Summaries:
Reflection / Discussion:
- In the first video, ‘Amazon: Land of the Flooded Forest’, covers the variety of species that live in the Amazon, both Rainforest and River, and how during 6 months out of the year, these species have to cohabitate due to the flooding of the Amazon River. The video talks about a couple interesting species (fruit eating tambaqui fish and the river dolphin) and how they evolved to be able to exist in this bizarre environment.
- The second video, ‘Golden Amazon’, describes the effects of exploiting the natural resources of the Amazon, via fishing, mining, and lumber. Although seemingly biased to the lumber industry, it still manages to raise a few good points, it shows the human desire to be rich, and our desire to break the land to our will, even after it has cause irreparable damage to the locals, the prospectors, and the land.
- Video number three, ‘I Have Seen the Earth Change’, focuses on the natural effects of living in the Amazon Rainforest, and how the weather can go from being barren and dry, to flooded under an inordinate amount of river water in the blink of an eye. The video then goes on to describe and show how the people have adapted to this recurring event in order to get by in a hostile land.
- The last video, ‘An Untamed Wilderness’, covers rare and endangered species that exist, either exclusively or primarily, in the Amazon. This video goes through the daily life and habits of such exotic and rare animals by the use of hidden cameras, and while these camera are scattered throughout the Rainforest, it reveals the primal beauty of the jungle, and, although shorter than the rest, is as informative, in its own way, as the rest.
Reflection / Discussion:
- ‘Amazon: Land of the Flooded Forest’ was, I feel, the most well balanced between nature itself, and animal existence. It also did a great job keeping the viewer entertained, cause who doesn’t love William Shatner? Besides the great narration, and fantastic balance between what the other videos were showing, this Nat Geo video had great shots of nature and its interactions. This was my favorite video of the four that we had to watch.
- ‘Golden Amazon’ on the other hand, was my least favorite. This is mainly because of the fact that it was littered with propaganda for the logging industry, at least I found it to be this way. Throughout the entire video, it shows the evil and horrors of mining (primary) nut always tries to portray logging as a good alternative, especially as is. Now while logging is necessary, to a very limited extent, logging the the Rainforest doesn’t work because the trees have the nutrients, and when you log, it removes the nutrients from the ecosystem and everything dies.
- ‘I Have Seen the Earth Change’ was a very interesting video to watch because of the fact that it just covered a natural phenomena and how humans have to adjust their lifestyles to fit into this world, instead of trying to break the environment to fit their desires. Solely because of this, the ‘peaceful’(for lack of a better word) interaction between humans and nature, which has grown to be a rather rare occurrence, this video was fascinating.
- ‘An Untamed Wilderness’ was interesting in its own right. It removed the human portion of the interaction and tried to completely capture animals in their natural habitat without the interference of humans. This was pretty cool to watch, because everything acts differently when it’s being watched, this includes animals, who will normally hide from sight when they sense humans.