Attenborough Hopes to Pass the Torch with 'Planet Earth: Asia'

David Attenborough’s masterly BBC series Planet Earth: Asia, which concluded its run on BBC America and AMC+ in early March 2025, ends tentatively optimistic for the future. After Attenborough's guidance through remote, seemingly inhospitable parts of the world, where rare species adapt to harsh environments, it turns out the more difficult of all is living in proximity to human beings. The numbers of those animals we’re privileged to see are frighteningly low as habitats shrink, water sources dry up, and the planet warms. Addressing COP26 in 2021, Attenborough defined care of the planet as an act of social justice, with a huge disparity between those at the top who created the climate crisis, and the poor populations who will be most impacted by global warming.

Attenborough: In my lifetime I've witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could and should witness a wonderful recovery.

In creating the series Asia, Attenborough does not go over the top with his warnings, but instead shares what he has seen and allows us to draw our own conclusions. As calm and measured as ever, he does not raise false hopes. Approaching his 99th birthday (May 8), he is passing on the responsibility to new generations, starting with showing us valuable work by those in poor communities who understand what some world leaders and politicians refuse to grasp. 

In Asia alone, the population has doubled in four years to 4.7 billion, forcing animals and humans to tolerate each other. Usually, Attentborough includes one episode at the very end with these sorts of scenes, but here, it simply exists everywhere he goes. 

Episode 5, “Crowded City,” takes us to the highly populated urban environments of Central India, where tigers have learned to adapt to an urban lifestyle, avoiding traffic and trouble, and their two-legged neighbors overlook the occasional livestock loss. In Sri Lanka, elephants wander their vast territories and entire families scavenge for treats from vehicles. They have learned to evaluate how likely drivers and passengers are to share fruit and other delicacies, and allow people to pet them. (More assertive elephants discover they won’t receive treats, and mutual respect and road sense establish a cordial relationship.) 

In Nara, in central Japan, Sika deer, once considered sacred, enjoy legal protection and wander the crowded town and streets with their human neighbors. (Sensibly, the stags’ antlers are trimmed back during mating season for safety. But as heartwarming as these human-animal interactions are, it's a fragile bond, threatened by extreme weather, and social and political changes. Asian cities are growing larger. Bangkok, Thailand, with 10 million, has preserved a patch of its original wetland, now Lumphini Park, enjoyed by families, runners, and the original inhabitants, about 300 Asian water monitors. (They can grow up to six feet long. It's not pretty.) Humans keep their distance as these creatures gather in a heap when a kill is made, smacking each other with their powerful tails. 

Urban development can wipe out the food source for an animal that eats only one sort of vegetation, as has happened to Borneo’s Proboscis monkeys. They eat only mangrove leaves, and have to travel across the outskirts of cities, looking for fresh growth.

“The Arid Heart,” Asia's penultimate episode, takes us to the great deserts, like the famous Gobi Desert, home of the rare Gobi bear, once considered a myth. The BBC team painstakingly set cameras in likely areas like the stand of ancient poplar trees, essential to the bears as a place to leave scent messages, and waited for days for results. The other hot spot for the bears is an oasis, where Attenborough’s team sets up cameras, collects bear hair from feeding areas (and from failed attempts to snack on the cameras). We’re also introduced to the tiny nocturnal Long-eared Jerboa, a small but deadly fluffy creature with a lion’s tail, rabbit ears, a pig's snout, and a kangaroo's legs. It doesn’t drink water, relying on hydration from its kills. (Nice juicy moth, anyone?)

The Thar Desert is the continuation of the Gobi in India, home to 20 million. It's also the last refuge of the rare Asiatic Lion, which manages to hunt in a scrubby, dry forest with no cover. Meanwhile, the nearby town of Jain, India, annually hosts 30,000 Demoiselle Cranes, which migrate there from the north. The human community has a spiritual connection to animals and welcomes the birds, which consume a ton of grain. Moving west, we come to a sanded, bleak area bigger than France, sculpted by the wind, which blows sand to form desert islands in the Persian Gulf. It’s the nesting place of 60,000 Sacotra Cormorants who must abandon their chicks when they reach adult weight.

