Barack Obama is the nature narrator we didn’t know we needed, until now. Released earlier this year, Our Great National Parks is a five-part series narrated by the former president, showcasing some of the planet’s most spectacular national parks. Noteworthy spots include Chilean Patagonia in South America, Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park in Madagascar and Kakadu National Park in Australia. 

If you’re not that into traditional nature documentaries, you’ll like that this series doesn’t go super hard on the educational angle, so you don’t have to be too switched-on to enjoy it. Just sit back and let Barack’s soothing voice do all the work.

“A photographer is literally someone drawing with light. A man writing and rewriting the world with lights and shadows.” 

Legendary Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist Sebastião Salgado spent 40 years travelling around the world documenting major events in history. His thought-provoking work put a lens to international conflicts, starvations and exodus, paying tribute to some of the most dispossessed people in the world. Co-directed by filmmaker Wim Wenders and Sebastião’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, The Salt of the Earth takes a closer look at the photojournalist’s life work and chronicles a photographic project to discover pristine territories and grandiose landscapes. 

Sebastião’s early work rarely depicted comfortable shades of the human condition. But his swerve into environmental activism and nature photography, combined with his brilliance and purposeful approach, is ultimately inspiring and eye-opening.

In 2012, friends Inge Wegge and Jørn Ranum swapped the comforts of normal life for nine months of cold, sunless Norwegian winter in the isolated and uninhabited bay of a remote, arctic island. On the coast of Northern Norway, they built a cabin out of driftwood and washed-up trash, ate expired food destined for the bin and surfed some of the world’s finest surfing waves. 

You probably won’t watch this and want to follow in the pair’s footsteps, but you will be captivated by their adventure and the landscape’s untouched beauty. There’s also a nice feel-good element to this story: the pair not only built a home out of trash, but also collected over 30 tonnes of waste that had washed in from the Atlantic Ocean.