[tense music] - [Narrator] For most of us, a volcanic eruption, a hurricane or an earthquake is either a blind cosmic force or an act of God.

But there are those who make such forces their life's work.

For them, it's personal.

In the final episode of "Forces of the Wild", we're going to meet those explorers of planet earth.

They're unconventional, they're risk takers with insights that have brought us to the very edge of human knowledge about the world we live in.

[somber vocal music] - [Announcer] This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- [Narrator] Planet Earth, our home world.

It's a world shaped by forces of monumental power.

Yet that doesn't mean we should see it simply as a raging, savage planet.

There's a raw, humbling beauty in these forces that has always fascinated people, and many scientists and explorers have spent their lives trying to understand the way the world works.

It's these ideas that lie behind the series, "Forces of the Wild."

In this program, we look behind the scenes to hear from some of those people whose work inspired this series, to hear their personal reactions to the power of nature.

- I think in Hawaii where you have volcanoes around you all the time, you just accept that they're there and you accept that if you live down slope of an active volcano, that you may have your house overrun by lava.

[fire crackling] [wind gusting] - To sort of get an idea of the power of one of these, you can compare it to the atomic bomb.

The energy release is something on the order of three or 400 Hiroshima type atomic bombs per hour.

[office crashing] - Scientists don't know how to predict earthquakes.

We really don't know enough about what's going on at depth to issue a short term warning for an earthquake.

- [Narrator] We are still a long way from understanding our planet.

There are many frontiers left to explore if they survive the onslaught of humanity.

[waves crashing] - The most important thing we need to do is to explore and understand what's killing the oceans and therefore harming us in our future, is ignorance.

We know so little.

[waves crashing] - And yet we still operate as if we understood it all and it was all under our command, under our control, we are sort of basically regulating what goes on on the planet, and that's the dominant assumption, that we are in charge.

Everything tells us today that we don't know anything like enough to entertain that illusion of being in charge of anything.

And I guess a sense of scale and our smallness measured against great natural forces like volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, whatever it might be, may just tell us to achieve that philosophical revolution.

- [Narrator] The great shield volcano of Hawaii's big island is the largest volcano on the planet.

It has been erupting continuously for the last 15 years.

John Kjagaard has spent his life here, filming the ever-changing lava flows.

- I started off because I've been attracted to fire, and I think if you're attracted to fire and you live in Hawaii as I do, it's pretty natural that you're gonna end up in one of these volcanoes.

I've been photographing the volcano instills for probably 30 years now, and I like to capture the fluidity of flows and the beauty of color.

And at certain times of the day, like in the dawn and dusk, we have what we call magic hour.

You know, when colors show up so nicely.

So I'd say that my work here is half documenting the scientific side of it, and the other half is the artistic side.

[ominous music] - [Narrator] John's love of the volcano comes through in the beauty of his images, but he never takes it for granted.

However beautiful it looks, a volcano is very dangerous.

- When you're out there, if you wanna get good footage, you've gotta be, what I'd say, in the right place at the right time.

And what you don't wanna be is the wrong place at the wrong time.

You can easily go from being in the very right place to being in the very wrong place in only a few seconds or only a few feet.

The wrong place could say be, the wind may shift, and you may end up in a gas cloud.

And if you'd been only 50 meters away, you wouldn't be in the gas cloud or you may be in very close to a fountain that you're shooting.

And again, the wind changes and you find yourself under a cloud of tephra or Pele's hair or, or just tremendous heat.

A blast of wind may come from someplace that you haven't calculated it to be and the air temperature could go from, you know, normal air temperature of say, you know, a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, up to five or 600 degrees Fahrenheit in two or three seconds.

Almost everything that occurs out there is preceded by a sound.

And you must be able to hear this sound and recognize that it's different from all the other roars and rumbles and rushes and that kind of thing that's going on out there so that you stop.

If you can't figure out what that sound is, then you get out of there immediately.

[volcano rumbling] - [Narrator] Living with a volcano means developing a healthy respect, bordering on fear.

- I think if you're out there and you don't get scared, you should be in another business.

