The Garden (for the BBC); no US release date announced
AS A committed urbanite, I would never swap the industrial chic of my home city of Wolverhampton, UK, for a vista of rolling hills and dales, let alone tropical rainforests or mountain peaks. For me, and for billions like me, the glories of untamed nature feel a planet away.
Wilderness with Simon Reeve, a four-part BBC travel documentary, aims to fill this gap. Reeve and his crew seek out corners of our rapidly urbanising globe so far relatively untouched by humanity. Travelling across rainforests and ice fields, deserts and oceans, including the Pacific Ocean鈥檚 Coral Triangle, and Patagonia, they reveal the pressures there and how we might protect them 鈥� from us.
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Travel programmes have a rather queasy relationship with conservation, predicated as they are on 鈥渟elling鈥� a destination. When it comes to the places least influenced by humans (the idea of 鈥減ristine鈥� nature is an enduring, appealing myth), I am wary that glossy travelogues can lead to mass tourism and damage.
Happily, based on its first episode, seems more about finding a balance between 鈥渞ight鈥� and 鈥渨rong鈥� kinds of tourism. In this instalment, we visit the Congo basin, home to the world鈥檚 second-largest tropical forest, which stretches for more than 2 million square kilometres across central Africa. The three-week journey begins along the Republic of the Congo鈥檚 Motaba river in search of the Baku, hunter-gatherers who live nomadically in the jungle.
After an old-fashioned knees-up to welcome Reeve, several young Baku men agree to take a camera as they climb 20 metres into the tree canopy. One man thrusts his arm into a beehive and extracts a luminescent haul of honeycomb.
This is just one example of the extraordinary nature in the Congo rainforest. For me, it epitomised the joy and surprise I felt learning about this region and its people, who aren鈥檛 treated as quasi-mystical custodians of arcane knowledge, but as an adaptable, conscientious community moving with the times.
The Baku face a huge risk from deforestation: not only has it brought them into hostile contact with neighbouring villages, it has also forced them to venture into areas where mosquitoes thrive. If someone contracts malaria, the group can sometimes be four days away from medical care, meaning child mortality rates are high.
In this first leg, Reeve is joined by , a wildlife criminal investigator who runs a network of informers working to prevent illegal forest clearances. He steals the show, especially when he scrutinises African redwoods for illegal felling.
Once Reeve and the team cross into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they look for bonobos. Here, the show feels more like a traditional travel series, all boiling heat and swarms of insects.
But despite the difficult trek, Reeve provides an ebullient precis of the importance of these apes, one of our closest relatives. The peaceful, largely female-dominated social structure of bonobos hints at a different side of human evolution compared with their cousins, the chimpanzees.
All told, the first episode is informative and entertaining. I still have reservations about the impact of such travel shows on conservation, but the series makes a strong case that the first step to preserving an ecosystem is to see its value. Wilderness with Simon Reeve does that in spades.
Bethan also recommends鈥�
BBC iPlayer
This uplifting two-part series highlights amazing conservation wins in Europe, such as the comeback of Scotland鈥檚 capercaillie.
Curzon Home Cinema
Hang Son Doong in Vietnam is the world鈥檚 largest cave system. Plans to make it more accessible to tourists are being resisted by environmentalists, as this documentary explores.
Bethan Ackerley is a subeditor at New Scientist. She loves sci-fi, sitcoms and anything spooky. She is still upset about the ending of Game of聽Thrones. Follow her on
Twitter @鈥宨nkerley
