Force of Nature
When Attenborough met the Windsors, a multi-gen alliance was born
WHEN BRITISH naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough joined Instagram Sept. 24, he got one million followers in four hours and 44 minutes, breaking U.S. actress Jennifer Aniston’s 2019 Guinness record of five hours and 16 minutes.
Far from fading gently into his dotage, the 94-year-old is busier than ever, and the urgency comes from facing his mortality – and that of our planet.
“I realize that although as a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world, it was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying,” he says in his October 2020 Netflix documentary, David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. He sounds crestfallen, bereft. Looking down at the ground, he continues in almost a mumble.
“Um, so the world is not as wild as it once was,” he says, looking up to meet the camera’s eye. “Well, we destroyed it. Not just ruined it … Human beings have overrun the world.”
He calls the documentary his “witness statement,” and it comes almost seven decades after he started with the BBC writing, narrating and producing series like 1979s’ Life on Earth: A Natural History, for which he travelled 1.5 million miles to 39 countries to film 650 species of wild animals.
In A Life on Our Planet, Attenborough also provides a prescription for undoing the damage: eat vegetarian; switch to sustainable energy sources like solar, wind and geothermal; halt deforestation; and fish sustainably.
Now at six million Instagram followers and counting, Attenborough has gained fresh currency among youth after “meeting” Swedish climate champion Greta Thunberg for the first time on a Zoom call in January and answering questions in a YouTube video from famous fans like soccer star David Beckham, U.S. singer Billie Eilish and the cast of the Netflix show Sex Education.
Last year, Prince William called on Attenborough to narrate a short video released with the announcement of his Earthshot Prize. The name references John F. Kennedy’s 1961 moonshot speech, where the president urged a joint session of Congress to allocate more resour
ces to the U.S. space program so they could land a man on the moon within a decade.
A longtime friend of the Royal Family who once helped produce the Queen’s Christmas address, Attenborough interviewed William this year about the Earthshot Prize after the prince announced the Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge would hand out $85 million over the next 10 years to innovators who address its goals of reducing waste, protecting nature, cleaning the air, restoring oceans and fixing climate change.
William reciprocated in kind when he released photographs on the @kensingtonroyal Instagram account of him and Sir David watching A Life on Our Planet – on an outdoor screen in the gardens at Kensington Palace. Next, he released a video of Prince George, 7, Princess
Charlotte, 5, and Prince Louis, 2, which has been viewed almost seven million times. When Prince George asked what animal Attenborough thought would become extinct next, he replied: “Let’s hope there won’t be any because there are lots of things we can do when animals are in danger of extinction. We can protect them.”
It’s a goal he believes is within reach, with a little help from his royal friends. —Kim Honey