Episode 4 | 53m 48s | Video has closed captioning.
Amidst shifts in Earth's climate, once-stable ecosystems are now in turmoil. Experts, Indigenous communities, and megafauna from the Arctic to the Amazon reveal how science, nature, and tradition can help prepare us for a fast-changing future.
Aired: 07/10/24
Expired: 08/07/24
♪ [Bleating] Man, voice-over: I actually love the farming.
It's a lifestyle.
We have open space, clean air to breathe.
♪ Soon as you start chatting to a farmer, you will see every day is a challenge.
For the last couple of years, we had a big drought.
The rain wasn't on time where it needs to be.
Narrator: When the rains finally arrive, they're followed by something Francois has never seen in this region.
And, uh, then the locusts had come.
♪ Narrator: Locusts, that hatched hundreds of miles to the north, where they're more common, suddenly swarmed towards his farm, a sure sign that our natural world is out of balance.
Francois: I believe it's definitely climate change, wind patterns that are changed this year.
Most of us had never seen locusts in the Eastern Cape.
Some of the older farmers said there was a little bit of locusts, but not like we're seeing today.
What we see now is the biggest ever.
♪ And as locusts-- whatever is green, they're taking it out and eating it up.
♪ You will actually see the destruction happening before your eyes.
It's, like, unbelievable.
They will eat a crop.
It can be anything between, uh, 30 minutes to an hour.
There is only ground left.
♪ Francois: It's really devastating.
[Voice cracks] Oh, sometimes... you feel like just want to sell the farm and... get away from all this hard life.
I'd actually lost a whole--a whole crop out of, uh, out of the locusts and, uh... [Sighs] [Sniffles] [Sobs] ♪ Everywhere where they set, they're breeding, laying eggs.
That eggs can lie in the ground between one till ten years, waiting for the right time to hatch.
Narrator: There are locust eggs all around this farm now, but whether they all hatch all at once and form a new swarm depends on heat and rainfall.
And with the world warming fast, the likelihood of more unexpected events increases.
Francois: We can survive this.
We can come through it.
That's why we're farmers.
That's why we're still there.
♪ Narrator: In this epic new series, we explore the extremes...
They're new species.
Amazing.
Narrator: on all seven continents... [Trills] Oh, my God!
Narrator: meeting people standing in the face of change and revealing how science... Whoa!
Narrator: nature... [Growls] [Gull squawks] Narrator: and Indigenous knowledge can prepare us for a fast-changing future.
This time, we explore the balance and resilience of Earth's ecosystems and some surprising solutions... [Grunting] for our dynamic planet.
It's amazing.
♪ [Woman vocalizing] ♪ Narrator: Locust plagues in unexpected places are just one example of the way climate change disrupts the natural order of the world.
[Vocalizing continues] Narrator: We expect things to happen as they always have-- seasons to be regular and rain to fall when we need it.
We've built entire civilizations on the back of stable, predictable environments.
But rapid warming undermines the stability, increasing the chances of droughts... floods... and violent storms.
♪ Plants and animals are going extinct faster than at any other time in human history.
[Grunts] Losing that diversity makes Earth less able to respond to further change.
More change is coming, but so are fresh solutions.
♪ Rain forests are important carbon reservoirs.
Plants take in CO2 and use it to make leaves and branches.
♪ Man, voice-over: Working in the rainforest has been one of the great experiences of my life.
It's love at first sight.
You see the rainforest and you fall in love.
You fall in love with this truly majestic cathedral to nature.
♪ Narrator: But this is no ordinary rainforest.
Scott: Hey, Charlie, are you in the energy center?
Charlie over radio: Yes, sir.
Go ahead.
Yeah, can you turn on the rain in the northeast quadrant of the rainforest?
Ten-four.
I'll start it now.
[Rainfall pattering] ♪ Narrator: This is a vast science laboratory... ♪ the world's largest and longest-running Earth science experiment.
♪ Around half an acre of tropical rainforest... ♪ baking under the desert sun in Arizona.
[Women vocalizing] ♪ Narrator: Inside, the temperature is nine degrees hotter than the average rainforest.
