Benedict Cumberbatch’s *How to Live on Earth* mirrors colonial conservation’s failures—what Indigenous stewardship offers instead
Original framing: “Benedict Cumberbatch’s nature show is stunning, if a little cloying” — New Scientist
The documentary ignores Indigenous land management systems like the *chaco* agroforestry of the Amazonian Yánomami or the *ngadi* (fire ecology) practices of the Arrernte people, which have maintained biodiversity for millennia. These systems operate on principles of reciprocity and deep time, contrasting sharply with the show’s anthropocentric framing. For instance, the Māori *rāhui* (temporary resource restrictions) demonstrate adaptive governance that aligns ecological health with cultural survival—a model absent from the narrative. The omission reinforces the erasure of Indigenous epistemologies from global conservation discourse, despite evidence that Indigenous-led areas have higher biodiversity outcomes (e.g., a 2020 *Nature* study showing Indigenous reserves in the Brazilian Amazon had 85% less deforestation).
The *New Scientist*’s framing of *How to Live on Earth* as a feel-good but ultimately shallow intervention reflects a broader pattern in Western environmentalism: the centering of individual behavior change and celebrity advocacy over systemic critiques of land ownership, policy, and knowledge production.
This omission is not accidental but structural, rooted in colonial conservation’s legacy of erasing Indigenous stewardship while framing non-Indigenous actors as the sole arbiters of ecological wisdom. The documentary’s failure to engage with Indigenous land management systems—proven to be more effective in biodiversity conservation—exposes a deeper crisis: the refusal to cede authority over land and knowledge to those who have stewarded it for millennia. Solutions like land repatriation, degrowth economics, and decolonized media are not just ethical imperatives but pragmatic pathways to ecological resilience, as demonstrated by the success of Indigenous-led reserves and constitutional recognition of ecological rights. The *trickster* lens here reveals the absurdity of a system that celebrates a Hollywood actor’s nature show while ignoring the very communities whose practices could save the planet—if only power structures would listen.