David Attenborough’s Witness Statement is a must watch
Sir David Attenborough, a broadcaster and natural historian has been working as a bridge between the environment and humans for most parts of his career. Bringing visual stories from the natural world. He has termed his latest Netflix documentary, David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet”, his witness statement for the environment.
The documentary opens with Attenborough standing in the deserted territory of Chernobyl nuclear plant. Once a buzzing area that had to be immediately evacuated in 1986 when due to a human error the reactor exploded leaving the place uninhabitable. Just like this human error that suddenly exploded impacting a set of human beings; our collective human error is leading us towards the explosion of climate change and its devastating consequences, some of which we have already started to experience.
In the initial part of his narration, he says that he is 93 years old and over the span of his life time has been the deterioration suffered by the natural world as a result of the human habits. Over the span of the film David Attenborough traces his career that covers the duration of more than sixty years; and how when he started out the aim was to show the general public parts of the world that they would most probably not be able to see for themselves, given the global air travel was very new at that point and unlike today livestreaming was not an everyday used term let alone accessible to everyone.
The cinematography of the film gels really well with the narration. From old footages of a young David Attenborough interacting with exotic flora and fauna with a mix of the scenes of what a healthy environment and wildlife looks like compared to the deteriorating version of it. These segments are divided by a screen giving a status update of where the population number were and the corresponding natural habitat and wildlife percentages; the result is quite haunting.
Despite the gravity of the situation this is not a doom and gloom narration only. It is a plea to put our collective efforts to restore the ecological balance and why it is important for us. All is not lost and there is a sustainable way in which we can live on this home that we all share. As Attenborough says during his narration if you can’t do it forever, it is by definition not sustainable. There are successful cases where the case has been established through practical examples. Like Netherlands, a country that is one of the global leaders when it comes to exporting food and their entire industry is based on sustainable farming. Then there is the rebounding of marine life around the Pacific archipelago nation of Palau as a result of the fishing restrictions.
So there is hope and that is the reason that Sir David Attenborough has no plans of retiring and continues to fight for humanity’s survival. The closing shots of the film pans out to show the full frame of Chernobyl to show that the territory is still not inhabited by humans, however, there is life in the form of natural outgrowths and wildlife as he highlights that nature always finds a way to survive but humans can’t make that claim and therefore, fighting for our environment is basically fighting for our own survival.
Originally published at https://pk.mashable.com on October 16, 2020.