I get scared all the time.

- [Narrator] John is not the only person out on these slopes.

All this activity offers the perfect chance for scientists from the Hawaii Volcano Observatory to study the details of how a volcano works.

- What we have here at at K+lauea is a natural laboratory, a unique opportunity to study an active volcanic eruption.

One that's been ongoing for 14 and a half years.

We can study the changes, however subtle or however dramatic they might be.

We sample the lava routinely.

Hopefully, at least once a week.

The chemistry of these lava samples tell us a lot about what's going on in K+lauea's magma chambers.

Once you work around the volcano enough, you gain an appreciation for what can happen.

And believe me, I'm a lot more cautious than most people.

I'm a lot more jumpy than most people.

Often I'm out with visiting scientists or film crews and other people that aren't as jumpy as I am.

When I hear a noise, I move quickly and only because I have some appreciation of the things that can happen.

But if you've been around it long enough, you gain some appreciation of the behavior and it allows you to make the kinds of measurements that that are very important.

You want to be able to collect lava samples that are directly from the vent and not far away from the vent.

And that's where things are most active.

That's where, you know, the ground is most likely to crack and erupt from new fishers or it's where you're more likely to get large collapses in the ground because the magma is eroding from beneath the surface.

So all of these things come into play when you're trying to make measurements near an active head.

- [Narrator] Lava runs down the flanks of the great volcano and pours into the sea, creating clouds of hydrochloric acid as it reacts with the sea water.

This is the volcano at its most dramatic.

Not surprisingly, John Kjagaard tries to get as close as possible, as safely as possible.

- Of all the filming I've done, the most spectacular day I had was about four years ago.

I was filming a flow going into the ocean from very close when somehow water got into the tube and a tremendous explosion occurred right in front of me, maybe about 50 feet away, and it blew rocks and spatter about 200 meters into the air.

You know, the blast was so big that pieces the size of a bathtub were blown out and the entire first burst went over me, landing as much as a hundred or 150 yards behind me.

And by the time that burst landed, the second burst was airborne.

And I got decked by a piece the size of a trashcan lid on that one.

And before the third burst landed, I managed to grab the camera and run for it.

But it was completely memorable and a tremendous amount of material was being thrown out.

And I think that standing there and also getting knocked down by it just makes you not take anything for granted.

- [Narrator] All volcanoes demand respect, but some are very, very dangerous.

In 1996, the Soufrière Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, re-awoke after hundreds of years of inactivity, most of the time a brooding cloud of dust and steam sits over the peak.

Now and then, a rock fall rattles down as the peak grows in height and collapses again.

[ominous music] And sometimes without warning, a massive explosion of boiling gas and fragments of rock hurdles down the volcano at a hundred miles an hour.

From the air, we can follow this pyroclastic flow as it tears down the valley, but on the ground there's no escape.

The wall of searing heat moves too quickly, it overwhelms everything.

Despite the speed of the pyroclastic flow, and despite its unpredictability, there's one man on Montserrat who's prepared to venture up the smoldering peak on foot, photographer David Lee.

[ominous music] - It's right in here, you start to hear it and it makes your heart beat real fast and essentially, don't do this at home.

And it's hot already and it's spewing right now.

There's an eruption right now on Langs, that's hot stuff going up..

It's falling down to this side.

I'm not gonna stay long at Star River.

She isn't fired up too bad.

What you hear there is rocks coming up and I'm getting outta here.

The whole mountain's shaking.

I'm outta here.

I'm moving.

The whole mountain is quivering and it got real guttural and you can hear stuff dropping all over the place behind me, so I'm getting outta here.

She's blowing hot and heavy behind me.

Right when I walked up to the ridge, she just let loose.

Well, that's what you call in your face.

Do I look scared?

Let me take it and put it on auto.

Now do I look scared?

I'm not outta here yet.

I'm only down about 600 feet.

If the whole thing went, wouldn't have a chance up here.

I think that's the closest I ever thought about being dead.

The whole top of the mountain was just shivering, shivering, shivering, up and down under your feet, and you could feel this awesome power underneath, vibrating wanting to come out.

