In The Atlantic, Emma Marris has penned a long, beautifully written article (“The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false“). I read it twice over today, glad to find something to propel me back into my Cranes project. “It isn’t just the sounds that make these films feel more than real,” she writes, among the many points used to illustrate her thesis. “They use the absolute highest-resolution cameras available, what Chang calls ‘military-grade lenses.’ The images on any modern television are thus crisp as fuck.”
Well, yes. I can appreciate the argument, I can appreciate her telling points. But as counterpoint, I’ve begun feeling that human beings should retreat from remote nature trips, should perhaps retreat to watching the documentaries she decries. We can’t, in all conscience, burn the carbon our travel entails, just so we can crowd out the animals and birds we point our cameras at. To be fair, Marris is not against travel documentaries per se, she’d prefer we’re dealt up nature documentaries that employ a “still-gorgeous-but-not-mythical approach,” and to be fair, I’d prefer that as well. But in the end, the nature documentary genre will exhibit the same jaw-dropping spectrum between the best and the worst that every other genre of human entertainment shows. Certainly, it seems to me, better we watch Planet Earth III than Farmer Wants a Bride.
Emma Marris’s weighty article is, of course, doubly germane to my 15 Cranes project. Should I spend the money, release the carbon, and disturb the remoteness as I have intended, in order to merely “see” or “witness” all fifteen species. Can I not ponder the world’s cranes using documentaries and the wonders of the Internet? What is the “right” thing for me to do and what should I do?