It is 1957. A 31-year-old BBC presenter named David Attenborough is on Raine Island in the Great Barrier ReefThe world's largest coral reef system found off the coast of Australia. , capturing some of the first ever footage of green turtles laying their eggs.

It is 2023. Attenborough's programmes no longer have an audience of mere thousands in Britain, but of tens of millions around the world.¹

At 97 years old, he is too frail to return to Raine Island. But from Down House, Charles DarwinHis book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, is the founding work of evolutionary biology.'s old home,² he offers the world a terrifying warning. The paradise he was the first to film is sinking beneath the waves.

Critics are calling Planet Earth III Attenborough's masterpiece of scale, sound and colour, carrying us from the intimate world of the tiniest fish to sprawling desert landscapes.

But it is at the end of the first episode that he brings us back down to Earth. On Raine Island the coastline is changing rapidly as sea levels rise. That leaves nesting green turtles unable to reach the water.

Thousands perishDie., dehydrated and exhausted. Their eggs rot. When the island disappears, the turtles here will simply die out.

It is a horrifying reminder of the vulnerability of the natural world. But some think nature actually has a lot to teach us when it comes to resilience. They say it is not really fragile at all, but antifragile.

Antifragility is the idea that the more stress a system faces, the more it thrives. Nassim Nicholas TalebTaleb is a Lebanese-American essayist and statistician., who invented the term, argues that it is a better aim than resilience. He says: "The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better."³

Scientists say this is how evolution works. Changes in the environment are often very sudden. Species have to adapt quickly to this new stress if they want to survive.

Many do not succeed. But the ones that do come up with innovative techniques to make their ecosystemsComplex networks of living things that rely on each other to survive. hardier.

For example, great white sharks used to be solitary hunters. But Planet Earth III shows they have evolved the ability to hunt in packs to take on bigger targets, like a seal colony.

It is a technique that humans have already applied in some areas. Engineers increasingly design everything from bridges to aircraft not just to survive damage, but to become stronger because of it.⁴

Yes: The world has already experienced five mass extinctions, each one killing 70-90% of all species.⁵ Nature has always come back stronger. 

No: Nature certainly recovers from disasters, but that does not mean it comes back stronger. It has no way of predicting what the world will look like in future, so it cannot prepare itself. That is why it is suffering so much now.

Or... There is no question nature will survive climate breakdown. What will not survive is the world as it is now, in all its wonder and glory. We are not looking to preserve nature for itself, but for ourselves.