this article is a culmination of my attempts to address my deep emotional reaction to My Octopus Teacher (MOT). This reaction does not seem inappropriate considering that the documentary traces the bond that filmmaker Craig Foster establishes with an octopus that goes through its stages of life, experiences some trials and tribulations, and then (spoiler alert) dies. Talking-head footage of Foster plays a significant role in establishing his emotional vulnerability arising from his relationship with the octopus, and audiences can accordingly empathize with Foster because they are exposed to nonverbal communication that is “often more subtle and more effective than verbal communication and can convey meaning better than words” (Bambaeeroo and Shokrpour 53).However, my particular emotional response was quite severe. For a week after viewing, I carried a heavy sadness, and I displayed some physical symptoms of grief: bouts of unexpected tearfulness, tightness in the chest, lethargy, an unusual lack of motivation, and the persistent feeling of a lump in the throat. Two months after viewing, I would still become emotional when thinking about the connection to the octopus articulated by Foster. The persistence of these reactions is something quite intriguing: as a middle-aged person, I have loved and lost family members and pets, and I recognize in my responses to the documentary something compatible with the grief that I felt in response to those other losses.My feelings of grief after watching MOT appear further out place when one considers that the documentary can be described as an optimistic nature documentary with potentially positive impacts on audiences. The octopus lives a full life, Foster overcomes the depression he alludes to at the start of the documentary, and the documentary ends with an aerial shot of him swimming with other people, presumably to go and experience some of the wonders of nature showcased in the documentary. Furthermore, via the very mild anthropomorphization of the octopus, Foster's story is likely to incite pro-ecological attitudes in audiences, because as Manfredo et al. have observed, this “alters values toward wildlife” (2). The narrative of the documentary presents the octopus as an intelligent and likable character, with the result likely being a positive shift in audience members’ values toward wildlife.While the very mild anthropomorphization of the octopus may have something to do with the strong emotional impacts that MOT had on me, my own reflections since watching the documentary have led me to a much broader analysis. Of crucial importance is the fact that I watched it after two other documentaries—namely, Planet of the Humans (PotH, directed by Jeff Gibbs and produced by Michael Moore) and A Life on Our Planet (ALouP, featuring David Attenborough). My hypothesis is that when viewed as a trilogy, these documentaries paint a picture of hopelessness for the future of biodiversity and therefore of human well-being (seeing as the latter is inextricably dependent on the former), even if one of the documentaries (ALouP) explicitly aims to leave audiences with grounds for hope and optimism while another (MOT) aims to leave audiences with an uplifting vicarious nature experience.In the analysis and commentary to follow, I will demonstrate how the heavily criticized PotH, though accused of misrepresenting some issues, links seamlessly with the highly acclaimed ALouP, with the former providing the worrying details that render suspect many optimistic claims made in the latter. I will then position MOT as a documentary about what is very likely to be lost despite conservation efforts, even if the documentary-makers did not intend for this to be their focus. I will work toward a conclusion by discussing some of the potential consequences of viewing nature documentaries in isolation versus in the broader context of the ecological crisis.I also will discuss how the broader context may impact on the role of the nature documentary in society. A positive documentary such as MOT might, as an isolated snapshot, provoke uplifting feelings and emotions in many audience members, but against the backdrop of an undeniable ecological crisis in which a multitude of life-forms are going extinct or are at risk of extinction (Ripple et al.), an uplifting nature documentary details aspects of what is being lost at an alarming rate in the nonhuman world. The broadened contextual backdrop of ecological crisis—which I refer to here as a context that scars—therefore positions even eco-optimistic nature documentaries in an eco-pessimistic process of elaboration, though this will depend on the extent to which viewers acknowledge the severity of the ecological crisis.Considering the extent to which most audiences are aware of global events and issues via information overload from news media and social media, it is not unreasonable to generalize and suggest that many audience members (if not most of them) are