It’s About Us: Extinction, Contradiction, and the Mourning of Modernity in David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite their worldwide viewership, popular eco-documentary treatments of biodiversity loss and the ecological grief they evoke have received scarce attention from critics. Addressing this gap in scholarship, this article posits that understanding the grief and mourning affected by these cultural texts requires attention to the numerous contradictions inherent to the form. More concretely, this paper argues that a thorough exploration of the contradictory nature of the eco-documentary, as a media genre that is imbricated in the modernity whose impact on the natural world it critiques, renders the genre into a critical junction at which to interrogate the cultural meanings of the mass extinction of biodiversity. This is done through an analysis of David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. This study suggests that popular ecodocumentary representations of biodiversity loss such as this remain entrenched in an anthropocentric instrumentalism characteristic of the modernist paradigm. Acknowledging the unwavering popularity of such films, this study concludes by positing that it is through attentiveness to rather than a wholesale rejection of eco-documentaries like A Life on Our Planet that scholars and viewers alike stand to grasp the extent of the fallacy and the fall of modernity and its worldview.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".