Nick Rufford 

 

Australian Geographic 

 

As he looked forward to his 94th birthday in May, Sir David Attenborough solemnly reflected on a very different planet from the one on which he grew up. “We need to reconnect with nature, for our own health – as well as the Earth’s,” he said.

    After a lifetime of bringing nature into our living rooms, Sir David wants us to get out of our armchairs and help save the natural world we’ve enjoyed watching on TV. Decades of relentless industrialisation, urbanisation and intensive farming have driven a wedge between us and our animal ancestors, he warns, and the disconnection between modern families and nature is getting worse.

    “I think it’s terrible that children should grow up without knowing what a tadpole is – just awful,” he says. “I can’t criticize other people on how they bring up their children, but in my time I could, and did, get on a bicycle and cycle 15 miles to a quarry and spend the day looking for dragonflies, grass snakes and newts, as well as fossils.”

(Continued...)

“we need to reconnect with nature, for our own health – as well as the Earth’s” 

 

    Losing touch with nature not only affects the way we treat the planet, but also affects us on a primal level.

    “We are now recognizing clinically that it is important to have contact with the natural world, for people’s sanity,” he says. “Anybody will recognize that in moments of both exultation and deep sorrow that’s where you go. That’s where you grieve and that’s where you contemplate real things, the natural world. Psychologists recognize this, and I think it’s the case for everybody. If you lose contact – emotional contact – with the natural world, you’re badly deprived […]”

B. Quinton,

The Sunday Times

Sir David Attenborough.

A Life On Our Planet

is available to watch 

in cinemas and via

Netflix this year.

  

 

  

 

    So is he right to blame himself and his generation for the planet’s problems? His 1961 film, Zoo Quest to Madagascar, was ahead of its time, revealing the damage caused by the Climate Crisis and deforestation. At one point Sir David walks along the vast bed of a dried-up river commenting that the lack of water is “a clear indication of the drastic changes in climate that have overtaken this part of Madagascar. It’s likely that, only a few hundred years ago, when the gigantic birds […] were alive, this was not a desert, but a great area of swamp.”

    The Climate Crisis was already happening in 1961 but the scale of our impact on nature has grown, as has the amount of money at stake. The Climate Crisis is now a global industry on which livelihoods, careers, reputations, marketing budgets and sales forecasts depend. It pays for academics, research groups, lobbyists, publishers and filmmakers, among others, and generates profits for thousands of companies involved in green technologies. Clean-energy company Tesla has ballooned into the world’s second biggest car company by value. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, is sinking a sizeable chunk of its seven-trillion-dollar funds into “sustainable” investments.

“don’t waste” 

 

To skeptics, it sounds like opportunism. They take the view that there are always doomsayers warning of disaster – a hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, nuclear accidents. Sir David thinks this time it is genuinely different, citing extreme weather events such as the Australian wildfires, and he argues that the skeptics may never be convinced until it’s too late. For him, the message is simple: Be considerate, live modestly. The future is at stake, he says, not for him but for the next generation, for his two granddaughters, at university in the UK. “You know, we’ve overtaken the world,” he warns. “We are representatives of a very powerful, damaging species. Don’t waste. Don’t waste electricity. Don’t waste food. Don’t waste time.”

 

Rufford, N. (2020, November 1). A life on our planet. Australian Geographic, 159, 19.