Get ready for the Pandageddon. PBS is launching Earth: A New Wild, an ambitious new nature show which aims to show how humans and nature depend on each other. Host M. Sanjayan spent two years shooting footage for the series. A preview released by PBS shows Sanjayan visiting fourteen ludicrously cute baby pandas at China’s Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.
“Here’s this animal that’s almost cartoonish — that has these Facebook pages and birthday parties and you know, iconic cartoonish — it doesn’t even look like a real animal,” Sanjayan said. “Yet the Chinese have now cracked the code on how to breed them. And actually how to take a captive-born animal and put it back in the wild, which is really the holy grail of re-wilding.” Mashable reports that in other episodes “Sanjayan shows how tigers coexist with communities in densely-populated Bangladesh, learns about an Arctic tradition of castrating reindeer with one’s teeth and visits an Amazonian tribe that has never had any human contact with the outside world.” Earth: A New Wild premieres on February 4th.