- [Narrator] And the mountain blew again.

The pyroclastic flow was so powerful, it reached the sea.

This is the first time anyone has filmed such a flow over the water.

Unpredictable events are difficult to study or capture on film and the hardest to predict are earthquakes.

They come without warning and are over in seconds.

In trying to understand them, scientists are faced with an almost impossible challenge.

[plates shattering] [glass shattering] - Earthquakes are a very interesting phenomenon.

We can't predict them and they happen infrequently.

When we want to learn something about an earthquake, we can put all the instruments out that we can think of and then we essentially have to wait for the earth to do its thing.

And sometimes we wait a long time.

- [Narrator] Parkfield California was the obvious place to focus their efforts.

It straddles the San Andrea's fault.

And historical records show that the fault here breaks at regular intervals every 22 years producing earthquakes.

[somber vocal music] To try to capture the event as it happens, cameras are set up to point along the fault line, which is clearly marked out.

When the quake hits, we should for the first time see exactly what happens as the fault breaks.

But 22 years have come and gone and nothing has happened.

And all this equipment needs to be checked, maintained, updated.

- In the early days of the experiment, we were rushing to get the instruments in place because we weren't sure when the earthquake would happen and when the most likely time was about 1988.

Of course, the earthquake hasn't yet happened and we've had some time to examine the recordings from our data.

And clearly the big payoff will come when the earthquake happens because most of the experiments are really designed to record what happened just before, during, and after a significant earthquake.

Well, Fred Fisher designed this camera case, couldn't buy one commercially.

It seems to have held up pretty.

- Yeah, it's aged through the year so far pretty good.

Pretty good.

- Is this the original camera or we've had to replace them?

- No, this is an upgrade.

We decided, or Fred decided that when this, this better camera became available for sighting down the long way down the fault, better optics, a little faster film or shutter speed, that he thought he we'd install this one.

- Oh, and there's the electronics that Fred built.

As I remember, this is designed to turn on about every six minutes to keep the camera in pause mode so it can engage quickly enough to capture the beginning of the earthquake.

- Right, right.

- How many times has this system triggered in an actual earthquake?

- Geez, I can think of at least three other times.

- So it seems to be working fine.

- Right, right.

Catching those earthquakes.

We just need to catch the one we're looking for.

- [Narrator] The fault here still refuses to break.

Bill Bachan and Rich Liecht will just have to be patient.

While Parkfield waits for its big moment, other sections of the San Andrea's fault have broken without warning.

In 1989, San Francisco was badly shaken and in 1994 it was Los Angeles.

The quakes were captured on security videos.

[people screaming] Two continental plates grind and slip past each other along the fault.

As they do, the great cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco are devastated.

[sirens blaring] A serious danger is fire, as fuel pipes break open and heaters ignite.

To find out what it's like to experience a quake of that magnitude and to film it, we couldn't predict one or wait for one to happen, so we had to simulate the ground movement of a severe shock.

This is the full sized ground floor of a house, built and balanced on a central pivot.

- Push up please, push up.

Okay, push down, take it straight.

Here, here, here.

- [Narrator] With enough muscle power, it can be shaken to the same degree as a force eight quake and the house is demolished.

[glass shatters] [glass shattering] [director yelling] [house crashing] [crew applauding] - [Narrator] Meanwhile, in Parkfield, the earth still hasn't moved and the waiting goes on.

- In Parkfield, I've waited longer than I thought I would have to.

I'm still waiting and I'll be happy when the earthquake happens.

- [Narrator] People tracking tropical storms and hurricanes have the opposite problem.

Watching one approaching for at least a week before it hits gives plenty of time to worry about the damage it will do.

Tropical storms are born over the warm waters of the tropical oceans.

- [Reporter] Today, August 17th, the first tropical storm of the 1992 season, tropical storm Andrew is developing in the East Atlantic.

It's currently tracking due west and is expected to turn to the northwest within 24 hours.

- [Narrator] Following these storms and predicting their path is the job of scientists at the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Florida.