aware of the worrying ecological context I highlight here. If this is so, then any documentary that aims to deliver eco-optimistic messages is unlikely to overcome the gravity of eco-pessimism, a point that explains to some extent why I could not view MOT as the uplifting nature documentary that its makers clearly want it to be. To employ a term that is fitting for reception theory, it is arguably the case that mine was an aberrant decoding of MOT, in that I was left with a different final message from the one that the documentary-makers appear to have intended to convey. However, the aberration was not a misinterpretation of the documentary, but rather a reading that occurred in part due to my recent exposure to PotH and ALouP and in part due to the broader context of ecological crises that are now widely reported on in scientific and academic literature, as well as in news media and social media. Nature documentarians will likely battle to encode into their texts final messages that are eco-optimistic due to ubiquitous ecological contexts that scar. This article is offered for the purpose of assisting nature documentarians and film theorists alike in comprehending the persistence of difficult ecological-contextual issues that are ineluctably part of the nature documentary terrain. Ideally, the article will provoke wider discussion about the possibility of nurturing eco-optimism despite the prevalence of eco-pessimistic content and contexts.This documentary, shot in a typical investigative-journalism style involving somber narration and, occasionally, Jeff Gibbs's ambush interviews, has received strong pushback in many scathing reviews. One article, written by Tom Athanasiou, bears a title that says it all: “Why ‘Planet of the Humans’ Is Crap.” While that title lacks finesse, it does sum up the responses of many offended critics who have slammed the documentary on various online platforms.For example, in an article titled “How Did Michael Moore Become a Hero to Climate Deniers and the Far Right?,” the influential journalist George Monbiot describes the documentary as an “excruciating mishmash of environment falsehoods [that] plays into the hands of those [Moore] once opposed.” Another example is from the widely read vox.com, where Leah C. Stokes states that the documentary “peddles falsehoods,” something that dozens of reviewers go well out of their way to argue.Most reviews focus on the minor technicalities that Gibbs and Moore get wrong and on how some claims made in the film play into the hands of alleged climate deniers and fossil fuel pundits, though this is clearly not the intention of the documentarians—Gibbs states clearly that he is “against our addiction to fossil fuels” (20:41). With details about the film's inaccuracies being easy to find online, I will not list them here. Instead, I will make a suggestion that may position the film in an alternative light. I suggest that the film should be considered as a nature documentary in addition to an environmental one.When Planet of the Humans is viewed as an environmental documentary, matters of a technical nature (e.g., how dependent solar and wind energy technologies are on fossil-fuel backup power) may become the central themes. When it is watched as a nature documentary, however, the more general theme is foregrounded, this theme being the destruction of the natural world by human beings (i.e., the devastating loss of biodiversity that is occurring globally), regardless of the source of energy that powers the activity. This suggested genre distinction corresponds to some extent with an insightful observation made by reviewer Aragorn Eloff. Eloff begins his critical review by stating that on Earth Day 2020, “two important documentaries were released”: The first was a film . . . called Planet of the Humans. This flawed film highlights the environmental impact of renewable technologies such as solar panels and wind power and observes that a great deal of greenwashing takes place in their promotion as a path towards an ecologically sustainable world. It has been condemned by numerous critics as relying on dated information, making unsubstantiated claims, drawing false equivalences, cherry-picking data and lacking in journalistic integrity. The second, much better film, is Planet of the Humans . . . [which] draws attention to the capture of large NGOs by market forces and the selling out of environmentalist aspirations to the logic of green capitalism. It has been largely ignored.Eloff is, of course, referring to the same documentary. His analysis goes beyond the limited focus of reviewers such as Monbiot, whose review is fitting for an offended environmentalist who takes a technical approach to addressing the specific claims made in the flawed documentary highlighted by Eloff. The largely ignored documentary, however, presents viewers with a much broader (and scarring) context, which Eloff partly describes in his preceding commentary. A fuller