Throughout his career, Sir David Attenborough has made hundreds of hours of iconic television, yet A Life on Our Planet is his first feature film.
The film’s producer-director, Jonnie Hughes, explains its genesis.
David has witnessed a serious decline in the living world over his lifetime. He has seen the rainforests retreating and the grasslands emptying, and has searched ever harder for species hanging on in hidden corners of the world.
He’s observed a downward trend that is set to cause a disaster far more profound and with more lasting impacts than the desolation of Chernobyl – a decline that will have a more limited impact on his life, but will come to define the lives of all those who follow him.
He is dedicated to lending his considerable profile to efforts to halt and then reverse this decline, and he’s in a good place to do so.
“Saving our planet is no longer a technological problem, it’s a communications challenge,”
David has said on several important stages. To bring about the wholesale change required to transition to a sustainable existence on Earth, we all need to hear a new story – a positive, inspiring one in which we take control of our impact and aspire to a future in balance with nature.
A key component of David’s efforts to assist in this great communications challenge is this film. In 2014, WWF calculated that populations of wild animals had declined on average by more than half since 1970.
This shocking statistic made real the steady dismantling of the living world that David had become increasingly aware of throughout his career. It quantified the terrifying extent of our impact and qualified that, in addition to climate change, a second red warning light was now flashing on the dashboard of Earth – ‘biodiversity loss’.
It also made us all decide we urgently needed to make a single film that broadcast this biodiversity crisis far and wide – David’s witness statement and his vision for the future – a personal account of a story that involves us all.
David is clearly troubled by the vision he has. He knows what happens next. We humans will, accidentally, clumsily, destabilise nature. We’ll tip the world into a sixth mass extinction. Nature, our life-support machine, will seize up. We are, it is suddenly clear, involved in an act of self-destruction.
Unless we build a new kind of life on our planet.