- During the hurricane season that goes from June 1st to November the 30th, I'm watching every disturbance that come from Africa all the way to the Pacific.

And if one of those systems develop into a tropical storm or a hurricane, we issue the warnings and we coordinate with all the Caribbean countries.

We coordinate with all the forecast offices in the United States and we try to issue the watches and warnings.

- [Reporter] Tropical Storm Andrew is upgraded to a hurricane.

It is now tracking directly west and gaining strength.

A hurricane watch is posted for the Northwest Bahamas.

[wind gusting] - [Narrator] Hurricane Andrew hit The Bahamas on August 23rd and four people died.

- Normally we can initiate a hurricane warnings for 24 hours and we tell the people there is an area of low pressure, you should listen to the radio in case or TV in case the system develops and we go step by step.

- [Reporter] August 23rd, Hurricane Andrew is now a category four hurricane and has reached the North Bahamas.

Wind speeds of 150 miles per hour have been measured in a storm surge-- - Yeah, when we go to press, we're going to have it over the central part of the island ... - It was a really tough situation.

I was working those days and it really, you can see the big monster coming.

It was really intensifying.

And we know that it's gonna be a disaster for South Florida.

When we have a hurricane that hits land, the ocean come with it.

And that's a big problem because if you have winds, you can hide in a closet, you can hide in a bathroom, but if you have the water, you die.

- [Narrator] When it was clear where Andrew was headed, the hurricane center issued a warning to people along the coast.

- The great fear is that you're going to have this huge traffic jam gridlock, and then the hurricane comes and a car is much more dangerous to be in than a home.

And beside the highway is low lying area, that's gonna be flooded.

And so we're afraid that in that kind of scenario you could lose hundreds.

The only reason we don't say thousands is that we just can't bring ourselves to even imagine a thousand people.

But it's certainly possible.

- [Narrator] Andrew hit Florida just south of Miami in the early hours the morning of August 24th, 1992.

- I have to, I'll use my wife's words.

The other day she saw me on television saying that if you had a plan then you had nothing to worry about.

And if you have a plan, you have less to worry about.

But she said, believe me, you have a lot to worry about because it's extremely noisy.

You think the house may be about to fall apart.

You can literally see the ceiling in the house lifting and you don't know that the roof isn't going to go and you have a lot to worry about.

So what you're really trying to do is find the safest place you can be and then pray a lot.

- Well, I had two things in mind.

One of them, I had to issue the forecast, but on the other hand, I was thinking about my house, I was thinking about my family and it was really tough for me to remain cool and think about the forecast and think about my house at the same time.

It was really bad and it was really for me, a very sad story when I finished working that day and I drove home and I saw so many trees destroyed, so many houses destroyed.

I was almost crying when I was driving home.

- [Narrator] Planet earth is a world of water.

Sea covers 70% of the globe, but we're creatures of the land and still have a lot to learn about our own habitat.

We've barely dipped below the surface of the ocean world.

This is the final frontier.

Just a few bold scientists and explorers are now venturing into this dark world of freezing temperatures and crushing pressures to investigate life in this, the largest part of our planet.

Don Liperatore pilots the Johnson Sea Link Submersible for the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, taking it to depths of 3000 feet.

- As we go down, the pressure is increasing.

Of course, the water pressure is increasing and the sphere actually shrinks.

It's getting smaller in the center.

It comes in three, about three eighths of an inch.

And as it's doing that, you can hear little creeks and groans and moans and you can feel the floorboards actually starting to come up a little bit from that.

Yeah, and the sphere is made outta plexiglass and it's a very good insulator.

So it actually stays pretty warm inside the vehicle, inside the pilot sphere.

So we air condition that.

So there's not really that sense of cold, but what happens is the aluminum structures condense some of the water.

So somewhere during the dive it starts to almost rain on you a little bit if the air conditioner isn't working at full capacity there.

And that's a little disconcerting from time to time, you feel a little drip of water come down on you.

But you know, we know it's just from condensation and not from coming in from the outside.

Over here on the front of the sub, we have one of our means of documentation, which is our video camera.