description must include what has mainly been ignored by reviewers of the documentary, something that Gibbs as narrator draws attention to in the first few minutes of the documentary via a rhetorical question: “Have you ever wondered what would happen if a single species took over an entire planet?” (01:20)Gibbs's initial question foreshadows the ending of the documentary, which is constituted by the following sequence (01:28:43 to 01:33:45): a red moon is seen rising over a dark cityscape, accompanied by an admonishing voice-over that concludes with Gibbs saying, “It's not the carbon dioxide molecule that's destroying the planet—it's us. It's not one thing, but everything we humans are doing. A human-caused apocalypse. If we get ourselves under control, all things are possible. And if we don't . . . ” Gibbs does not finish his final sentence. The sequence fades out from the blood-moon footage and fades into an aerial shot of a misty forest canopy, cutting to a shot in the forest and then to an orangutan adult and baby in a tree. The short sequence is textbook nature-documentary content.The sounds of chainsaws fade in as the orangutans start looking around. Cut to a series of shots of forest trees being felled by loggers with chainsaws and earth-moving machines. Cut to shots of a lone orangutan in a swaying tree. Cut to a shot of the flattened post-logging landscape. Cut to a long shot of a lone leafless tree. Cut closer to the two orangutans in the barren tree, climbing, but with nowhere to go. Cut to one of the orangutans at the top of the tree; the branch snaps, and the orangutan swings down a few branches, stops, and despondently droops its head. The background music that started the sequence has increased in volume so that a piercingly mournful melody is conveyed in the female singer's voice.Cut to several shots of a burning forest, then a few of the charred aftermath. Cut to a lone, exhausted orangutan hanging from forest debris alongside a trench of water, which was perhaps once a river—the primate battles along the low bank, with a human being stepping into view to assist. Cut to the orangutan being held awkwardly by someone. The primate is clearly traumatized, wounded, suffering. Cut to it being carried away; cut to the animal on its back on the ground, skeletal, dying, its lungs shallowly processing its last breaths of air. Cut to a close-up of its near-lifeless or lifeless face. Cut to a lone dead tree in what appears to be a field of palm oil trees. Cut to a lengthy black screen before credits.The sequence is almost entirely ignored by reviewers and critics of the documentary. Athanasiou does say the following: “The orangutan stuff at the end, in the palm oil deforestation scene, is very, very sad.” This response reveals the extent to which viewers of the documentary may be incapable of responding to the second film identified by Eloff. While Gibbs and Moore may be guilty of getting a few technical points wrong, they do provide an unambiguous answer to the primary question asked by Gibbs at the outset: this is in part what happens when a single species takes over an entire planet, “this” being the tragic event depicted in the closing sequence of the film.No critic or offended reviewer of the documentary can adequately address the event on which the final sequence focuses. It is not an event that might occur at some point in the future if human beings continue their ecocidal activity, but rather an event that has occurred because of extant destructive human activity—there is nothing for critics to nitpick or debate in this regard, which is why they tend to review mainly the contents of the first flawed documentary, the environmental documentary. But the nature documentary that conveys the complete destruction of the forest that once homed orangutans is powerful. It encapsulates human beings’ decimation of nature, be it for palm oil, more fossil fuel sites, more mines, or more solar panel farms and wind farms. The particular details the critics take umbrage with are minor in light of the worrying patterns to which PotH draws attention.The documentary's predictable cinematographic style may leave one with little to comment on, but what it lacks in creativity, it makes up for in hard-hitting subject matter. The closing sequence and the earlier scenes of cityscapes, factories, industry, industrial machines, massive active wind farms and solar panel farms, scorched earth, wind turbine graveyards, abandoned solar farms, and more all coalesce to showcase a planet dominated by an expanding species that has started to add allegedly green sources of energy to its fossil fuel sources.It may be tempting for critics to argue that what is being showcased in the documentary is too selectively pessimistic, but as York and Bell suggest, previous “changes in the proportion of energy produced by various sources . . . could more accurately be characterized as energy additions rather than transitions. In both cases, the