Plants cover much of the world as we know it, David Attenborough notes in the opening moments of The Green Planet’s wondrous second hour, Water Worlds, “but there is another extraordinary green world that is often hidden from us.”
It is a world where plants have overcome huge challenges in order to survive — the world of fresh water, as manifested in streams, rivers and lakes. To succeed, Attenborough tells us, “water plants have had to abandon many of the adaptations that served them so well on land, and evolve something quite new. “And In doing that, they have created some of the most beautiful and bizarre and important habitat on Earth.”
At this point, it’s worth noting that The Green Planet has something so many nature programs lack — magisterial, hypnotic and ethereal choral music, composed in this case by UK Emmy Award composers Will Slater and Benji Merrison, who recently accepted a choral commission for the National Youth Choir of Great Britain. Music matters in this instance, because it adds a new dimension to what is already a moveable feasts of visuals, whether it’s a close-up view of the leaf of a giant water lily — it expands by over eight inches a day and can reach six feet across at its widest point, all protected by inch-long spines — or the overhead view of a magical river in Brazil where, from the air, the water appears to bubble like champagne, propelled by plants beneath the surface that feed into the atmosphere above.
Freshwater lakes, streams and rivers feed an ecosystem that is finely poised, and delicately balanced. The Green Planet wear its conservation bona fides on its green sleeve, but it’s no screed. Attenborough is an old master at this — it’s fair to say no presenter of natural history programs has made a more indelible impression on the conversation about climate change and species extinction — and there is a passion and life force there that is as inspiring as it inspired.
There are so many hidden surprises and tiny revelations in Water Worlds that it’s a challenge to keep at times, from underwater plants that dance — to find enough time in the sunlight to keep growing — to riverine streams in the heart of the Amazon where, despite recent news headlines from the isolated border region that links Brazil with the Peruvian Andes, there are waterways so remote, Attenborough tells us, “that even today few people have ever seen them.” Until now.
Merrison and Slater’s choral music is especially appropriate here because it’s as the viewer has been invited inside a cathedral, a green cathedral bathed in sunlight, set against a magical landscape of miniature mountains and valleys, carpeted in star grass.
We’re living in a cruel and unforgiving world right now, and in this context The Green Planet could not have arrived at a more appropriate — and welcome — time. It’s inspiring and heartbreaking at the same time, a glimpse of Nature as time itself had intended.
In a moving passage midway through the program, The Green Planet reveals the sheer-cliff table mountains of central Venezuela, the tepuis and sheer-sided waterfalls that literally inspired the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle literary classic The Lost World. Conan Doyle published his tale of a life-changing fictional expedition into the prehistoric past in 1912, but as Water World reveals in all its splendour, there are still mysteries to be found — and solved — some 110 years later. And these finds are real. From the swamps of the Pantanal to the lakes of Thailand , Water Worlds is a living marvel.
The Green Planet: Water Worlds airs Wednesday, July 13 on PBS at 8E/7C. New episodes premiere Wednesdays, on PBS and through the PBS app, through Aug. 3
©BBC Studios/Paul Williams