It's a color video camera that has a remotely operated zoom and focus lens in there.

It goes from six to 48 millimeters.

And we also have four lasers that are incorporated into the bracketry so that we can get a rough approximation of the size of whatever it is you're looking at on the bottom.

- [Narrator] These submersibles give us a way to study life down here at firsthand, rather than the pressure distorted remains of creatures hauled to the surface in nets.

And the trip is always worth it.

Edie Widder of Harbor Branch.

- 13 Years ago I got my first dive in a submersible and it definitely changed my view of what the oceans are about.

I was stunned by how much bioluminescence I saw, and I realized that this had to be one of the dominant processes in the ocean, and yet very few people were studying it.

Animals make light by mixing chemicals inside their bodies and we can actually duplicate that in the laboratory with a light stick such as this.

We have chemicals inside this tube that can produce light.

They're separated from each other by virtue of the fact that one of them's in a glass tube.

But when I break that glass tube, I can produce light, but there's no heat from that light.

It's cold light.

And that's exactly what the animals do.

They mix chemicals inside their bodies to produce light.

And the light shows that I saw were so stunning and breathtaking.

There'd be things that would flash and glow and there would be pyrotechnics that would just swirl out of the darkness and then be replaced by something even more spectacular.

And most of the time I had no idea what I was seeing, but it was absolutely breathtaking.

[relaxing vocal music] Animals use bioluminescence for all the things that animals need to do on land.

They need to find food, they need to find mates.

Animals also use bioluminescence to protect themselves by releasing light into the water, just the way a squiddle releases an ink cloud in the face of a predator and swim away.

There's a lot of animals in the ocean that can release a cloud of light, blinding light into the face of a predator and then swim away into the darkness.

Life in the ocean is so diverse.

Virtually all of the major divisions of plants and animals and bacteria and the other kingdoms that have been recently discovered, microbial realms, they're in the ocean.

Only about half of these are found anywhere on the land.

It's amazing how little we actually know about the deep sea, however, and think of how big the ocean is.

I think less than one 10th of 1% of the deep sea has been explored at all.

And what is it that makes this planet hospitable?

It's that ocean filled with life.

It's not just that it's water.

It's water with all of the many variations on the theme of life that we call biodiversity.

Make that system work, produce the oxygen, absorb the carbon dioxide, are fundamental to the chemistry of the planet.

- [Narrator] We survive on earth because we are a part of nature.

We can't separate ourselves from it.

- If we do succeed in lofting ourselves to some distant place in space, it will be because we take our life support system with us.

[rocket rumbling] - [Operator] You're looking great.

Here you go.

Lift off.

Lift off.

[rocket thrusting] - [Narrator] We've only just begun the journey to other worlds.

So far, we can spend only a short time away from the life support systems of earth, but there are many human beings who have floated high above the planet.

Seeing the whole of our world in one glance.

- [Astronaut] Beautiful view.

- [Astronaut 2] Ain't that something?

- [Narrator] And from this viewpoint, we are starting to gain a new perspective of earth.

- [Astronaut] Stand by And we'd like you to press onto Star 44.

- [Narrator] Science has been successful because it separates things into their component parts.

Science tries to understand the world from the bottom up, but the top down view of earth inspired Lynn Margolis and James Lovelock to see the earth in a different way, creating the idea they named Gaia.

- Gaia's the name that the Greeks gave to the earth originally.

And it's really a theory of evolution.

And it goes on from Darwin's great vision to see the evolution of the organisms.

You know, all of the life from the bacteria to the elephants.

And the evolution of the air and the oceans and the rocks is one single, tightly coupled process that has gone on right since the beginning.

And from it has emerged the entity Gaia, which has the capacity to regulate the climate and the chemistry of the earth so as to keep it always comfortable for living organisms.

- [Narrator] The Gaia hypothesis is a revolutionary idea that the earth can be seen as a single living organism.

That life, mostly microscopic life, can regulate the earth's temperature and atmosphere so that it never becomes unsuitable for life.

It's a revolutionary idea, not yet accepted by many scientists.

