Our precious planet has had many different lives. Photo: Studio_OMG.
First and foremost, this is not a review column; for that, you can check out Jarryd Rowley’s excellent work.
Second-most (if that’s a word), do yourself a favour and watch the Netflix doco series Life On Our Planet immediately.
Ok, it’s an eight-part series so maybe immediately is a bit of a tall order, but get cracking.
Anyone who grew up with the 1998 series Walking With Dinosaurs will immediately get a delicious nostalgia hit from the CGI and anyone who didn’t can surely at least appreciate the inimitable narration from Morgan Freeman.
But this isn’t just a millennial comfort watch. It’s a look at our planet’s history that inspires awe in the same way looking up into the night sky when you’re in the middle of nowhere does.
It’s beautiful, fascinating, and makes you realise we are so terribly, terribly small.
The types of life that have thrived on our planet are incredibly varied. Life is endlessly creative and adaptable.
It’s endlessly beautiful, too, with each mass extinction event wiping a spectacular, vivid, detailed version of the world off the planetary etch-a-sketch.
For trivia nerds, Life On Our Planet offers a plethora of fun facts – after one mass extinction event so few creatures survived that one species of mammal made up 74 per cent of life on the whole planet (so my friend Morgan Freeman tells me).
In a time of climate crisis and widespread war, it also offers a strange kind of hope.
We all know an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.
What I didn’t know, until Morgan Freeman told me, was that asteroid unleashed the same amount of energy as one billion nuclear bombs.
Billion with a ‘b’.
The chaos it unleashed was terrible. Everything within a thousand kilometres would have been vapourised in seconds.
Off-the-scale earthquakes and tidal waves were unleashed across the planet, swamping and devastating huge amounts of land.
Wildfires broke out, burning through unimaginably large tracts of forest.
Vapourised particles encircled the atmosphere and caused a years-long winter.
The death and destruction bred more death and destruction, as the oceans and waterways became toxic and overloaded with decay.
About 75 per cent of all life was wiped out.
Millions of years later, here we are. Surrounded by ridiculous, beautiful things like rose bushes and platypus and puppies, things dinosaurs never could have imagined existing on their planet.
There have been five events as devastating as the dinosaur’s asteroid over the course of the planet’s history, and each time what was has been replaced by something new and brilliant and bizarrely wonderful.
It drives home that as we face an uncertain climate future, we don’t need to save the planet.
The planet will save itself, just like it has time and time again. Life will persist and find a way, no matter how much pollution we chuck at it.
For more contemporary examples, check out the extraordinary biodiversity that can now be found at Chernobyl; it’s okay, I’ll wait while you google.
The survival we are fighting for is our own. Because just as surely as life has found a way through every mass extinction event in the earth’s history, the species who were on top during one era are lucky if they manage to scrape through to the next.
There’s always a changing of the guard.
If we want our children, and their children, to survive and thrive on this big blue marble in space, we need to make some changes.
Otherwise, it will be time for a new era.
