A Planet for the Taking
An eight-part series hosted by David Suzuki in 1985
A Planet for the Taking 1: Human Nature by William Whitehead
A Planet for the Taking 2: Mythmakers by William Whitehead
A Planet for the Taking 3: Subdue the Earth by John Livingston
A Planet for the Taking 4: Who Needs Nature by John Livingston
A Planet for the Taking 5: The Ultimate Slavery by John Livingston, author of Rogue Primate
A Planet for the Taking 6: Improving on Nature by David Suzuki, 1986 Award, Best Television Script
A Planet for the Taking 7: At War with Death by David Suzuki
A Planet for the Taking 8: The Runaway Brain by William Whitehead
Intro:
David Suzuki’s 1985 TV series, A Planet for the Taking, is an alternative POV to the Business-As-Usual worldview of modernity.
The 1985 message needs to be seen in context. The worlds’ scientists/science-literates (those having some grasp of the human predicament/problematique), were in 1985 still endeavoring to communicate with humanity (from ‘the public’ to assorted ‘policy makers’ and ‘leaders’ of all strips (from political and media pundits to the religious).
This endeavor began in 1948, climaxed in 1972, and effectively ended in 1992 with the Worlds’ Scientists Warning to Humanity. A Planet for the Taking was the climax of efforts to communicate using TV. It was effectively also the last.
Humanity was not listening. Today’s world is the outcome (not good news for 10 year olds — sorry about that, but within the next decade or two, humanity may get a message from the remaining ecolate elders… “we told you so…. And now what? Consider a paradigm shift…”)
The series averaged more than 1.8 million viewers per episode and earned a United Nations Environment Programme Medal. His message: “We have both a sense of the importance of the wilderness and space in our culture and an attitude that it is limitless and therefore we needn’t worry.” [Oh, but actually we should worry, as while space may be limitless, wilderness, things for the taking, is not.] He called for a major “perceptual [paradigm] shift” in our relationship with nature.
A Planet for the Taking, with episodes 4 and 8 (the last) missing has been the most important video series on YouTube for nine years and the first episode had over 400 views with over 100 people making it to the second to the last one (in 2017, but 2.6k total now for episode 1, and 423 views for episode 7 today, July 17, 2023). The two missing episodes are not even on Netflix, Amazon Video, BitTorrent, private trackers, public FTP sites, file shares, Usenet, eBay…). No readable transcripts were available for any episodes.
One can but wonder what Suzuki had to say that was of such disinterest (I don’t recall anything of disinterest when I saw the series on PBS in the late 1980s, easily one of the highest value offerings in the 20th century on any medium).
So six years ago I spent $100 to acquire tapes 4 and 8 from Canada, bought a VCR, and a video decoder that failed to defeat the copy protection, and so I ended up making screeners using a web-cam. I hosted all eight on my website to link to, but so far as I know, no one has viewed any.
The ideas expressed fell on mostly deaf ears in 1985 (even if millions liked the mostly pretty moving pictures). Virtually no one today has even heard them to then ignore them, nor will until humanity’s “I suppose they told us so” moment comes (when belief in Business-As-Usual collapses before or after the climax of the world socioeconomic-political system is evident, at least to those who would rather know than believe.
The first episode was written by William Whitehead, a science literate generalist (not a real scientist), and contains much that 99% of experts (specialists) don’t know that they don’t know.
Watching the video may be a distraction, but if watched, then after the remorseless rush of images and the voice in your head passes, consider reading (between deep breaths), and thinking about the words, words, words.
I recently paid for AI transcriptions of the videos, but a correcting of the AI versions (without which I would have spent two days transcribing each video, but instead I called for volunteers, maybe seven, but zero were forthcoming). With AI, it still involved over three hours each.
Most of what I’ve written in the last 13 years is in the form of footnotes to what the nature of things has been telling us before and after we expansionist form of human stopped listening about 50k years ago (as evidenced by our expansion). Perhaps we should stop listening to human centric prattle and listen to Nature who has all the answers.
A perhaps radical seeming suggestion, if I may suggest, is to eliminate (defund/destroy/boycott) the modern schooling system and transition to an education system. Start by producing 13 versions of a series (for what is now called K-12) like this one (perhaps call it A Planet for the Saving from Hu-mans) and, for as long as such programing can be shown, everyone (so inclined, no force implied even if failure means human extinction) watches it, then reads the version transcript in Bliss appropriate to their age (and learns to read by reading the transcripts). The content and number of episodes of each version would progress from K to 12. The series, with books, would be the basis for a new education system and ecolate civilization.
Those who then learn to listen to Nature (like the traditional San and some modern scientists and poets endeavor to do) could then pass on their knowledge to others sitting about a camp’s fire when not reading by sunlight from clay tablets, what the elders before them have heard Nature whisper to them (information of lesser value would be printed on paper, but high-value offerings would last for thousands of years on clay tablets). The paradigm shift that needs to come for humans to persist is FROM a Hubris-mancentric worldview TO a Nature centric worldview.
“Saving the world” may be a nice turn of phrase, but is not meaningfully actionable. Making a 13 version series is. One person may not be able to do so, but a hundred (0.000002% of today’s adults) could. Maybe more than a hundred 13 year olds would both consider boycotting the modern schooling system AND seek out an alternative (even if it means learning a new language, e.g. Cosmos Simplified).
A four-minute intro may not be too distracting: