1.5.1. King Kong 1933, 1976, 1986, 1998, 2005, 2017
The still above is from the 1933 classic, and watching it elicits a weird mix of emotions; from humour, to curiosity, to engagement, to sadness. There’s much that is brutal and clunky in the original, but it somehow draws the viewer in and Kong’s ...
1.5.2. My Octopus Teacher
This is a truly special documentary which starts so quietly you’d think it impossible to leave the viewer at the end emotionally stunned, as well as joyous. I am still thinking about it almost a year after watching it and I think it will remain wi...
1.5.3. Quoll Farm ABC
There is much of ‘My Octopus Teacher’ in ‘Quoll Farm’, though the locations could hardly be more different: terrestrial, instead of aquatic; Tasmania rather than South Africa; an altered farm landscape instead of a largely intact ocean environment...
1.5.4. Etosha: Africa’s Untamed Wilderness. Living Edens Series
It is almost impossible to choose favourites, let alone a favourite, Nature documentary, they are so outstandingly shot and produced. Nonetheless, I will try to list one that I have never forgotten from years ago (1998) because of the way it trans...
1.5.5. Nature Walkabout
I include ‘Nature Walkabout’ both as a personal indulgence and as a representative of the times, and I believe, of several similar TV series and documentaries shown around the world in the ‘60s. (I look forward to readers’ examples of these).
T...
1.5.6. Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story
This is a very difficult documentary to include, not because of any doubts as to its quality or accuracy, but because the content is often confronting, and because of the embarrassment you will feel if you are an Australian. As the New South Wales...
1.5.7. Life on Earth: A Natural History
Just as with Ansel Adams’ wonderful photography (see 1.8.5), or William Blake’s ‘Tyger’ (1.9.7), it would be mean-spirited to leave out ‘Life on Earth’ just because it is so well-known. And well known it is, with an estimated 500 million people se...
1.5.8. Roger Swainston: Drawn to Water
This is a fascinating story of intense focus, exquisite skill, and most importantly, the ability to see life. When I look at a close-up of an illustration of a lobster carapace by Roger I can’t believe he’s drawn it: the detail and the irridescenc...
1.5.9. Off Track: Live Long, Little Lizard
After the ABC’s Natural History Unit was shamefully closed in 2007 there has been precious little for lovers of Nature in this, one of the world’s ‘megadiverse’ countries, and with the globe’s highest number of unique species2.
Insid...
1.5.10. Hooked on Growth
Dave Gardner is the perfect heretic: softly-spoken, mild-mannered, unflappable, and with a sense of humour, very hard to demonise and marginalise as ‘crazy’, ‘eccentric’, ‘dangerous’, ‘racist’, or ‘anti-people’. Heretics are, at best, dismissed, a...
Explore Other Sections
1. Build the Nature-Human Relationship
This section is designed to foster appreciation and insight that will – hopefully – lead to novel ways to build a better relationship between human beings and Nature. This section is also atypical ...
2. Reduce Consumption
I hope Reneé Descartes would forgive us for saying that, at least for the modern world, he was wrong. When, in 1637, he said: “I think, therefore I am”, he could not have anticipated that the majo...
3. Replace God of Growth with God of Quality
In a supposedly secular age there has arisen a global religion and god like never before, a religion whose reach and power makes every other belief system before it seem pitiful and insignificant: ...
4. Work, Volunteer, Act for the Environment
What we do in our day-to-day lives can have great impact. Section Four divides up these actions into three groups – Work (4.2 & 4.3), Volunteering (4.4), and Action, e.g. voting, protesting, et...
5. Reduce Population
Even on top of Mt. Everest, in one of the remotest, most difficult places on earth, there is a great traffic-jam of people jostling for position. And yet, ever more vociferously, we deny that overp...
6. Ensure Media Acknowledgement of Environmental Context
The media is one of the three, great ‘poles’ of power in the world (alongside political and corporate power) and how they frame and present ‘the environment’ has a profound effect on how we respond...
7. Stop Further Loss of Natural Habitat and Species
New York is an exciting, mesmerising place. Human culture is extraordinary and often wonderful. Our powers of transformation of the natural world seem limitless. The trouble is, we don’t seem to be...
8. Assist Energy Descent and Transition
Our current energy largesse is an extraordinary ‘gift’, an unprecedented gift of the ages; millions of years to produce and from millions of years ago. Coal, oil and gas, forming...
9. Support New, Environmentally-Aware, Economic Systems
Just as with the previous section – ‘Energy’ – which is, inescapably, all about fossil fuels so pre-eminent and extraordinary has been their dominance and transformation of the world in the last 20...
10. Reduce Wastes to the Rate of Natural Assimilation
Section 10 will attempt to organise this enormous topic by addressing the context and status of pollution in 10.2, before focussing in on air pollution; particularly greenhouse gas pollution and cl...
