I’m tempted to title this Update written in the last days of October, an ‘Octopus Update’, as one of the most impactful events of the past month for me personally was watching the Netflix film, My Octopus Teacher. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend this other-worldly exploration of the bond built up over a year between a film-maker and a common octopus (Octopus vulgaris). There is nothing ‘common’ or ‘vulgar’ about the octopus star of the film, nor in the deep nature connection and healing that Craig Foster, the film-maker suffering from career burn-out and emotional withdrawal from his own human family, finds from studying and interacting with the octopus over the short, intense and dramatic single year of her life amidst the kelp forests of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. There you go, I‘ve referred to the octopus as ‘her’. The film flickers like the beams of sunlight distorted through the icy-cold seawater between scientific detachment and the anthropomorphising of an animal. One considered to be the most ‘alien-like’ life form on our planet, which with no skeleton, can flow like liquid through the narrowest spaces in the reef, hop out of the water to ‘walk’ across a rock to escape a predatory pyjama shark, and whose ‘brain’ is as much located in its 8 tentacles and 2,000 suckers as its ‘head’. The ‘money shot’ of the film is when the octopus tentatively stretches out one tentacle to touch and fathom the finger of the film-maker who’s immersed himself in her world. I watched My Octopus Teacher over the same period the Royal Society’s biological research journal Proceedings B published its alarming findings that two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef had been damaged by ‘back to back bleachings’ caused by climate change, with more than half of all coral populations and types lost. And not long after watching our patron David Attenborough’s A Life On Our Planet (see link below), documenting his experiences and awakening alarm at the despoiling of the extraordinary diversity of life that he has been privileged to witness. Again the programme makers presented the scientific facts, but showed Attenborough’s obvious empathy and emotional connection with the natural world, equivalent to that Michelangelo-esque Sistine Chapel image of the octopus tentacle to finger-tip with the human. In this case, as the camera held in close-focus on Attenborough’s face, his characteristic mellifluous voice muted, his emotional anguish at the rending of nature, the breaking of the myriad connections and synergies with the wild – without which our lives and potential as a species are diminished – was palpably clear. My point? Our work must be underpinned by scientific evidence, but what engages people are not the facts alone but the associated stories that provoke personal, emotional responses and that deeper nature connection. - Robin Maynard, Director, Population Matters
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