The Green Planet: A soaring blend of horror and beauty lays bare the scale of human hubris

Analysis: This is the tenderest, most beautiful way of being told how moronic our species is being, writes Harry Cockburn

Plants, what even are they? Little bits of green stuff standing around in the dirt, waiting to get trodden on.

Bengal tigers, great white sharks, eagles, kangaroos – surely these dynamic lifeforms were the ones purpose-made for TV.

Who wants to watch a weed inch its way up a bit of an old wall, when you could be watching a pack of lions hunt down some young weakling of a mammal and claw out its glistening red guts?

Yet here we are, the weed is feeling its way up some brickwork like a blind viper, and it has never been more captivating.

On paper, the BBC’s The Green Planet series may sound somewhat staid: water lilies and mosses and trees are hardly thought of as being exhilarating viewing subjects.

But as we can see, that is just wrong. With the latest scientific knowledge, camera hardware, patience and imagination, this series is a true wake-up call: not only must we wake up to the boundless wealth of life which makes up the natural world, but also to the astonishing stories plants can tell if we know how to look at them.

While big cats and other predators have long had a visceral impact on viewers, the scope of documentary-making in the 21st century is now broader than ever due to technological and scientific breakthroughs, and as a result it is able to teach us a vast amount about the world around us.

It is not that plants haven’t been beautifully filmed before, but this series has brought an incredible level of drama, insight and imaginative presentation which had usually been reserved for the big game – almost like realising a shift away from meat eating needn’t be dull and tasteless (more of which below).

Up until now, the series has largely focused on wild plants – those living in rainforests, in seas and rivers, in deserts, and how the seasons impact their survival. But the final episode examines humans’ relationship with the plants all around us, and the inextricable evolutionary reciprocity between us.

“The relationship between plants and humans is extraordinary,” Sir David Attenborough tells us as the programme begins.

“We’ve been adapting to one another for as long as we’ve been on the planet. We rely upon plants for almost everything – the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, much of the clothes we wear, and in some parts of the world the very buildings in which we live. But that relationship is now changing…"

There follows an hour which can only scratch the surface of how commercial-scale cultivation of the land, pollution, and various other aspects of poorly considered human activity is rapidly destroying ecosystems around the globe and putting us on course for apocalypse-scale disaster.

Drone-mounted cameras reveal the surreal and sterile beauty of California’s living desert of almond orchards. In bloom, this ocean of flowers is a spectacular agricultural sight, but the programme highlights the extraordinary toll they have taken on the environment, as all the other plants and insects which would have once thrived in the landscape have been extirpated to make way for the neat rows of trees – a process which now threatens to be their undoing, as there are no pollinators remaining to fertilise the trees in order for the almonds to grow. Their future is precarious.

A very rapid history of farming also highlights how humans and plants entered a “bargain”, in which we helped one another out, but now, through high-intensity farming that bargain has turned sour.

We have selected a tiny number of species which take precedence over all others – plants for which we work tirelessly to “eliminate their competitors, cure their diseases, poison their enemies and keep them well watered – even when other species face drought”.

Vast factory farms, and aerial shots of rainforest land grabs show how whole landscapes can become dominated by single species – replacing healthy variety with dangerous monocultures prone to ecological collapse.

While the programme does provide a wonderful example of how a ravaged rainforest landscape stripped back to bare earth can be recovered in just a few decades through careful rewilding, the overall message is deeply bleak.

What’s more, much of the damage we are doing is unnecessary, Attenborough says. Eighty per cent of all farmland is used for rearing meat – either as pasture, or to grow additional crops to feed the animals.

This stat, which comes at the end of this series, is powerful. Has this been a five-part advert for the necessity of adopting a plant-based diet? It wouldn’t be an entirely inaccurate assessment.

Ultimately, The Green Planet series is among the best documentaries ever made by the BBC and Attenborough, and that is an incredible feat.

While the BBC has previously been criticised for failing to bang the drum for the science behind the climate and nature crises, this programme has responded by bringing in crucial facts without becoming hysterical – there is enough beauty for people to be inspired, and also enough concern to realise we have to fight now for a better future.

The Green Planet is on BBC One and iPlayer.