A LIFE ON OUR PLANET

While it’s tempting to think that the subtitle should be: “We’re all Doomed”, as Sir David Attenborough takes us on a journey to see how we’re living is destroying the planet, towards the end of the book he does give us plenty to be hopeful about.

This is the companion book to the powerful Netflix documentary of the same name. The first two thirds of the book called “My Witness Statement” is a mix of the biographical – his experiences of habitats and the natural world over the course of his career and how he can observe our destruction of the natural world. In his groundbreaking BBC series, Life on Earth, from the late 1970s, he was already seeing the effects of man on the environment. The number of whales in the sea had reduced from 250,000 to a few thousand due to whale hunters, and the mountain gorillas in Rwanda were down to just 300 as agriculture encroached on their territory.

Each chapter opening gives a date with scary statistics: for world population (rising), carbon in the atmosphere (going up) and percentage of the remaining wilderness (going down – dramatically), starting in 1937 when world population was 2.3bn with 66% wilderness and finishing in 2020 with population at 7.8bn and wilderness at 35%.

Sir David is of course one of the most credible guides imaginable as he has watched the changes over his 94 years, and he is passionate, knowledgable and articulate about them. It is a particularly powerful book with an uplifting ending as he manages to find places that are turning the tide.

Witness Books, £20; ISBN: 978-1529-10827-9