A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

When, in his introduction, Attenborough claims that we “are all people of Pripyat now” (7), he implicates not only himself but also his readers in tackling the problems that face the planet today. Primarily, the loss of biodiversity and the destruction of ecosystems brought about by a host of factors, including the continually growing population of human beings and their tendency toward technologies that pollute—especially the fossil fuels that contribute to climate change. The reader cannot simply turn away but is called upon to take action. Still, while Attenborough’s message is clearly one of urgency, it also always contains—as he himself always has projected—an underlying message of hope. If particular actions are taken with swift determination, then the dismal future he recounts in the slim section that is Part 2 will not come to pass.

While some of Part 1 covers some explicitly autobiographical material, it is more concerned with detailing the ways in which the planet has been altered over Attenborough’s lifetime, as well as the ways in which humanity started out on this path of planetary depletion. The autobiographical material serves to draw the reader in, to show Attenborough’s evolution as first a standard naturalist in the nineteenth-century explorer mode, then later as a crusader for conservation and rewilding. Again, the personal material is designed to implicate the reader: what changes have his audience witnessed in their lifetimes? How committed can his audience become to the changes that now need to occur?

Still, his focus is more particularly on natural history. In one instance, he makes a clear distinction between the five mass extinctions in past geological history versus the potential sixth mass distinction that the Anthropocene (see Index of Terms) might usher in. For example, the most famous of these previous mass extinctions—the asteroid that caused such geological upheaval that it killed off the dinosaurs after their “175-million-year reign” (17)—was a cosmic event, not a human-made catastrophe. Humanity was the ultimate beneficiary of this event, and with the fading of the last glaciers, the Holocene made possible the ideal climate conditions for humanity to flourish. Yet, humanity’s great success is starting to look like “our greatest mistake,” as the title of Attenborough’s introduction would have it. The looming sixth mass extinction would be the first of its kind: an avoidable, human-manufactured disaster; a tragedy forged by methane and carbon emissions, rather than random asteroids.

Attenborough also discusses the rise of humanity, sometimes in contradictory ways. He writes that “[t]he Holocene was our Garden of Eden” (21). The religious, even messianic, overtones serve to reinforce the “dominion” concept of humankind’s rule over nature—the kind of message that has been wielded to justify the subjugation of the natural world (and of indigenous peoples) throughout history. He pointedly uses the term “civilization” to describe the rise of farming and of large human settlements, with the implication that culture only grows out of what appears to be more complex societies and that technology is a result of this teleological progress. These are assumptions that have been called into question in recent years, most pointedly by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (see Further Reading & Resources for more information).

Still, he never fails to remind us that we are animals, as when he notes that “[o]ur own evolution is recorded in the rocks” (18), just like the ammonites he used to gather as a child. Humanity, however, has one unique attribute: “no other species has anything approaching the capacity for culture that we have” (18). Coupled with large brains and specialized societies, humankind also developed technologies far beyond the province of even the most intelligent apes or dolphins or other tool-wielding, self-recognizing species.

The turn to farming and the domestication of animals fundamentally “transformed the relationship between humankind and nature” (23). Suddenly, humans had the power to tame the land and to select for traits in both plants and animals in ways that served the needs of budding civilizations. Eventually, these innovations—along with improving technology—paved the way for factory farms (and other prominent features of modern life) with their attendant problems, to be addressed in further detail in subsequent sections. In many ways, technology and culture are mutually reinforcing entities (see Themes: Technological Development). That is, as technology develops—“Water power, steam power, electrification,” for example (25)—so too do “ever-more-complex societies” (25). Attenborough reminds his readers, however, that this expansion, this “progress” comes at a significant cost. As he points out throughout the book, humankind “was able to develop and progress only because the natural world continued to be stable” (25). That stability is no longer guaranteed.

He returns to memoir mode for the last three sections here, recounting his professional experience from the 1950s through the 1970s. He talks about his first forays in front of a camera for his initial BBC program, Zoo Quest, in mostly positive terms. He never mentions the ways in which traditional zoos have become relics of a more unenlightened past, though he does note that he was eager to get out into the field—“to let viewers see [the animals] in their proper surroundings” (28)—as soon as he started the show. He also admits, somewhat wistfully, that “[t]he 1950s were a time of great optimism” (30). He then immediately follows this admission with another one: “That was before any of us were aware that there were problems” (30). While succinct, this perhaps serves to repudiate some of his own critics, who have suggested through the years that Attenborough has not sufficiently used his platform to support conservation and other environmental issues. This book can be taken as a response to such criticisms.

Attenborough also recounts seeing the famous picture of the Earth, the first picture taken of the planet as a whole, by the Apollo 8 astronauts. His experience in the Serengeti, and the revelation that ensued—“all life was interconnected in a web of infinite variety” (36)—is confirmed by the haunting shot of Earth entire. Not only is everything on Earth interconnected, but Earth is “small, isolated and vulnerable” (43). Its resources are not unlimited and must be protected, if the inextricably interconnected life it holds is to be preserved—including humanity itself. His encounter with the indigenous men in New Guinea highlights his new way of thinking, where he realizes the group, unlike himself and his cohort, “live sustainably, in balance with their environment” (51). It is an epiphany that many others would have, upon witnessing the picture of Earth for the first time: within a few years of the global circulation of that photo (taken in 1968), Earth Day was established (1970); the EPA was founded (again, 1970); and a new conservationist movement had taken off around the world.

As Nobel-prize winning author and quasi-contemporary of Attenborough’s, Doris Lessing once remarked in an interview, “The moment you have a shot of the Earth from space—a beautifully colored bubble floating in space—then there’s a new sensibility; there has to be” (from Conversations, ed. Earl Ingersoll, 118: See Further Reading & Resources). Indeed, Attenborough himself is the living embodiment of that profoundly altered and uniquely positioned sensibility.