The world-renowned conservationist and naturalist on the future of our planet.
For over 60 years, David Attenborough has been exploring the wild and taking us along for the ride. At 94, he shows no signs of slowing down in his quest to share the marvels of the natural world and to ensure it is not destroyed.
For most of us, the small screen – and occasionally the cinema too – has been our window onto the animal kingdom, with David Attenborough our everpresent guide. The beloved British naturalist has been presenting and narrating wildlife series – more than 200 in all – for over 60 years. “The notion that the world is as varied and as rich as it is … is something that can only be conveyed by the moving image and that’s been within my lifetime,” he says. “It’s the beginning of an important thing, which all of us are the inheritors of.”
Attenborough is as gentle a creature as you could ever wish to meet. The world’s best-known wildlife documentary maker recently celebrated his 94th birthday, although he seemingly boasts the energy and stamina of a man half his age. Earlier this year, he railed about the Australian bushfires. No longer could rising temperatures on Earth be ignored. “We have been putting things off year after year,” he said. “The moment of crisis has come.”
Right now, with political leaders pre-occupied with controlling the coronavirus pandemic, attention has been worryingly diverted from the climate crisis with which Attenborough is so concerned. But if there’s a theme for our meeting, it’s the interconnectivity of life on the planet. As Attenborough recently told the BBC, he was not surprised by the rapid transmission of COVID-19.
“Anybody who knows anything about keeping animals ... the more dense population you’ve got, the quicker the disease will spread. And there’s never been a denser population than the human species.”
Perhaps ironically, a couple of months of the world being in lockdown has already shown how the planet can repair itself. With far less air, rail and road traffic, a huge downturn in pollution has led to clearer skies in traditionally smog-filled cities like São Paolo and Delhi, sparking hopes that the pandemic might inadvertently inspire a clean-air revolution. But this by-product can’t come at the expense of climate change reform on the global stage.
What is remarkable in talking to Attenborough is just how un-jaded he is. He’s almost childlike in his love for the natural world.
“If you’ve been living with it for 50 years, as I have, then the emotion doesn’t really decrease,” he explains. “It doesn’t come to you new.” By way of example, he cites Seven Worlds, One Planet – which devotes each of its seven
“HE IS ALMOST CHILDLIKE IN HIS LOVE FOR THE NATURAL WORLD.”
episodes to a different continent. The opening salvo in the Antarctic features staggering footage of 150 whales gathering in the ocean.
Once upon a time, the hunting of whales led to the near-extinction of these kings of the water. “The idea that we were totally exterminating a whole class of animals from the ocean was awful,” he shudders. It remains an on-going battle to preserve these mammals and fight against lifting the ban on commercial whaling. “And we are winning,” says Attenborough, “but as in the whole movement, it’s dangerous to focus just on one particular kind of animal. It’s whole communities that we’ve got to save.”
Arguably, there’s no one person more responsible for stimulating public interest in the natural world, environmentalism and eco-issues than Attenborough. In the early 1950s, he found his way to the BBC, producing and presenting such shows as Zoo Quest – the first time on-location footage of rare animals was beamed into viewers’ homes.
Later he became Controller of the newly-launched British television channel BBC2 – even commissioning the iconic sketch show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
An executive desk job was never going to truly satisfy Attenborough’s wanderlust, though. Returning to remote regions, it was 1979’s 13-episode Life on Earth that inspired a generation, as an encounter with mountain gorillas in Dian Fossey’s sanctuary in Rwanda became TV history.
“That was an unforgettable time and more successful than we could possibly imagine,” he reflects now, with pride. Yet it was just another step in a unique career that’s seen him front such jaw-dropping shows as The Blue Planet and Planet Earth.
When 2017’s follow-up Blue Planet II was released, the impact was astounding – in particular raising awareness of plastic pollution in the oceans. “Suddenly, you hit the right note,” Attenborough says. “Suddenly, with Blue Planet II, the world was electrified about the crime – the crime! – of chucking plastic in the ocean that can throttle creatures, that can poison creatures, including ourselves.” Even he is at a loss to explain why this hit such a nerve. “I daresay if we knew exactly how to do it, we would do it more frequently, but we don’t.”
The show arrived in the wake of President Donald Trump’s controversial decree that America was going to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the treaty drawn up in 2015 to combat the rise in the planet’s temperatures by cutting back on the use of fossil fuels and regulating emissions. Since then, climate change, deforestation and plastic misuse have climbed back to the top of the political agenda, thanks also to vocal activists like the Extinction Rebellion organisation and Swedish teenage activist, Greta Thunberg.
