SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH
In this special interview that took place in May, the legendary broadcaster and naturalist shared his hopes and fears for Earth’s future.
His landmark witness statement on the state of planet Earth.
AS HE LOOKED FORWARD to his 94th birthday in May, Sir David Attenborough solemnly reflected on a very different planet from the one on which he grew up. “We need to reconnect with nature, for our own health – as well as the Earth’s,” he said.
After a lifetime of bringing nature into our living rooms, Sir David wants us to get out of our armchairs and help save the natural world we’ve enjoyed watching on TV. Decades of relentless industrialisation, urbanisation and intensive farming have driven a wedge between us and our animal ancestors, he warns, and the disconnection between modern families and nature is getting worse.
“I think it’s terrible that children should grow up without knowing what a tadpole is – just awful,” he says. “I can’t criticise other people on how they bring up their children, but in my time I could, and did, get on a bicycle and cycle 15 miles [24km] to a quarry and spend the day looking for dragonflies, grass snakes and newts, as well as fossils.”
Losing touch with nature not only affects the way we treat the planet, but also affects us on a primal level.
“We are now recognising clinically that it is important to have contact with the natural world, for people’s sanity,” he says. “Anybody will recognise that in moments of both exultation and deep sorrow that’s where you go. That’s where you grieve and that’s where you contemplate real things, the natural world. Psychologists recognise this, and I think it’s the case for everybody. If you lose contact – emotional contact – with the natural world, you’re badly deprived.”
As a youngster before World War II, Sir David pedalled his Raleigh junior bike up hill and down dale, at a time when, he admits, there was less traffic on the roads and less to distract children from the wonders of the natural world (including TV documentaries). As he looks around him now, he sees a very different world. Swathes of rainforest in Borneo where he made his early films have been burnt and bulldozed to make way for palm oil plantations. Arctic sea ice has shrunk by a third. Some of the reefs where he dived for his first underwater series are now lifeless.
This, he explains, is why he’s still campaigning when he could be putting up his feet. Against stereotype, he’s grown more outspoken as he’s grown older. “I belong to the generation that really created all this stuff. We had no concept that we were ruining the world, none. I suppose you can say, well, you were very insensitive, you should have realised, but I don’t think many people did.”
His latest film, and its namesake book, A Life on Our Planet, produced in partnership with the World Wide Fund for Nature, borrows the cadence of Life on Earth, his landmark 1979 TV series, but shows the world in a different light. Instead of the pristine habitats and unspoilt wildernesses of that era, this production aims to show the monumental scale of humanity’s impact on nature. It is his most political film to date. Not only is the Earth gaining humans and losing animal and plant species at a pace it can’t sustain, Sir David says, but it is also heating up at a rate that could tip it into sudden, catastrophic disaster.
At the beginning of the film, we see him stepping gingerly through the ruins of the Ukrainian town devastated in 1986 by the Chernobyl nuclear power station meltdown (see book extract on page 22). The message that unfolds during the next 83 minutes is just how destructive humankind can be, as we see rainforests torn down, slabs of polar ice collapsing and lifeless coral. At the end he returns to the long-abandoned town to show how nature has reclaimed it. If we are intent on destroying our own species, it will eventually happen. Nature will find a way to carry on, even though humans may no longer be around.
The theme is that such destruction is a modern phenomenon, brought about by the baby boomer generation and its excesses, and it is generation Z that is paying the price for their sins. Sir David endorses this view, declaring that he and his generation have “done terrible things” and that the future is in the hands of young people who understand “science and our dependence upon the natural world”.
Probably no-one else alive has seen as much of the Earth’s surface over such a long period of time as Sir David has. To make just that one series of Life on Earth he travelled more than 2.4 million kilometres to 30 countries and filmed more than 600 species. Audiences have voted him the greatest broadcaster of all time, cooler than footballing superstar David Beckham in a poll of coolest men and, most recently, the person they trust most on environmental matters, more so than 17-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.
People listen when he sounds the alarm, but he also has an upbeat message about how we can help save the planet. A first step is to eat less meat. “The big demand that we’ve imposed on the planet is to get meat,” he explains. “That’s what’s taken over so much of our countryside. That’s what’s causing the Brazilian rainforest to be knocked down, to turn it into grazing – for more hamburgers. We can’t afford to do that anymore and sustain the number of people we’ve got.”
IS HE VEGETARIAN? “I don’t eat meat. That’s not entirely true, I eat fish. It wasn’t a great sort of decision and I can’t pretend that it was motivated by any ecological conscience, but I now avoid red flesh.”
The other thing we can all do is live modestly. Even small changes make a difference. If we avoided food waste, we could feed five instead of four.
“I try to recycle,” Sir David says. “It’s more like a religious practice, a kind of ritualised thing.”
