The Human Planet

"Only one creature has carved the life of itself in every habitat on Earth. That creature is us. All over the world we still use our ingenuity to survive in the wild places, far from the city lights, face to face with the raw nature. This is the Human Planet."

Since 3 days I am simply fascinated while discovering our "small world", even doe it's through some lenses, on a sophisticated machine called computer. I am calling it sophisticated because everything I have seen in the past few days has been so simple and natural, just like long looong time ago, before many things got to rule our living.
The whole above description refers to BBC documentary, Human Planet, an amazing combination of sounds, images with a remarkable story teller, actor John Hurt, bringing in front in every single minute the extraordinary relationship that humans have with nature.
The documentary was first launched in UK on BBC One, during 8 weeks, starting 13th Of January 2011. The stories are spread in 8 episodes, but the filming of the entire movie took about 3 years in many many countries, on all continents.
I usually don't have the patience to watch serials, but this is one is simply amazing, making me forget that it finishes in 8 episodes. Or may I say it never finishes. Actually in every story I am fascinated and I think how lucky and blessed those people were (the working team I mean) to witness such amazing human rituals, and how much those scenes have changed their life values.
Each episode has a topic, like the human life and global waters, human life in the jungle, in the mountains and others.
I am going to tell you some of my favorite discoveries from these episodes, letting you discover the rest while watching them, if I made you curious of course (and I am sure I will :P )

One of the stories brings in front Sulbin, a normal man as it may first seem, who lives with his family in the Sulu Sea from Borneo. And when I write "in the sea" I mean that the houses are actually constructed in the sea, kilometers away from land. Sulbin's family is used to live here, they find small happiness moments while sailing with their wooden boat on the crystal waters. The sea is just like land for them, more than that, when they set foot on land they feel the thing called land-sick (equivalent with the sea-sick that we have when we sail the seas) But Sulbin's normality fades away when he starts showing the BBC team how he provides food to his family. He has the capability to stay under water for maximum 5 minutes, with only one breath. It was amazing to see how the super equipments of the team were nothing comparing to Sulbin, who was walking on the bottom of the water, at more that 20 m down, in his underwear with one spear, with which he was catching dinner for his family.


In the hearts of the Himalayas, at huge altitudes of over 4000m, where vegetation is just a dream and the air is quite rarefied, Do Tharap, one of the highest communities of Earth has one major problem : the disposal of the dead. What do you do with the body where there is only rock and no wood to start a fire for an incineration, when Buddhist don't have the habit of borrowing the corps?
There are certain people that have the job to prepare an old Buddhist ritual, a sky burial. The family walks along with the corps on a high mountain top, says the last prayers and goes back to the village, letting the funeral person, a non Buddhist, to do the rest.
On the top of the mountain the undertaker receives the help of other creatures living at those heights, the vultures. After the man cuts the body in peaces, the birds eat it, clearing the worries away from the community.


In the village of Djenne in Africa, the people have a huge problem in a certain time of the year, when the monsoons bring the rough rains and winds. Their religious home is an old mosque, completely made of river mud. When the monsoons come, their mosque is on the verge of being flushed away if the locals don't interfere. Therefor, every year, the entire village starts working on the fortification of the mosque, before the heavy rains begin. The people carry baskets full of mud from the nearby river, and paint the entire mosque, all together, to fortify it and make it strong in front of the weather. This habit has kept the religious house standing for more than 700 years.

A human habit in the jungles of Brazil was astonishing for me, especially because it is practiced by small local children. When the kids get hungry, they rush in the jungle to find some "snacks", and oh my Good what snacks. The food they often seek for is named Goliath, and is actually the largest spider in the world. They catch the spider with their hands, using a small stick to immobilize the victim. After each kid gets its spider, they make a small fire, cook them and eat them. They say it's delicious, but I have my doubts.

It's all about community, help, survival, about the laws of the nature and how we, the people, managed to adjust or even change some of them. It's about ways of life but most important about us. It's all about us. I hope I made you curious enough to seek for the stories yourself. If it is so, enjoy =)

"More than half of us now live in cities, and we are using up nature's resources as never before. We are, without doubt, the most inventive and powerful creature on the planet. We are so successful, we've highjacked the whole world for our own ends. But the consequences of our voracious lives are spiraling out of control. Are we pushing the natural world towards a crisis? Where do we go from here?"