use of the older energy source continued to grow, despite rapid growth in the new source” (40). This corresponds to the Jevons paradox, which states that “an increase in efficiency in resource use will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decrease” (Giampietro and Mayumi 2).PotH forces viewers to confront, among other things, some of the real and worrying detrimental ecological consequences of a growing population of human beings who are hungry for more energy and more resources and who are presently adding renewable energy sources to the fossil fuel mix but ultimately failing to slow their devastating impacts on the nonhuman world.A Life on Our Planet (ALouP) is a documentary that highlights many of the same major themes as PotH, but unlike PotH, it carries with it an air of credibility by virtue of association with the largely respected Sir David Attenborough. Of most relevance for the purpose of this article is the fact that ALouP incorporates orangutan footage that is fully compatible with the alarming orangutan footage used in PotH. The footage is used for the same reason: to demonstrate some of the ecological consequences of the relentless human expansion across the world.The relevant sequence of events depicted in ALouP (33:42 to 35:05) is as follows. A logger is shown using a chainsaw to cut a tree in a forest. A series of cuts to similar shots follows, with some close-ups of the chainsaw as it saws through the tree. Cut to a tree falling in the forest, its base clearly severed by a chainsaw. Cut to the tree being dragged by a steel cable (with the narrator stating that “we've cut down three trillion trees across the world; half of the world's rain forests have already been cleared”). Cut to an aerial shot of a huge tree falling in slow motion into the dense forest below it.Cut to a lone orangutan on what looks like a felled tree. Cut to three barren but tall tree stumps in a field of debris from timber-felling, an orangutan perched near the top of one of the remaining tall trunks. Cut to a wider-angle shot of the aftermath of deforestation, a lone orangutan stumbling over the sprawling mess. Cut to a zoom-in of the orangutan at the top of the tall tree stump. Attenborough's narration ends this sequence with the following words: “The deforestation of Borneo has reduced the population of orangutan by two-thirds since I first saw one just over sixty years ago.”The makers of ALouP did not go the extra step toward showing the full extent of what the reduction of “the population of orangutan by two-thirds” in approximately sixty years looks like in reality. The makers of PotH did take that excruciatingly painful extra step to emphasize this reality by focusing on the orangutan as it lay dying. Perhaps the scathing reviews of PotH are only in part a consequence of the documentary-makers getting a few technical details incorrect. A less obvious offense is that the documentarians crossed a forbidden line.In the instance of the skeletal and dying orangutan, the forbidden line is one that is partly contextualized with reference to the term “habitual perception.” Hadot quotes Bergson to characterize habitual perception: “Life requires that we put on blinkers; we must not look to the right, to the left, or behind, but straight ahead, in the direction in which we are supposed to walk. In order to live, we must be selective in our knowledge and our memories, and retain only that which may contribute to our action upon things” (254). This is an instrumentalist and largely anthropocentric way of looking at the world, a manner of perceiving that Hadot calls “utilitarian perception” (254).The crossing of the forbidden line arguably displaces audience members’ habitual perception, albeit for only a few minutes. It does so because audience members are unaccustomed to encountering such brutal consequences of their consumer lifestyles. In almost all nature documentaries, “[n]ature is still mostly shown as pristine, and the presence or impacts of people on the natural world very seldom appear” (Jones et al. 421). That observation was made in an analysis of a 2019 BBC documentary, also narrated by Attenborough. However, the observation is relevant to the vast majority of nature documentaries because “[t]his tragic loss of wilderness presents the wildlife filmmaker with a fundamental dilemma. So long as we maintain the myth of nature, our programmes find a wide and appreciative audience. . . . But as viewing figures adamantly prove, once we make a habit of showing the bad news, our audience slinks away” (Mills).The makers of ALouP were almost certainly aware that they could lose audience support by fully representing the death of the orangutan that features halfway into their documentary. They obviously decided not to cross the line that Gibbs and Moore crossed, but the fact that Gibbs and Moore did cross it creates a precursor to the footage used in the Attenborough documentary. If one has witnessed the