求《自然界大事件》大融化英文原稿

You can't watch a good nature documentary in a hurry, so this complex six-show series on Discovery won't mean much to casual channel-surfers.

But anyone who enjoys sitting back to savor the beauty and wonder of the planet where we all spend a little time will find it visually stunning.

Most of us will also learn a few things and be reminded of a few others - like the fact that the phrase "a cruel world" is not an abstract figure of speech.

The events chronicled in these episodes might seem almost random: the summer ice melt in the Arctic, a salmon run, the flooding of an African plain, a plankton bloom in the Pacific, the wildlife migration on the Serengeti and South Africa's sardine run.

But the more you watch, the more you'll realize how much they all have in common.

"Can of sardines" looks more like an ocean of sardines here, an endless wave of fish determined to survive by sheer numbers.

Far less crowded is the Arctic, whose brief summer is the subject of tonight's first episode. But we see the same forces and instincts driving the lives of its fauna as we tour some of the most forbidding territory anywhere.

For two or three months every summer, and only for those months, everything thaws just enough to sustain and renew life for the handful of critters who live there. Polar bears above the ice, seals below. Birds nesting on sheer cliffs, the Arctic fox waiting below to devour the birds that fall short when they try to make the long glide off those cliffs to the safety of the water.

"Survival of the fittest" is another phrase that's not just a figure of speech here. If an Arctic fox has a litter of eight, odds are that two will survive. Six of 10 polar bear cubs die in their first year.

Life is equally unsentimental for the salmon and the Serengeti wildlife, yet those who survive instinctively return each year to do what all salmon and zebras before them have done.

Tying all these segments together is the deceptively complex rhythm of nature. Some of the results are random - which antelope stumbles at the wrong time, which salmon make it past the grizzlies - but collectively, it's all part of the one pattern.

By devoting six hours to this series, Discovery also doesn't try to jazz up nature, give it a peppy soundtrack and pretend we can rewire it to our pace.

The antelope, or the plankton, move as they are programmed to move - and no matter how smart we think we are, that's how it is.

If we come away from this series with nothing more than the reminder we don't run this planet, that's not a bad couple of nights' work.