Seven Worlds, One Planet (4)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000bj0s/seven-worlds-one-planet-series-1-4-australia

Australia – another amazing programme.

I’ve been to Australia once and I doubt I’ll ever go back.

I was there in 2005 and we left Heathrow while the first of the Ashes tests was happening at Lord’s – England was obviously heading for a defeat.

Just over two weeks later (after my first kangaroos, Duck-billed Platypuses and Koalas – and Humpback Whales) we were in a caravan on the coast of Queensland at Mission Beach, watching the scintillating end of the second test where we just managed to bowl out Australia at Edgbaston (and I see from this link that it may have been a dodgy umpiring decision but that didn’t stop the cheers in our caravan that evening). That was quite late at night and at the next dawn I was parked in the rainforest of Djiru National Park, on a track, hoping a Southern Cassowary would walk across the road. And one did! It was a long way away but in some ways that just made the sighting more magical.

So it was wonderful to see the footage of a dad cassowary in this episode.

What a fantastic episode with Dingos, Budgerigars, sharks, corals and a bunch of reptiles and so much else.

Watch this episode. Next week we are closer to home in Europe – I wonder how our home continent will be treated.

[registration_form]

2 Replies to “Seven Worlds, One Planet (4)”

  1. Let’s hope the episode on Europe brings a halt to the logging which is happening in Romania and other parts of Eastern Europe.
    Ancient forest is being felled even with National Parks and there are reports of protesters and park employees being murdered! Within the EU!!

    1. Yes while we talk about rewilding degraded land, the land that’s still in good nick is being plundered – they’ve even tried to open up Bialowieca to logging. A lot of forest in Scandinavia instead of being allowed to become more natural is going in the opposite direction and being turned into pulp factories including that for virgin fibre toilet paper. It doesn’t help stop the logging of mature trees when the likes of Oak furniture land are trying to persuade us it’s a good idea to have a piece of ‘prestigious’ hardwood in every room. We need to start looking at hardwood as a bit like wearing fur – do we really need to use so much now? There needs to be a drive on reduce, reuse, recycle and use of recycled material to not only facilitate rewilding, but keeping what we still have as well – it’s not either or.

Comments are closed.