What’s a Human Doing in My Wildlife Documentary?

Widening the proverbial nature documentary lens, PBS’s fresh, five-part series, EARTH A New Wild, not only walks viewers across the usual African plains and down deep into coral reefs, it also shows off the people living nearby. As much as we enjoy spacing ourselves from nature, we undoubtedly play a major role within it— we’re the prime perpetrators of Earth’s new carbon-laden Anthropocene after all. This is a point that the new series, beginning February 4, makes explicit.

Audubon spoke on the phone with the New Wild’s host, conservationist Dr. M Sanjayan, as he stood along San Francisco Bay, smitten by the Bay’s herring fish. Before we even started, Sanjayan remarked on the footage this scene could produce, adding that many filmmakers would never expand the shot the few inches needed to reveal a towering Golden Gate Bridge in the background. The fact that his new series would is exactly what makes it stand out.

What sets EARTH A New Wild apart from the hundreds of other nature documentaries out there?

A lot of nature documentaries fall into one of two categories—there’s showing the planet in this stylistic, idealistic sort of unrealistic way, where you’ll never see a power line, a road, or a human being. And then, there are documentaries with people like Steve Irwin, who got into this notion that we had to get really close to, and wrestle, catch, eat, or even attempt to be eaten by whatever it is that we want to look at.

But the reality is, most of the natural world is not like this. It is somewhere in the middle. This middle ground is really interesting because it shows the planet how it actually is. It shows that there is this spectacle taking place, but that there are also people right there as well! This is what we were trying to embark upon, where humans are part of nature, not separate from it.

You traveled 29 countries to research this film—what was the most outstanding example of nature’s influence on humans?

On the Indian subcontinent, there are eight or so species of vultures that have virtually vanished in the past 20 years. We’re talking 20 million birds that have disappeared. You really see the impact of this in the spread of dead bird carcasses and thus, an enormous increase in the local feral dog population. This makes the Indian subcontinent now the number one place for humans to get rabies.

This series puts a positive spin on humans coexisting with nature. What is the conservation community’s response to the optimistic perspective?

I think it probably depends if you’re an activist group or a solution-oriented group. But I didn’t make it for either of them—I made it for people who typically will turn off the television the second they hear something that sounds preachy.

The number one rule of making good TV is that you want people to watch it. And if there’s a message, you want that message to be emergent rather than be lectured. Pessimism never really changed the world. I want to address the ills and challenges of the planet, but I don’t want to leave my audience there. I want to leave them with a way out. I want to leave them with an incredible sense that a future is possible.

Did you encounter examples of humans living less-than-harmoniously with nature?

Well, we didn’t set out to say: What are the most positive examples we can find? Rather we asked ourselves: What’s the relationship between people and nature? And is nature still relevant to our lives? In fact, there are examples in the film where the relationship between people and nature is frightening.

Tigers in Bangladesh kill, on average, one person a week in a relatively small forest. These tigers come into the villages and literally snatch people out of their houses and will swim and then jump onto a boat and kill someone—it’s extraordinary. And yet, this forest where they live provides protection for one of the biggest cities in Asia—without it, millions of people would be at risk of flooding. The forest is also one of the largest captures of carbon and it provides food for again, millions of people.

Were you able to capture any never-before-seen footage?

Yes, the mating and rutting of the saiga antelope in Russia. This is something that even saiga experts that I showed the footage to were shocked that we got on film.

There’s also a really incredible sequence of the Sami people in Norway, where they castrate male reindeer using a traditional technique that is coming back: they bite the testicles. We knew that this happened, but the last footage we saw was done in the 1960s and 1970s and was done in sort of a campy kind of way.

Then we go with the Orani people into the deep, deep Amazon—and these are first contact people, so we are talking with people who, in their lifetimes, have never seen anyone else outside of their little community.

Anything else?

In Palmyra Atoll, one of the most remote atolls on the planet, we film sharks at densities that I had never, ever experienced before. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them stacked up.

And then, I mean, I got to sit with 14 baby pandas. In the Wolong Mountains in China, we watched the first captive-born female panda ever to be released into the wild.

Did this series change your personal perspective of conservation?

More than anything this film has reminded me that the work that we conservationists do must focus on ensuring that people understand how nature provides value to their lives. If you want to sum it down to four words, it’s this: Save Nature, Live Better.

I also will say that, unlike any documentary I’ve worked on before, this one left me with more optimism than when I started.

Yes, you meet Jane Goodall in this series and yes, you meet Jeremy Jackson—those are the famous scientists. But you also meet people you would have never heard of before: the guy who is rescuing vultures in Asia, the guy who is working on ensuring that lions aren’t coming into conflict in Africa, a cowboy in Montana. You need these new architects of the New Wild.