Knight as clear as day on virus
The Covid fightback has given Sir David Attenborough heart for the climate battle, writes Joe Shute.
Sir David Attenborough is contemplating when he might receive his vaccine for Covid-19. By the time you read this, the great naturalist may already have been inoculated with his first dose. ‘‘At 94, I think I’m entitled,’’ he says, joking, puffing out his chest as I ask whether he has considered pulling rank to jump the queue. After all, beyond the Queen, he would surely be considered next in line.
Perhaps surprisingly for aman who has no doubt been vaccinated against a barrage of tropical diseases in his time, he admits he is slightly squeamish about the idea of a needle in the arm. But in a quick barb at any anti-vaxxer sentiment, he says: ‘‘I’m sufficient of a scientist still, I hope, to realise this is the thing to do.’’
The man who has been to the north and south poles, and travelled everywhere in between, has spent the past year like the rest of us – grounded.
To finish the year with a vaccine is, he says, a triumph of science and international co-operation, and one that gives him heart for our ability to deal with the climate crisis now engulfing the world.
Attenborough believes this year has also reminded us all of something else. ‘‘The virus has made us feel we are more vulnerable, and vulnerable to what is happening to the world,’’ he says. ‘‘It has drawn attention to the fact we aren’t as omnipotent and all controlling as we think we are.’’
He has been confined at his Richmond, London, home with his daughter, Susan, who lives with him. During spring and summer, the pair took a walk at least three times a day around their substantial gardens, which are close to Richmond Park. Attenborough kept a record of all the wildlife he could spot: nesting great tits, robins and the first dragonflies rising up from his pond.
For aman who has spent time up close with some of the world’s most exotic creatures, he has been struck by the ‘‘intensity’’ of watching his local wildlife as the seasons passed. ‘‘The extraordinary thing is the continuity,’’ he says. ‘‘You see them every day. You are in it all the time.’’
Continuity is, of course, what we all associate with Attenborough, who was named in a 2018 Yougov poll as the most popular person in Britain, and has numerous species of flora and fauna, a dinosaur and a constellation of stars named after him, as well as more honorary degrees than anyone else.
Ever since beginning his travels for his first series, Zoo Quest, in 1954, he has been a mainstay on our screens. His voice, now rougherwith age but having lost none of its power, has revealed the secrets of the natural world to generations of youngsters.
Now the torch is passing. These days, he says, it is young people who offer him signs of hope. During the pandemic, he has been receiving between 50 and 70 letters a day, mainly from schoolchildren. ‘‘I get a huge number of letters from kids written out of passion because they want to help.’’
He believes teachers should receive greater recognition for instilling this passion, not least with another public sector pay freeze looming as the British Government seeks to balance the books. Before the death of his wife, Jane, who suffered a brain haemorrhage in 1997 when he was filming in New Zealand, their daughter Susan worked as a primary school head teacher. She later gave up the job to move in with Attenborough, but he retains a strong understanding of what teachers do.
‘‘Thank God it’s a vocation rather than a job, and there will always be teachers, however badly we as a society treat them, because they cherish children,’’ he says. ‘‘We ought not to take it for granted.’’
Attenborough has kept in touch with his son, Robert, an anthropologist at Cambridge University, and two grandchildren, also scientists, as best he can – ‘‘They come and shout at me through the garden window’’ – but he won’t be seeing them at Christmas. He’ll stick to their regular Zoom call instead. ‘‘It is extraordinary how different [Zoom] is from a telephone call,’’ he says, ‘‘which shows what a visual animal homo sapiens is. So much an element of our conversation now is altered by the fact we can see each other. It’s interesting from a semiotic point of view.’’
Attenborough’s latest series, A Perfect Planet, to be broadcast on the BBC next month, was filmed with long-term work-mates, including his old friend Alastair Fothergill, who says Attenborough remains a true master of his craft. ‘‘I have spent days with highly paid Hollywood actors who take a day to get it right,’’ Fothergill tells me. ‘‘With David, we always do it in two hours and finish up with a cheese sandwich.’’
Attenborough once told me during an interview that he thinks about his mortality every day. Today whenwe speak, he seems to have changed his tune. ‘‘I don’t spend time speculating about when I should drop off the bough,’’ he says firmly. ‘‘You have to keep going as long as you can.’’
Perhaps, in part, this is down to a renewed sense of hope. He has detected in recent years a shift in public opinion towards the climate crisis and loss of global biodiversity.
The challenge now is matching that public feeling with political action. He says he rose cheering out of his chair when Joe Biden, the United States president-elect, announced he would reverse Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty on climate change. In November 2021, the UN’S Climate Change Conference will be hosted in Glasgow, Scotland, and Attenborough plans to be there to fulfil whatever role is requested of him.
What, I wonder, does he regard to be the most important thing that could come out of the Glasgow conference? Normally he answers questions with the speed of aman in a hurry, but at this he thinks for a while.
‘‘A sense of internationalism,’’ he eventually says. ‘‘A sense that we are all in this together.’’
The Daily Telegraph