The Green Planet: Plants thriving on a diet of toxic excrement is a humbling reminder of our own culture

Analysis: BBC’s flagship nature programme is the oasis of cohesion our fractured society needs, writes Harry Cockburn

Sir David Attenborough standing next to an ancient creosote bush (BBC Studios/Paul Williams)

There are some cactuses on a barren island 420km (260 miles) off the coast of Mexico that have adapted to thrive on a diet made up almost exclusively of toxic bird faeces.

"This guano is of such strength and quantity," Sir David Attenborough says, "that most plants would be poisoned by it."

Piers Morgan comparisons aside, the latest episode of the BBC’s The Green Planet series reminds us that ultimately we are all excrement-nourished life forms, only alive for this brief moment because of the unending cycle of death and destruction on which existence is built.

It is comforting to remember that we’re all going to become soil at some point in the future – perhaps nourishing some beautiful plant and thereby doing our own little bit to draw down soaring levels of atmospheric carbon.

This reassuring sense of enormous insignificance, combined with Attenborough’s soothing narration, is a mental oasis. It is a world away from the startling rise of the divisions stoked by the capitalist cult of the individual, the wilderness of the culture wars and the proliferation of misinformation. All of which make up the cultural backdrop to this programme.

There is no space to question the intricate natural systems he breezily describes – they slot together like jigsaw puzzles. He takes for granted the viewer’s trust for revered institutions, their appreciation of the scientific method and the decades of research which has uncovered these slivers of nature’s limitless resourcefulness.

For a moment the world around us begins to make sense – the beautiful flowers attract the pollinators, the pollinators eat the nectar, they fertilise the plants, the predators eat the pollinators… In every astonishing variation of this theme there is coherence.

There is no space for flat earth madness, climate denial or any other brand of anti-science. This is a programme built on our species’ cumulative learning, made by an institution which excels at promoting just that.

As this phenomenal TV series airs, the UK’s torrid political landscape is an extremely unwelcome distraction from something even more frightening, something written into the blueprint for this very programme – environmental collapse.

Not only are politicians failing to address the crisis, in the UK they are on a warpath towards making it worse, as they pursue relentless capitalist growth. Just this week, figures from the WWF revealed Rishi Sunak’s spending plans will add 38 million tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere over the next four years, at a time when we ought to be halting our destruction.

This obsession with expansion, with choice, with superabundance, with limitless resource hoarding, is also shown to be a collective mania.

In The Green Planet, the limitations placed on plants – in this episode, by hostile desert environments – are shown to be the very reason why they have adapted to become so magnificent.

It is reminiscent of the BBC’s own struggle for survival, in which its detractors would like to see it relegated to a subscription model to fight a one-dimensional battle for paying viewers alongside Netflix, Amazon and Disney.

Just as people in rich western nations are increasingly afflicted by the "paradox of choice", with so many options to choose from that they are worse off than before, the fruits of the BBC would no longer have to be created within the narrower remit required of a state broadcaster, but would instead be made to cater to paying customers – a scenario in which we all lose.

If we are to preserve nature in all its astonishing forms, the free market must not be the sole arbiter of how we learn about it.

The Green Planet is on BBC One.