orangutan footage in PotH and accordingly had one's attention displaced in the manner I have suggested, then it would be difficult to watch ALouP without being triggered and having the dying orangutan come to mind and once again dislodge one's habitual perception.It is unlikely that the two documentaries would be watched in tandem by most people. PotH was released for free viewing on Earth Day 2020 and then appeared on a dedicated website with a paywall. ALouP appeared later in 2020 on Netflix, a platform with an incomparably wider audience reach than the private route taken by Gibbs and Moore, whose controversial documentary would have been unlikely to suit the market-pleasing modus operandi of Netflix content selectors.Nevertheless, the two documentaries supplement each other in important ways: one toes the line, while the other does not. In toeing the line, ALouP arguably gives credence to the more controversial documentary, at least with regard to their mutual focus on human impacts on the natural world. In crossing the line, PotH can momentarily disrupt audience members’ habitual perception, thereby endowing the less controversial documentary (which uses an extremely similar orangutan sequence) with an aura of explicitness that can emphasize the call for urgent action made by Attenborough later in his documentary.It would be difficult to deny that Attenborough, Gibbs, and Moore are on the same page in their stances on the problematic impacts that human beings continue to have on and in nature. Both documentaries contain a fair to large amount of footage showing degradation of forests and wild areas, and narrators Attenborough and Gibbs share a mournful tone in articulating this loss. However, PotH and ALouP diverge in important ways: the renewable energy industry that Attenborough promotes as part of his proposed solutions to, for example, climate change is one of the same industries with which Gibbs and Moore take umbrage.Gibbs and Moore's problematization of renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind power is itself problematic for specific technical reasons. As stated already, many articles have been written to highlight the technical details. However, a general pattern is highlighted in their documentary, a pattern that no critic can dismiss because it is true to fact. Whether powered by fossil fuels, solar power, wind power, or biogas, the expansion of the human race continues to result in the processing of nature into resources or spaces that enable the powering, feeding, and entertaining of an expanding and resource-hungry human species.Perhaps surprisingly, it is Attenborough and not Gibbs/Moore who provides the more concise and specific details to support the conclusion that human expansion and its accompanying destruction of nature are unlikely to stop—at least not for a few decades. The Attenborough documentary does this by periodically displaying a black screen containing numerical information about the size of the human population and percentage of the world's remaining wilderness. As the first number increases, the second decreases, with the implication being clear: historically, as more humans have populated the earth, the more the planet's wild places have dwindled.The Attenborough documentary goes further than the present tense. It employs the black screen and numerical data technique (49:02) to fast-forward from 2020 (“population: 7.8 billion”; “carbon in atmosphere: 415 parts per million”; “remaining wilderness: 35%”) through to later decades. Against forest-fire imagery and the text “2030,” Attenborough explains that the Amazon rain forest “degrades into a dry savannah, bringing catastrophic species loss,” and that “the speed of global warming increases.” The “2040s” bring with them the thawing of frozen soils, “releasing methane, . . . accelerating the rate of climate change dramatically.” The “2050s” see “coral reefs around the world” dying and “fish populations” crashing. In the 2080s, “global food production enters a crisis as soils become exhausted by overuse” and “pollinating insects disappear.” In the “2100s,” the planet is “four degrees Celsius warmer,” “large parts of the Earth are uninhabitable,” and a “sixth mass extinction event is well under way.”This sequence lasts for 3 minutes 24 seconds (49:02 to 52:26). It is the point in the documentary where Attenborough changes focus to tell viewers what must be done to remedy the problems. “It's quite straightforward,” states Attenborough. “We must restore [the planet's] biodiversity” (54:51), he says, his narration accompanying a shot of a baby orangutan and uplifting music. “We must re-wild the world” (55:11), he states, and a few beautiful shots of animals and wild spaces later, Attenborough promises to “tell you how” (56:11) to do so.He turns to population, using Japan's numbers as an indication that “as nations develop everywhere, people choose to have fewer children” (57:00). At some point in the future, the