How We Live

This week we watched David Attenborough’s film “Life On Our Planet.” The film contained beautiful footage. I found it both impressive and interesting to view animal life and landscapes with which I am not yet familiar. Here’s the but —and maybe it’s that I am overly sensitive to this as an environmental studies major growing up in this time— it was incredibly difficult to see all that I have missed and may never see by virtue of my birth date. Near the beginning of the film Attenborough says that his youth was the best time to be a human, which we know is only really true in the way he means it for the privileged and particularly white men. However, even without that omission of a qualifier, the statement is incredibly disconcerting for a person born forty years after he began filming in the 1950s. They speak a bit about how Attenborough could actually retire and ignore the issues he’s seen. While he has chosen not to follow that path, it is a privilege to have the option to check out. A privilege not available to the young, nor anyone facing additional difficulties.

The film may turn around for the final thirty minutes but that is after being bombarded with terrifying observations and predictions for over an hour, not to mention footage of actual violence. I never would have made it far enough into the documentary to reach the slightly more hopeful ending had it not been required viewing. I can acknowledge that speaking of solutions requires a certain level of background knowledge on the issues that need resolving. I simply do not have the stomach to keep watching whales be harpooned and rainforests cut down in order to reach an explanation of solutions of which I am typically already aware and in favor. To be told that all we need is the will to do good can also be hard to bear. You and I might have that will, but it takes a large collective effort and government support in most cases to make necessary changes.

We talked about this very briefly in our shared forum class on Wednesday, but it is hard to overstate how devastating it is to be constantly told that the world we were born into is not as it should be and only getting worse. Professor Seymour brought up that all of us, especially graduating seniors, may be thinking about what their lives are going to look like in the next 10 years, about whether we are going to have families and what that might look like. It’s a deeply personal question and one that I’ve been contemplating since my very first environmental studies course. We all know the pain of being told our world is beautiful and amazing and that it has been dying for years at the hands of the people who were here before us. I can only imagine how much that resentment and despondence will compound for those born more recently and in the future. I worry about it for the child I nannied and for my nieces who have yet to live a full year on the planet. I don’t believe that I am alone in those fears, nor do I have a better solution than collective action, I only wish the balance between doom and hope were tilted farther away from apocalyptic messaging.