This year will see the first films released by Disneynature, making good on Mickey’s New Year’s resolution to produce two nature documentaries annually for the foreseeable future. Reports on the endeavor (including the National Reviews’ always hilarious Planet Gore blog) portray it as novel. Yet, in its own press release, Disney speaks of “balancing heritage and innovation,” as Disneynature is a resurrection and rebranding of what the studio sold sixty years ago as “True-Life Adventures.”

Then as now, Disney’s motives are financial. Its early animated features (those without the iconic princesses) hemorrhaged money. Time consuming and labor intensive, they sent the studio’s producers looking for some way to balance the books. They tried propaganda for the military and industrial films for Detroit. And then in 1948 they landed on Seal Island. A fanciful trip to Alaska’s Pribilof Islands, which in mating season (according to Roy Disney himself) “looks like Coney Island on the Fourth of July,” the documentary cost a fraction of Bambi to make, raked in more money, and won an Oscar to boot. Eleven additional nature films would follow in the next twelve years, as the series begot the studio’s own distribution apparatus, Buena Vista, and raised its profile on primetime television. Today, as a recent restructuring has cut Disney’s annual production schedule in half and its first-quarter profits are down by 33%, it’s no wonder Chief Executive Robert Iger revealed to the New York Times his envy of March of the Penguins, the $3 million shoestring Warner Brothers used to lasso $127 million at the box office. The shining knights have been dispatched from Cinderella’s castle to try once again to, as Gregg Mitman’s writes, “mine the frontier of nature.”

Mitman takes us through the fascinating history of the “True-Life Adventures” in his Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Though Walt Disney liked to say that “nature wrote the screenplays,” (more…)

• Remember how David Hayes might’ve once could’ve been Interior Secretary? He’s going to be Deputy Interior Secretary instead.
• Native plants in your backyard really do increase native diversity of wildlife.
• $93 million has been spent conserving the Mojave desert tortoise. Meanwhile, the Barneby reed-mustard (of the Utah Reed-Mustards) received $6. I know we’ve put a value on a human life. Has anybody estimated the value of a species? Whatever it was, it was too high for the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, which is now genetically extinct.
• It’s fun pretending to read this interview with David Attenborough in his voice. To wit: “I can find you a new species without any problem at all. Take you to the rainforest and spend three or four days just scooping up insects. The difficulty is not finding the species, it’s finding the one man who specialises in thrips or whatever, who can tell you that it’s a different thing. Taxonomy is unfashionable.”
• “Mythical glorification of trees first reached its zenith in the songs, prose and paintings of the Romantic period. The Nazis were likewise obsessed with the concept of the forest.” Uh, Brian? Little help?
• Foreigners appear to be driving demand for snow leopard pelts in Afghanistan.
• From Minnesota Birdnerd, here is a picture of a real live bilateral gynandromorph cardinal: half-male, half-female, down the center:

I’ll try not to switch into all-Attenborough all the time mode.