New Republic:

The popular conception of a lemming blindly rushing to its death does a poor job of describing the animal’s nature, but an excellent job of describing human nature—lemmings has entered the vernacular to denote any group of unthinking followers hastening their own demise.

To paraphrase Voltaire’s chestnut on God, since no animal that regularly commits mass suicide exists, it was necessary to invent one. We turn to nature documentaries not to understand nature, but to see our own behavior reflected back at us. The natural world—wild, chaotic, mutable—can be endlessly recut to tell whatever story we need to tell ourselves.

Like many of us here in Canada and the US, as a kid I sat down on Sunday evening’s to watch “The Wonderful World of Disney”. They often had “documentaries” about various animals. As an adult, I learned many of them weren’t in fact documentaries but often staged to get the desired response from the audience. I still like nature documentaries (I’m a huge fan of the “Planet Earth” series) but I’m much more wary of the staging that is possible.