I was surprised how hard it was to find nature documentaries that mostly showed nature and animals and not talking heads very concerned about the planet. I'm all aboard but it wasn't what I wanted to show my 1.5 year-old. I wanted her to see cool animals.

This was across a few platforms, had to really dig.

I would also like to see a Nike documentary that focuses on the cool shoes and doesn’t mention anything about the child labor used to make them.

Not covering a recant and pertinent fact is also an agenda.

What would be the agenda of, say, talking about birds while not mentioning climate doomerism constantly? Is there some bird lobby we should be aware of?

Destruction of natural habitat is a problem, pretty much everywhere on earth. If you're watching a show about birds, it probably covers where they live. If you like seeing birds, you probably care about them being around in the next 50 years.

There is more to environmentalism than just climate change. I am obligated to point out that climate change will also change habitats, which will negatively impact many bird populations.

It's true but it just doesn't need to be interjected into every conversation, every film, every time something even moderately related comes up.

You can come up with negativity about how X is being ruined or is awful in some way or another for every X.

The almond milk in your coffee uses scarce California water supplies, cows are mistreated and use water and produce methane, coffee farmers are threatened by global warming and have these other environmental concerns, Starbucks employees are mistreated and have these union issues, you drove a car to get coffee and emitted this much carbon, coffee is addictive and has these awful side effects, strip malls and big corporations ruin local economies... and on and on and on. Pick a topic and you can ramble on about awful things as though being "woke" about it and mentioning it at every opportunity makes anything better.

It's cheap proselytizing for a certain morality and doubtful actual impact of mentioning it over and over in shallow ways that don't actually explain much to people who mostly already know. It's pointless and should be avoided. If you want to make a documentary about destruction of habitat, go do that, people will watch. But maybe stop trying to shoehorn it in at every possible opportunity.

To each their own. I think the whole context is relevant on a subject and would prefer understanding habitat and human impact when I’m trying to learn about something. To me, the habitat destruction is a crucial part of the story, and if you left it out it would be like teaching about life in America during ww2 without mentioning Japanese internments. Or discussing the 1960s without mentioning civil rights.

These things are critical topics necessary in order to understand a topic. It honestly feels a bit like you would prefer a space where the downsides or costs are not mentioned - I prefer to not elide the uncomfortable.

Edit - maybe it’s like a dinosaur documentary not mentioning their extinction? I could understand that, if it were a matter of prioritizing based on available time. Still, it does seem like the meteor event is pretty important when talking about dinosaurs. I guess we just see things differently.

If we want that nature to still exist in 50 years, then yeah, it's probably good to remind folks that they should care about fixing that doom. You could argue it were unethical to pretend the environment isn't in danger, or should we just be happy we got some video footage while it lasted?

I'll never be able to find it, but I remember watching an interesting clip from a nature documentary about cuckoo's breaking eggs or something. The narrator was talking through the scene, then abruptly "How could an all-loving God possibly..." It was narrated by Richard Dawkins.