A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

Attenborough is clear about his overarching project from the beginning: “This is the true tragedy of our time: the spiralling decline of our planet’s biodiversity” (6). It will be his mission, throughout this memoir and vision statement, to impress upon his readers—hopefully, a few world leaders among them—the importance of restoring biodiversity to the planet through rewilding the land and seas, among other initiatives. The restoration of biodiversity will, he believes, return Earth to its Holocene-era stability: the more flora and fauna the world enjoys, the more carbon is naturally captured; the more balanced are the most crucial ecosystems; and the better able humanity is to survive. This stability will prevent extreme weather events (including devastating droughts and unsustainable climate change) and natural disasters, as well as ensuring an adequate food supply for all of humanity. Attenborough uses nature itself as his guide. Its cyclical manner and intricate interconnectedness provide the answers for how to halt the human-generated impacts that have knocked the planet out of balance.

After embarking on his broadcasting career, particularly during his work on the groundbreaking Life on Earth series, Attenborough realizes a profound fact about said life on Earth: “The series opened with an introduction I called ‘The Infinite Variety’—a broad survey of animal and plant diversity, to establish at the outset of the series, that variety is indeed crucial to life” (65).