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. Halfway across the world, British children are awestruck at the wonders of the natural world.

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 where he once filmed the first steps of the world's newest members is sinking beneath the waves.

Critics are calling Planet Earth III Attenborough's masterpiece. He is a master of scale: from soaring overhead shots of vast deserts, down to the minute world of a tiny archer fish that shoots water at insects overhead to bring them tumbling into its hungry mawSomething that seems to surround and absorb everything near it..

He is a master of colour, from deep ocean blues to crisp bright white snow to the deep yellow of a sea angel's hungry belly.

And he is a master of sound: thrumming, agitated strings mark the deadly stakes of a fight between seals and great white sharks, and deep brass underlines the majesty of an Arctic sunset.

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 they rely on for life.

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

Some scientists now think this is how evolution works. In the past, evolution was thought to be a gradual and continuous process. But new evidence suggests it actually comes in fits and bursts, with periods of rapid change punctuating long epochsParticular periods in history. of stasisA period in which there is no activity or everything stays the same. .

This is because 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 ecosystems 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.