At the head of Ishibishi Falls, on the Klamath River, a man who first learned to walk on these rocks at four years old stood watching water run clear for the first time in over a century. The salmon had returned. Not slowly, not partially: within the very first year after four dams came down, the fish traveled more than 200 miles to spawning grounds no one seriously expected them to reach so quickly. That moment – a single man, a cold river, a fish he estimated at 25 pounds while the guy across the water called it 50 – sits at the center of a sweeping question the documentary ‘How to Live on Earth’ sets out to answer: can humans actually become a positive force on this planet, or are we too late to try?
When the bees stopped coming and the drones couldn’t fill in
The film opens not in a rainforest or an ocean but in an orchard, in what the documentary describes as the biggest pear-growing area in the world. It is spring, and farmers are walking the rows with feather dusters. Since the 1980s, pesticide use inadvertently wiped out the local pollinator population. Now human workers hand-pollinate trees on an industrial scale, collecting blossom, separating stamens by machine, drying the flowers, and extracting the pollen. Farmers experimenting with drones to replace the humans who replaced the bees found the spray could not match the precision of a human hand. As the film notes, nothing can match the bees and other pollinators that are needed for 75% of the cultivated crops humans grow. The orchard is a preview of the three puzzles the film argues humanity must solve: how to value nature, how to feed the future, and how to feel human.
Shia Bastida, from the Ottomi people of central Mexico, carries the first puzzle personally. Her community’s wetland, tended for millennia, dried up entirely in the 1960s when Mexico City redirected the water. It has since returned to health, but industrial parks and factories now press in from every direction, offering money for the land. The problem, she says, is not that people are greedy. It is that the financial system assigns no price to a living wetland’s services. Economist Douglas Edgar is trying to change that by creating natural asset companies: legal entities built around living ecosystems whose share price rises as the ecosystem heals. He puts the value of a healthy wetland at 25 to 50 thousand dollars per acre per year in services including clean air, clean water, and carbon storage. ‘Biodiversity is bankable,’ the film declares. ‘People who own land full of nature will become the richest people on Earth.’
Feeding eight billion people without swallowing the planet
Sam Kass, a former senior policy adviser and White House chef who now cooks mainly for his own children, walks through the protein problem in a kitchen that feels deliberately ordinary. Globally, agriculture is the biggest driver of nature loss. Livestock currently occupies an area the size of North and South America combined, and today humans, cattle, sheep, pigs, and pets together make up 95% of the weight of all mammals on Earth. Wild mammals have fallen to just 5%. The film traces one cattle farmer in Brazil who cleared his land and has now begun planting cacao, putting the forest back as shade cover. Bearing witness to deforestation, Kass describes the sound of trees being knocked down: ‘it was literally raining destruction.’ Two operators, he was told, could clear 90 hectares in 90 days.
The alternatives are arriving. A Michelin-star chef named Greg is cooking with a protein grown from air, a product with a flavor he describes as faintly umami and nearly neutral, which disappears entirely into a carrot crepe. He is also working with mycelium farmed in tanks, noting that a blended sausage using part real pork and part mycelium still delivers the depth of flavor most people want while carrying a third of daily protein and a third of daily fiber per serving. Lion fish, an invasive Pacific species now spreading through the Atlantic with no natural predators and the ability to kill up to 90% of juvenile native fish on a reef within five weeks, is also on the menu. One female lays 2 million eggs at a time. Eating it, the film argues cheerfully, is one of the few dietary choices that actively repairs an ecosystem.
A small turtle named Yellow
Inside a prison, a man who describes himself as someone who has spent years being ‘that guy’ holds a small sea turtle named Yellow in a tank of water. Yellow is endangered, sick, and temporary. He is also in the same situation. ‘We’re both going to be out of here,’ he tells the turtle quietly. ‘You’re going to be out of here. I’m going to be out of here. This is just a little bump in the road for us.’
The Klamath River’s recovery took 20 years of legal battle, half a billion dollars in dam removal and restoration costs, and produced what the film calls the largest river restoration project in the history of the United States. The salmon were not supposed to reach the upper spawning grounds in the first year. There were elders who fought their whole lives for dam removal and did not live to see it. The man standing at Ishibishi Falls said a prayer for them, then watched the water run cold and clear, carrying fish home to a river that had been sick for over a century and was now, visibly, healing fast.