Scott: This is the hottest rainforest on Earth, so we're basically seeing right here, right now the future of what tropical forests might be like.
And so that's a great tool, to be able to have that lens to peer into the future, to understand the ecology, the biology, the dynamics of rainforests under a hotter climate.
♪ Narrator: It takes a labyrinth of pipes and tunnels to run this high-tech forest... allowing scientists to change climate conditions and see the results.
Looks healthy.
It is.
And it, uh--you can see it from the photo sensors as well in a minute.
CO2 levels are at about 350 right now?
Yep, yep.
Narrator: Biologists keep detailed records of how heat affects the biodiversity of their model forest.
Scott: One of the reasons that biodiversity is valuable is that it's not just a bunch of different species that look pretty, they are a bunch of different species that make their livelihood in slightly different ways.
Some are really suited to very wet conditions.
Others are more suited to dry conditions, others hot conditions or cold conditions, and you put all these together and you have an incredible resilience.
Narrator: But the variety of plants in this hothouse rainforest is going down.
Scott: Since 1993, when this forest was planted, we've lost 2/3 of the species.
But we haven't just lost 2/3 of the species at random.
We've specifically lost those species that are less able to tolerate the hot conditions in here.
Narrator: The same thing is starting to happen in real rainforests.
Scott: The science is telling us that the rainforest is resilient, but within limits, and the resilience is good news, in the sense that it's saying we still have a chance to save it if we act.
But if we look outside, we see a future that could be coming to the rainforest if we don't act-- the desert.
♪ Narrator: But there are signs of hope.
The Amazon is our largest rainforest, almost the size of the continental United States.
It sucks around half a billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year.
[Parrots squawk] It's a sanctuary for the largest collection of plants and animals on the planet... 10% of Earth's known biodiversity in one wilderness.
♪ And it's the ancestral home of 1.5 million Indigenous people, many of whom are determined to protect it.
♪ [Man singing in Native language] ♪ Narrator: Roberto and Liliana grew up just after the outside world first made contact with the Suruí in 1969.
Narrator: Today, only 1,300 Suruí survive, and their rainforest home is drastically different.
♪ Narrator: The changes here have forced many Suruí to seek work in the city... but Riquelme has returned to work with his aunt and uncle on an ingenious new project.
Narrator: The family works hard to maintain their traditional way of life in the forest.
Narrator: But the forest is under threat from people who want to cut it down.
Narrator: Riquelme's family has a surprising solution that allows them to live by the forest and protect it from deforestation at the same time.
♪ So much of the Amazon is being cleared and burnt that parts of it now emit more CO2 than they absorb.
That contributes to global heating, which further stresses the forest.
It's a positive feedback loop whose effects are felt all over our earth.
♪ Even way up in the frozen Arctic.
♪ [Woman vocalizing] ♪ Woman: One thing I like about going out to the lakes is we go out in all conditions, and when I get out there in that quiet stillness, I can observe what's going on, and that's when I learn the most.
Narrator: Katey Walter Anthony and assistant Phil Hanke are on a mission to study Alaska's icy lakes... the frozen frontier of research into how a hotter climate will change the planet.
Recent years have seen record-high temperatures across Alaska in summer and winter.
The changes are profound, affect us all, and are happening underground.
Katey, voice-over: The ground around me is made up of both ice and frozen soil.
We call that permafrost.
It contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, and it thaws faster as the climate gets warmer.
It's like opening a freezer door, and the food that's in the freezer door starts to rot.
So the dead plant and animal remains that have been locked away in permafrost for thousands of years are now becoming food for microbes that decompose it, and they make greenhouse gases, methane and carbon dioxide.
♪ Narrator: As the permafrost thaws, the ground sinks and floods.
Katey: Since the 1980s, the amount of lakes here around interior Alaska has increased by 40%.
Narrator: In summer, there's nothing to stop the damaging greenhouse gases bubbling up into the atmosphere.
But in winter, all that changes.
Katey: These great big dimples are telling me that...there's hardly any ice there.
OK. Be careful, though.
[Clears throat] Thin ice means a hole we could fall into.
