Between fragility and resilience: Ambivalent images of nature in popular documentaries with David Attenborough

Nature documentaries often present contradictory images of, on the one hand, a fragile nature that is threatened or already destroyed by humans and, on the other hand, a resilient nature that indifferently survives the human species. Similar ambivalences characterize the public discourse on “nature” in the Anthropocene. From the perspective of cultural and media studies, this essay attempts to disentangle the incoherencies in popular imaginaries of nature by exploring the challenges of narrating and picturing the two opposite qualities of vulnerability and resilience. Tracing the conceptual evolution of documentaries presented by David Attenborough between 1979 and 2020 and their gradual increase in environmentalist rhetoric, I show how different visual motifs undergo a recoding (resilient/fragile) and relate it to paradigm shifts in ecology, earth system science, and environmental protection principles. With an interest in the historical development of multimedia discourses on resilience and vulnerability, I focus on the relationship between visual and verbal representation as well as on the interplay of semantic and aesthetic aspects, while reflecting on whether the observed ambivalences are intentional and how they might influence the perception of the documentaries. This essay is a contribution to Transmedia Ecocriticism and thus situates itself in the Environmental Humanities.