- [Ted] Last time on Our Fascinating Planet
A planet was born.
It exploded all over itself
and changed its own face.
It survived its puberty,
killed its dinosaurs,
and then developed its own death defying cycles
to keep its starry insides in check.
But it would leave its human outsides unchecked.
This is Our Fascinating Planet.
(majestic music)
(majestic music becoming pompous)
The story of our Earth
is a story of the life it has birthed and nurtured,
and perhaps nothing has been birthed
and nurtured more on Earth than ...
Animals.
One of Nature's most valuable resources.
We chase them, we wear them, we play with them,
we taunt them, we laugh at them,
we roast them, we toast them,
we even host them in our homes as pets,
but lying just beneath the surface
of these often ridiculous coinhabitants
of our shared home we call Earth
is a much greater story.
One filled with melodramatic danger and cosmic safety,
all punctuated by glorious displays
of our Earth's lifedom.
The Earth has long used animals to sustain itself.
They dig holes in its soil to ventilate it.
They swim in its waters to hydrate it.
They stampede on its ground to massage it,
and flap their wings in its air,
moving its clouds to shade it.
Animals eat plants to keep them from strangling the land,
and they convert chewed plant carcases into feces,
which helps thicken the Earth's protective crust,
and they urinate on its surface to quench its thirst
and prevent it from exploding.
And when they die, the animals melt into the Earth,
becoming food for plants.
Animals eat plants, which then die
and become food for new plants,
which then also die and become dirt,
which becomes food for the Earth.
Put simply, the Earth would not be what it is today
without its animals.
But the best of these animals is Man,
who just so happens to also be
the worst of these animals.
No conversation about life on Earth is complete
without addressing Man's almost flippant disregard
for his animal neighbors with whom he shares this planet.
Statistically, Man is the most dangerous animal
on the planet.
When you consider mankind's history
and its clever use of things
like jackhammers and atomic bombs,
it's easy to see why.
And Man also ranks highest in conflicts.
And at the same time, Man ranks lowest
in respect for the Earth.
But how did we end up like this?
It's almost as if Man was destined to clash with Earth
from the very beginning,
a process that started with early humans who lived in trees
and soon clashed with each other right out of those trees.
So early Man's first journey,
a veritable leap from the tree to the ground,
was also the first significant step
towards what we call civilization.
Once our species managed to come together on the ground,
we suddenly discovered that a lot of us
didn't like a lot of them, and so there was conflict.
Tribes began to separate,
to sort themselves into warring factions
based on their differences.
Some separations were obvious,
determined by things like hair type
or body smell
or geography.
Specifically, those who were good at geography went one way,
and those who were not got lost,
and as they wandered, trying to find their way back,
they accidentally populated the Earth.
But one thing would prove to separate human beings
from each other more than anything else,
something called ...
Religion.
Man has long practiced religion, because ...
- It's the opposite, it's easy, you know.
You draw a circle or you wear a hat,
talk about the sun, you know,
maybe you get to burn a woman while she's still alive.
People love that, to set women on fire.
Sometimes you got to kill a bird,
so animal cruelty was always really appealing.
- [Ted] With the advent of religion,
Man took his first real step towards changing the planet.
Early Man's gods not only helped him describe small events,
like a poor harvest or diarrhea,
but also larger phenomena like tornadoes.
Floods.
Plague.
Even earthquakes.
All of this could be ascribed
to an invisible source in the sky.
So Man, almost from his beginning,
looked not to Earth for answers,
but away from it and then beyond it,
putting himself and his needs above his planet.
And his gods would be instrumental
in cultivating his disregard for the Earth itself.
There was the Greek god of trash,
the Inca god of killing things for fun,
and the Chinese god of burning whatever you could
whenever you felt like it.
And of course, the Nordic god of Earth rape.
For these gods were the perfect scapegoats.
Perhaps no better example can be found
than the Roman god, Scape.
A goat.
- In every ancient language we see recurring phrases,
like 'the gods made me do it', you know, that ***ing goat!
