A different view on Blue Planet II

How are you inspired?

David Attenborough and his many nature documentaries are lauded as inspiring millions of people. The entire team at Blue Planet (a nature documentary based in the ocean) and Planet Earth (a nature documentary based on land) is applauded for bringing wildlife into people’s homes and leaving them in awe. But what are they actually achieving and do they do the natural world justice, considering humans are leaving it on the brink of destruction?

Blue Planet II is the latest nature documentary by the BBC. Filmed with the most advanced underwater cameras, it brings viewers into the most unexplored areas in the world where the most extraordinary creatures live. It showcases whales in all their glory, seals fishing and sharks breeding. It is an incredible television feat that entertains millions of viewers and sells worldwide, making the BBC a lot of money in the process. Blue Planet II was filmed over many years and supposedly goes across the globe to represent all areas of the ocean. Yet it has managed to miss the most prevalent thing happening today across all oceans: the capture and killing of the species living in it by humans. Blue Planet II is the digital zoo of television - entertainment with good public relations and little effective conservation.

An injustice to the animals

There are countless examples in Blue Planet II where fish and mammals are filmed interacting with their natural environment but never is the interaction with humans considered. Humans have had such impact on these animals that they now must be considered to be a part of their story. There are only fleeting mentions of how damaging plastic can be, or how coral reefs are being bleached, but never is a human shown killing an animal. Depicting the life stages of these animals without showing the hundreds of billions of lives cut short by human interference is a betrayal.

How can you accurately reflect the life of a seal without mentioning the 217,800 seals killed in just one year in Canada by seal hunters, or the 90,000 killed in one year by hunters in Greenland? In Canada, hunters can legally kill seals that are just 14 days old. A government report states that 98% of seals killed are under 3 months old. They are killed with a club and a spike and dragged on to boats. If you are a seal, there’s a very good chance you will be beaten to death by a human. Yet coming away from Blue Planet, you would be forgiven for thinking they live according to nature in their natural habitat.

In the first Blue Planet documentary which aired in 2001, sharks were shown visiting the shores of a small island to have their skin cleaned by small fish, a truly amazing spectacle. Approximately 100 million sharks are caught and killed each year. The sharks are either caught for their meat or as bycatch, picked up by giant fishing nets used to catch the very food the viewers of Blue Planet are eating. A billion sharks have been killed by humans over the past 10 years.

Given how common the occurrence is, the Blue Planet crew must have at some point, been in scenarios where they have seen humans killing fish or mammals. Not including this in the final show feels like a glaring omission. The viewer certainly comes away being entertained by skin cleaning but is left completely ignorant to the mass extinction of sharks at hands of humans.

Blue Planet II is the equivalent of being a journalist who is dropped in Syria and reports back that Syria has lovely parks, completely ignoring the war. If you are portraying an accurate reflection of the oceans and how animals behave, you cannot ignore the impact of humans on the very animals you are filming.

The state of our planet

There is little evidence to support the notion that nature documentaries which ignore the threat of humans will inspire their audience to take conservation seriously. The 2016 Living Planet Report showed a 58% decline in vertebrate population abundance worldwide between 1970 and 2012. Between 900 million and 2.7 trillion animals are taken from the oceans each year by human-beings and thanks to the use of giant fishing nets, nothing is safe. Whales, sharks, dolphins and anything else are taken up by these nets, where they will often suffocate to death.

The ocean is a complex ecosystem, the animals living there give and receive. Whales, for example, eat fish but excrete waste that feeds phytoplankton, which feeds zooplankton, which feeds the fish. Eighty percent of the world's oxygen comes from phytoplankton. Not only are warming oceans reducing the numbers of phytoplankton, the fish and mammals taken from the ocean are too.

With rising sea temperatures and pollution, even fish at the deepest darkest areas of the ocean, where no human ventures, are not safe. Excrement from the more than 50 billion animals used for human consumption is not treated and goes directly into rivers leading out to the ocean. The excrement causes ocean dead zones - entire stretches of ocean where nothing lives.

The digital zoo

Take a look at Twitter the next time Blue Planet airs, you'll see viewers are utterly awe-struck, a reaction not too dissimilar to when people visit zoos. You will hear that "animals and nature are incredible" and how loved they are. Blue Planet is the digital zoo of television. If we strip back the glossy editing and expensive camerawork, we have to face the reality that is simply a form of entertainment which achieves next to nothing in relation to conservation.

Seals are clubbed to death to protect fisheries; sharks and whales are caught for meat or by accident in fishing nets, and we’re polluting the oceans with the items we buy. Nature documentaries are happy to show the lion catch the deer, the shark catch and kill the tuna, but will not show the biggest killer of them all – humans.

Viewers need to demand to see the truth. Shows like Blue Planet are not commissioned to teach viewers how to save the natural world but to entertain a mainstream audience. It is up to viewers to turn off the television and speak out loudly, or the oceans will die and no one will notice. Blue Planet II will become nothing more than a testimonial of how beautiful the wild once was.

Andy Davidson

Would you like to write for our blog? Read our guidelines then send your pitch to web[at]vegansociety[dot]com.