A new documentary presents devastation from climate change from the perspective of animals

Summer 2023 is officially the hottest summer on record, while freak storms and rising sea levels are all around us. But we often only think of these impacts in terms of how they affect humans, such as how many billions of dollars in damages hurricanes or wildfires cause. A new documentary takes a different approach, with a specific eye toward how animals are reacting to climate change.

"Evolution Earth," which premiered on PBS on September 6, is narrated by evolutionary biologist Dr. Shane Campbell-Staton and features titles like "Islands," "Heat," "Ice" and "Grasslands." One could be forgiven for thinking "Evolution Earth" is a standard nature documentary. Yet every animal captured in the series, from the polar bears to the white hares, is in one way or another responding to humanity's ongoing burning of fossil fuels, which is dangerously heating up the globe and pushing our planet to its very limits.

"Evolution Earth" does not chronicle these animals simply to tell a story or perhaps to glorify nature. Instead the docuseries has a subtler message: Nature is miraculous and capable of repairing itself. Animals are smarter and more resilient than we appreciate, and are capable of bouncing back from climate change.

This is a compelling, even uplifting story, and one that "Evolution Earth" tells with breathtakingly vivid and colorful cinematography. To better understand the genesis of the documentary Salon spoke with the managing director of Passion Planet and the co-series producer, David Arnold.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

What made you take an interest in this subject? 

Well, we've had a long relationship with PBS doing films like this. We did a series called "Earth: A New Wild," which was similar in this vein. We had another one about water called "H2O: The Molecule That Made Us" and a couple of feature docs as well. It's all really trying to tell the story of conservation with that kind of natural history fascination that people have, We're trying to string together solutions and hope that's what our kind of films really specialize in.

It's a very difficult thing to do without sort of descending into complete doom and gloom. I would would say the programs tend to blitz one way or the other. The docs tend to say either what we call sort of blue chip behavior, and not doing anything other than presenting the planet as this sort of wonderful chocolate box of wildlife, or you get conservation shows which are sort of very dire and sort of difficult to watch. We try and bridge that gap in a way, try and sort of exploit that niche. 

When I watch a show like this, I want to understand the impact of climate change as if I was visiting these places myself, even though I have not done so. I thought "Evolution Earth" did that effectively. My question for you is, what do you think it teaches us about climate change?

That climate change is changing the world is becoming apparent wherever you live. I'm no longer trying to convince our audience that climate change is happening. You just have to look outside the window, whether you're in America, Europe or wherever. It's sort of becoming increasingly apparent.

What's great about these shows is they do have a kind of arc. If you watch all five, you go through the journey all the way through to our final show "Grasslands." It just starts to hint at nature's resilience and ability to react, given a chance. Some of those stories are extraordinary, but in our big conclusions toward the end of the "Grasslands" episodes and the "Ice" episode, and sort of hinting in the "Heat" episode as well, is that you really start to see there are some big, big impacts we can make by just allowing nature to repair itself. 

And that doesn't just repair biodiversity, it starts to repair the planet. In particular, the episodes like "Grasslands" sort of start to suggest that repairing our grasslands can have as big an effect for us helping global warming as [repairing] the Amazon does. And that's a really exciting proposal.

Likewise, there's a sort of message within the "Ice" episode that allowing the natural systems back into play will help those sort of feedback loops — or, rather, it's more frightening in terms of if you take out those natural systems, you can get runaway climate change. You can get to disastrous consequences. But we were really, really happy to find some of those bigger picture messages that really start to make sense for us in terms of repair and rewilding and how much effect that can have for sure.

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You said earlier that all you need to do is look out your windows and the effects of climate change are all around us. Yet "Evolution Earth" goes a little deeper by going to different regions of the world that we can't visit just by going outside our front door. What lessons would you say a person watching this can glean in terms of things that they could not learn through direct observation?

The scientists have got together and said Earth's changing 140 times faster than any time in the last several million years. But it is at some levels difficult for us to quantify or see that with our own sort of vision, in a way. It is very difficult. We see some of the effects of it, but we don't really see that change. And so just going to intimate animal stories, I think that what this shows is that animals do have a story to tell. Their behavior is so finely tuned to their environment that it is a barometer of change. I think those each one of our sequences has that baked into its DNA, from the simplest thing of how the white hares are sort of mistimed with the melting snow.

It goes on and on. Each one of our examples is exactly that. Look at the lifecycles, or the intimate lives of these animals, and they've got a story to tell. 

I think what's really between the lines, which sometimes it's difficult for us to say or explain, but there is extraordinary power in nature when you let it rebuild itself. There is something about connecting the pieces of broken nature, which gives you more than the sum of its parts. I think we keep getting that message, and that is pushed across all our shows in a way that there is a brave baseline of change happened around all of us in all our worlds where we have forgotten what the planet is supposed to look like. And the wonderful thing about that is repairing it back to what it was – not really what it was like, but to have back a sort of functioning state that has benefits for us all.