Fun part of the job.
Katey, voice-over: It wasn't until I went out on a lake in the winter when the ice had frozen that I learned a lot about methane bubbles.
Narrator: The ice traps gases bubbling up from the decomposing permafrost.
Oh, there we go!
We found one.
See how round that is?
And you can actually see some of the bubbles there... Mm-hmm.
trapped in the ice, so that's a good candidate.
Narrator: There's a surefire way of finding out what gas this is.
♪ Are you ready?
Yep.
♪ Ooh!
Whoa!
Nice!
[Both laugh] Ha ha!
You OK, Phil?
That was about as good as they get.
Ha ha!
I wonder how high that went.
Katey, voice-over: If we see gas pockets, we try lighting a match, and if our match lights up into a big ball of fire, we know that we have a methane lake.
Oh.
Whoo!
Narrator: Methane traps 30 times more heat in the atmosphere than CO2.
And as the world gets hotter, the permafrost melts faster, releasing ever-greater quantities of this dangerous greenhouse gas.
Katey: It's basically a self-reinforcing process, and it goes around in a circle, getting stronger and stronger.
OK. Katey, voice-over: We're standing at a threshold.
Just in the last couple of decades, there has been warming that has created more lakes with more methane.
This is an important feedback loop for the rest of the planet because this methane doesn't stay in the Arctic.
It circulates around the whole planet and leads to global climate warming.
♪ [Scooter engine puttering] Narrator: But if climate problems can have a global impact, so, too, can solutions.
[Women vocalizing] Narrator: But nature can restore itself with a little help.
Roberto and Liliana are doing just that.
They're replanting deforested land with organic cacao, grown in forest-like conditions.
♪ As part of that, they're also bringing back big forest canopy trees to what was dried-up wasteland.
Narrator: Replanting this land protects the forest behind it from drying out.
And the mix of trees brings back biodiversity, making the whole area more resilient to climate change.
♪ Narrator: The plantation yields about a ton of cacao beans a year, to be turned into high-end chocolate.
Narrator: Similar plantations are springing up across the Amazon.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of small cacao plantations collectively pull millions of tons of CO2 from the air.
♪ It's a great step towards returning the Brazilian Amazon to being a net carbon store for the good of the whole planet.
♪ Narrator: For many of us, the natural world can seem remote.
[Car horns honking] But even in our concrete canyons, there are small, surprising ways to help Mother Nature.
One of the world's largest migrations passes through one of its largest cities.
♪ Boy, voice-over: The first caterpillar I adopted was when I was seven and a half.
I was like, "Hey, Mom, there's a butterfly center.
Let's go get a butterfly."
And she's like, "OK." If you see just a regular white butterfly, that's definitely not a monarch.
A monarch is an orange, black, and white butterfly.
Man: Once we established the sanctuary, we were surrounded by kids.
They would just come up and say, "Oh, butterfly, butterfly!"
or "Caterpillars!"
Alonso: It has six legs, so imagine it has actually six legs.
Man: We give them an up-close and personal experience with the caterpillars and the butterflies, and children intuitively are fascinated by them.
♪ The monarch butterfly is amazing because, just like birds, they migrate.
They migrate all the way from Canada down to Mexico.
Alonso: They're known for their traveling abilities.
It's very far, something like 3,000 miles.
Keith: They have many challenges along the way, and one of the challenges is finding a food source and finding milkweed.
That's the only plant that they use to lay their eggs.
We had six or seven weeks with 90 to 100 degrees and, uh, with no rain, and I noticed a lot of the milkweed was drying up.
Without the milkweed, the monarchs don't have a food source, and they can't continue the migration.
Narrator: Pollinators like butterflies are vital to healthy natural ecosystems and to farmers growing food.
But the number of monarchs has dropped by 80% in the last 30 years.
Thankfully, these butterflies are getting a little help from their friends.
Keith: Cities can play a very important role in helping the monarchs by planting the milkweed.
You plant the milkweed, and they come.
They'll find it.
So here we are.
We're in one of the most densely populated cities in the country, and, uh, we're raising butterflies on a busy street corner.
