HUMSS - Evi Zemanek

Resilient or fragile? Ambivalent Images of Nature in Popular Documentaries

The starting point of my reflections is the observation that in nature documentaries watched by a vast global audience, the interpretations of natural processes often oscillate between extremes. They generate contradictory images of, on the one hand, a fragile nature that is threatened and already destroyed by humans and, on the other hand, a resilient nature that indifferently survives the human species. Similar paradoxes revolving around vulnerability and resilience characterize the public discourse on ‘nature’ in the Anthropocene. This semantic ambivalence, I argue, might reduce the persuasive potential of nature documentaries, which increasingly adopt the activist concerns of environmental documentaries. Focusing on documentaries in which David Attenborough plays a leading role, I attempt to disentangle the incoherencies in imaginaries of nature by exploring the challenges of narrating and picturing the two seemingly opposite characteristics of vulnerability and resilience.