- Biologists always get very anxious when I talk about the earth as a living organism.

And they say, but it can't reproduce so it can't be alive.

But this I think is a bit of a narrow view.

It's irritated scientists all over the world, but I can't help that.

I'm not in the business to please them.

- [Narrator] Lovelock doesn't see Gaia as a literal idea.

It's a way of seeing our planet that makes us ask new kinds of questions.

To writer and activist Jonathan Porritt, that can make all the difference.

- I think one of the great, exciting science adventures of the last 20 years has been the so-called Gaia hypothesis.

Because what it has done is to inspire a debate about the notion of interconnectedness of the whole planet, of the planet as an organism.

Now, I still think that for most people on the earth today, that's a very hard thing to wrestle with.

We still see the world as a series of these completely disconnected little slices of life.

You know, this species, that habitat, that system, whatever it might be, none of them connected as far as you can tell.

And what the great challenge now for the science coming forward from scientists is that we have to see the connections between things as being at least as important as the things themselves.

- [Narrator] Perhaps the greatest value of the space age is in giving us the ability to look back at our own world.

- We need the top down, the broad view and space is giving us this.

It gave us the view of the earth that led to Gaia.

And it's telling us we take for granted, the weather forecasts are seen from space.

We take for granted the satellites that look at the distribution of plants and ocean life and so on.

We are learning an immense amount from those, but we have an immense amount more to learn before we can understand how to live properly with our planet.

[wind gusting] - [Narrator] But the very success of the technology that took us into space and gave us the new view of the earth is also cutting us off from the nature of our world.

Cocooned in our cities, we lose touch with nature.

With our life support system.

[lively music] - I think we are dangerously out of touch with nature.

Just to live in the middle of a largely urban industrial culture means you get very disconnected from ordinary, natural patterns, from the seasons, from different sounds, from being able to see the stars.

You know, we're doing this interview here in London.

When did you ever last see the stars in London?

All of these things which are a very important part of what we are as human beings.

We didn't just pop out of nowhere as human beings.

We emerged out of an evolutionary process going back over billions of years with all the inheritance that that brings with it.

Now, I'm not sure that we can really cope with some of these complex sustainability issues, which are all about our relationship with the rest of life on earth.

Unless we reconnect to life on earth.

Unless we find a much more living relationship, direct relationship with these natural cycles, with some of the basic underpinning elements of what makes life on earth possible.

[water pattering] - [Narrator] Biologists and earth's scientists are in a privileged position.

They're in contact with nature every day.

But beyond the objectivity of science, there's an emotional bond that can't be denied.

An emotional bond that drives many scientists.

Marine biologists Sylvia Earl has been drawn to the great unknown oceans from an early age.

- I was once standing on the sea floor and a whole school swirled down, like a big whirlpool of silver blue fish and surrounded me.

But the incredible thing was that they came by actually and their eyes met my eyes and then they, you know, they checked me out.

It was really quite incredible.

I have never thought about fishing quite the same way since then or other times with these encounters.

- [Narrator] Wildlife filmmakers also enjoy daily contact with the natural world, but sometimes the bond goes much deeper.

To film swans and geese flying like this means becoming part of their family.

It means completely taking over the role of the parent bird, even before the eggs have hatched.

It's a 24 hour day a job, but for Rose Buck, every moment is worth it.

- Come on, guys.

Come on, hey.

Let's go, let's go.

Come on.

[geese squawking] - When the geese were very tiny, I used to have them at home.

I couldn't go anywhere and they wouldn't leave me.

And one day I just had to walk into the kitchen, which was by our living room to make the tea.

And they all came waffling along and just sat over my foot.

So I had like this big fluffy slipper of geese, they were really tiny.

- [Narrator] Once they could fly, the birds would follow Rose anywhere.

The geese fledged before the swans and were always more of a handful.

- I think they were probably a bit more difficult to train in the fact that they were quite unstable, they try and get in front of the car and you really had to have your wits about you when driving to see where they were all the time.

Because I had both the geese and the swans since they were really tiny babies under 24 hours old, the feeling grows the older they get, you feel really proud of them the first time they fly and the first time they go beside the car and it's, they are so affectionate to you.

