Original air dates: 19 January – 12 April 1984
Following up the series Life on Earth is a difficult thing to ask. Luckily Attenborough does it in his own way. Like its predecessor this series is split into several miniseries, but differently from it this one does not follow a strict story line since it is more theoretical. Being about living organisms’ reaction with the environment it is obviously of fundamental importance to understand the environment. The second half of the first programme deals with geology and reveals that Attenborough is not only brilliant at explaining biology but also geology.
The first programme stands apart from the rest of them in two ways: The programme itself is split into two halves, one of them being in the books treated as a prologue, being a decent summary of plant and animal adaptation to elevation (altitude) and its inevitable decreasing warmth, the second being about geology and how life returns no matter what has happened.
The next four programmes cover the various zones of the globe (on dry land) starting with the coldest (the poles and the high mountains) and ending in the warmest ones (the deserts), the impact of amount of light, water and warmth on global distribution of life.
The next few deal with ranging from the effects of water in its various forms through island ecology ending, like the earlier series, with a coverage of man and his influence.
These two halves are joined by a single programme on the effects of gravity ingeniously connecting to the latter half by following a single rain drop.