After many evening of happy viewing I have finally come to the end of the BBC’s Planet Earth series (thank you, Kevin!). I’ve seen a fair amount of nature programming in my time, and I have to admit that this series really does have some awesomely spectacular photography. Scenes like the surfing dolphins, the chimp war, the great white shark and snow leopard hunting, the vampire squid and so on will stay with me for a long time. If you have an interest in the natural world, the series is definitely worth buying.

If I have a complaint at all it is that the series is still very much bogged down in the traditional male naturalist view of what a nature program should be about: sex and death. Animals do exhibit a wide range of different behaviors, but put a man behind a camera with some animals and what he’ll want to film is them either fucking or killing each other. With mammals in particular an essential part of behavior is raising their young, but this is much less often shown, and even when we do get shots of mother leopards and bears the narrative is all about how she catches food for the cubs, not how she trains them to hunt, which she surely must do.

Still, given the quality of the shots, and the efforts that the camera crews went through to get them (the “diary” sections at the end of each program are very revealing), I can hardly complain.

What is more, some of the best stuff was added at the end. The final DVD contains three 1-hour programs that are illustrated with shots from the series, but are primarily talking head debates about the current state of the conservation debate. I have to admit that the BBC did a superb job in finding the most oily and unconvincing people to put the Rethuglican case (not that this really mattered – their position was fatally caricatured long ago by Shea and Wilson in the form of the guy in Illuminatus! whose ambition was to be the person who killed the last ever bald eagle in America). On the other hand, some of the environmentalists, particularly James Lovelock, are equally scary. In the end what matters is that we save the planet, not that someone with a rigorous and narrow ethical standpoint forces everyone to do what he says.