Fighting the Death Wind—a review of A Life on Our Planet
Sir David Attenborough
Sir David Attenborough is one of three people, along with the Queen and Vin Scully, who have provided markers of stability throughout my life. All three have been there since before I hit puberty, and it brings me a sense of calm joy to know that all four of us still live. Granted, they’re all in their nineties now, but still…
As a child, I would watch Attenborough’s grainy, black and white documentaries on our 13” black and white TV, and marvel at the worlds he explored. Even then I knew he was different; most “nature documentaries” of the time involved shooting animals and bringing them home to be mounted. In his earliest days, he brought some creatures back, alive, to be studied and put in zoos, but he was the first to stop doing even that, preferring to study them in the wild. I admired him for that. At a time when “the natives” weren’t quite seen as being people, and their wildlife circus curiosities, his benevolence and compassion stood out.
His documentaries have grown in depth and technical virtuosity over the decades, many of them becoming seminal events in the growth of humans as a species. At the age of nine, I saw my first Attenborough documentary and decided when I was grown up, I was going to have a Komodo dragon. Imagine walking down Fleet Street with one of THOSE pulling on a leash!
It’s an odd fact of the English language that “panache” and “suicidal” only share two letters.
Nearly everyone has an indelible memory of an Attenborough show. The overcrowded walruses falling to their deaths. The new-born lizard racing to the safety of an outcropping, chased by hundreds of racer snakes. A bonobo mourning the loss of her mate. Tool-using fish. A view of birds in flight from the backs of the birds. His is a vast and magnificent library of the Earth in the final years of its natural glory.
But in the 90s, people began saying, “Sir David, what you are showing us is under threat, and is vanishing before our very eyes. Please let the world know.” And at the turn of the century, the threat we pose, more and more, informed his narration of the natural world.
“I am David Attenborough and I’m 93. This is my witness statement.”
Thus starts A Life on Our Planet. Together with Extinction, it presents a bleak and unswerving gaze upon the damage and depredations our species has wrought on the biodiversity and wonder that informed that library of his.
It will leave you in tears.
But you must watch. It is his witness statement, and few others can make such a statement with the power and wisdom that he can.
Bleak as it is, it would be uncharacteristic of Attenborough to leave his audience without hope, and in the final half-hour he shows how, through a series of surprisingly attainable actions, we can mitigate the damage we’re doing, and perhaps save enough for the Earth to eventually heal.
Attenborough shows the worst that we can do. But he is the best that we can be.
Now on Netflix.