Our Planet, the U.N. climate change report, and why fear of the future is finally sinking in.

Netflix recently released a new nature documentary series, Our Planet, and its bland title is only the first indication that it is attempting to compete with the BBC’s popular Planet Earth and Blue Planet series. While the BBC series tend to save any discussion of climate change and human devastation for the end of episodes or, more often, the last episode of each season, in Our Planet, the narrative beat “ … and we’re destroying them” seems to recur in every segment. On Monday, the United Nations released the first iteration of its latest report on how human beings are screwing up the planet, taking an expansive view of all types of human-driven harms, from land use to pollution to climate change, and concluding, as the New York Times summarized in its headline, that “humans are speeding extinction and altering the natural world at an ‘unprecedented’ pace.” This follows October’s terrifying report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the one that teens have been using as their evidence that we have just 12 years to turn this ship around before things get really bad. “Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded,” Brad Plumer’s Times story begins.