- [Narrator] Welcome to the age of humans.

(lively music) - Hell to the yeah, this is crazy.

- My name is Shane Campbell-Staton and I am lucky enough to be the host of Human Footprint.

Wow, this is ridiculous.

Ha ha.

Good shot.

Hell of a good time.

I would say "Human Footprint" is a journey.

I think it's definitely my journey, but I think it's more of a collective journey to explore exactly who we are as a species.

- "Human Footprint" is a science series, and a travel series, and a natural history series, kind of, all wrapped into one.

It's a show about the things that humans do to the planet and have done to the planet.

And in investigating our footprint on the planet, we also learn about ourselves.

- That is not for the faint of heart.

- I think it's an important story to tell right now.

It's easy to get sucked into our day-to-day routines and not think about how absolutely bizarre it is that we live on a planet with 8 billion people and that most of the biomass on the planet is stuff that we eat and that we've got technology that we've never couldn't even imagine 50 years ago.

And we're just now coming to a time where scientists are understanding the impacts that we're having.

I think it's important that we're asking ourselves those questions, so I hope audiences walk away feeling like they're challenged to think about it a little bit more.

- What do you do for a living?

- I am a professor at Princeton.

- Oh, really?

- Yeah.

- How they trick into doing this?

- We met Shane while filming "Laws of the Lizard" for Smithsonian Channel, and he was one of the scientists that we featured in that show.

- I came to a point in my career where a lot of my research was focused on human impacts and how it impacted evolution and I realized something that I had never really seen on television before.

- It was incredibly fortuitous because Nate and I had actually been developing and pitching a non-hosted series about evolution in the age of humans.

And from across the room I saw his beautiful brown eyes and I thought to myself, I have to put this man on television.

This man deserves to be on television.

- And I think Shane coming to us and proposing himself as host, which is like a ballsy move but totally justified because he's got the goods.

Gave that pitch, sort of, the secret sauce, I think, to put it over the edge.

- We came together and I think it ended up being something different than either of our ideas but better than either of those ideas and something completely unique.

- And three years later, we were on our first shoot making this show.

And I still like his eyes.

- When Nate and Neil approached me about working on this series, I was like, "Really?

We get to be able to do this?

We're gonna be able to tell these kind of stories?"

A lot of environmental stories are created in a way that are, they're simplified where you you lose a lot of the nuance.

And so with this series we had an opportunity to dive into some of these subjects that are kind of messy.

There's no right answer and the answers that you do find are sometimes a little unsettling.

The opportunity to work on a project like this was something that I just couldn't pass up.

- From a very early stage of development, the show that most inspired us was Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown".

Bourdain wasn't like a person who told you how to feel, he was a person who got the information out there, assumed you were a smart, intelligent person, emotionally sensitive individual and let you put it all together.

And we really tried to do that in this show.

- "Human Footprint" would not be "Human Footprint" without Shane.

- Cheers.

- Cheers.

- Shane Campbell-Staton is a singular phenomenon, as a scientist and science communicator.

His science is amazing and rigorous and widely respected by his peers.

He's also a dynamic and charismatic personality on screen.

- Once Gators are on the menu, - Yeah.

like you've reached official gangster status.

This is absolutely incredible.

- [Neil] He thinks big.

He has big ideas and big ambitions and the skills to execute on those ambitions.

- I had to give a lot more of myself than I anticipated.

You know, it's one thing for me, like, as a scientist to sit up and give a lecture, like these are the things I know and so on and so forth.

But at some point you actually, you have to give more of yourself than just what you know.

That's not something I typically do.

I've spoken with, like, family and friends, like, several times about some of these trips and some of the conversations and they're like, "I'm sorry, you talked about what in front of a television?"

"You did what?"

I've had conversations on camera that I haven't even had with my mom.

- Shane shares his perspective but I think we leave a lot of room for everybody to come away with their own take-home message from some of these episodes.

And I think that's important because we're all co-creators of whatever future we create for ourselves.

Understanding how we got to the present is a prerequisite for charting a path forward into a future that we want.

♪ I was the black cat that used to have bad luck ♪ - You know, Shane is a nineties hip hop fanatic.

And so we were like, well, what if we made a real different kind of show?

And I think once we started, like, thinking about the show as a way to showcase Shane's personality and his background, I think all of us were like, oh my God, this is like, this is gonna be a good show.

- Yeah, it's smooth, it's beautiful.

It's, you know, it's got flavor, you know?

And I think it's something that you don't really see in this genre very often.

- I think science documentaries in general are made for older male skewing, generally, whiter audiences than the American public at large.

And I hope that this series appeals to a broader audience than that, a younger audience, a more diverse audience.

I think, we would like for everybody to realize that their lives are connected to science and that the choices they make have impacts on the world around them and their fellow humans.

- You know, I think the one thing that I was really hoping to accomplish with this series is, for it to be something that no one has ever seen before.

And I really think that we've been able to do that.

I've never seen anything like it.

It's incredible.

The style, the flavor of the conversations, the music, just everything about this show is just, it's dynamic.

I think it's just a dynamic dope show.

I love it.

(chuckling) - The battle started and we've never stopped doing it.

- What you realize when you try to come into these stories with an open mind is that humanity is not bad.

We're all doing our best, right?

People are trying to live good lives, and trying to provide for their families, and trying to be productive, and create things that are of value, but we don't always think very far ahead when we do these things.

- Step by step, we get to a world that looks pretty bizarre.

- [Shane] We have a kind of power that is singular but we spent a lot of our history wielding that power like a child with a chainsaw, you know?

Just, kind of, going at it and not really thinking about the consequences.

- We can transform the planet at an incredible scale and speed without even really understanding what we're doing.

And I think it doesn't take individual humans being bad humans to do that.

- [Shane] But that story isn't done yet and we are still learning.

- It's the result of all these choices that we've made.

We evolved on this planet.

We were shaped by our environment, and we are this unique species that has the power to transform everything.

But as soon as we change the world it turns back around and it changes us.

That's, I think, the biggest take-home message is that we are not separate from nature.

We are of this earth.

- Do we have the ability to change?

Absolutely.

The question is, will we?

(ominous music)