OUR PLANET A LIFE ON
BY MELANIE ROBITAILLE, SR. STAFF WRITER & GRAPHIC DESIGNER
David Attenborough’s recent witness statement, A Life on Our Planet sends an urgent message of both a man and planet nearing the end of their lives.
46 Volume 10 Issue 1
Growing up over the last 40 years, David Attenborough’s unmistakable and mellifluous voice was the narrated soundtrack to my budding environmentalism; a passion that earned me the nickname Granola. Over his extraordinary 94-year lifespan, he quite literally became the voice of planet earth and his most recent witness statement, A Life on Our Planet sends an urgent message of both a man and planet nearing the end of their lives. There were those familiar, vibrantly colorful, and intimate moments of nature going about its day, to which most of us remain oblivious, with poignant and personal moments of his relationship with this planet dating all the way back to his boyhood, when he first fell in love with fossils. The difference, this time, was the juxtaposed weight of footage featuring the harsh realities of what he calls man’s “unleashed” impact on nature and our single-handed destabilization of the planet’s biodiversity. “We had broken loose. We were apart from the rest of life on earth. Living a different kind of life,” he explains of our rapid idea progression versus typical animal evolution, which transformed what a species could achieve. “Our predators had been eliminated. Most of our diseases were under control. We had worked out how to produce food to order. There was nothing left to restrict us. Nothing to stop us unless we stopped ourselves.” There’s an acceptance and understanding of the brutality of natural selection, knowing nature is running its course, however it’s an entirely altering experience watching scenes of whale poaching, time lapses of devastating deforestation, and watching a polar bear swimming out into the blue oblivion in search of sea ice and food. As you follow Attenborough through his various explorations and travels, the timeline of his life is used as a backdrop to show the stark statistics of world population, atmospheric carbon amounts, and remaining wilderness percentages dialing up and down respectively as he experiences, learns, and tries to educate the world on the interconnectedness of life. He and his crew, he solemnly admits, were among the first to capture bleaching of the coral reef before scientists even understood the enormity of what was taking place. Almost as if he’s reminiscing, he speaks of our Holocene, our “Garden of Eden” as he calls it; a measure of time when the natural world worked so cohesively following
