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I’VE SEEN mankind’s greatest mistake WITH MY OWN EYES
Sir David Attenborough’s new film is a ll to action he felt compelled to make, he tells Christopher Stevens – so that he extraordinary sights he’s enjoyed are still there for future generations
David Attenborough is giving evidence. The man regarded by millions as the greatest broadcaster in television history, whose career as an explorer and naturalist stretches back almost 70 years, is speaking out to condemn what he regards as the greatest crime of his lifetime.
‘This is my witness statement,’ he says. ‘The natural world is fading. The evidence is all around. It’s happened in my lifetime, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. This is mankind’s greatest mistake but if we act now, we can put it right.’
Sir David is speaking with an intensity, a harnessed anger, that I have never seen in him before. It’s a grey and chilly afternoon, and earlier in the day he joined the prime minister at the Science Museum in London to launch the UN climate summit.
Now we are talking in a back room at the Royal Albert Hall where, next month, his latest wildlife spectacular – A Life On Our Planet – will be presented to a live audience and simultaneously screened in cinemas globally before it is released on Netflix. ‘It is a polemic,’ he says, ‘and I have never done a polemic before. I am a public service broadcaster who joined the BBC in the 1940s at a time when it was a monopoly. I began my career as a producer, enabling people to give their opinions – not mine. I still feel in my bones I ought to be impartial.
‘But if you have seen what I have, you cannot remain silent. You have to speak out, to bear witness. What we have done to this planet during my lifetime is a crime, and future generations will view it as that. Humanity is responsible for the destruction of the world’s wild places and all the biodiversity they sustain, because we don’t have the ability to control ourselves. As a species, we don’t know how to handle the power of our hands or the intelligence of our brains.’
The 80-minute film begins in the deserted Ukrainian city of Pripyat, once home to thousands of workers at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. In April 1986, within 36 hours of the plant’s atomic meltdown, the city was completely evacuated. No one has lived there since. David
walks through deserted rooms in family flats, the corridors decorated with Soviet-era murals. Pripyat is an empty mausoleum, a concrete tomb without a corpse, that stands as a monument to a colossal, man-made eco-catastrophe. ‘I hadn’t been to Chernobyl before,’ he tells me. ‘But it was featured in my Netflix series Our Planet last year, so of course I knew that large mammals are starting to live and breed there again.’
The film confirms it. A camera perched in a window in a tower block might see elk, foxes, wild horses and even wolves in these city streets, now overgrown with vegetation. Nothing, not even nuclear meltdown, can hold back nature for long. But David is keen to emphasise that this is not a complete recovery. Scientists do not yet know how the animals will be affected by residual levels of radiation, expected to be higher than normal for thousands of years to come.
‘A short trip doesn’t pose a risk to humans now,’ he says. ‘But I was aware there was no birdsong, and no insects. It hasn’t come back to life fully, as a total eco-system. And it didn’t feel like a real wilderness, more of an eerie halfway world.
‘A feeling of criminality pervades the place. Pripyat is the scene of a crime. But what is truly shocking is the global eco-catastrophe dwarfs even Chernobyl. The nuclear disaster happened because of human mistakes. What is happening to our pla
net is also happening because of human mistakes and crimes – and like Chernobyl, it will result in a place where people cannot live. But now, that place is the whole world.’
His speech, usually so considered and moderate, is urgent. There’s no doubt that the great educator, who has taken countless millions of viewers with him on his travels to the furthest corners of the earth in search of wildlife, is determined that his message must be heard.
‘I have had the most extraordi
nary life,’ he says. ‘It’s only now that I appreciate how extraordinary. Virtue is not involved: I just arrived at the right time. I’ve been lucky enough to spend my life exploring the wild places of the planet. I’ve travelled to every part of the globe. In truth, I couldn’t imagine living my life any other way. The start of my career coincided with the advent of global air travel. It was the best time of my life.’ That’s a rare admission for David, who usually insists his next project will be his favourite. He is relentlessly forward-looking, but the gentle persuasion of his old friends Keith Scholey and Alastair Fothergill, veteran wildlife film-makers, has persuaded him to look backwards. I ask him why he feels the 50s and 60s, when his shows were broadcast in black and white even though they were often shot in colour, were so special. ‘They were the best time of my life,’ he says without hesitation. ‘I was born in 1926, and when I was in my 30s we had no idea of the damage that was coming, of the awaitcriminality. ing Mankind Continued on page 6
‘What we’ve done to thisplanet is a crime’
hadn’t carried out the devastation we have now. It was possible to see the world as it was of old, with great areas still untouched. Although one was aware that there were creatures becoming extinct, you didn’t feel that nature was beleaguered in the way it is now.’