Narrator: Alonso's hand-reared butterfly is just one of millions of migrating monarchs.
We're going to follow their epic journey all the way to Mexico.
Alonso, voice-over: So, when I release a monarch, I feel like I've just released a whole bunch of nature.
Like, it's just one, but I feel like it's just a whole bunch.
♪ Narrator: It'll take up to two months for those that survive to reach their destination.
Keith: They're known as an indicator species.
They signal to us the health or the balance of the environment, and if they're in decline, that means there's something out of balance.
♪ Narrator: There are indications that the natural world is out of balance all over our Earth... [Soft squawking] especially on the Antarctic Peninsula.
For millennia, only animals adapted to extreme cold have survived here, but climate change has radically transformed their habitat in a few short years.
[Woman vocalizing] ♪ For some animals, that can actually be good news.
Antarctic fur seals, for instance, don't really like the ice.
Like monarch butterflies, these seals are an indicator species, and the indications should be good.
[Squeaking] Man: Antarctic fur seals need ice-free ground in order to breed.
This is a population that experts thought would be climate-change winners, that they would be doing better as the climate warmed, as ice receded.
But, in fact, here at Cape Shirreff, the numbers have dropped catastrophically.
Narrator: Doug Krause heads up the seal program at the Cape Shirreff Research Station.
He wants to know why the seals are disappearing.
♪ Doug: The first several years that I was here, there were fur seals everywhere.
We used to have pups up on the deck at this time of year, playing around, you could hear them as you went to sleep at night... and now, we just hear silence.
Narrator: Scientists initially suspected that global warming was messing with the fur seals' food supply, but over the years, Doug has zeroed in on a different suspect.
♪ Doug: You will never forget the first time that you see a leopard seal.
[Seal exhales] Doug: They're approximately the size of an adult male grizzly bear.
Ancient, serpentine.
Narrator: Leopard seals are the only seals that prey on other seal species, although fur seals have rarely been on the menu before.
Come on, girl.
Where are you?
Narrator: Doug has attached monitoring equipment to leopard seals to find out whether this has changed.
Doug, voice-over: She's got some really valuable data attached to her back.
Narrator: But to retrieve it, he'll need some help.
Doug: The capture of a leopard seal involves a team of at least four or five people, all working together.
Anyone who tells you that they are not really nervous about the whole thing is absolutely lying.
These are huge, dominant apex predators.
We have finally located probably the most persnickety and evasive leopard seal we've ever had here, but I'm very happy to say that she is asleep on this very beach.
What I've got in this dart right now would be enough to overdose six adult human beings, so that's why I'm extremely careful with the dart.
♪ [Pop, seal grunts] ♪ ♪ Doug: I'm just testing her level of sedation.
Just give her a sec.
♪ Doug: Got all our measurements and instruments and data back, and I'm about to give her the reversal agents, and she's gonna wake up pretty quickly and hopefully go back to sleep or go to sea.
♪ [Seabird squawking] Narrator: These leopard seals should be living in sea ice, hunting other ice-dwelling seals.
But summer sea ice is a thing of the past in this part of Antarctica.
Doug's work reveals that rather than follow the retreating ice, these leopard seals have switched to a new food source.
Doug: Antarctic fur seal pups don't react to the presence of this large predator.
They are a temperate-evolved species.
They actually haven't been in the Antarctic for that long and don't know to be scared or avoid leopard seals when they see them.
♪ Narrator: Doug's recordings show that leopard seals can get within inches of their prey without causing alarm.
♪ Doug: She's moving in, just her nose and her eyes above the waterline.
♪ And then she just rushes in... grabs a pup right by the head.
♪ Narrator: Cape Shirreff's fur seals are unexpected losers in a warming world.
♪ Doug: Leopard seals have consumed over 70% of the pups that were born this year.
And at some point, the fur seal population is either going to simply disappear or the leopard seals are going to need to move on to another resource.
Narrator: It's anyone's guess what the adaptable leopard seals would do next.
This environment has been thrown off-kilter so fast that it hasn't yet reached a new equilibrium.
