Why do bother watching nature documentaries? I know they’re rubbish and yet each time I’m like “maybe this one won’t suck”
Right off the bat it’s projecting vicious intent onto nature. Nature isn’t just shit that happens, oh no, it’s A BRUTAL WAR OF DYNASTIES!!!1!!!
“Look at this centipede from the Devonian, but invertebrates wouldn’t be the ones to win the game of survival” WHAT DO YOU MEAN? WHAT GAME? INVERTS ARE STILL HERE, THEY’RE THE MOST COMMON AND THRIVING LIFEFORM ON THE PLANET.
And of course the whole thing chooses to fixate on competition and ignore how much of nature revolves around cooperation and symbiosis.
I am begging the media (especially media that sells itself as educational) to stop speaking about nature the same way a 1930s German pseudoscientist would.
Its always the neo-Malthusian competition and pseudo-morality nonsense rather than adaptation and survival. Anyway, conservationism in the US had its origins in racist huntsmen who blamed natives and the poor for species going extinct rather than their own bourgeois failson and industrial practice (greatest example is the buffalo), so not surprised.
Thinking about documentaries, all the in the future documentaries are really super lib, worst one that comes to mind is Earth 2100, its so US and bourgeois centric even when it came out it was breathtakingly bad. My favorite is the end where the narrator protagonist flips out her grandson won’t ever see an opera like we’re back in Balzac’s time and that’s the highpoint of the arts, society and culture.