ABSTRACT
Wildlife documentary television series such as Planet Earth I, II, III and Our Planet offer viewers access into the lives and behaviours of creatures and ecosystems across the world. Largely, such programmes have been examined in terms of their representation of the animals they feature , but equally important to these depictions are the landscapes in which those animals exist. Indeed, individual episodes of Planet Earth and Our Planet are titled via the environments they depict (“Frozen Worlds”, “From Deserts to Grasslands”, “Fresh Water”), meaning landscape is an organising principle for the narratives they construct, and a taxonomic understanding of the plant viewers are invited to accept. Similarly, while one of the pleasures of these programmes is seeing animal behaviour up close, another is the sweeping shots of grand, “exotic”, far away, inaccessible (to humans) landscapes, likely far beyond the reach of most viewers. This chapter will then analyse the ways in which landscape is depicted in these series, and the implications these portrayals have for human cultures’ conceptualisations of “the natural world”. Via textual analysis, it will explore how landscapes are conceptualised and exoticised, and the ways in which this reinforces an anthropocentric reading position normalised by such programming. It will also outline the kinds of landscapes that are largely absent in these series; that is, those dominated by humans, for wildlife documentaries typically focus on spaces where humans are largely absent. This analysis will be placed within the discourse of these programmes’ negotiation of debates about humans’ impact upon landscapes and the creatures within them, as a result of human-made climate change. As such, the chapter will point to the complex contradictions within the meanings of landscape offered by these series, in which humans are both always-absent and ever-present.