♪ We've been changing the natural world for centuries.
[Buffalo huffing] But we can also restore nature and biodiversity to make the land more resilient to climate change.
These buffalo are descendants of the vast herds that once roamed America's Great Plains.
The Indigenous Blackfeet tribe is working to return free-roaming buffalo, or iiníí, to their lands.
♪ Man, voice-over: I'm very proud of who I am, to be Amskapi Piikani-- Blackfeet.
Narrator: Ervin Carlson runs the Blackfeet Buffalo Program.
Ervin: We roamed here, along with the many, many buffalo, the iiníí that we'd had in our past, which we survived on and survived with.
Yeah, let's kind of go that way a little bit and see what we can see.
Ervin: They're a big, strong, majestic animal, and that's what we have to look up to.
That's the way we want to be.
Narrator: Traditionally, many Indigenous American peoples depended on buffalo for their livelihoods.
Western colonizers slaughtered almost all of them.
[Grunting] Woman: We went from 30 million animals, maybe even more, to 500 in less than a hundred years.
♪ Ervin: It was truly said that if you got rid of the buffalo, you would get rid of the Indians.
But the buffalo, they're still here, and we're still here.
Narrator: Buffalo stimulate grass growth by as much as 40% as they graze.
The healthy grasslands they create store carbon that would otherwise contribute to climate change.
Cristina: When you take something like buffalo out of the system, it starts to unravel.
Ecologically, you lose different grasses, you lose birds, the insects change, but the other thing you lose is the heart of the culture, because buffalo is and was everything to Blackfoot people.
Narrator: Indigenous people make up less than 5% of Earth's population, but they protect 80% of its biodiversity.
Cristina: I think there's actually tremendous hope to draw on the wisdom of Indigenous peoples, who have lived in relationship with Mother Earth, and turn it around.
Narrator: Bringing back buffalo will revitalize the landscape, making it more resistant to climate change.
Cristina: One thing that's so important for people to understand is that as we heal the land with buffalo, we heal people.
♪ Narrator: The monarch butterflies released in New York have now been traveling for two months.
Together with millions of others, they've reached their destination in the mountains of Mexico.
They now need a safe forest to spend the winter, and thanks in part to the people in towns like Ocampo, they have one.
♪ Butterfly ecotourism creates business opportunities that support a protected reserve for the monarchs.
Narrator: Forest biologist Cuauhtémoc Sáenz-Romero is passionate about the unique trees that grow in the reserve.
♪ These are oyamel firs, trees unique to the volcanoes of southern and central Mexico.
♪ They grow above 7,000 feet in areas with cool, wet summers.
♪ And they are the only trees in which the migrating monarchs will rest, at last.
[Women vocalizing] ♪ ♪ ♪ Narrator: The forest is cool enough to keep the butterflies' activity to a minimum.
It's important they don't use up fat stores that they'll need for the return journey next spring, so, on warm days, they fill up their reserves.
♪ Narrator: The trees protect them when they rest.
Narrator: The monarchs have overwintered here for centuries, but Cuauhtémoc sees worrying signs for the future as the climate begins to change.
[Sighs] Narrator: It's the start of a process Cuauhtémoc and his colleagues predicted 15 years ago.
Narrator: What Cuauhtémoc is planning has never been attempted before-- move an entire forest to save a butterfly.
He wants to create a futureproof sanctuary that will be much more resilient to climate change.
♪ Man: We ask you to pity this one today, Grandfather [indistinct].
Narrator: For the Blackfeet, bringing back buffalo is intimately tied to bringing back culture and being able to survive off the land in a sustainable way.
Man: Being asked to sit here and to pray.
Cristina: Today, we're going out to harvest an animal.
It's really critical that Blackfoot and buffalo are connected in the way that we have been connected since time immemorial.
Man: We smoke with you, we pray, because we're gonna take this one's life.
Cristina: The hunters will smudge themselves.
The gun will be smudged to purify and make sure that it shoots true and that we cause the least amount of suffering and pain to that animal.
Man: We ask blessings upon those, Grandfather, in which we-- who uses this one.