world's population of humans will peak, explains Attenborough, thus making easier “everything else we need to do.” Raising people everywhere out of poverty, providing access to health care, and “enabling girls in particular to stay in school as long as possible” (58:49) are more answers he adds to his initial comments about restoring biodiversity and re-wilding. “The trick is to raise the standard of living around the world, without increasing our impact on that world” (58:58).Attenborough then moves into the more specific territory of renewable energy, appealing to the viewer to “imagine if we phase out fossil fuels and run our world on the eternal energies of nature too: sunlight, wind, water, and geothermal” (59:43). In the footage that follows, one sees aerial shots of a massive solar farm and a field of wind turbines—if viewers had seen PotH, they would note the uncritical approach taken by Attenborough to renewable energy technologies. Nevertheless, a “renewable future will be full of benefits” (1:01:13), says Attenborough over a night shot of a huge city littered with buildings and lights.With reference to fishing, Attenborough states that “if we do it right, it can continue” (1:02:40), just as in the case of Palau. Farming, says Attenborough, must be done on less land, and if “we” all were vegetarians, we would need only half the land currently in use for farming (1:06:10). Attenborough's hypothesizing about all people turning to vegetarianism raises the alarm bells, because global meat consumption is on the rise (Godfray et al.), and attentive viewers should be on high alert that the narrator is speculating wildly.Attention turns to the Netherlands, which, explains Attenborough over shots of the city and then large food-growing infrastructure, is “covered with small family-run farms with no room for expansion” (1:06:40). A production line–style sequence proceeds to capture the expertise of the Dutch, positively framing the observation that Attenborough narrates: “the Netherlands is now the second-largest exporter of food” (1:07:20). A few sequences later, Attenborough states that “we need to rediscover how to be sustainable—to move from being apart from nature, to becoming a part of nature once again” (1:12:30). In the final scene of the documentary, Attenborough states that “it's not all doom and gloom” and that “there's a chance for us to make amends, to complete our journey of development, manage our impact, and once again become a species in balance with nature” (1:16:27).There might be little doubt that ALouP is a moving documentary that will likely remind viewers of some of the details of the ecological crisis, details that are already distributed widely, considering the public familiarity with environmental activists such as Greta Thunberg and the rise in popularity of groups such as Extinction Rebellion. However, Attenborough and his team provide no specific answers to the question of how to achieve a dispensation that they depict as the solution to the problems they raise. Of course, it would be more sustainable to do certain things and not do others, and it would be very nice indeed to live in the pleasant world hypothesized by Attenborough, but the practical matter of how to transition remains unanswered, as it has since environmentalism began. Attenborough's appeal is to choose wisely, but he provides no indication that such proactive choices will be made. Instead, he makes a worn-out appeal: “All we need is the will to” become “a species in balance with nature” (1:16:42).Gibbs and Moore chose not to take the problem-solution approach. Whereas PotH ended with the scene of the dying orangutan, ALouP positions such a phenomenon as a problem that can be solved. However, the focus in PotH on the co-option of the environmental movement's green energy sector by fossil fuel–style economic interests for the sake of continued profits is a focus that considerably derails Attenborough's optimistic tone. Attenborough is of the opinion that green energy will be part of the solution; Gibbs states that “the notion that green energy would save us” is an “illusion” (48:48).Gibbs and Moore show without a doubt that large-scale renewable energy projects are dependent on, and entangled with, the fossil fuel industry and growth-focused corporate capitalism, which means that Attenborough's vision of a “renewable future” is a castle in the sky—as Eloff reminds readers, “capitalism is premised upon continuous growth,” a claim easily corroborated by prominent figures such as Joel Kovel throughout his book The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World. In their lambasting of PotH, critics such as Monbiot have not managed to ground the renewable energy castle on any firm foundations. Instead, their focus is on the specific point that renewable energy is better than fossil fuel energy, a point that completely fails to address the broader contextual concerns that are emphasized in different way