Crumbling houses in New Orleans turn out to be the work of Formosan termites that arrived from southern China, and this episode of Strange Days on Planet Earth follows the scientists who traced that connection along with two others: vanishing forests in Yellowstone linked to the loss of wolves, and an asthma epidemic in the Caribbean traced back to dust storms blowing off Africa. Host Edward Norton frames each case as a piece of detective work, following researchers as they gather field data and lab evidence to show how one disturbance in an ecosystem ripples outward into places that seem unrelated. The throughline is Earth System Science, a discipline treating the planet's ecosystems as interconnected rather than isolated, and the episode uses each mystery to demonstrate that principle in practice rather than assert it. It builds toward a plain claim: human activity is accelerating environmental change faster than any prior generation has witnessed, and the three cases are offered as evidence rather than illustration.