscraper, breaking off an ice shelf in Greenland is followed by the fact that such losses are now coming twice as fast as they were a decade ago, along with a description of their effects on sea levels, salinity and – tying it back to the start of the show – currents like the Humboldt, on which seabirds depend to bring them their anchovy feast and the birth of their next generation. Later in the series, Attenborough tells us that the Madagascan forests in which we just saw two fossas mating have since been destroyed, and there is a time-lapse sequence of the Borneo jungle being turned into a palm oil plantation that may have you jackknifing in pain.

Socially responsible nature programming that retains all its beauty – we have at last, and at least, come to this.

• This article was amended on 5 April 2019, replacing “herds of wildebeest” with “caribou”.