The key ideas

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

David Attenborough, 2020

For more than sixty years David Attenborough filmed the wild world and watched it shrink. In this book he gives his witness statement: a year of his life, what he saw, and the numbers for that year. Then he explains how, in his view, we can bring the wild back.

Who it is for

For anyone who loves nature documentaries and wants to understand what is really happening to the wild world, and whether it can still be changed.

We have stopped being a part of nature. We have separated ourselves from it.

What this book is about

The book opens in Pripyat, a town next to the Chernobyl power station. After the accident in 1986, people left it for good. Many call Chernobyl the costliest environmental disaster in history. David Attenborough stands among the empty buildings and says he disagrees. The real disaster, he says, is slow and global, and almost nobody notices it. He shows what that disaster is through his own life, not through a lecture.

Attenborough is a naturalist who spent more than sixty years filming the wild all over the world. He calls this book, written with Jonnie Hughes, his witness statement. Its rhythm is simple: a year of his life, what he saw with his own eyes, and the numbers for that year. Then comes the second part, a vision for the future: what could happen next and what can still be put right. At the end we go back to Pripyat and see what grows there now.

Idea 1. 1937: a boy and his fossils

Eleven-year-old David roams the quarries around Leicester, splitting rocks in search of ammonites, ancient sea shells. Holding a creature that lived millions of years ago felt like a miracle to him. Later he would understand that finds like these tell the story of life on Earth, a story in which whole groups of creatures vanished more than once.

The author's numbers for that year: people on Earth, 2.3 billion. Carbon dioxide in the air, 280 parts per million. Wilderness remaining, 66 percent.

Attenborough explains why this matters. The last ten thousand years, an epoch called the Holocene, were remarkably calm: the average temperature never strayed by more than a degree. Status: this is a scientific reconstruction of past climate. In the author's view, it was this steady climate that let people take up farming and build civilisation.

We tend to treat a stable climate as the backdrop to everything that happens. In Attenborough's logic it is the condition without which our story might never have begun.

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About the author

David Attenborough is a British naturalist and broadcaster, born in 1926. He worked with the BBC for decades and created series such as Life on Earth and The Blue Planet. He wrote this book with Jonnie Hughes, and it came out alongside the documentary of the same name.

All books by this author: David Attenborough

Terms from the book

  • Leicester
  • naturalist
  • Hughes
  • Borneo
  • Ammonites
  • Permafrost
  • Methane
  • Pripyat: A town built for nuclear workers next to the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine. Its people were evacuated the day after the 1986 accident, and the town has stood empty ever since.
  • Chernobyl: The Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, then part of the USSR. In April 1986 one of its reactors exploded. It was the worst accident in the history of nuclear power.
  • Parts per million: A measure of how much carbon dioxide is in the air: how many of its molecules there are in every million molecules of air. The higher the number, the more heat the air holds.
  • Holocene: The geological epoch of roughly the last twelve thousand years. Its climate was unusually steady, and during it people took up farming.
  • Sierra Leone: A small country in West Africa, on the Atlantic coast.
  • Zoo Quest: A BBC television series from the 1950s that made Attenborough famous. Its expeditions caught animals for London Zoo and filmed them in the wild.
  • White-necked picathartes: A rare bird of the West African forests with a bare yellow head. It builds its nests out of mud on rock faces.
  • Life on Earth: Attenborough's famous 1979 series about how life developed on the planet. Its scene with mountain gorillas became one of the best known moments in the history of nature television.
  • Rainforest: A tropical forest where it rains almost all year round. These forests hold more species than anywhere else on land.
  • Oil palm: The palm whose fruit gives us palm oil. Its plantations, planted where forests were cut down, are one of the main threats to orangutans.
  • Biomass: The total weight of all living things in a given group. Scientists estimate it to compare how much of the planet's life is people, farm animals and wild animals.
  • Coral bleaching: A coral turns white when overheating makes it expel the algae that live in its tissues and feed it. If the water stays warm for long, the coral can die.
  • Canary in a coal mine: Miners once took a canary down the mine with them: the bird suffered from poisonous gas before people did. When the canary was in trouble, it was time to get out.
  • Tipping point: A threshold past which a system shifts into a new state and does not return to the old one on its own. A forest turning into savanna is one example.
  • Rewilding: Bringing the wild back: people leave land or a stretch of sea alone, or help it recover. It is the central idea of the book's second part.
  • Palau: An island nation of more than five hundred islands in the western Pacific Ocean. Since 2020 about 80 percent of its waters have been closed to fishing.
  • Costa Rica: A small country in Central America, between Nicaragua and Panama, known for winning its forests back.

All terms

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