You know, that kind of thing,
so the goat was very prevalent in households.
People talked about that a lot.
- [Ted] By removing any responsibility from himself,
Man was free to wreak havoc on the planet,
and he would attack the Earth in many ways.
We started by assaulting the Earth's plants.
We began to grow them only to kill them and eat them,
and sometimes to smoke them.
Animals soon became a favorite target for Man.
We hunted, killed, wore and even teased animals,
even turning some of them into our play slaves, or pets.
A barbaric custom that is still practiced
in many places today, this has had dire consequences.
But perhaps Man's greatest assault
has been on the Earth itself, building homes and towns,
digging into the Earth to extract minerals
to make vitamins and jewelry,
and decorating the land in embarrassing ways.
Soon, cities began to rise.
The goal was clear:
remove all traces of Nature as quickly as possible,
and in many places, we've succeeded in doing just that.
We went from living in small straw huts
to living in tall straw skyscrapers almost overnight,
which today of course are no longer made of straw
but of balsa wood and concrete and plexiglass.
These concrete jungles and prairies
have replaced the regular jungles and prairies
that once ruled the planet,
leaving Man today with little choice
but to live and die in his own industrial wasteland.
Today, five in every seven people lives in a city,
and of those, two in every three
are 10 times more likely
to spend the remaining three fifths of their life
in the heart of that city.
And of those, 90% will die in a city,
and of those, 80% will die a violent death in that city,
and of those, 10% will live
in either an urban or rural area.
And so today we find a planet
that is in many places almost unrecognizable.
Animals often look confused or embarrassed
as they enter our habitats, and even worse,
many of them have suffered psychologically
from our overwhelming impact.
- Animals replicate human life.
You'll see human culture as behaving a certain way,
animals go, oh, humans are better than me,
I wanna behave like that.
And you see that a lot, I studied quail patterns,
how quails interact over time, and quails act like people,
and it's disgusting, you know, it's wrong.
But it's fascinating.
And also, we keep animals as pets
because they're not as smart, they're not as intelligent,
we eat them as food because they're objects, essentially.
Objects with a heart, so,
it causes a lot of questions to come up.
- [Ted] And we mock the Earth
by making things like plastic Christmas trees
and wooden ducks.
Man has displayed an almost tragic arrogance
towards his planet.
While we jump for Jupiter and salivate over Saturn,
we are brazen enough to use the very material from the Earth
to make small ridiculous dolls of it, called globes.
On top of that, to get these very materials,
we have penetrated the Earth
and robbed it of its fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels which we burn like witches or dogs.
This has had dire consequences,
namely globular warming.
(flames crackling)
Our planet is in trouble,
there's no question about that now.
And Man, more than any species, is responsible for it.
Fire, once thought to be Man's best friend,
now turns out to be one of Nature's worst enemies.
- [Bernadette] It's like we're
gonna destroy ourselves, right?
But that's something that's seemed really likely
for a long time, and we've made it this far.
- In fact, the future is in our hands,
both our own future and our planet's.
The question is, what do we do with it?
So what does the future hold for our fascinating planet?
The current interglacial period ends,
sending our Earth into another ice age.
Extinction of animals continues to occur
until they are all gone and we all become vegan,
removing all joy from the planet.
Father Earth comes back and we must decide
which Earth we want to live on.
Everything works out,
and we learn to live harmoniously with our planet.
Well that's up to you.
The Earth is not just our home,
it is also our friend and our enemy,
much like a mother or a foster aunt.
We may leave this planet someday or it may explode,
and we will find ourselves
living on small oddly shaped Earthlets
hurtling through space, which will never be as good
as the planet was when it was all together
in one big ball the way it is today.
We don't know what will happen,
only the future can tell us that, but in the meantime,
instead of telling this planet what to do,
as we have for centuries,
maybe we should start listening to her.
And when we do, let's not be so arrogant
that we end up laughing at what she has to say.
(majestic music)