Featuring favorite scenes and highlights from the Our Planet series, Our Planet Live in Concert tours international arenas. Hosted by the series composer and Academy Award®-winner Steven Price, the show features spectacular visual and sound effects and on-screen narration from David Attenborough. The magnificent series score is performed live by a 44-piece orchestra. This specially-curated reimagining of the Netflix series takes you on a journey across our planet, like you’ve never seen it before. All net profits from the Our Planet live project will be donated to WWF’s global Our Planet education and awareness initiatives. These include providing a wealth of educational materials for schools and young people, based on the series, with the aim to inspire and motivate the next generation to protect our planet. So far Netflix’s announcement.
The Our Planet tetralogy (the live concert together with the television series, documentary and book) leaves me with mixed feelings, as you can see in my review of David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. On the one hand I like Attenborough’s reflections on the changing state of our natural world. But his light-handed wonder-of-nature escapism—“A great relief from the political landscape which otherwise dominates our thought”, Attenborough’s own words—becomes more and more problematic in times of ‘climate crisis’ (The Guardian). His neutral description of how we’ve destroyed the earth, as if we belong to one undifferentiated ‘human kind’ or ‘species’ (the ‘Age of Man’ of the Anthropocene), is politically unsatisfactory. We, for example, cannot be held accountable for the devastating effects of the Dakota Access Pipeline nor the Third Carbon Age of hydro-fracking. It is time to reformulate George Orwell’s “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others”: we are all responsible for planet Earth as global ecological citizens. But some are more responsible than others, as is shown by organizations such as Milieudefensie: the Dutch chapter of Friends of the Earth, Urgenda and the Center for Earth Ethics, to name but a few. Their climate cases against Shell and the Dutch government, their fight against 29 major pollutors and “globalized capitalism and the big corporations that drive it” (the ‘Age of Capital’ of the Capitalocene) are examples of ‘thinking the world politically’. Thereby they provide a necessary addition to and alternative for the unbearable lightness of David Attenborough.