Learn from ‘Our Planet’ producer Keith Scholey Oct. 7

Keith Scholey understands the urgency of protecting our blue dot of a home. He sees it, lives it and shares it through his series “Our Planet” and his “Our Planet Live: Life on Our Planet,” coming to the Peace Center Oct. 7. But for anyone lamenting the demise of Earth, Scholey has good news. The boy who thought whales would soon be extinct grew up to be a researcher and documentarian who not only saw whales but had the opportunity to swim with them. He has learned that the future, quite literally, is in our hands.

Scholey is the series producer for Netflix’s “Our Planet” and director of the film “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet.” He will share stories, video and more during the live event, bringing his decades of experience to the stage.

“Our Planet Live” brings “bits” from all three “Our Planet” series, according to Scholey, to give a picture of the planet and its inhabitants in exciting, thoughtful ways.

“The first half starts with the original series of ‘Our Planet,’ which was really all about looking at the different sorts of environments of Earth. What we want to do is to obviously entertain people with the beauty of the wildlife and excitement of the wildlife, but also tell a bigger story about what's important for those habitats,” he said.

To conserve grassland habitats, for example, you need space for the big animals that live there.

Scholey includes information from the second season, which focuses on the creatures of the planet that need to migrate.

“How do we ensure that life on Earth has the right to roam across the planet?” he said.

The live show continues with the story of life itself.

“It's a journey through time,” he said. “We really look at very much from a personal perspective of mine, what I learned by all the research we did, looking at the journey of life on Earth through time. And there are lots of lessons in that for us, I think now, because we discovered all the five big extinction events, and I'll talk a little bit about what caused them, because there are similarities of what's going on now to what happened in in the past.”

But don’t despair too much. Scholey said to offer a problem without also inviting a solution is immoral. The good news is that we can make a difference. The even better news is that he is optimistic about the future.

“If we know all of these things, actually there's a really, really exciting future for the world, because by knowing them, we can fix these things,” he said. “I guess my mission in life is to try and persuade people to go towards the solutions and not think the world is broken. My travel around it, I've looked at it in great detail. It's a long way from broken, and the wonderful thing about nature, it bounces back, and it bounces back fast.”

See “Our Planet Live: Life on Our Planet” at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 7 at the Peace Center. The show includes nature sequences (a lion hunt, for example) that might be too intense for very young children. A suggested age is 8 and older. Tickets are on sale now and are $25 each. For details and tickets, visit peacecenter.org .

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Learn from ‘Our Planet’ producer Keith Scholey Oct. 7