Can TV change the world?
I just watched the Plant Earth III humans episode and I was in tears just 3 minutes into it.
Seeing a rhino slowly picking his way through a bustling city amid the screeching mopeds, bright lights and loud horns on his way to find food, just about broke my heart. The juxtaposition of just an obviously jungle animals foot on the tarmac ground tapped into my anger at the injustice of the world springing hot tears to my eyes.
I have visited many of the places in this episode and seen some of these animals and their habitats firsthand. In 2017, I went on a tour around the world in search of food and nature and found myself in Australia, Bali, India, Costa Rica, Mexico and Ecuador where I met and fell in love with humpbacks, spiders, snakes, sharks, and of course, the now infamous macaques who rule Uluwatu temple in Nusa Dua.
(My friend, Heather bought a bag of peanuts as a snack and thought she could walk around eating them unnoticed. She was wrong!)
What they didn’t show in the episode is that at the end of every day, as the sun goes down and the last tourists are leaving, they light the bins on fire, plastic bottles and all, so an acrid smoke fills the air poisoning the environment for any creature in the vicinity. (Whether or not the monkey pay the humans to do this to vacate the tourists and get some peace is unclear.)
The humpbacks I encountered in Salinas, Ecuador along with the scuba diving I did helped me understand just how crucial a role whales play to the survival of humans - another point underlined in the programme. This seahorse demonstrates why corals provide essential habitats for the lifeforms we forget (but we need) that live under the sea!
In 40 years, we have halved the number of fish in the sea. When I advocate for veganism, people sometimes say, “but what about coastal communities? You can’t expect an island village in the Philippines to eat seafood replacements.”
Perhaps not, whilst there are still fish in the sea but our insatiable appetite for fish and seafood is robbing these people of their futures in a way that feels terribly unjust when we have a slew of amazing vegan alternatives available in every supermarket in the country.
So to those people, I don’t know expect them to eat replacements. I expect you to! 😝
With such an abundance of fruit and veg at our fingertips in the West, there really are no excuses…
