Nature films are made inside systems that both protect and restrict them. The people who make them care deeply about truth, but they work within rules that shape what can be shown. These rules come from broadcasters, funders and global partners who avoid conflict and politics. The result is work that is beautiful and careful, but not always complete. The real tension is not about skill or effort. It is about how honest a film can be when the system around it is often twitchy about the truth.

The Sea Lion and the Machine

I am watching Planet Earth III. A sea lion darts towards the steel wall of a trawler net, desperate for an easy catch without being scooped up in the nets itself. The music swells, the narration urges empathy. The scene is one of destruction, yet we are being asked to focus on the sea lion. Around it, thousands of animals churn in chaos. The sky is full of birds, the water thick with bodies. Sea lions scream as they raid the nets, competing with one of the largest fisheries in the world. Will they be scooped up with the anchovies and surely die?

The fishermen bang on the hull to drive them away before the nets close. At the last moment they release the net and the sea lions pour out, alive and frantic. The water settles, and the narration offers relief. But the real violence is still unfolding behind them, as tonnes of anchovy collapse into the hold. The film directs our empathy toward the animals’ escape while the machinery of extraction carries on, vast and unexamined.

No one doubts the devotion or mastery of the crews behind these films. The patience, risk and ingenuity required to capture moments like this are extraordinary. Yet for all that brilliance, the sequence feels incomplete. The camera finds drama in the individual animal but not in the system devouring it. The sea lion’s gamble for a mouthful of fish becomes the emotional core, when the real story is the machine it is gambling against. The tragedy is not the animal’s risk but the net itself, and the industrial appetite it serves.

This is where much mainstream wildlife filmmaking finds itself stranded. Pristine nature. Limited context.

The Human in Nature

Across two decades of the Planet series, the BBC’s blue chip natural history model has evolved technically but not always narratively. Planet Earth (2006) pioneered the pure wilderness spectacle, sweeping aerials, untouched worlds and almost no sign of humanity. Human Planet (2011) briefly flipped the perspective, placing people within ecosystems and showing how culture itself is a form of ecological adaptation. When Planet Earth II (2016) arrived, its 4K drones and intimate animal portraits pushed immersion further, yet it was the Cities episode, where wildlife meets human infrastructure, that most audiences remembered. The same pattern continued with Planet Earth III (2023). Its Heroes episode, focused on conservationists and communities restoring damaged ecosystems, became the emotional anchor of the series. The lesson is simple. The closer natural history moves toward human stories, toward culture, ethics and interdependence, the more powerful and lasting its impact becomes. Awe can capture attention, but it is our relationship with nature that makes it relatable and builds understanding.

Culture and Ecology

This was not inevitable. In 1975 the BBC aired The Tribal Eye, Attenborough’s series exploring ritual and art across Indigenous societies. For its time it broadened television’s gaze, though it still carried the colonial framing of a civilised observer studying vanishing cultures. Still, it understood culture as an ecological expression. Masks, carvings and ceremonies were ways of knowing landscapes and species.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TOLcVbw1Os&list=PLmGObvIzDCArBrZK5rYxsdpITaxnWXDtD

Four years later came Life on Earth (1979), the first full scale blue chip epic. Bigger crews, controlled narration, pure wilderness imagery. From that point, mainstream series increasingly framed nature apart from people.

In the 1980s and 1990s, shows like The Living Planet and The Trials of Life perfected the formula with stunning images, a godlike narrator and sweeping music. By the 2000s, digital cameras made it even more dazzling. Nature on display, untouched by politics. Even Blue Planet II, for all its brilliance, saved the hard truths for the final minutes. Beauty first, uncomfortable truth saved for the last episode.

Only now, with Oceans with David Attenborough (2025), are we beginning to see that balance shift. The series finally turned its lens on the scale and violence of bottom trawling, showing industrial destruction that has long been edited out of view. Attenborough called it “a new colonialism”, a striking statement for a mainstream film. Yet the critique still stopped short. The film condemned the practice but not the system driving it. No companies were named, no global supply chains mapped, no policies held to account. It was a breakthrough in honesty, but still a step away from full accountability.

It is also fair to acknowledge the realities of broadcast television. These films are bound by editorial policy, global distribution rules and the need to reach mass audiences. They are made under such constraints and driven by the fear of upsetting viewers and losing their audience.

