This is a series of one-way doors bringing irreversible change. The truth is, with or without us, the natural world will rebuild. [NASA technician] Five, four, three, two one, zero. But the longer we leave it, the more difficult itll be to do something about it. The living world is essentially solar-powered. Yet the way we humans live on Earth now is sending biodiversity into a decline. What has that done? And I believe we can do our best. By damming, polluting, and over-extracting rivers and lakes, weve reduced the size of freshwater populations by over 80%. It triggered an environmental catastrophe that had an impact across Europe. Estimates suggest that no fish zones over a third of our coastal seas would be sufficient to provide us with all the fish we will ever need. The very thing that weve removed. We need to shift to plant-based diets. Thank you so much for being with us. Then watch the video and do the exercises. It took a visionary scientist, Bernhard Grzimek, to explain that this wasnt true. Energy everywhere will be more affordable. In the process, they also provide us with simple solutions to saving our planet before it is too late. But within only a few years, the nets across the globe were coming in empty. All rights reserved. When you think about it, were completing a journey. Ive visited the polar regions over many decades. But it now appeared this was only because the ocean was absorbing much of the excess heat, masking our impact. Then you deal so with the land. That disaster is being brought about by the very things that allow us to live our comfortable lives." Scientists call it the Holocene. Against the backdrop of the WWII battle known as Hitler's first defeat, a Norwegian soldier returns home and learns a shocking truth about his wife. In this time-jumping dramedy, a workaholic who's always in a rush now wants life to slow down when he finds himself leaping ahead a year every few hours. We invented farming. This unique feature documentary is his witness statement. The sooner it happens, the easier it makes everything else we have to do. If we want to, we can kill almost anything in the sea that we wish. And that completely changed the mindset of the population, the human population of the world. And ways to harvest our forests sustainably. These rivers are also dumping grounds for chemicals and pesticides, destroying birds and freshwater fish. watch for yourself. More recently, you may have heard of Pripyat from the HBO series Chernobyl? When her husband dies, Sole decides that the best way to take care of her son is to become a crime boss even if that means being her father's enemy. This too is happening as a result of bad planning and human error and it too will lead to what we see here. To start to thrive. Imagine if we phase out fossil fuels and run our world on the eternal energies of nature too. Today, forests cover half of Costa Rica. Levies and carbon taxes will go somewhere to shift this. I spent the latter half of the 1970s traveling the world, making a series I had long dreamed of called Life on Earth, the story of the evolution of life and its diversity. By the 1980s, uncontrolled logging had reduced this to just one quarter. Since the Second World War, what's known as the "Great Acceleration" has brought us many progressive things, as our GDPs indicate. And to begin with, it was quite easy. But lines blur when a key informant makes a big ask. As we improve our approach to farming, well start to reverse the land-grab that weve been pursuing ever since we began to farm, which is essential because we have an urgent need for all that free land. Life had no option but to rebuild. He believes that we have The Planetary Boundaries model as our guide, and that we should be looking to it for inspiration. Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre | Transcript, The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) Review by David Denby, J.P. Morgan: How One Man Financed America [Transcript]. Below the line are a multitude of lifeforms. [Attenborough] By the time Life on Earth aired in 1979, I had entered my 50s. The longer they have to wait for the ice to return, the more they use up their fat supplies. Our predators had been eliminated. The true tragedy of our time is still unfolding across the globe, barely noticeable from day to day. The return of the trees would absorb as much as two thirds of the carbon emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by our activities to date. [imperceptible] Theyve always been a place beyond imagination with scenery unlike anything else on earth and unique species adapted to a life in the extreme. Starring: David Attenborough. But scientists started to discover that in many cases where bleaching occurred, the ocean was warming. Weitere Details. The largest whales, the blues, numbered only a few thousand by then. Half of the worlds rainforests have already been cleared. And the songs have distinct themes and variations which evolve over time. And there I was, actually being asked to explore these places and record the wonders of the natural world for people back home. The rest, from mice to whales, make up just 4%. Honest, revealing and urgent, David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet is a powerful first-hand account of humanity's impact on nature and a message of hope for future generations. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Trailer: David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. Interspersed with footage of his career and of a wide variety of ecosystems, he narrates key moments in his career and indicators of how the planet has changed over his lifetime. [indistinct chatter] But its now becoming apparent that its not all doom and gloom. ATTENBOROUGH: Yes. We all need to change our mindset, and we need to implement a new order right now. on the Internet. They discovered that the Serengeti herds required an enormous area of healthy grassland to function. The white color is caused by corals expelling algae that lives symbiotically within their body. Instructions Preparation David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet | Official Trailer | Netflix Watch on Transcript Task 1 Task 2 Discussion Have you seen any of David Attenborough's films? Population growth peaked in about 1962. These mass extinctions have occurred five times during our planet's four billion-year lifespan. And renewable energy will never run out. If we take care of nature, nature will take care of us. Instead, cover crops are planted after harvest to protect the soil, and crops are rotated. We were transforming what a species could achieve. Synopsis. From a person that has seen just how quickly our natural world has disappeared in his own lifetime, at the present rate how little time could be left, what solutions, course to take. I am David Attenborough, and I am 93. But to continue, we require more than intelligence. This unique feature documentary is his witness statement. And we don't learn the lessons. There is little left for the rest of the living world. The Holocene has been one of the most stable periods in our planets great history. When you first see it, you think perhaps that its beautiful, and suddenly you realize its tragic. As Attenborough cautions, the bleached coral is like canaries in a coal mine. [birds chirping] Just imagine if we achieve this on a global scale. Preparation. 2020 WORLD POPULATION: 7.8 BILLION CARBON IN ATMOSPHERE: 415 PARTS PER MILLION REMAINING WILDERNESS: 35%, Science predicts that were I born today, I would be witness to the following. For 65 million years, its been at work reconstructing the living world until we come to the world we know our time. It needs protecting. However, Attenborough points out that vested interests will hold us back. Recordings like these revealed that the songs of the humpbacks are long and complex. Tune in for a live pre-show 30 minutes before Chris set, followed by an aftershow. You and I belong to the most widespread and dominant species of animal on earth. As a result, the average global temperature today is one degree Celsius warmer than it was when I was born. Even orangutans play a role in this by spreading seeds as they search for ripe fruit. Politicians and corporates have to overcome vested interests and work towards the greater good. Humanitarian crises would result as people would be forced to relocate, triggering border conflict. No one wants this to happen. Our closest relatives. And the changes we have to make will only benefit ourselves and the generations that follow. The wilder and more diverse forests are, the more effective they are at absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. [whales singing] [whales continue singing]. The ocean has long since become unable to absorb all the excess heat caused by our activities. For the first time, Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garca Mrquez's masterwork comes to the screen. But, there are ways to change direction and alter the doom and gloom we've created. We found humpbacks off Hawaii only by listening out for their calls. A key reason the population is still growing is because many of us are living longer. And the reef turns from wonderland to wasteland. The orangutan. Nature will take any chance to reclaim some space. 2020 | Maturity rating: 7+ | 1h 23m | Nature & Ecology Documentaries. My first visit to East Africa was in 1960. By burning millions of years worth of living organisms all at once as coal and oil, we had managed to do so in less than 200. Two legendary Go players, once student and master, face victory and defeat as they inevitably come face to face as rivals. It will survive. Without this training, they would not complete their role in dispersing seeds. Soil would be inadequate, insects and bees destroyed, and droughts and flooding would increase. But on the 26th of April, 1986, it suddenly became uninhabitable. After all, theres plenty of it. Working together to benefit from the energy of the sun and the minerals of the earth. [Attenborough] It felt that nothing would limit our progress. Videos David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. A few days after that and theyre gone over the horizon. So, what do we do? Seasons blend into one another in these tropical