Man 2, voice-over: We eat the buffalo, and, uh, every time, there's gonna be a prayer for that sacrifice of that animal.
And, uh, afterwards, I go out and lay some tobacco and say another few words of prayer for that animal.
♪ Imagine when there was 30 million of 'em.
Oh, man.
I have.
Can you imagine?
It would just be just black.
It would be like the ground rippling under your feet.
We got to make that happen.
See the one with the tail up?
Right above her, the young bull.
Cristina, voice-over: It's really important to have the young, the next generation be a part of this ritual and to relearn that culture and those ways.
I actually got two young bulls right there.
I like him.
Chazz, voice-over: I'd say, in the last ten years, that it's gotten to where we can do that, you know, go out and do the harvest and the culture.
Bringing it back's a big thing.
♪ Hey, hey, hey.
Chazz: Oh, that's a nice bull we got.
That's a three or-- three or four, that guy.
OK, you guys stay in for a second, let me make sure.
[Truck door closes] So we got to pull his hide.
You could step around this side of him.
OK, we--we got to cut slow right here, huh?
Cristina: Your dad did good.
He went down fast.
Did you see that?
Yeah.
You crying?
Am I crying?
Yeah.
Oh, I always cry.
It's just such a beautiful being, you know?
Cristina: I never get used to taking one, but there is a recognition and a humility that you are taking a life to feed yourself, to maintain and revitalize culture, to make sure that the young people who have not lived with buffalo understand who they are, their identity.
Nice animal, huh?
Mm-hmm.
Cristina: And to do it in the right way, from a place of prayer and celebration and gratitude.
Chazz: You was in there.
You cut the throat.
Your blood's on your hands.
You can take honor and you can say a prayer.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you, son.
Buffalo, stay safe, and all the animals that they get good nutrition in the grass and they have a good winter.
Chazz, voice-over: He had a lot of muscle on him, lot of fat, and a lot of meat for the whole tribe.
Cut that off real quick.
Look at that.
Ervin, voice-over: It makes me feel really good, you know, to see my grandson being able to, uh, participate in the harvest.
And I hope that, you know, that's here for generations to come.
♪ Narrator: The Blackfeet plan to return buffalo to lands around Chief Mountain.
It's a sacred site, bordering Glacier National Park.
♪ Cristina: The hope is that in the next year or two, we will be able to set those animals free, and they will reestablish their migrations, they will reestablish these ecological systems that they're a part of.
A huge cascade of effects will happen, and we will see increases in birds and grasses, bumblebees, all kinds of insects.
Narrator: Restoring biodiversity is a long-term undertaking, but it will have ongoing benefits for the climate, the people, and the land.
♪ Narrator: In Mexico, Cuauhtémoc's long-term plan to save the monarchs won't come to fruition until 2016, but he has a far more immediate problem.
He needs to move the oyamel forest to a higher elevation.
But there are no higher mountains in the Monarch Reserve... ♪ so Cuauhtémoc is creating his new forest 90 miles away, high on the flanks of a volcano.
If the climate keeps warming at the current rate, temperatures here should be perfect for the oyamel fir trees by 2060.
Working with the local people, he's planting seedlings now.
Narrator: The problem is, right now, it's still too cold at these elevations for oyamel seedlings to naturally survive.
♪ ♪ Narrator: Cuauhtémoc's ambitious plan will have knock-on benefits that extend well beyond monarchs.
Narrator: If Cuauhtémoc can protect biodiversity in Mexico, the butterfly effect will reach as far as New York City and beyond.
♪ Climate change knows no borders.
Instability in one place can have far-reaching consequences.
Whoa!
Narrator: But bringing back biodiversity will help build ecological resilience, making Earth's natural systems stronger as we race to cut emissions.
To succeed, we need not only biological diversity... [Singing in Native language] but also a diversity of thought.
By combining traditional knowledge with cutting-edge science...
Careful.
we will be better-prepared for a fast-changing future... [Men cheer] on our beautiful, dynamic planet.
♪ ♪ To order this program on DVD, Visit ShopPBS, or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS This program is also available on Amazon Prime Video ♪