Does he drive an electric car? “I don’t drive. I’ve never driven. Well, that’s not true, I can drive, but I’ve never driven. Never had a reason, never had a car.
“My daughter drives and we’re getting an electric car. We haven’t yet got it. We’ve got a little – I don’t know
whether I ought to mention it or not – a little German job. A [fossil-fuel powered] VW.”
None of the current concerns about the planet occurred to him when he first crisscrossed the world in jetliners that were flying gas-guzzlers, complete with ashtrays in the armrests. “Yes, 40 years ago we didn’t realise there was a problem of climate change. Forty years ago we were concerned about disappearing species and how we could save them. Arabian oryxes and so on; gorillas. Nobody said to me, and I didn’t say to myself, you are wrecking the climate with the amount of carbon that jet airliners emit. You’re complicit in that. It didn’t occur to me.”
Sir David’s lifelong love affair with nature, creatures, unspoilt habitats and the wilderness began when his father gave him his first pet, an amphibian called a fire salamander, for his eighth birthday. He beams as he recalls the occasion. “They’re absolutely magical things. If you’ve never seen one before, it’s jet black with sulphur spots on it,” he says. “They are quite innocuous and they’re quite slow-moving so you can handle them no problem at all. I had an aquarium that I turned into a vivarium with moss and stones and so on, and a little pool at the bottom on one side.”
His first foray into natural history collecting came a year later when he began supplying newts to the University of Leicester zoology department, where his father was principal, for threepence each. Showing an early flair for enterprise, he didn’t reveal that the newts were from a pond only yards from the department.
SIR DAVID JOINED THE BBC Television Service in 1952 having previously graduated from the University of Cambridge where he had studied geology and zoology. If you can’t remember a time when there wasn’t an Attenborough wildlife documentary on TV, it’s because there wasn’t one really. In those days, the service was a fledgling arm of the BBC, broadcasting to only a few thousand people. Sir David’s brief as a producer included “politics, gardening, even knitting”.
Already married, with an infant son, he had no plans to travel the world until a zookeeper who was to have presented a new program about animal collecting fell ill. In 1954 a 28-year-old Attenborough was dispatched with a cameraman to find a rare jungle bird.
“When I started making natural history films – I’m almost ashamed of it now, but there’s no point in denying it – I was making a film about London Zoo, which was collecting animals. Rare animals? Oh, good, let’s go and scrag it and take it back to London, he recalls. “You wouldn’t dream of doing that now.”
Zoo Quest was a success. More collecting programs were commissioned. Colour TV arrived. Film photography evolved to show animals in close-up, in slow motion, in highdefinition and in a spectacular window into the natural world of the African plains, polar icecaps, rainforests and coral reefs, always with David Attenborough as the guide.
On early trips he brought home animals to keep as pets – a practice he admits would be unthinkable today – including “lemurs, parrots and hummingbirds”. The most unusual specimens were two lungfish, living relics of prehistoric times. His favourites were a pair of bush babies – small nocturnal primates – that ran loose in the house and had a fondness for marking their territory with urine. He recalls that dinner guests would sniff the air as they entered the house, wondering whether their hosts were cooking strong-smelling soup.
These days he has firm views on which animals should be kept in zoos: “There are lots of things that live perfectly well in captivity and you can give them all they need. Equally, there are things that should not, under any circumstances, be kept in captivity. You should not keep raptors; you shouldn’t keep eagles in captivity. Dreadful. I don’t think that you should keep lions in captivity, unless you can provide them with an enormous area.”
He has been urinated on by bats, dive-bombed by gulls, and he has swum with hungry grey reef sharks. To capture one vital shot he put his head in a lion’s mouth – for real. In 1961 he was filming a program about Elsa the lioness. Sleeping in his Land Rover in the Kenyan bush, he was awoken “by a stench of bad breath and opened my eyes to find her jaw dripping saliva inches above my head”.
For years he travelled with only a battered leather suitcase. His wife, Jane, would pack it and see him off at the airport, never knowing quite when he would return. Then, in 1997, when he was filming a series about birdlife in New Zealand, Jane, then 70, suffered a brain haemorrhage. He flew to her bedside at a London hospital just in time for her to squeeze his hand before she died. They had been married for 47 years. Afterwards, he threw himself deeper into his work. Life is very different without her, he says, still missing her terribly.
EVERYONE HAS THEIR favourite Attenborough TV moment. If you watched Life on Earth in the 1980s, it may be the time he rolled around with silverback mountain gorillas in Rwanda. Or it may be more recently, on the BBC’s Africa series, when he got down on all fours to chat to Nicky the baby rhinoceros.
