How PBS Makes Evolutionary Biology Exciting for the Masses With “Human Footprint”

“I've always loved nature shows but I've never seen a nature show that was made for me and the homies,” composer Adrian Younge said of Human Footprint, a new six-part PBS documentary series about mankind’s impact on planet Earth. As a composer on films like Black Dynamite and an arranger/producer on songs for artists like Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar, Adrian Younge was excited to share his passion for this new series during a TCA press tour in January. “I've never seen a nature show where we're all getting something to eat and we've gotta talk about what we watched last night.”

“One of the strengths of the show is that they’re presenting the world as it is and trying to show people how it functions, and it’s not moralizing,” explained Bill Gardner, VP of multiplatform programming and head of development for general audience programming at PBS. “It’s not trying to say this action is better than others, but our actions have repercussions and just understand them and help us make better choices by being informed.”

Human Footprint is hosted by Shane Campbell-Staton, a biology professor at Princeton University who also taught at UCLA. “I spend literally every hour of every day thinking about humans as engines of evolutionary change,” the American evolutionary biologist shared. As a Ph.D. who has dedicated his career to this field, he found that the unique approach of the series was an eye opening experience. “I considered myself an expert, but I also realize how narrow my vision of the topic was coming at it strictly as an evolutionary biologist. Having conversations with people who are intimately connected to all of the ideas that we explore really clarified my understanding of who we are as a force of nature. It’s interesting because I bring a certain expertise as a practicing evolutionary biologist, and I think that it has informed how we go about science communication. The most surprising thing during this whole process [has been] the science communication and being able to figure out what these stories are, how to tell these stories. Interacting with these people has fundamentally made me a better biologist. I see my field in a different light now. I understand the questions in a different way, and I can approach them now with a breadth and an artistry that I wasn’t able to before. It just really highlights the importance of connecting the scientific community and the broader public around conversations that unite the two.”

“It's a leading cause of zoonotic disease; It causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the transportation sources combined,” added Eat Just, Inc. co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrick about how meat consumption affects the world. “The vast majority of people today in the US and around the world don't feel anything about it because they're not thinking about it,” Josh added, having successfully launched the plant-based egg substitute Just Egg and in development on lab-grown meat. “What's been done here is important because it gets people thinking about it. And eventually, our goal is to try to give people all the meat and the eggs they want without half the world being used to make it happen, without all the harm that's being caused.” And while lab-grown meat isn’t exactly a lower carbon option, it would be a reduction and at this point, anything is better than nothing. “The impact is coming from the energy used in the facility… The second area where there’s emissions is we need to source the feed for the cell. So amino acids, sugars, and salts. And there’s a carbon impact, a land/water impact [that’s] about 80% less intensive than both chicken and beef. Not nearly as good as kale, corn, arugula, squash, apples, blueberries. So if people would universally just eat those things instead of meat then we wouldn’t even be in business and would be happy about that. It’s just a recognition that doing something that is better doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but it does mean it’s better.”

“The big challenge for us was figuring out how to find the human stories that would allow us to reveal the facts in an engaging, exciting way that we could explore those facts in the context of human culture and human society,” series producer Nathan Dappen concluded about the commitment to making Human Nature both entertaining and informative. “How do we tell a story of Asian carp as an invasive species? Well, the Redneck Fishing Tournament was a fantastic way of doing that. There’s lots of examples like that where it was really difficult to find the right folks to tell these stories in a way that connected the facts to something emotional, something cultural.” Behind the scenes, the creative team is also doing everything they can to reduce their footprint on the world. “Our team will be offsetting our carbon for our flights. We went to 45 cities, interviewed hundreds of people, traveled to some of the most remote parts of the globe. So there was definitely an impact there, but I think that all of us are pretty conscious of that and tried to make efforts where we could. It’s impossible to make a show like this, or any of the shows that any of us make, without having some kind of impact. But we’re trying.”

Human Footprint premieres tonight at 9/8c on PBS, with episodes airing on Wednesdays at that same time through August 9th. Check out the full episode schedule below.