What David Attenborough’s extraordinary life can teach us
by Alberto Sclaverano for Citiplat
Sir David Attenborough is a living legend. The ninety-eight-year-old British scientist will always be associated with his monumental work as a popularizer. While his college degree is in natural sciences, his interests have been wider, spreading from biology to geology, and most recently to research on renewable energies and sustainable development.
A pioneer broadcaster who spent years working at BBC (and directing BBC Two between 1965 and 1969), Mr. Attenborough prioritized spreading scientific knowledge to a wide audience. His impact on an entire UK generation was so deep that he has been compared to politicians like Margaret Thatcher or actresses such as Judy Dench for his great influence on his country’s pop culture and politics. Due to an incredible coincidence, he is also the brother of well-known actor Richard Attenborough (1932-2014), who will always be remembered, among many impressive roles, as John Hammond in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. David Attenborough through the years has starred in several made-for-television documentaries, often hiring on BBBC, and has also written various books. I think such a figure still has a lot to talk about and teach us all, especially concerning our future and the threat posed to humankind by climate change.
The recent documentary David Attenborough A Life on Our Planet (2020) offers a unique opportunity for people who are not familiar with Attenborough’s themes to know him, and for his fans will be a great homage to his legacy. Directed and produced by Alastair Fothergill, Jonnie Hughes, and Keith Scholey, it was released in 2020 by Netflix, alongside the book A Life on Our Planet, also written by Attenborough and acting as both a sort of autobiography and a meditation on the current state of our planet and our future.
The movie is what has been called a “witness statement”, in which David Attenborough speaks a lot about his life and the planet, while the film’s beautiful images highlight the wonders of the natural world. Sometimes Attenborough takes a direct part in the action, like when he examines an ammonite’s fossil and reflects on evolution and the history of life on Earth. The movie is not only about beauty. It opens with the terrible images of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which becomes an example of the terrible power of humans’ mismanagement of technology.
Attenborough soon starts to talk about humankind’s development and evolution, from primates to the industrialized world. But it also shows the negative consequences of massive exploitation of Earth’s resources, from the destruction of entire natural ecosystems like the rainforests, a risk that Attenborough has documented since the 1950s, to the danger of activities like whales haunting, that are put entire species on the verge of extinction. And finally, the narrator deals with the ongoing climate crisis and its potentially devastating consequences.
David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet explores problems like the melting of the polar cap and the rise in the average global temperature. The danger of a general collapse of the ecosystem due to the excessive environmental footprint by humankind becomes the real topic of the film.
In what can be seen as a sort of testament, both written and filmed, Sir David Attenborough gives us a clear warning. We cannot go along like we had during the past decades; the resources are simply not sufficient. The film never becomes an apocalyptic sermon, but Attenborough is very serious in putting us in front of our errors and the grave danger our planet is in.
Given his long, incredible, personal track record, and direct experience on Earth-related topics that is the result of almost a century of life and work, I believe that we need to listen to Attenborough’s last lesson very carefully. Before it is too late.
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