What are your favorite nature documentaries that DO talk about human beings, but NOT in a way that sounds like humans just suck? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Prompted by a post from @krishnanrohit: "I'm once again registering my annoyance at the fact that EVERY SINGLE NATURE DOCUMENTARY talks about how humans suck. Literally every single one. I am so tired of explaining to my 7yo son that no humans are not destroying everything. That he can be optimistic. It's obscene."

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

I like the documentaries that show how some renegade humans are trying to save a small percentage of the remaining life from other humans.

Those are my truest heroes .

Please remember individual humans do not suck, but any large group we make is deadly

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

any large group we make is deadly

This is basically our challenge, finding ways to organize large numbers of ourselves in ways that are far less exploitative of other humans, and other life, than the systems we have going now. Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything suggests it's not quite as hopeless as many believe.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

I also think our primate brains simply cannot handle being in a group larger than some small number; and most of us have lost the ability to shrink back down to that level of interactions for sustaining ourselves .

So we have exceeded our design parameters.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'm with that the question of scale is very, very important. [edit: LOL, forgot I'd already mentioned it!] Graeber & Wengrow (Dawn of Everything) pulled together a bunch of research on there being plenty of past, larger societies which did not yield self-/other-destructive habits. But we certainly have a lot to learn about living together, especially in the large groups/networks/etc. we now have. Participedia is a good source for things in that direction. Mini-publics, citizen assemblies, sortition, a variety of good facilitation methods, online tools such as Pol.is, are all ideas/areas that explore how to do better at this. Healthy Democracy is one of the larger organizations working on related stuff in the USA, a smaller one I'm involved with is https://www.co-intelligence.institute/

Their Wise Democracy deck: https://www.wd-pl.com/

Deck about group patterns: https://groupworksdeck.org/

this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025

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