"Serengeti is not a theme park"

Serengeti, the first programme in BBC Four's new series Unnatural Histories, told me a lot of things I never learnt in decades of wildlife documentaries and environmental activism.

I knew that colonial governments set up parks to protect game animals from "poachers" or subsistence hunters (who had co-existed with the wildlife for centuries, if not longer) whereas the actual threats to animal populations were from "white" hunters who were just killing for fun and macho cred. I didn't know that the low human population in eastern Africa, when those colonial governments started paying attention, was a result of a major natural and humanitarian disaster caused by invaders from Europe: Rinderpest. "Explorers" saw starving environmental refugees whose herds or plough animals had died; they didn't look for the civilisation that had been there a generation earlier, in dynamic balance with the ecosystem.

So the colonial governments came along, saw this romantic pseudo-pristine landscape without all those pesky people, and tried to preserve it in amber. But the ecosystem itself, before and after the arrival of humans, had changed many times with the natural variations of climate. The current path of the wildebeest migration has not been the same for time immemorial, and it will need to change again if it's to survive.

The programme is available for another 17 days (region-locked to the UK, probably). The next episode is about Yellowstone.