Within those limits, Oceans was a bold act. The question is how much further the form can stretch. Some moments in nature don’t need explaining. Wild places and animal lives can still move us just by being seen. The best traditional sequences remind us what we stand to lose, not how separate we are from it. But even then, our influence is always close by.

Joining the Dots

I have filmed in places where human and non human lives are inseparable. River rituals in Nepal. Fishing beaches in Ghana. Salmon farms in Scotland. The stories that matter are not pristine. They are about adaptation, dependence and loss. Yet the mainstream frame cannot hold this complexity. It still demands heroes, victims and villains, never feedback loops or shared responsibility.

Some filmmakers are breaking that pattern. Honeyland watches a beekeeper sustain a fragile balance between humans and bees. All That Breathes frames air pollution and bird rescue as one continuous act of care through a poetic and observational lens. The Territory gives Indigenous filmmakers authorship in defending their forest. Even My Octopus Teacher, for all its sentimentality, roots empathy in patient observation. None of these films are flawless, but each rejoins nature and culture. They trade grandeur for intimacy and spectacle for systems awareness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2a00LVaz4k

The Case for Honesty

Perhaps most impressive is We Are Guardians (2023). It does what most natural history and environmental films still avoid. It names names. It follows Indigenous forest guardians in the Brazilian Amazon as they confront loggers, land grabbers and the corporations fuelling the destruction. The film connects the dots between forest loss and global supply chains, calling out companies like Cargill, JBS and Bunge, the system’s hidden engines. It is made with Indigenous storytellers, not about them, and it refuses to sanitise the politics. This is what accountability looks like in film. It shows that beauty and truth are not opposites, and that honesty is the only language left with the power to protect life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NrD7ytwN\_Y

Still, spectacle has its place. Aerial wonder and microscopic detail can awaken care in audiences who may never stand in a rainforest or dive beneath the waves. But wonder alone is not enough. It must be paired with context and consequence.

Nature films do not need to abandon awe. They need to deepen it. They need people, systems and openness about what shapes the stories we tell, who funds them, who frames them and what realities they leave out. The real story is not beauty versus threat. It is the web of life, human and non human, that makes beauty possible at all.

Or maybe this is just me lobbying for the anthropology slot on BBC Two to make a comeback. Maybe this whole piece is just wishful thinking, a small attempt to turn a dream into reality, to direct the kind of series that brings humanity, stewardship and the natural world closer together for those precious 60 minutes.

A New School of Storytelling

A new language is forming. Small crews, local storytellers, regenerative farmers, youth researchers and conservationists documenting from within their own systems. Platforms like WaterBear, Ecohustler and initiatives like Doc Society’s Climate Story Unit hint at this shift. The lens is turning from awe to relationship.

If I had to write a rulebook, it would be brief:

Co-creation

Credit, pay and collaborate with local storytellers. Share authorship and ownership. Films should emerge from relationships and lived understanding, not extraction.

Transparency

Publish clear ethics, methods and impact data with every release. Audiences and contributors deserve to know how stories were made and what change they aim to create.

Purpose

Design films for measurable participation, not passive viewing. Prioritise outcomes such as community screenings, volunteer sign ups and policy influence over view counts.

Imagination

Make for alert, curious minds. Use creativity to deepen empathy, stretch perception and reimagine humanity’s relationship with nature.

Access

Diversify who gets to tell the story. Purpose driven storytelling should open the field to new voices, not replicate elite production economies.

Bring People With You

Natural history now needs to widen the frame. To see the plastic bag drifting by, the mine up stream, the fishing line tangled around the camera housing. To look beyond nature and face the system that surrounds it.

What happens next depends on honesty. If we keep filming nature in isolation, we turn away from the truth of our collective impact. Greed and profit cannot come at the expense of biodiversity, or this awe-inspiring planet will become desolate and these documentaries a painful archive of what once was.

Some might argue that emotional access precedes activism but I think we’ve reached a point where what we choose not to include is causing the natural world more harm than good. I think it’s time to call out our collective impact and use the craft to shape the narrative of a positive biodiverse future for all.

Our children and grandchildren will no doubt ask what we were doing during the sixth mass extinction.

How you answer that one is up to you.