A LIFE ON OUR PLANET
MY WITNESS STATEMENT AND A VISION FOR THE FUTURE
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH WITH JONNIE HUGHES
Ebury Press, 272pp, £20
Adorning the cover of David Attenborough’s manifesto for change, there is a photograph of Sir David himself, appropriately enough for a man described by Kerri ní Dochartaigh in the Irish Times as ‘the most inspirational human being on Earth’.
In the Financial Times, Henry Mance also paid tribute. ‘It’s possible that no human being, alive or dead, has seen so much of the natural world. In A Life on Our Planet, the 94-year-old natural historian and broadcaster seeks to sum up just how much has been damaged — and just how much trouble we are in.’ The book is part autobiography and part polemic, from Attenborough’s fossil-hunting childhood in Leicester to his decades as the great pioneer of nature and wildlife documentaries. Attenborough has come to his environmental message late in life,
wrote Mance: ‘He was looking in the wrong direction – at the natural world’s wonders, not its disappearance.’ Reviewing the book in the Sunday
Times, Bryan Appleyard reflected: ‘This man — the one we wish the Queen had married, the national treasure, the embodiment of all the BBC and Britain should be, the secular saint — is on his last lap. This shortish book is his troubled valedictory. It is also a “witness statement” warning of the end of the world that made him.’ For Appleyard, the book offers a ‘hellfire sermon’ on an environmental crisis. ‘The big difference is that his emphasis is not just on global warming; he gives equal weight to species extinction.’
The book begins in Pripyat, the Ukrainian town abandoned 30 years ago after the Chernobyl disaster. Appleyard sees signs of hope for the future there. ‘The town has been spectacularly rewilded, not by us, but by nature. It is covered in thick vegetation and there are populations of foxes, elk, deer, wild boar, bison, brown bear and raccoon dogs. Not, of course, humans.’