David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet is a powerful call to action

“We’ve not just ruined the planet, we’ve destroyed it,” says David Attenborough, who has spent his days recording the wonders of the natural world, only to realise that his life’s work has, in fact, been to document its demise.

The reprimand comes from his latest film, David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, which has been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. With luck, the documentary will hit cinemas and Netflix later this year.

Attenborough was particularly outspoken when New Scientist sat down with him at a press event ahead of its release. The film is part-memoir, part-lecture on the state of the environment, and its tone is forthright throughout. It is a powerful plea to humanity to turn things around, for the sake of every living thing on the planet.

Attenborough has mostly kept away from politics and campaigning journalism. He has put this down to the sort of public service broadcasting expected of him at the BBC throughout his long career.

Yet in the past few years, Attenborough has decided to take a stand. In 2017, Blue Planet II’s focus on plastics sparked a war on the stuff, while last year’s Climate Change – The facts put global warming in a prime-time slot for the first time in years, and he’s increasingly discussed the climate crisis in interviews and speeches.

“I’ve got no idea if humanity is going to get through this or not,” says Attenborough. “There have been extraordinary changes in the last 5 to 10 years in general public attitude, and that’s because I think people actually recognise that the environment is really in trouble.”

On coronavirus, he was little more hopeful, however. “I think we will deal with it perfectly well,” he says. “I don’t think that we can draw a big moral lesson about how we are treating nature so badly that she’s kicking back. I think it’s just part of life.”

Luckier days

A Life on Our Planet starts with Attenborough’s childhood fascination with rocks, then follows his nearly 60-year career as a broadcaster, interspersed with regular updates on the state of the planet. In the 1930s, 66 per cent of the world was wilderness and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were around 310 parts per million, says the film.

By the time he started recording The Blue Planet in 1997, wilderness was down to 47 per cent and CO2 was at 363ppm. Now, of course, the numbers are much worse: wilderness covers just 23 per cent of the planet, and atmospheric CO2 is at more than 410ppm.

As A Life On Our Planet unfolds, Attenborough speaks about how lucky he has been. He grew up at a time when travelling the world was becoming easier. There were many untouched wildernesses and so, at first, nature filmmaking was simple. People had never seen pangolins or sloths on TV before, he says. “It was the best time of my life.”

By the 1970s, however, Attenborough started to see warning signs when some animals became harder to find. He visited a part of Rwanda, for instance, where mountain gorilla numbers had drastically declined, and rangers had to be with them at all times to save them from poachers.

The film’s three directors, Alastair Fothergill, Jonnie Hughes and Keith Scholey, have worked with Attenborough before. They skilfully paint a picture of how dire the planet’s situation has become. Half the world’s rainforests have been cleared, and two-thirds of the Bornean orangutan population has disappeared since Attenborough first filmed them.

Each stroke of the brush intensifies the image: whaling, over-fishing, large-scale agriculture, coral bleaching. Average global temperatures are now 1°C warmer than when Attenborough was born. “Our blind assault on the planet has now come to alter the fundamentals of the living world,” he says.

Collection for COP26

Individually, this is all old news. Put together, though, it is a timely and compelling document in the run-up to the crucial United Nations COP26 climate talks, which are still scheduled for November this year.

Attenborough does offer solutions. Again, most of them are already known, but they perhaps have more chance of being heard with his support. The human population needs to stabilise as soon as possible, he says, which he believes is achievable by raising people out of poverty, giving them access to healthcare and keeping girls in particular in school for longer.

Next on his list is phasing out fossil fuels. We already have solar, wind and geothermal power, and they need to become our primary sources of energy, he says.

For food, the ocean is a “critical ally”: by making large no-fishing zones, we would give a  stocks a chance to recover and still be able to supply our fishing needs. On land, he says we need to radically reduce the area we use for farming by half to make it available for wildlife. The quickest way to do that is by changing our diet, he says. “The planet simply can’t support millions of meat-eaters.”

Laid out like this, Attenborough makes the road to saving the planet and a long-term environmentally friendly future look straightforward. We know what to do, it is just a case of having the will to do it, he says.

This feels like a baton-passing moment. Attenborough’s cinematic memoir lays out the state of play, but it is up to us to fix the problems before it is too late.