But also I felt very affectionate and well, I just love them to bits.

- [Narrator] While the geese were performing for the camera, the swans still had a little way to go.

- Come on, Rufus.

Come on.

When they were in the egg, I got the egg out the incubator at two or three hour intervals, held up the egg to my face and talked to them.

And because they were in the air sack just before they hatched, they don't see you through the eggs so you feel a bit daft 'cause you have to babble on and say all sorts of things.

And then I'd put them back and go back again two or three hours later.

Come on, boys.

Come on.

When I went to get one of the eggs out, a few hours later they'd, it was done and he chipped all around the shell and his little beak was poking out.

And when I sort of held him out to talk to him, he was just going all along the edge of my mouth with his beak.

So he was really sweet and he turned out to be one of the best ones for flying and keeping close to me.

Good boys, come on.

Swan's are a just are much slower, more majestic.

And they'd go about their own business and they were quite peaceful in amongst themselves.

But the geese were like, they were like a gang of scruffy teenagers.

Sometimes they'd go around sort of strutting around, see what they could do.

And they were into everything and noseying around.

I spend all my time with them.

Every minute of the day, every day they were with me.

And as soon as I called, if they'd just got more than a few yards away, I'd just say Hoopers, Hoopers and they'd come back in and sort of talk to you.

It just made you feel so privileged that these, these birds were just, you know, they treated you like their mum really.

And especially, it was so striking when we went and did the filming in the car and in the boat, they'd be be there in the water and you call them and as soon as they saw you rushing away, they'd come flaffing along with their great, huge wings.

And then they'd get into position beside the boat or the car and I'd be the lead swan, they'd view me as the lead swan and they'd all get in their formation behind.

They have these huge wings just flapping up and down inches from your face.

And then every few seconds they looked to see if you were still there.

And it was, it was a privilege.

It was absolutely brilliant.

Come on!

Come on!

Come on!

Come on!

- [Narrator] The bond between Rose and the swans, between parent and chick is called imprinting.

[lively music] In the wild, swans and geese imprint onto their parents so they can follow them on their long migration flights and learn the route for themselves.

Eventually, as in the wild, they'll grew out of their imprinting on Rose in the same way they would lose their imprinting on their natural parents.

But for now, she's everything to them.

[lively music] When we come face to face with these immense forces of the wild, it gives us a sense of our place in the great scheme of things.

From ancient stories to modern science, we are still reaching to understand the raw power of nature.

- I think it's a fairly strong belief amongst Hawaiians of Pele being the goddess of fire.

I see Pele as mother nature.

And so when I'm out on lava flows, I don't do things like throw my trash in the flow, although some people do.

I respect nature and to me, Pele is the deity that I use when I see nature.

- [Narrator] And these forces operate with or without us.

Your role is, it just seems so insignificant compared to standing beside this dynamic, powerful force of nature that exists regardless of civilization and our ability as humans to experience.

And it's almost a religious experience.

It rocks your very sense of existence just to stand and feel that awesome power.

Yeah, it really does make you think.

And it's experience you carry with you for the rest of your life.

[lava splattering] - [Narrator] We can now study the earth's great processes.

We can use scientific theories to speculate on how it all works.

[calm vocal music] But with our understanding, comes the drive to make changes, to alter the earth to suit ourselves.

- I think it's probably part of our cultural and religious inheritance that we think we can control life on earth.

After all, according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, man was made in the image of God.

We therefore assume that we are able to control God's creation.

We either control it as dominators as it were or stewards but we still think we can control it.

[water splashing] [grand vocal music] - [Narrator] All we've ever tried to do is live well on this earth, but in our success it is dawning on us that it is no longer the planet we need to control.

It is ourselves.

[calm vocal music] Perhaps our growing knowledge is yet another regulating mechanism, a part of Gaia's plan to keep the world in balance, for we too are children of the earth.

An unfolding chapter in it's warm history of change, of glorious creation shaped by the forces of the wild.

- [Announcer] This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

[upbeat music]