Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic ADVERTISEMENTFrom mountain gorillas on the border of Rwanda, via late cocaine baron Pablo Escobar\u2019s escaped hippos in Colombia, to island reserves where endangered Australian bandicoots can flourish away from predators introduced by misguided humans, a new documentary brings visually stunning views of successful wildlife restoration projects to the big screen \u2013 but skirts some weighty political questions.\u201cWhat is the cost of indifference, when is the point of no return,\u201d begins the emotive narration by three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep. A whistle-stop tour of global environmental destruction, from cleared rainforest to bleached coral reefs answers the first question. The second is left hanging.But that is not the point of the film, producer and director Matthew Brady said after a European premier in the European Parliament. \u201cI think the message of hope was really important to me in this film because we watched so many movies that are doom and gloom,\u201d Brady said. \u201cThis was a film where there’s actually positive things happening in the world.\u201dThere\u2019s a substantial section about the efforts to restore gorilla populations in Rwanda, from a perilously low 200 in the 1980s to over 1,000 at the last count. The film presents the argument that tourism can be a force for good \u2013 with rich visitors paying substantial sums to get close to their distant cousins, some of which can be ploughed back into local communities.A central theme is connectedness. Take sea otters on the Pacific coast of America, hunted to near extinction for their fur. The removal of this apex predator meant sea urchins ran riot, virtually eliminating the giant kelp from the coast of California. Now populations are growing, the otters are acting as unwitting custodians of growing patches of biodiverse kelp forest.Didactic by turns, the film gives a useful primer on invasive alien species, using as a cautionary tale Australia, where rabbits and foxes ran amok after being introduced by European settlers. Feral camels (ditto, via the Canary Islands, of all places) are now routinely culled from helicopters. Incidentally, the film also explores the morality of such culls.It culminates in a plea for recognition of the valuable role indigenous populations \u2013 who, surprisingly, retain strong links to a quarter of the world\u2019s land surface \u2013 can play in nature restoration and stewardship. More broadly, it makes the case \u2013 as in gorilla tourism \u2013 for demonstrating to local communities, whether indigenous or not, that they can make a better living through protecting and restoring nature than by treating it as a resource to be exploited.Meryl Streep driven to drinkThe narrator isn\u2019t new to environmental and social activism. Streep had recently co-founded \u2018Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet\u2019 \u2013 a campaign sparked by a pesticide scandal \u2013 when she played a disillusioned activist pouring her heart out to barman Kevin Costner in a 1990 Earth Day special.In 2015 the actress became the figurehead of a campaign for the release of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, who had been sentenced to 20 years in a Russian penal colony following the annexation of Crimea (he was released in a prisoner swap in 2019, and went on to make a documentary\u00a0showing the reality of life on the new front line). Last year Streep gave an impassioned plea for women\u2019s rights in Afghanistan \u2013 \u201ca bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not\u201d \u2013 during the UN general assembly.\u201cI know her agent and I approached him and I just said I have this film,\u201d Brady recalled. \u201cThe SAG [Screen Actors\u2019 Guild] strike was almost ending and it was one of those miracle stories\u2026And she agreed to do the film and she’s passionate about animals and the environment as well and wanted to help and lend her voice to help the cause.\u201dThe message of Brady\u2019s film \u2013 a sequel to an earlier production also made for the American Humane Society and narrated by Helen Mirren \u2013 is the same as that in Streep\u2019s two-hander with Costner 35 years ago: you can\u2019t fix it all, but do something.Viewers are advised to choose one species and do what they can for it \u2013 whether through activism or supporting green groups. Don\u2019t be overwhelmed by the scale of the destruction: start small, let a\u00a0 patch of your garden grow wild.\u00a0\u201cI literally do nothing, I just let it grow and leave it alone,\u201d Brady said of his garden back home in California. \u201cAnd that can be very empowering to know that you can help in such a small way.\u201dThe political dimensionTo be fair to the filmmakers, Escape from Extinction \u2013 Rewilding\u00a0was in the can before the Trump II administration began to reveal the full extent of its hostility towards environmental protection \u2013 though, having already pulled out of the global climate effort once and promising to \u201cdrill, baby, drill\u201d while on the campaign trail, the signs were there for all to see.But the absence of a political context in the documentary is somewhat jarring, even if there is a dig at alt-right news outlet Breitbart in a fleeting reference to disinformation. Especially when the European premier was hosted in the shadow of the EU Council building in the heart of the Brussels policy making bubble.ADVERTISEMENTOn this side of the Atlantic, a rightwing pushback against the European Green Deal is gathering momentum even before the ink is dry on a slew of environmental legislation \u2013 including the Nature Restoration Law that sets legally binding targets for precisely the kind of ecosystem restoration advocated in the film.The film praises the 2018 treaty between Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda to cooperate on conservation, but doesn\u2019t mention the threat to wildlife from fighting between M23 insurgents backed by Rwanda and the Congolese armed forces \u2013 not to mention the scramble for raw materials behind the conflagration.Perhaps that is asking too much of a single documentary \u2013 but with the sixth mass extinction already well underway, no alarm bell is one too many, and any call to action must be welcomed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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