Watching a David Attenborough documentary feels less like casual viewing and more like sliding into the pew for the Church of Planet Earth. The man’s diction alone could resurrect the dead—each syllable polished, each pause wielded like a scalpel—while he preaches an all-natural gospel: paradise isn’t some vaporous hereafter; it’s right here, pulsing under our sneakers. And we, the congregation of carbon footprints, are the sinners. We bulldoze forests, mainline fossil fuels, and still have the gall to call ourselves stewards. His sermons don’t merely entertain; they indict. Ten minutes in and I’m itching to mulch my own receipts and swear off cheeseburgers for life.
I’ve basked in Attenborough’s velvet reprimands for decades, often drifting into a blissful half-sleep as he murmurs about the “delicate balance of nature” and the tender devotion of a mother panda—as soothing as chamomile tea and twice as guilt-inducing. His newest homily, Ocean on Hulu, finds the maestro wide-eyed as ever, a silver-haired Burl Ives guiding us through Rudolph’s wilderness—only this time the Abominable Snowman is industrial bottom trawling. Picture a gargantuan steel mouth dragging across the seabed, gulping everything in its path. Rays flutter, fish scatter, and then—slam—the net’s iron curtain drops. Most of the hapless catch is unceremoniously dumped, lifeless, back into the brine.
The footage left me queasy, a queasiness only partly soothed by Attenborough’s grandfatherly timbre. I’ve already been flirting with a plant-forward diet; Ocean shoved me into a full-blown breakup with seafood. Good luck unseeing hundreds of doomed creatures funneled into a floating abattoir while an octogenarian sage explains—as gently as one can—that we’re devouring our own Eden.
So yes, I’ll skip the shrimp cocktail, thanks. My conscience already has acid reflux.
Cinemorphosis 