Finding hope in our destruction of wildlife
ON the afternoon of Sunday 27 April 1986, the once-thriving city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine in the former Soviet Union was evacuated. All of the 50,000 inhabitants hurriedly packed their belongings and were moved away from the city that formerly served the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
They were moved away the day after the worst nuclear disaster in history happened when reactor No 4 overheated, went into meltdown during a routine safety check, and released a plume of life-threatening radioactive pollution. The former city is now a ghost town. Trees grow on the deserted streets and deer and wolves roam freely as nature and wildlife reclaim the former city.
Earlier this month, Netflix released these apocalyptic scenes of the deserted Pripyat as the ever-inspiring David Attenborough brought viewers on a tour of empty buildings, abandoned playgrounds and utter urban dereliction as the best-known naturalist on the planet made what he called his ‘witness statement’ for the environment, and ‘ The Sixth Extinction’.
In Earth’s long history of some 4.5 billion years, scientists have identified five extinctions of wildlife on a global scale. All five were caused by natural forces. The most recent one happened 66 million years ago when a rogue asteroid crashed into our planet leaving a huge impact scar on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and initiating a chain of events that wiped out much of life on Earth including all of the dinosaurs.
We are now living during the sixth mass extinction and this time we are causing it. We are systematically destroying our natural heritage via our unsustainable lifestyles, gross mismanagement, bad land-use practices, pollution, global warming, climate change, etc.
In his moving witness statement, 94-year-old Attenborough reflects upon both the defining moments of his lifetime as a naturalist and the devastating changes he has seen. He makes the point that, as has happened before, nature has the resilience to bounce back after the present extinction but maybe mankind will not fare as well as evidenced in the case of places like Pripyat abandoned 34 years ago. The 83-minute-long ‘David Attenborough: A Life on our Planet’, now streaming on Netflix, is a must-see film for a powerful reminder of what we have lost, where we are at, and to hear an optimistic message of hope for a sustainable future.