Malaika Vaz

I’ve always felt that every crisis is in part a storytelling crisis. That includes the climate and environmental crises. Too often our attention is captured only by the headline-grabbing disaster: the hurricane, the zoonotic pandemic, the flood. But once the moment fades, we return to business as usual. Through Untamed Planet, my team and I focus on what happens after the news crews leave. We document the long-term realities of communities on the frontlines of climate change, the wildlife and ecosystems adapting in real time, and the innovations and structural shifts that offer a way forward. I’m motivated by the idea that storytelling can help people understand not just the urgency of the crisis, but also help us rethink our relationship with nature.

Over the past decade, we have focused on balancing nuance and entertainment in the TV shows and films we work on and believed deeply in the idea that the impact of a film begins after the distribution date. This has inspired partnerships with conservation organisations like WildAid and the Wildlife Trust of India, with policy makers and scientists and with local community-led organisations that use the films as impact tools and are our collaborators in advocating for critical environmental issues in the long term. By spending time immersed with the communities, scientists, rangers, and innovators we film with, we’re able to highlight the solutions that often go unseen: the village-led patrols protecting tigers and lions, the engineers redesigning food systems, the conservationists restoring habitats acre by acre. These are the stories that remind audiences that restoration is not abstract. My hope is that by bringing these lived realities to screens around the world, we can shift not only how people understand the crisis but how they choose to participate in shaping a more resilient planet.

I hope filmmaking evolves from simply documenting the natural world to shaping the evolution of the human footprint on biodiversity and climate. My dream is for nature to be mainstreamed across media, on primetime television, in news platforms, and online in larger ways, so that the link between a healthy planet and human survival is visible and urgent globally. I want to shift the narrative from sustainability as sacrifice to sustainability as an intentional act of creating abundance. Conserving nature strengthens communities, safeguards public health, reduces the cost of disasters, and builds resilient economies. These are benefits that resonate across political and cultural divides. Storytelling can reveal these connections and move beyond polarizing debates toward a shared understanding of what is at stake and what is possible. At a time when the United States and the world at large is more polarised than ever before, I hope nature can help bring us together.