How to Live on Earth in and out of the Classroom

1.The Film and Its Argument

How to Live on Earth is a feature documentary that sets out a series of fundamental questions and then answers it through real people rather than data. It opens with Benedict Cumberbatch inside London's Natural History Museum, among the remains of extinct and vanishing species, and asks whether we, the species that calls itself wise, are living wisely yet. The film's own answer is that we are not, but that we could be.

The film frames this through a simple idea students grasp at once. Picture the story of a planet like Earth in four chapters.

1. 1A time before lifeThe planet without living things.
2. 2A time when life evolvesLiving systems appear and spread.
3. 3A time of intelligent life, unrestrainedIts impact grows until it threatens the planet. The film places Earth here.
4. 4A time of wise lifeThe same intelligence learns to be a positive force. Only those alive now can make the move.

The film argues that we become wise when we solve three puzzles, and it uses those three questions as its structure. This companion follows the same spine.

It ends on the honest note that gives the film its charge. Are we ready to move to chapter four? Are we wise enough? Almost. For a class, that word is the invitation. It leaves students with a question to answer through their own work rather than a conclusion to memorise.

2.Mapping the Film to GreenComp

The European Commission's GreenComp framework sets out the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that make up sustainability competence, organised into four areas and twelve competences (Bianchi, Pisiotis and Cabrera Giraldez, 2022). It describes what learners should develop, but it does not prescribe how to teach it. That open space is where a film like this earns its place. GreenComp supplies the structure. The film supplies vivid, real cases on which students can practice the competences rather than simply define them.

The film's three questions do not sit in separate boxes. Each one draws on more than one GreenComp area. The table shows where each question does most of its work. The next section builds in the whole framework, so you can look up any competence named here.

3.GreenComp: The Framework Built In

This companion names GreenComp competences by number, such as GreenComp 2.1. The whole framework is built in below, in plain English. Filter by area, search a term, or tap any competence to open the knowledge, skills and attitudes behind it. All twelve matter equally, and the numbers are labels, not a ranking.

Plain-English wording rewritten from GreenComp (Joint Research Centre, 2022), reused under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.

4.Question One: How to Value Nature

The film's first puzzle is that the modern world values nature for its parts, not for the whole. It shows an elephant worth more for its ivory than for the role it plays, a rainforest worth less than the gold beneath it, and a wetland under pressure from the factories that want its land. Against this it sets people who see the whole, and it ends with a way to make living nature visible to the economy, so that biodiversity, the measure of the whole, can finally be counted.

GreenComp 1.3 and 1.1What Is a Living Thing Worth?

Film Anchor: The film contrasts two ways of valuing the same animal. In Chad, poachers killed around four thousand elephants in five years, ninety per cent of the population, for ivory. Under guard the herd has doubled in two decades, and as the elephants return they clear bush, keep water holes open and lock carbon into the soil, so the whole savannah works again. Later an economist asks the same question of a living tree, a free elephant and a whale in the ocean, and points out that the market can only see the dead version, the timber and the ivory, because the living version is delivered for free.

GreenComp 2.1The Forest Is More Than Its Parts

Film Anchor: Dan O'Neill is a field biologist working in Calakmul, a vast forest in Mexico that was once a Mayan city of fifty thousand people, most of it still unexcavated under the trees. He shows how the parts lock together. Ants live inside the thorns of a tree and attack anything that harms it, so its leaves stay whole. A tapir tramples the mud around a seasonal waterhole and seals it, so the water lasts through the dry season. Jaguars, ocelots and pumas share one small patch, caught on camera traps, and fruit trees the Maya planted centuries ago still feed the toucans today. His point is that it is the relationships, not the species counted one by one, that keep the forest alive.

GreenComp 4.1 and 2.3Pricing the Wetland

Film Anchor: Xiye Bastida, from the Otomi people of central Mexico, describes a wetland her community has lived beside for generations. In the 1960s Mexico City took its water and the lake dried up, and elders still weep when they recall the morning the fish were found dead. It is recovering now, but industrial parks and factories want to drain it and build. In the film an entrepreneur proposes a natural asset company: scientists measure the wetland's yearly services, its clean water, stored carbon and flood protection, and that value sets a share price that rises as the wetland heals, so the community can earn from keeping it alive rather than selling the land once. The film puts the world's ecosystem services at around a hundred trillion dollars a year, all delivered without an invoice.

5.Question Two: How to Feed the Future

The film's second puzzle is that the way we grow food, and above all the way we get our protein, is the biggest driver of nature loss. It reports that a third of the world's forests have already gone, most of it cleared for farmland, and that eighty per cent of current Amazon clearance is for cattle. It then shows the alternatives: a farmer swapping cattle pasture for cacao and returning the forest, proteins grown from mycelium or even from air, and invasive species eaten to protect the habitats they are wrecking.

GreenComp 2.3The True Cost of a Burger

Film Anchor: Sam Kass, a former White House chef and food policy adviser who now mostly cooks for his own children, explains that a burger takes a great deal of grass or grain, land and water to produce. The film sets this against a scene in Brazil where he watches a rancher clear ninety hectares of Amazon forest, and asks him why. The rancher says he is doing it to feed his family and leave something for his children. Kass replies that he is there for the same reason, and refuses to blame him. The rancher is making a rational choice, and it is society that has failed to put a value on what the standing forest does for everyone.