When I ask Attenborough his feelings towards the 17-year-old Thunberg, his eyes light up. “I think it’s a marvellous thing,” says Attenborough. “I think all young people are amazing. She’s marvellous that she’s spoken out but it’s a great emotional response to an overwhelming fact – which a lot of people have turned their eyes from.” He draws breath. “We are destroying eco-systems and the living sequence of communities that we all depend on.”
As Attenborough points out, environmental activism is hardly new to the world. He remembers all the way back the mid-fifties, just as he started making natural history television programmes, when he’d meet enthusiastic conservationists. “At the time, I think even we ourselves thought there are some people who are a bit extreme – they think birds or butterflies are the be all and end all of the world! [You’d think to yourself] ‘It’s a bit far out, but they’re nice people!’”
He then proceeds to give me a hugely detailed history of the conservation movement, back to the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire – “the very first conservation organisation charity going beyond their own domestic shores”.
Later renamed Fauna & Flora International, it was very species-focused, such as campaigning against the hunting of the Arabian oryx, a medium-sized antelope that almost disappeared until a last-ditch rescue operation in the early 1960s saved it from extinction.
“The people that were [causing the dwindling numbers] were mostly actually big game hunters and they were the people who saw it disappear first,” he informs. “They were finding that they couldn’t shoot anything that had a bigger horn than something that was shot 50 years ago. Suddenly, the penny dropped – the reason there
“AN EXECUTIVE DESK JOB WAS NEVER GOING TO SATISFY ATTENBOROUGH’S WANDERLUST.”
“LOOK AFTER THE ANIMALS AND PLANTS. THIS IS THEIR PLANET AS WELL AS OURS.”
SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH
Attenborough has more than 10 animals and plants named after him.
weren’t these bigger ones was because there weren’t any. They were being shot. So suddenly the conservation movement took off.”
The realisation soon dawned, he adds. “It’s not one species you should be concerned about – it’s whole ecosystems. When you take out an important species like that you disrupt everything and you’re heading for catastrophe. So suddenly the conservation movement was transformed from caring for one particular species to caring for whole communities and that’s where we are now. For a long time, it was just communities on, say, the East African plains. But now we realise it’s the whole world that we’re dealing with.”
These days, understandably, Attenborough doesn’t travel quite as much as he once did. Much of his work time is taken up with speaking at eco-conferences. He is the father of two children, now well into their fifties. Susan is a primary school teacher and Robert is a senior lecturer in biological anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. Their mother Elizabeth, whom Attenborough married in 1950 shortly after leaving the Royal Navy, died in 1997 of a brain haemorrhage.
Outliving his two brothers – the Oscar-winning film director/actor Richard Attenborough and younger sibling John Attenborough – he still lives in his family home in London’s Richmond Park. But his extensive travels mark him out from so many city-dwellers. “They are cut off from – to a greater or lesser extent – the natural world,” he sighs. “They don’t see a real living animal, unless it’s a rat! Just a rat or a pigeon! And they’re not wild animals – they’re domesticated really.”
He’s already completed another film, David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet, which he calls his “witness statement and vision for the future.” You might call it the equivalent of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, as it presses home the point – once again – that “our planet is headed for disaster” unless dramatic changes are made. Attenborough may be guilty of repetition, but how else can this humanity-saving point be made?
Back in the 1970s, Attenborough made several shows about tribal populations in remote locations like the Solomon Islands. But urbanised living is not something he would ever want to chronicle, he says. Animals are by far more fascinating, more unknowable. “You can’t compare,” he says.
“Human beings, both in their nature and their influence on the world, are totally other from the natural world. We’ve divorced ourselves from the natural world. We operate under different systems.”
Documenting mankind? That’s for other filmmakers. “I can’t film human beings, other human beings, as though I am God, as though I am showing them in the same way as I would show a family of monkeys. You can’t do that, because we’re human beings and we understand about one another’s influences. You can’t make animal films like human-being films.”
But what you can do, he adds, is make films about how humans are changing the world around them. “That’s a different thing. And that we must do.”
The planet is not a fruit bowl from which we can simply snatch anything we want, he adds before our time is up. “We are part of it. And if we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.” His motto – one we can all adhere to – is quite manageable: don’t waste things. “Don’t waste electricity. Don’t waste paper. Don’t waste food. Live in the way you want to live, but just don’t waste. Look after the natural world and the animals in it and the plants in it too. This is their planet as well as ours.”
Seven Worlds One Planet is available on 9Now.
David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet will be in cinemas and available on Netflix later in 2020. VISIT MiNDFOOD.COM
A UN climate change report revealed there would be catastrophic consequences in less than two decades unless carbon emissions were drastically slashed. Here’s how to affect this outcome in an impactful way. mindfood.com/tackling-climate-change