Blue-sky thinking

• Published date: 30 January 2024
• Publication title: Signal

IT’S defiance in the face of impossible odds at Hollywood scale, at least

In the first episode of Dynamic Planet we meet a small group of locals from the high Himalayan plateau of Ladakh, India who have taken it upon themselves to hold the line against the massive losses of glacial ice caused by planetary heating.

In their region, villages are emptying as the glacial melt they once relied on to grow food, evaporates. It’s a harbinger of worse to come, as these same vanishing glaciers are the source of many of Asia’s great rivers, actor Cliff Curtis intones gravely as narrator.

It’s a problem of daunting scale. But rather than focusing on the apocalyptic possibilities, Dynamic Planet joins the Ladakh farmers’ efforts to build an ice stupa in winter — a towering reservoir of ice — in the hope that it will store enough water for them to grow a crop later, when it begins to melt.

Their monument to hope and determination appears at first a rickety construction — water sprayed over a makeshift wooden framework — but it looks to be holding. It’s a chance.

The series, a Sky Original/NHNZ production —...