‘A Life on Our Planet’ and ‘Perfect Planet’
Veteran natural history broadcaster David Attenborough describes ‘A Life on Our Planet’ as his “Witness Testament and vision for the future”. It goes further than his BBC program “Extinction – The Facts”, broadcast in September 2020 and his collaboration with WWF in “Our Planet”, released on Netflix in April 2019. Most of these stunningly photographed documentaries were overseen by executive producer/director, Alastair Fothergill.
Attenborough narrates a powerful script as he reflects on his remarkable broadcasting journey over decades, observing the natural world and the growing human assault that is reshaping it. “We have broken apart from the natural world that has sustained us. We need to reconnect”, he warns. It needs to be viewed in schools and homes around the world. .
The dialog offers rich educational content, from food production and plundering of the oceans to destruction of climate-stabilizing forests and the dangerous assumption of ever more growth being economically sustainable.
He reflects that wide coverage of whale slaughter, exposed and challenged by Greenpeace activists, began to wake people up to the damage we were doing to the natural world.
With population growing dramatically, humans have overrun the planet. We have now destroyed half of the world’s rainforests. Ninety percent of large fish in the sea have gone, impacting the ocean’s ecological balance.
Summer sea ice in the Arctic has reduced by 40% in 40 years and warming permafrost is releasing methane gas into the atmosphere. Oceans absorb much excess heat, but Earth is losing its balance. Our blind assault on the planet has seen over 15 billion trees cut each year. Half of fertile land on Earth is now farmland to feed growing human populations. Soils are becoming exhausted under intense overuse. Wild animal populations have more than halved. If we continue on this track, our planet is on course to be 4C degrees warmer, making large parts of the Earth uninhabitable.
He catalogues the change in global wilderness from 1960 with 62% remaining wilderness, to 2020 with wilderness declining to 35%.
What can we do to restore stability? “We must urgently start to rewild the world. Forests are fundamental and we must immediately stop forest destruction”, says Attenborough. “We must stop simply ‘growing’.” Attenborough offers a vision of hope towards the end.
Work with nature rather than against it. Nature is our biggest ally and our greatest inspiration.
He mentions:
Japan’s falling birth-rate, stability and prosperity.
With government intervention, Costa Rica has increased its forest coverage to 50%.
If we all move to a largely vegetarian diet, we would need half the farmland we do now.
If we protected a third of our richest ocean ecology into no fishing zones, it is estimated this would be enough to restore fishing stocks to sustainable levels.
We must raise standards of living for the poor without increasing our impact on the planet.
We must move to a renewable energy infrastructure as soon as possible. Morocco now produces 40% of its energy from solar power.
By developing a high-tech food production infrastructure, a small country like the Netherlands has become the second biggest food producer in the world.
Attenborough paints a rosy picture of hope, though some of the claims lack contextual reference. Unlike many developed countries Japan has a very low level of immigration. He picks evidence of reducing population growth as clear evidence that our population will stabilise in about 20 years, without looking at very high fertility levels in many parts of Africa. Nor the mass unemployment and social problems this will exacerbate. Assumptions about a rapid transition to a genuinely renewable energy infrastructure fail to discuss the huge logistical and energy challenges in replacing and maintaining it, nor the energy employed in mining and refining many rare minerals.
Perfect Planet
Attenborough’s five-part ‘Perfect Planet’ series was broadcast on the BBC through January 2021 and is now streaming on BBC I player. Programme five 'Humans' is the most engaged in terms of discussing the challenges linked to human domination of the planet and goes further than anything he has said before.
'Humans' gives a further fascinating and honest picture of how Humans are degrading our planet through climate destabilization, pollution, plundering our oceans and degrading forests. He warns that if we don't wake up we could see catastrophic tipping points within 20 years that could destroy our children's future along with other species that share our world. Climate changes we are driving could result in some parts of the world become uninhabitable through excessive heat, driving millions of climate refugees into Europe.
So no punches pulled. It is the sort of message we needed in mainstream media at least 20 years ago. While he mentions several hopeful solutions, including the solar thermal energy project in Morocco - 'Desertec' that uses molten salt to power generators, once again they are all 'sticking plaster' solutions and remedies, important though they are.
Human beings have overrun the world,' says Sir David Attenborough
Population is mentioned in terms of our current 7.8 billion people, set to rise to over 9 billion by 2050, with the world already in overshoot by over 1.5 planets every year. But disappointingly, nowhere does he mention that our population momentum is such, that we don’t have time to await a potential gradual fall in numbers. We need to do much more to cut the fundamental drivers of overpopulation and overconsumption to have any chance of transitioning to a sustainable future before critical resources collapse, in a way that is both life-affirming and equitable.
A Life on Our Planet was premiered in April 2020 at the Royal Albert Hall in London and broadcast in the UK, the Netherlands, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Australia and New Zealand, before release on Netflix.