- One man has seen more of the natural world than any other. This unique feature documentary is his witness statement.
- One man has seen more of the natural world than any other. This unique feature documentary is his witness statement. In his 93 years, David Attenborough has visited every continent on the globe, exploring the wild places of our planet and documenting the living world in all its variety and wonder. Now, for the first time he reflects upon both the defining moments of his lifetime as a naturalist and the devastating changes he has seen. Honest, revealing and urgent, DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: A LIFE ON OUR PLANET is a powerful first-hand account of humanity's impact on nature and a message of hope for future generations. Created by award-winning natural history filmmakers Silverback Films and global conservation organization WWF, the film is Directed by Alastair Fothergill, Jonnie Hughes and Keith Scholey and Executive Produced by Colin Butfield. Celebrated British naturalist Sir David Attenborough has a broadcasting career spanning over eight decades. He has visited every continent on the globe, exploring the wild places of our planet and bringing the wonders of the living world to audiences worldwide through groundbreaking natural history series. His work includes: Life on Earth, Planet Earth and more recently the Netflix original documentary series Our Planet.
- From Pripyat, an area deserted after a nuclear disaster, Attenborough gives an overview of his life. Interspersed with footage of his career and of a wide variety of ecosystems, he narrates key moments in his career and indicators of how the planet has changed over his lifetime. As a child, Attenborough enjoyed studying fossils. His documentary career began in the 1950s when he began working for the BBC, a British public service broadcaster. He visited places such as the African Serengeti, in which native animals require vast areas of land to maintain grazing patterns. Over time, he noticed a decline in wildlife when searching for fish or orangutans in Borneo or other animals which he was looking for as part of his documentaries. Areas of the Arctic or Antarctic were different to what the filming crew expected due to ice caps melting. The causes are anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss pushing the planet towards a sixth mass extinction event over a period of centuries rather than the hundreds of millennia that built up to previous mass extinctions.
Attenborough describes the film as his "witness statement" and gives an impression of what could happen to the planet over the course of a lifetime beginning in 2020 and lasting as long as his own, were human activity to continue unchanged. The Amazon rainforest could degrade into a savanna; the Arctic could lose all ice during summer; coral reefs could die; soil overuse could cause food crises. These irreversible events would cause mass extinction and exacerbate climate change further.
However, Attenborough describes actions which could prevent these effects and combat climate change and biodiversity loss. He asserts that the solution has been "staring us in the face all along. To restore stability to our planet, we must restore its biodiversity. The very thing that we've removed." He proposes re-wilding; moreover, he says that bringing countries out of poverty, providing universal healthcare and improving girls' education would make the growing human population stabilise sooner and at a lower level. Renewable energy such as solar, wind, water and geothermal could sustainably power all human energy usage. Protecting a third of coastal areas from fishing could allow fish populations to thrive and the remaining area would be sufficient for human consumption. Humans changing their diet to eliminate or reduce meat in favour of plant-based foods could allow land to be used far more efficiently. Attenborough cites government intervention in Costa Rica causing deforestation to reverse, Palau's fishing regulations and improved use of land in the Netherlands as good examples.
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