GreenComp 3.1 and 3.3Protein for 2050

Film Anchor: The film follows the search for protein that needs almost no land. A chef cooks with protein made from air, and with a steak grown from mycelium in a tank that comes, as he puts it, straight from a strand of nature. It also makes the case for blended meats, a sausage that is part pork and part mushroom, which keeps the flavour while adding fibre. The film argues that if we adopt these, we could feed ourselves on a fraction of today's farmland and give the rest back to wild habitat that locks away carbon.

GreenComp 4.3Eat the Problem

Film Anchor: The film's lightest idea is that some of the most helpful things you can eat are the species wrecking an ecosystem. Lionfish, invasive in the Atlantic with no natural predators, can kill up to ninety per cent of the young native fish on a reef in five weeks, and one female can lay two million eggs at a time, yet the meat is sweet and easy to cook. The same logic runs through feral pigs in the United States, wild goats in Australia, and deer in Europe whose numbers are stopping forests growing back.

6.Question Three: How to Feel Human

The film's third puzzle turns inward. It argues that nature is not only outside us but part of what keeps us stable, and it makes the case through people rather than studies: a biologist who needs the wild to feel well, prisoners nursing turtles, a marine team reviving a reef with sound, and cities learning to build nature back in.

GreenComp 1.1Nature and the Mind

Film Anchor: The film argues that nature keeps us stable, not just alive. Dan O'Neill, so at home in the wild, describes falling into a dark place while living in London and realising he needs nature to feel well. In a prison, inmates nurse sick and endangered sea turtles back to health, and one says the turtles are helping him as much as he is helping them. The film reports that prisons with nature programmes see a significant fall in violence. The thread ties back to the film's central claim, that only when the Earth thrives can we thrive.

GreenComp 3.3 and 3.1A City That Heals

Film Anchor: The film reports that around seventy per cent of people will live in cities by 2050, and looks at what that does to us. In South Korea it links the stress of city life to high rates of depression and a rise in youth suicide, and follows forest-healing programmes, endorsed by the government, that take students out of the city to recover. Then it reaches Singapore, a city built with nature running all the way through it: greenery planted onto buildings, cleaned-up waterways that have drawn otters back, and even a public hospital full of plants where patients heal among birds. The reaction in the film is that this feels like a blueprint for a future worth living in, with nothing given up.

GreenComp 2.1Listening to a Reef

Film Anchor: Steve Simpson, a marine biologist, measures a reef's health by its sound. A thriving reef crackles and pops with fish, while a bleached one falls acoustically silent, like a graveyard. To bring a dead reef back, his team records the sound of a healthy one and plays it underwater to lure young coral and fish to settle. They cut heat-tolerant corals into fragments, grow them on, and plant them out with a farming damselfish as a bodyguard and a speaker playing reef sound, and hope to see a stunning reef again within a decade.

7.The Turning Point: From Chapter Three to Chapter Four

The film needs to show that reversal is not a dream, and it does so on the Klamath River. The river's Indigenous families describe a drought year, 2002, when the water above four hydroelectric dams grew warm and disease spread. The film reports that more than eighty thousand adult Chinook salmon died, the largest fish kill in the country's history, and entirely man-made. One young man decided to become a lawyer to stop it happening again. After a legal battle of some twenty years, all four dams were removed and about four hundred miles of habitat were reopened, described in the film as the biggest river restoration in the country's history. No one expected the salmon to reach the upper spawning grounds in the first year. They did. This is the film's proof that we can move Earth on to its fourth chapter, and it makes a strong capstone.

GreenComp 4.2 and 4.1The Four Hundred Mile Question

8.A Screening-to-Action Model

The companion reduces to five steps, which take a class from watching the film to acting on it.

1. 1WatchThe film, or one of its three questions.
2. 2QuestionAsk which direction the film took, and whether it convinces.
3. 3InvestigateTest the film's cases against local evidence and observation.
4. 4EvidenceWeigh what you found before deciding anything.
5. 5ActOne thing to protect or restore, individual or collective.

9.Screening Notes and Curriculum Fit

The film premieres globally on YouTube on 20 September 2026 at 8pm CEST and stays free to watch afterwards, so there is no cost barrier for schools. Watching the live premiere makes a strong shared moment where timing allows, and the film works just as well screened later in class. It suits students aged 11 to 16, and works for teacher training and staff sessions too.

The three questions give three natural break points. Show the film in full with older groups, or split it across three lessons for younger ones, taking one question at a time.

Set one question before each part so students watch with a purpose, then pause and take answers. A good closing task across any part is a commitment: each student or group names one thing they will protect or restore, and reports back the following week.

10.Principles for Educators

The film is a strong starting point, not a whole curriculum. A few principles keep the teaching grounded and inspiring.

1. Hold honesty and hope together. The film is open about the scale of the problem and still focused on solutions. Keep both. Students should understand the stakes without being left in despair.
2. Attribute knowledge to its people. Where the film draws on Indigenous knowledge, from the Otomi community in Mexico to the families of the Klamath River, name the specific people and place rather than presenting it as a general idea.
3. Test the claims. Treat the film's figures and cases as evidence to examine, not facts to accept. Comparing them with local observation is itself the lesson.
4. Keep it local. A question about the students' own street, pond or canteen usually teaches more than a distant example. The film supplies the idea; the neighbourhood supplies the practice.
5. Let students answer the question. The film ends on "almost". Leave that open, so students reach their own view through their work rather than repeating a conclusion.

Discussion

Questions for educators planning to use the film.

The strongest starting point is usually close to home: one question, one place, one competence, one action.

Sources and Further Reading

This companion is built on the three questions the film sets itself and on the European Commission's GreenComp framework, which is a non-prescriptive reference. The activities are illustrative starting points for educators to adapt to their own students, settings and local context.