8pm NOVA: Wild Ways - Science/Education
Four-lane highways may be a necessity to our modern society, but they can be a death traps for millions of animals that try to cross them. Around the world, wildlife need to roam for breeding, foraging, and to carry out their traditional migrations–but they are often blocked by ranches, farms, roads, and other human-made obstacles. While national parks and preserves offer some protection to wildlife, even the magnificent Serengeti and Yellowstone parks are too small to sustain healthy populations over generations. But now comes new hope for wildlife through an approach called “connectivity conservation.” Some of the world’s most beloved species–lions, bears, antelope and elephants–can be preserved by linking the world’s wildlife refuges with tunnels, overpasses, and protected land corridors. From North America’s Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation initiative to Southern Africa’s elephant highways stretching across five nations, see how animals are on the move again.
9pm IN DEFENSE OF FOOD - Science/Health
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." With that seven-word maxim, US-based journalist Michael Pollan distills a career’s worth of reporting into a prescription for reversing the damage being done to people’s health by today’s industrially driven Western diet. In Defense of Food debunks the daily media barrage of conflicting claims about nutrition. Traveling the globe and the supermarket aisles to illustrate the principles of his bestselling “eater’s manifesto,” Pollan offers a clear answer to one of the most confounding and urgent questions of our time: What should I eat to be healthy?
