The tasks facing humankind are urgent: to re-learn how to be in a healthy relationship with the earth, to be good neighbors within our ecosystems.
Two different teachers have emphasized this to me lately: David Attenborough and Robin Wall Kimmerer.
“David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet”
This Netflix documentary is a finale in the long career of the 93-year old English natural historian and broadcaster famed for the Planet Earth series, among many others. Attenborough calls “A Life on Our Planet” his “witness statement.”
And what a statement it is. Over his life, he has seen miraculous lifeforms, incredible beauty, and yet profound loss: loss of biodiversity, of wild animals, of wilderness. The loss is growing by the day as we cross tipping points to species extinction (populations of animals fell by 68% over 50 years). Yet paradise is not entirely lost, and Attenborough devotes the final half-hour to some of the hopeful solutions already underway. The film poses a visual challenge to our ignorance and apathy about what we are doing to our home and co-inhabitants, and it shows us that a better way already exists.
Short take: please see this film, though with a critical eye. (If you want to form your own opinions first, skip down to the next section.) Longer take:
The film effectively situates Attenborough’s singular life and perspective within the span of human history. He readily admits to the coincidental timing of his 93 years: reaching adulthood just after WWII, he has the advantages of global travel and scientific knowledge not accessible to any generation previous. His entire adult life plays out in an era where, thanks to television, humans can see the biodiversity of their planet as never before — even as they are degrading it. Without much fanfare, the film establishes that Attenborough has a vantage point no one else has, one which makes him a credible witness.
For generations, others have made similar observations about the harm we are causing but from marginalized positions. And they should be heard. It does not take jet-setting or a film crew to see our effects on land or animals. Attenborough has had many social advantages, skills, and strokes of luck to gain such a massive platform, but I appreciate that in A Life on Our Planet, he’s leveraging that platform to speak directly to our intertwined crises.
Attenborough is a naturalist, but he has listened to climate science and learned from past climate communication mistakes. There is no dilly-dallying with change-your-lightbulbs messaging. The causes behind our present ecosystemic crises are straightforward: burning fossil fuels, deforestation and careless land use, and industrial animal agriculture; each, in its way, a manifestation of an economic model that prioritizes extraction, exploitation, and endless growth as its myth and rationale. His analysis is unsparing, systems-level, and yet does not give way to despair. Things are bad, but there is meaningful work to do that will help us (and our fellow animals) survive.
Attenborough’s vision is inspiring, in part because he doesn’t see the ultimate goal as carbon-neutrality, but rather drawdown; not merely bailing the water out of the boat at the same rate as the leak, but simultaneously plugging the hole and bailing so it can take us forward once again. (Which project would you rather be part of?) Few of us are inspired only by working to only minimize damage, as measured in years and degrees and percentages; we want to be part of visible repair and restoration. Attenborough’s film gives a hopeful picture of how we can be part of tangible efforts to “rewild” the earth.
As he pivots from problems to solutions, Attenborough unfortunately wades into the fraught questions of human population, claiming that leveling off our numbers eventually is an important piece of preserving the earth. Though not a long segment, I found it cringey, given the often-racist history of this conversation. Yes, we as a species have transgressed our ecosystemic limits (a point our guide is eminently well-qualified to make). But when the documentary tracks the world population across the decades of the narrator’s life alongside C02 parts-per-million and percentage of wilderness remaining — and the narrator recommends leveling off our numbers, it leaves room for some to hear this as “humans are harmful simply by existing.” I don’t think the film is saying this, but I worry that some might nonetheless infer a “nature would heal” message: reduce people, reduce the problem. Eco-fascism is all-too real in the wider world, even as (to my knowledge) reputable climate scientists have steered clear of it. So I wish Attenborough had landed his point about ecosystemic limits in other ways.
And other ways are readily available. Attenborough raises population needlessly, when he already covers all the solutions needed: renewable energy sources, reforestation and wilderness preservation, and smarter agriculture. We’ve transgressed our limits not because too many of us exist. Rather, we are destroying the earth through our wasteful consumption of resources and unsustainable practices (chiefly, burning dinosaur bones, destroying forests, and raising too many livestock over too little land). Bringing population into the equation subtly introduces a “man vs. nature” theme that the rest of the film seems to largely push against. In short, I think the documentary would have been better off tracking only the two most relevant figures across the decades (percentage of wilderness remaining and CO2 ppm). If the producers wanted to track a third, they could have added yearly consumption of farmed meat per person or carbon footprint per person. Even better: profits of fossil fuel companies.
Indeed, a focus on the overall population is also a distraction: not every human life is equally responsible for where we are today. Attenborough does openly question why our financial systems continue to invest in products that threaten our future, but he doesn’t touch extreme wealth inequality, when we know the superwealthy and their carbon budgets are main drivers of climate change (as a recent Oxfam report confirmed; and the “merely affluent” of us also play a large role). Even though we all rely to some degree on industries that cause climate change, only some of us set the terms for how these industries behave, and then themselves use obscenely more than their fair share of resources. A Life on Our Planet would have been stronger (though perhaps less popular?) had it more strongly echoed Gandhi: there is enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.