This remained true, even at the end of the 20th century. The film shows this vividly with shots of David near the frozen poles – backing away from a bull elephant seal in South Georgia in 1990’s The Trials Of Life, or posing with a walking stick with a penguin, like a couple of toffs, for 1993’s Life In The Freezer.
The picture switches to melting ice sheets and retreating glaciers. The film’s point is complex, explained with full clarity. Fifty years ago, conservationists were worried about individual species dying out, such as giant pandas and Siberian tigers.
But today, entire habitats are becoming extinct. If the oceans continue to warm at current rates, the North Pole could be entirely without ice during the summer within a couple of decades. And if the Amazon rainforest continues to be cut down to create land for agriculture, the remaining forests will become drier and more prone to wildfires which may devastate millions of acres.
A world without pandas or tigers is an appalling thought. But a world without ice sheets or rainforests is literally unthinkable. We have no way of knowing what that would do to the global climate, or whether humanity could survive the changes.
In the film, David explains that the past 10,000 years have been unique in the planet’s history. Human beings have been around for at least 200,000 years, but for almost all that time we were unable to do more than exist, living in caves, gathering fruit and trapping animals to eat.
An extraordinary thing happened at the end of the last Ice Age. The world settled into a pattern of seasons – something previously unknown. Forests spread across the earth and tiny creatures called phyloplankton
filled the oceans: between them, they locked up so much carbon that the world’s temperature and climate stabilised. Scientists call this period the Holocene era. To David, ‘the Holocene is our Garden of Eden.’
But by burning colossal quantities of fossil fuel we have released enough carbon to make the whole system
dangerously unstable. ‘Fortunately, the younger generation is more aware of the approaching calamities than my generation ever was. They are vociferous, and rightly so.’
He discussed the crisis with teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg last year. ‘Greta is extraordinary and she has an electric effect on people.
She has a way of speaking that is absolutely direct – she looks you straight in the eye. I was recording a radio show and one of the producers suggested I fly to Norway to meet her. I said, “You’re missing the point!” So we did it over Skype.’
His prognosis for the future at first seems bleak. Remembering the wildlife he saw thronging the Serengeti plain on his first visits, herds of elephants and giraffes, wildebeest, big cats, rhinos and other animals, all beyond number, he says, ‘We are not going to reverse things in any profound way in anybody’s lifetime. The richness I saw in Africa in the 50s will not come back. We have completely destroyed the world. Human beings have over-run the world.’
But pessimism is not in his nature. His emphasis is on repairing the damage. Making the documentary, he spent a week in a studio, talking to the camera – reminiscing about his life and developing ideas for restoring the planet’s wildernesses. The impassioned lecture that emerges from this is illustrated not only with archive film but with glofootage rious from last year’s Netflix extravaganza Our Planet. Breathtaking images include vast shoals of fish, devastated coral reefs and migrating herds. Some of the film is upsetting, some mesmerising, but all provides a vivid backdrop for David’s words. ‘Usually I write a narrative to explain the cameraman’s pictures,’ he says. ‘But this time the pictures are giving context to my words.’
The thrust of his message is that human beings will thrive only when all sorts of plant and animal life also thrive again. That means safeguarding vast areas from agriculture or housing, and maintaining swathes of the coastal oceans so fish stocks can revive. ‘It is simpler than you may think,’ he says in the film. ‘A century from now, our planet could be wild again. Nature is our biggest ally and our greatest inspiration. We need to move from being apart from nature, to being a part of nature.’
To do this, he says, we should all be more like the hunter-gatherers he met on his rainforest adventures, such as the Dyak people of Borneo. ‘They lived in a sustainable way, they had to. And now we have to, as well, so we can learn a lot from them.
‘Time and again, in the desert or the forest, in Amazonia or New Guinea, I have discovered how limited my knowledge is compared to the people I have encountered. I felt like a feckless, incompetent child by comparison. The first time I found myself in a rainforest, I’d have been hopelessly lost without my guides: I couldn’t see the sun and I had no idea where I was, wandering in circles.
‘I would still be there today without their knowledge... except much of the rainforests of Borneo and elsewhere have been cut down for palm oil production. It is essential that no more of the forest is destroyed.’
He leans forward towards me, to make his point. ‘In the end, I am certain of one thing. This is not just about saving our planet. It is about saving ourselves.’
‘The younger generation are rightly vociferous’
David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet is in cinemas on Thursday 16 April and will be available to watch on Netflix this spring. Visit attenborough.film for tickets.