His own favourite moments are not when animals are reacting to him, but when he’s observing: “The most moving times, as far as I am concerned, are when the natural world is unaware of your presence. A swamp in northern Australia, for example, I can remember very well sitting in a hide in the darkness, waiting for the sun to come up. You can hear that there’s a big community of water birds – and the sun comes up and you see egrets and there are crocodiles and you see a whole complex ecosystem just throbbing with life and beauty. You watch it for a bit, and you do something silly and alarm them, then the whole lot disappears. But you have that moment of revelation.”
He is still making documentaries, writing books and presenting BBC Radio 4’s Tweet of the Day (about birdsong, not Twitter). He still wears his trademark blue shirt and khaki chinos on screen, though he has shifted to satellite and streaming, making films for Sky and Netflix as well as the BBC, drawing in bigger audiences than ever.
One thing that may slow him down is if he runs out of film titles containing the word ‘planet’. Attenborough’s Our Planet was shown on Netflix last year, and his Seven Worlds, One Planet on the BBC. He is working on a BBC series about plants, Green Planet. Previously he has made Planet Earth, Planet Earth II, Blue Planet and Blue Planet II, Frozen Planet and Our Fragile Planet.
These days he’s less often in a hide or behind the camera, and more often in a recording studio providing the voiceover. He stresses that it’s film crews who spend months capturing footage and that they, not he, should take the credit. “People think I’ve shot the film and I get the credit,” he says. “People say, what was it like when you got really close up with those narwhals, you know, under water? I say, I wasn’t there, and they say, what? I say, no [raising his voice for emphasis], I wasn’t there!”
Money has never been his motivator, though he earned more than £1m in 2017–18 from his private company, David Attenborough Productions. He still lives in the same Victorian townhouse in south-west London he shared with his wife. He was renowned for travelling economy class and never taking upgrades unless the whole crew was upgraded, until he reached 75, when the BBC insisted he travelled business class.
Despite his fame, he remains engagingly modest. For years the joke in the Attenborough family was that he only got a knighthood because a palace official confused him with his older brother, Sir Richard, the actor and director (who died in 2014). And he’s a paragon of honesty. He has never done an advert, he says, because “my job is telling the truth, and if I say margarine is butter, people will think, ‘He’ll say anything.’”
HIS OWN FAVOURITE MOMENTS ARE WHEN HE’S OBSERVING.
So, although we yawn when self-interested politicians warn about climate change, when Sir David talks we listen – even when his message is stark.
In the 60-plus years he has been making documentaries, he points out, the world’s population has more than doubled: 7.8 billion people today, heading to 11 billion by the end of the century. Many of the habitats and species he filmed in those early days have vanished or are in retreat. If we don’t mend our ways – rein in population growth and live less wastefully – we’ll wipe out life as we know it, including ourselves.
So is he right to blame himself and his generation for the planet’s problems? His 1961 film, Zoo Quest to Madagascar, was ahead of its time, revealing the damage caused by climate change and deforestation. At one point Sir David walks along the vast bed of a dried-up river commenting that the lack of water is “a clear indication of the drastic changes in climate that have overtaken this part of Madagascar. It’s likely that, only a few hundred years ago, when the gigantic birds [ Aepyornis sp.] were alive, this was not a desert, but a great area of swamp.”
Climate change was already happening in 1961 but the scale of our impact on nature has grown, as has the amount of money at stake. Climate change is now a global industry on which livelihoods, careers, reputations, marketing budgets and sales forecasts depend. It pays for academics, research groups, lobbyists, publishers and filmmakers, among others, and generates profits for thousands of companies involved in green technologies. Clean-energy company Tesla has ballooned into the world’s second biggest car company by value. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, is sinking a sizeable chunk of its $7 trillion funds into “sustainable” investments. To sceptics, it sounds like opportunism. They take the view that there are always doomsayers warning of disaster – a hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, nuclear accidents. Sir David thinks this time it is genuinely different, citing extreme weather events such as the Aussie bushfires, and he argues that the sceptics may never be convinced until it’s too late. For him, the message is simple. Be considerate. Live modestly. The future is at stake, he says, not for him but for the next generation, for his two granddaughters, at university in the UK. “You know, we’ve overtaken the world,” he warns. “We are representatives of a very powerful, damaging species. Don’t waste. Don’t waste electricity. Don’t waste food. Don’t waste time.”
His own time is running out, he says: “I’m 93. How long have I got? I haven’t got 10 years, I don’t think.” Will he ever retire? “Well, when people want me to do things, I do things,” he says. “If they don’t want me to do it, I’ve retired.
“I have the greatest job in the world, you know. What a privileged time I’ve had. People provide me with wonderful pictures of things we’ve never seen before and ask me to write a sentence on it. Better than sitting in the corner knitting.”
“I HAVE THE GREATEST JOB IN THE WORLD, YOU KNOW.”
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: A LIFE ON OUR PLANET will be available to watch in cinemas and globally via Netflix later this year. For more info and to register for updates: au.attenborough.film or follow on Twitter @ourplanet