Positively, much of what the film presents by way of problem-analysis and solutions echoes what Indigenous peoples have known and said for quite some time. Attenborough’s strength is having a front-row seat to decades of broad evidence and presenting it via a powerful visual tour. To his credit, the film recognizes the vital role Indigenous wisdom and practice have to play if we are to collectively rewild the planet.
Finally, I appreciated that the film keeps us close to the animals we are so impacting. Attenborough is, in short, an animal person, and his life’s work has shown what many of us intuit: we relate to the world in part through animals (as through land). He sees our fates bound up with theirs, for we are not apart from nature, but part of an ecosystem. We have to respect boundaries for our species, and most other species, to flourish. A focus on animals makes A Life on Our Planet more attractive and compelling to more of us. And I think more of us seeing the film and renewing our love for the world is, on the whole, a good thing.
If there is a single takeaway line in the film I think it is: “If we take care of nature, nature will take care of us.” In this, Attenborough is perfectly in step with another sage guide, Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
If Attenborough issues an urgent warning to repair our species's relationship with nature, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass offers an Indigenous education in how.
First published in 2013, Braiding Sweetgrass has seen a much wider readership in the last year or two. In a season of facing how biological and finite we are, it is a comforting “hymn of love to the world.” It is easily the most beautiful book I’ve read this year, or in recent memory.
Kimmerer is a woman, mother, scientist, professor, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. And she brings each part of her identity to bear in this book, a series of reflections on the ways of plants which is also an experiential education in an Indigenous ethic of place. How can a book mediate experiential learning? I still don’t fully know, but it does.
We receive our lessons from a masterful teacher in Kimmerer, but also from plants: such as strawberries, cedars, squash, and, of course, sweetgrass. I learned more facts about each plant than I could retain in more than one chapter per sitting. But I also absorbed the meaning of the plant, what it means for human life and what we might learn from it.
To Kimmerer, to know a living thing intimately, thoroughly, and reverently is to love it. And to love is to have one’s relationship to it transformed; it is to have one’s sight, hearing, emotion, and grammar toward that being altered, to be drawn into curiosity and wonder, gratitude and humility. (Yes, the book can be a spiritual reading experience, whatever one’s faith tradition.)
To be sure, many readers will find aspects of their worldview challenged; particularly those of us who are relatively recent immigrants to their locale. The world, through Kimmerer’s Indigenous American eyes, is interrelated, symbiotic, and animate. The fact that this is unfamiliar to many of us underscores how separated from it we have been, by histories we didn’t choose and by forces of our own making.
The book is mostly about plants, not settler colonialism, but as a reader with a white settler heritage, I couldn’t help but learn from some of the contrasts in worldview. Kimmerer has a strong sense of Creator, even if we’ve inherited different creation stories. To be creatures, for Kimmerer, is to recognize with humility one’s place in a web of living beings in mutual, reciprocal relationships. To be creatures, in a Western and Christian imagination, has at times been distorted into something more like hierarchy and ownership, in which dominion is twisted into license to take, take, take, in which one is over the land, not part of it.
Here’s an example. My forebears were German settlers who, from what I know, turned the Illinois prairie into farms after it had first been cleared of the people who lived there (from what I can find, at least five Tribes once did). My hometown was surrounded by mile-by-mile plots of corn and soybeans, treated by pesticides and harvested by tractors. Our local economy was highly reliant upon but in certain ways alienated from the rich black dirt. So I never learned, for example, what I learned in one chapter on “The Three Sisters”: that corn, squash, and beans, when planted together in mounds (a common practice for certain tribes), enables each crop and the soil beneath it to thrive more than if they had been planted separately. This is but one small example of the numerous ways the book helped me question my inherited sight and marvel anew at the world.
This past week, many in the U.S. recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day. From cover to cover, Kimmerer hospitably schools the reader in indigenous understandings of the world, from her Potowatomi history. But in one powerful later chapter, she goes even farther, inviting those of us who aren’t the land’s original habitants to “become indigenous to place.” What does it mean to become indigenous to place? To live, she says, "as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it."
As “A Life on Our Planet” shows, our lives do depend on it. The climate and biodiversity crises we face today are an outgrowth of settler colonialism, a continuation of a history of wanton disregard for Indigenous life.
For her part, Kimmerer notes how mainstream U.S. culture does not live as if it expects to stay long-term; our decisions often take a short-term, quarterly-earnings view. Can we learn otherwise? She asks:
After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, ‘The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.’…Can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?
What would it mean to live here as if we were staying? I don’t fully know yet, but I know it looks like caring for the land as if our lives depended on it. And in this, Robin Wall Kimmerer is a trustworthy guide and a wise elder.
Kimmerer and Attenborough take us to a similar place in that they help us see the ways creation has been tragically marred by humankind. And yet neither remains there: they prompt us, via their own mediums, to see the world in a new way; to reconnect with nature and so with ourselves and with one another. They point us toward good and loving work, even joyful work.
Yet it is not easy work. There is plenty to change; there is plenty to lament. As part of its education in love, Braiding Sweetgrass gives its readers permission to grieve. Through the process of grieving as an expression of love, we find the joy necessary to carry on daily. On this, the last word belongs to Kimmerer:
Until we grieve for our planet we cannot love it — grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.