David Attenborough: A Life on our Planet

This is not about saving our planet, it’s about saving ourselves. The truth is, with our without us, the natural world will rebuild.

Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet shows the audience the drastic decline of biodiversity and emphasizes the pressing importance of conservation. The title of the documentary has a double meaning, and it thrives on this duality. On the one hand, the documentary follows the life of Sir David Attenborough, showing snapshots of his incredible career and his lifelong passion for nature. On the other hand, the title also highlights the fact that he and in fact all humans share the same fate as all living beings on our planet. In his long illustrious career, Attenborough has been a great ambassador for the natural world taking his audience on fantastic journeys through documentaries, exploring the dazzling diversity of living creatures and experiencing the stunning beauty of planet Earth. However, Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet is different since it uses Attenborough’s broadcasting career as a focus.

Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet masterfully addresses the difficulty of making the large-scale problems of climate change tangible to the general public, one of environmental activism’s greatest challenges. Environmental issues such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity disproportionately affect marginalized populations in developing countries or “exotic” creatures living in remote wilderness (see climate/environmental justice). For audiences sitting in the comfort of their homes, it’s easy to dismiss these pressing issues with a blasé attitude. The documentary addresses this problem through a change of scope: shifting back and forth between the fate of individual animals and overviews of large-scale environmental issues, between the intimate personal eyewitness of Attenborough and the image of Earth from the moon. By zooming in and out on a subject, both figuratively and literally, the documentary captures both the scale of the problems and how intimately lives would be affected. This technique is perhaps most impactful during scenes about the town near Chernobyl, where the abandoned buildings overtaken by nature and teeming with wildlife serve as a stark reminder that, while nature will recover from our environmental mismanagement, our own civilization may not (see nature’s resilience).

Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet does a great job highlighting the social causes underlying the global environmental crisis and points towards concrete social solutions to the problem. Positive social changes, most notably education and female empowerment, are integral to a sustainable future (see people care). The documentary is also keen to point out that these changes require not only individual effort but also community organizing as well as support from governments and the industry (see collective action). The shift towards renewable energy, sustainable fishing and a plant-based diet should not rely only on the goodwill of individual consumers but also requires changes from the top down (see systems care/change). Most importantly perhaps, the documentary advocates that we have to move away from our current economic model that is fixated on growth and expansion (see degrowth). Instead, we should focus on building a more equitable and sustainable future, thriving in balance with nature and all other creatures that share our planet (see ecological civilization, sustainable development).

©2024 ClimateLit (Haitong Xu)

Further Reading:

Attenborough, David. 2020. A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future. London: Ebury Publishing.

Publisher: Netflix, 2020

Pages: 1h 23m

ISBN: N/A

Audience: Ages 14+, Ages 8-13

Format: Films

Topics: Biodiversity, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Climate Crisis, Climate Justice, Collective Climate Action, Conservation, Degrowth, Ecological Civilization, Environmental Destruction, Environmental Justice, Habitat Loss, Nature, Nature's Resilience, People Care, Sustainability, Sustainable Development, System Change, Systems Care

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