‘How to Live On Earth’: the “world’s greatest how-to video” wants us to rethink how we invest, eat and live

In the first part of the film, Mexican climate justice activist Xiye Bastida asks how we are valuing nature as she explores the financial drivers of nature loss. Among the people she meets are economists Ralph Chami and Douglas Eger, who are working to create a financial system that values all the services that nature provides—and where, as the film puts it, “green is the new gold”.

As Devas says, “We’re very good at valuing [nature] when we extract from it, like felling a forest for timber. We’re just not so good at valuing everything that nature gives us that we depend on, like clean air, clean water, healthy soils.”

The way we value nature is the aspect that particularly stayed with composer Jacob Shea, who worked on the film. “A thriving natural system is invisible to the market, but essential for the survival of all species,” Shea tells Tatler. “Building an infrastructure that makes the health of the planet an investable asset would be a massive correction to our current setup.”

The second part of How to Live on Earth turns to food and how we feed the future without devouring the planet. Sam Kass, former White House chef and senior policy adviser for nutrition, travels from Brazilian cattle ranches to alternative-protein kitchens in New York and the waters of the Bahamas. Here, the film explores ways of reducing the pressure food production places on ecosystems, from agroforestry and sustainable farming practices to alternative proteins.

One example is striking: lionfish hunting in the Bahamas. The invasive species has proliferated in the Americas, putting pressure on reef ecosystems, and eating it becomes one example of how human consumption could potentially help address an ecological problem.

The third part of the film follows Dan O’Neill, a field biologist, wildlife filmmaker and explorer, as he investigates the relationship between biodiversity and human well-being—from forests in Mexico to nature-based programmes in Seoul and urban ecosystems in Singapore.

In Seoul, O’Neill meets a member of the Korean Forest Service who helps cancer patients, stressed workers and city dwellers connect with nature. In Singapore, meanwhile, he explores how a densely populated modern city can make room for nature to flourish.

For O’Neill, this isn't simply about conservation.

“People are more disconnected from the natural world than at any point in our history, and that disconnection has real consequences. If people never spend real time in the wild, it almost doesn't feel real to them, rather than something we're all part of and responsible for,” O’Neill tells Tatler. With 50 per cent of the world now living in urban environments, and an expected 75 per cent by 2050, he says that “we need messages like this more urgently than ever to remind us all of what we are, animals ourselves, evolved by and dependent on the same systems we’re watching disappear.”

What distinguishes How to Live on Earth is its insistence on hope.

The film features 20 contributors, including scientists, economists, Indigenous activists, farmers and incarcerated people, with filming spanning countries including Ecuador, Brazil, China, Chad, the Maldives, Singapore and the US. Its stories range from dam removal in California and elephant conservation in Chad to coral restoration in the Maldives using the soundtrack of a healthy reef, and communities in China hand-pollinating fruit trees as declining pollinator populations threaten agricultural production.

“This is a genuinely hopeful film, and I hope it makes people feel excited that good things are not only possible, but already happening,” says O’Neill. “I also hope it entertains, because entertainment is one of the most effective tools we have for creating change. People remember what moves them or makes them laugh far longer than they remember a statistic. And I hope the film becomes another tool in the fight to build a system where we all value nature for what it actually is: an absolute necessity to our existence.”

We are all aware that nature matters. The challenge is figuring out how to build systems that behave as though it does.

That could mean changing how capital values a standing forest. It could mean redesigning food production so that feeding people does not require degrading the ecosystems on which future food production depends. It could mean building cities that recognise access to nature as part of human well-being.

And perhaps that is the bigger question How to Live on Earth poses: what happens when humanity stops treating nature as something outside the systems of modern life, and starts recognising it as the foundation on which those systems depend?

Cumberbatch frames the human story as four chapters: first, the planet exists before life; then life evolves; then intelligent life evolves and becomes a threat to the planet; and finally, perhaps, intelligent life becomes a positive force for it.

The question, as the film asks it, is whether we can move into that fourth chapter.

The answer is not to invent an entirely new world. “We wanted audiences to discover that a future in which humankind works with nature, rather than against it, may not be far away,” says Jonnie Hughes, producer and executive producer on the film, and co-founder of Open Planet Studios. “The truth is, we humans now know ‘how to live on Earth’, we just have to put things in place.”

How to Live on Earth premieres globally on YouTube on September 20 at 7pm BST.

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