Most of Asia's deserts are ancient, except for the Aralkum Desert on the Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan border. It’s so recent, boats are stranded in the sand, marking the location of the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world. In the 1960s, the river that fed the lake dried up. As the world warms, deserts expand, and the former long grasses and trees of the Eurasian Steppes, from Hungary to China, are now gone. Yet the rare Pallas’s cat survives on tiny rodents, appearing to mesmerize the prey by waving its tail. It’s a bleak place in winter, and Mongolian gazelles would head south for food, but for a man-made obstacle: the Trans Siberian Railway.

The finale episode is titled “Saving Asia,” and sounds much like Attenborough’s usual finales focused on the work being done to save animals and ecosystems. However, letting the footage of animals versus people play out in the earlier installment allows this one to be more forthright and direct, as if Attenborough knows that even if the planet isn’t running out of time yet, he is.

At Borneo’s Sun Bear Conservation Center, biologist Dr. Siew Te Wong (aka Papa Bear) prepares to release one of his charges and bring it back into the wild. He’s raised Sika since 2017, and to avoid wildlife smugglers, they must travel by truck and helicopter after dark. The Indonesian forests are the habitat of treasured birds like the brilliantly colored Javan Green Magpies, now becoming rare in the wild. It’s a culture where birds are highly valued, captured, sold in bird markets, and entered into singing contests. Scientist Panji Gusti Akbar respects the tradition; befriending Mr. Neo, owner of several birds, unaware it’s a rare protected species. Panji introduces Mr. Neo to a bird tourism and photography center, proving that a change of heart can be possible, and “his” magpie is donated to the program.

In Hong Kong, scientists frequently discover rare fish in nets or fish markets, and scientists are pushing a “green light” program that uses colored lights to scare off the endangered fish while ensuring a good catch of other species. Fish is a big business in Hong Kong, and 800 tons of seafood are consumed daily. Unfortunately, the rare Napoleon fish is considered a delicacy–it’s intelligent, has lived for over thirty years, and is controlled by fishing, but often quotas are ignored. Scientists are winning support from the seafood traders, but now the government must get involved. The Napoleon fish has the piscine equivalent of a fingerprint, each fish carrying discrete facial markings. A software has been developed over five years to “read” the markings and identify fish showing up in restaurant tanks. 

The illegal wildlife trade in Asia is worth $20 billion dollars a year and the 1,000 mile border that separates Nepal from China is an ideal environment for smugglers to traffic rare animals, skins, and tusks. It may be the biggest threat yet to wildlife, as low-level traffickers, usually poor and not aware of the law, can be caught relatively quickly, while those at the top easily evade arrest. It’s worrying when a new species, such as the Tapanuli orangutan recently discovered in the Batang Toru Cloud Forest in Sumatra, is discovered. Eight hundred orangutans remain, and they are a vital umbrella species, protecting other animals. However, illegal logging and the logging industry threaten the survival of the forest and its inhabitants.

Hotlin Ompusunga, originally a dentist serving an impoverished community that scratched a living from the endangered Batang Toru Cloud Forest, came up with a solution. Many people needed dental work, but couldn’t afford to pay for it, so she encouraged them to grow saplings from seed as payment (she also accepts chainsaws as trade-ins too.) Once planted, the saplings grow rapidly, and Dr. Ompusunga founded the world’s first conservation clinic, Healthy Planet Indonesia. 

Attenborough clearly believes his work is too important to stop, and the dream of these different groups coming together for a common goal is an admirable one. But it remains to be seen who will come after him to pick up the torch once he finally rests.

All episodes of Planet Earth: Asia are streaming on AMC/AMC+ and BBC America.