Life...

Yesterday saw the 3rd episode of the latest extraordinary offering from those clever bod’s at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol. ‘Life’ has a broad remit, uncovering how every animal and plant group live, breed and survive, sometimes seemingly against all the odds.

This week it was our turn, well mammals at least. We humans weren’t referred to explicitly, but clearly lessons for our own survival, and success, were strongly inferred. As ever beautiful filming, and wry observations from Sir Richard, told a series of remarkable stories of how the particular features of mammalian life meant we are on to a winner in the survival stakes.

Clearly the ability to generate warmth with within our bodies and feed our own young was useful, especially if you were a seal in an Antarctic blizzard. Having your legs directly under your body certainly gives you an advantage if your trying to outrun a lizard, not something I’d ever had cause to be thankful for previously. The ability to learn from, and across, generations is certainly more widely appreciated, and not only by baby elephants pulled out of mud-holes by their grand-mothers.

Most of all though this was a story about the power of community. Whether it was a hyena, struggling to confront a pride of lions on his own, but far better equipped when joined by his clan, or the complex division of labour in a meerkat colony. A reindeer, keeping safe and mobile among the herd, but still prepared to leave it for days on end to search for one missing calf, or a polar bear willing to risk its life to forage for a rare meal for it’s cub. A key ingredient of our collective success was our sense of family, our inbuilt capacity for relationship.

A week ago I had an invitation to a book launch. A small book with a large claim, ‘The Best Idea in The World’. The strap-line, ‘How putting relationships first transforms everything’. It’s funny how the same ideas keep coming up, perhaps because they’re important, and right.