A race worth racing

A new film is a poignant call to action for saving the planet's vanishing species

The last male of the species (of a bird) is singing for the female, which will never come," remarks a senior scientist from Cornell University in Discovery Channel's latest offering, Racing Extinction. The film, directed by Louie Psihoyos, is an attempt to make humans aware of the massive havoc they are knowingly and unknowingly wreaking on their planet.

The film records interviews of various environmental scientists and activists, who explain how human greed is gradually destroying and disrupting the ecological balance. It gives a chilling account of the thriving shark fin trade in China. Undercover operations carried out by Psihoyos and his group of photojournalists reveal the cruel nature of this business. The sharks are captured and their fins removed, after which they are thrown back into the ocean. In a particularly heart-breaking scene, the director shows an underwater shot of a shark struggling to swim without fins.

Sharks have, as the film says, predated dinosaurs. They have survived a number of major extinctions. "In the generation that I have been alive, a sweeping number of sharks have vanished," says the director in the film.

The film talks of Cornell University's bioacoustics library that is the world's largest repository of animal sounds. These sounds have been accumulated since the 1930s. A scientist interviewed in the film, Chistopher W Clark, Johnson Senior Scientist at the Cornell Bioacoustics Research Program, describes how they have designed recording systems that are thrown into the ocean. These systems record the sounds of every species in the environment. In one of these recordings, he plays the sound of a bird singing. The recording only has the male voice of the Ho-oh bird, singing for the female, but the female never returns the call. The male bird was the last living creature of its species. By the time the recording ends, the male voice too fades away. In the lifetime of these recordings, about 70 years, many of the species that had been recorded are now extinct. The library itself is a proof of the massive rate at which species are vanishing from the planet.

The film very poignantly narrates how the entire universe is singing. From the frozen Antarctic to the vast forests of Africa, there is music everywhere. But humans have stopped listening to this music.

This extinction of species is driven by a change in the environment, especially the devastating changes in the oceans. There have been five extinctions, caused by a different environmental factor each time. But one common factor in all these events has been a massive increase in carbon dioxide levels. Even so, the emission levels have never been this high. The oceans have turned increasingly acidic, where an entire variety of species could almost literally dissolve.

The film's aim is to educate the viewers about their actions. It painstakingly interviews with a host of experts to drive home the point that we are responsible for destroying our own planet. The cause is aided by captivating visuals. The beauty of the underwater shots makes the irony starker. In about 90 minutes, the film presents the various facets of environment pollution, putting human intervention under the scanner. It is a silent urge to the audience to listen to the music of the planet and embrace solutions that would ensure a thriving, bio-diverse world for the future generations.

Racing Extinction will air on the Discovery Channel on December 2, 9 pm onwards