As the UK swelters under record-breaking June temperatures, with significant disruptions to schools, hospitals, care homes and public transport systems, this campaigning environmental documentary is an undeniably timely release.
It begins in the imposing surroundings of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, where a man in a white linen suit is sitting at the foot of the stairs in the entrance hall.
It’s Benedict Cumberbatch, here both presenting and narrating, who sets out the film’s approach and goals. Rather than making us despair about the unfolding climate emergency, it seeks to come up with practical solutions as to how around the world communities are working with nature to build a better, more sustainable future.
Directed by Ferdi Devas, whose previous credits include seasons two and three of David Attenborough’s Planet Earth, How to Live has a commendably global focus, consisting of various environmental case studies from an array of countries. In landlocked Chad in central Africa, we witness the work of forest rangers, who have been protecting the elephant population from poachers. The pachyderms, it transpires, turn out to be skilled at maintaining the ecosystem of the savannah: they clear the bush and keep the water holes open.
Want to see this content?
Accept and continue
Moving to Southeast Asia, we meet a former office worker in Seoul, who following a breakdown now conducts healing workshops in the forest land just outside the capital, and who offers classes to stressed schoolchildren. And in Singapore, we learn how that island city privileges nature, to the extent that patients at a public hospital enjoy recuperation within a tropical garden and wild species flourish within the urban area.
Another plus to this documentary is that rather than sending Cumberbatch himself out into the field and potentially falling into the celebrity white saviour trap, it deploys specialists to explore communities whose own livelihoods are being threatened by environmental harm.
Thus, the young Mexican indigenous rights activist Xiye Bastida travels to Ecuador, where gold mining operations have destroyed the natural habitat and poisoned the water supply used by the local indigenous peoples. Tears filling her eyes, she laments how the “financial system values gold more than the rainforest”.
How we feed ourselves sustainably as a species is another key question in How to Live, and Sam Class, a former White House chef and a nutrition expert, travels to Brazil to see first-hand how the Amazon rainforest is disastrously being burnt down to create pastureland for raising cattle, which serve to meet the world’s ever growing appetite for meat.
Perhaps the most heartening section of the film, which throughout contains some impressive cinematography of natural habitats, is the account of how members of the Native American Karuk tribe in north-west California have successfully lobbied the federal authorities to clean up the Klamath River.
After a 20-year battle, the protestors were granted their demand for the state to tear down four hydroelectric dams, whose activities had seriously damaged the stocks of fish in the surrounding area. Now the salmon, upon whom the Karuk depend for their livelihood, can once again swim several hundred kilometres upstream to their traditional breeding grounds.
Although How to Live in Nature contains many interesting suggestions of how we could move forward to a greener future, it doesn’t mention the formidable obstacles presented by nation states and global corporations: see for example the inability of countries to agree on a binding date for carbon reduction targets.
The examples in the film indicate progress on a local level in terms of specific schemes. Cumberbatch as narrator asks us to be wiser, only wisdom feels in short supply in this volatile and polarised world.
How to Live on Earth is now showing in UK cinemas.
Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what’s on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times View From My Sofa podcast.
