I’ve sat in audiences and listened to David Attenborough, I’ve talked to him, briefly, with others, and, like you, I’ve watched him and listened to him on television. He once phoned me at the RSPB and as Claire, my PA, said ‘It’s David Attenborough on the phone’ my brain thought ‘But I need to be better prepared to talk to the great man’. Sir David is as close to a national treasure as any public figure ever gets, I’d say, and although one imagines he doesn’t think much about this (but how would I know) his brand is very strong and very trusted.
This is a book of three parts. The first part, My Witness Statement (100 pages), is thoroughly Attenborough – you can hear his voice caressing you out of these 10 chapters, each of which takes a year of his life and tells a story with an environmental message. The chapter headings are very clever and tell a story in themselves
Part Two, What Lies Ahead (17 pages), is a bit of a jolt as it describes possible, likely?, futures for Planet Earth in several decades until the end of this century. I’ve not seen it laid out like this before and it made a big impact on me – particularly after the thought-provoking but gentle introduction (and I guess that was intended).
Part Three, A Vision for the Future (97 pages), is what we need to do to avoid catastrophe. This is well worth reading but, I warn you, it is full of the type of jargon that environmentalists love and you’ll notice that it is not written in the first person singular as were the first 100 pages. For Sir David has a co-author (in the acknowledgements if not on the cover) who is a film producer and, I’m guessing, had a lot more to do with these last bits of the book than Sir David. I’m not saying this part of the book is anything but worth the effort to read (it will repay reading and re-reading several times) and I’m not remotely suggesting that Sir David didn’t endorse every word, but we’ve moved a long way away from his voice at the beginning of the book. Look deeper in the acknowledgements and we find that this book and the film on Netflix was a collaboration with WWF and it is a readable and useful account of WWF’s view of the world.
And the book ends with a short conclusion which is pure Sir David again.
This important book should be read from beginning to end – and it should be read widely – but towards the end it feels a little as though a national treasure has either run off with, or perhaps been kidnapped by, Giant Pandas.
A Life on Our Planet: my witness statement and a vision of the future by David Attenborough is published by Witness Books, part of Ebury Publishing, part of Penguin Random House!
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Sounds very good, from the Patron of Population Matters.
I have just been watching the Netflix series, I was so appalled by the images especially of the walrus falling down the cliff. Without sea ice, these poor creatures have nowhere to go and this is the reality of climate change…I love it how he says in his interview that we have to work together for our environment to thrive again. This man is a gem. Looking forward to reading this book. Thanks for sharing.