In his new book, Sir David reflects on his extraordinary life and the devastating changes he has witnessed. In this exclusive extract, he ponders the destructive power of the human race.

PRIPYAT WAS built by the Soviet Union, in one busy period of construction in the 1970s.

It was the designed, perfect home for almost 50,000 people, a modernist utopia to suit the very best engineers and scientists in the Eastern Bloc, together with their young families. Amateur film footage from the early 1980s shows them smiling, mingling and pushing prams on the wide boulevards, taking ballet classes, swimming in the Olympic-size pool and boating on the river. Yet no one lives in Pripyat today. The walls are crumbling. Its windows are broken. Its lintels are collapsing. I have to watch my step as I explore its dark, empty buildings. Chairs lie on their backs in the hairdressing salons, surrounded by dusty curlers and broken mirrors. Fluorescent tubes hang down from the supermarket ceiling. The parquet floor of the town hall is ripped up and scattered down the length of a grand, marble staircase. Exercise books litter the floors of school rooms, neat Cyrillic handwriting scoring their pages in blue ink. I find the pools emptied. The seats of sofas in the apartments have dropped to the floor. The beds are rotten. Almost everything is motionless – paused. If something is stirred by a gust of wind, it startles me. With each new doorway you enter, the lack of people becomes more and more preoccupying. Their absence is the truth that is most present. I’ve visited other post-human towns – Pompei, Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu – but here, the normality of the place forces your attention on the abnormality of its abandonment. Its structures and accoutrements are so familiar that you know their disuse cannot simply be due to the passing of ages. Pripyat is a place of utter despair because everything here, from the noticeboards that are no longer looked at, to the discarded slide rules in the science classroom, to the shattered piano in the cafe, is a monument to the capacity of humankind to lose everything it needs, and everything it treasures. We humans, alone on Earth, are powerful enough to create worlds, and then to destroy them.

A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough, published by Ebury Press. Special AG and QBD price $29.99 (RRP $39.99) Order now at australiangeographic.com/books or turn to p29 for your chance to win a signed copy.