conditions, with lush growth, abundant flowering, and seed production occurring in ongoing cycles. Fishing is worlds greatest wild harvest. Farmers in developed countries could be incentivized to build biodiversity on their farms. Did you know that 1.8 trillion plastic fragments are currently drifting like a garbage site in the northern Pacific? How do we reclaim farmland but also increase the food supply for a growing population? Thats the sort of commitment you need if you want to even begin making a portrait of the living world. As the ocean continues to heat and becomes more acidic, coral reefs around the world die. In 1971, I set out to find an uncontacted tribe in New Guinea. Emmy-winning narrator David Attenborough ("Our Planet," "Planet Earth II") looks back and shares a way forward. And if we do it right, it can continue because theres a win-win at play. Be the first one to, David Attenborough - A Life on Our Planet 2020, Advanced embedding details, examples, and help, Terms of Service (last updated 12/31/2014). Some of the numbers are slightly out too. I got as close as I did only because the gorillas were used to people. And powerful evidence that however grave our mistakes, nature will ultimately overcome them. Within 20 years, renewables are predicted to be the worlds main source of power. Overnight, Pripyat transformed from a pleasant, bustling town to a nightmarish disaster zone. Uh The Human beings have overrun the world. Mistakes. A Life on Our Planet David Attenborough A legacy-defining book from Sir David Attenborough, reflecting on his life's work, the dramatic changes to the planet he has witnessed, and what we can do to make a better future. There was an edge to our existence. SIMON: You project what the world might look like in 10 years and even a century. We have arrived at locations expecting to find expanses of sea ice and found none. How many people can the Earth carry? on October 24, 2021. In 1937, at age 11, he would cycle from his home in Leicester into the countryside to study fossils in the rocks. The world population was 2.3 billion, the carbon in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million, and the remaining wilderness was 66%. The living world cant operate without a healthy ocean and neither can we. Sir David, thanks so much for being with us. After the death of their father, two half-brothers find themselves on opposite sides of an escalating conflict with tragic consequences. Half a million gazelle. The cycle of destruction continues as the sea life is trapped by or ingests this waste. A habitat that is dead in comparison. web pages A broadcaster recounts his life, and the evolutionary history of life on Earth, to grieve the loss of wild places and offer a vision for the future. Over billions of years, nature has crafted miraculous forms, each more complex and accomplished than the last. Its rhythm of seasons was so reliable that it gave our own species a unique opportunity. But it was noticeable that some of these animals were becoming harder to find. And that's because of the oceanic commons, as they say, the areas of the ocean in which anybody can do what they like. I've seen it with my own eyes. In such places, huge shoals of fish gather. In the 30 years since the evacuation of Chernobyl, the wild has reclaimed the space. A meteorite impact triggered a catastrophic change in the earths conditions. The process of extinction that Id seen as a boy in the rocks, I now became aware was happening right there around me to animals with which I was familiar. [Attenborough] If we can change the way we live on Earth, an alternative future comes into view. As a child, Attenborough enjoyed studying fossils. SIMON: You were a BBC executive in the control room when the first pictures of Earth were sent back by the Apollo 8 crew. SIMON: You're 94, but I have to ask, for all you have seen - almost a century - in times that have been bleak, where does this moment rank? All this was absolutely clear, it was only just stopped being a working quarry. Its an achingly intricate labor. Focusing on a specific period, from the birth of Black Wall Street to its catastrophic downfall over the course of two bloody days, and finally the fallout and reconstruction. If we do things that are unsustainable, the damage accumulates ultimately to a point where the whole system collapses. When I was a boy, I spent all my spare time searching through rocks in places like this for buried treasure. In the northern regions, the temperatures would lift in March, triggering spring, and stay high until they dipped in October and brought about autumn. "A Life on Our Planet" is as much a love story, a requiem, and a final request as it is a film about deforestation, overfishing, exponential population grown, and the various other culprits. One of the significant findings was that we pay attention to the environment when it affects us. In David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet (2020), which premiered on Netflix, co-director Keith Scholey of Silverback Films and producer Colin Butfield of the World Wildlife Fund bring us Sir David's witness statement. Starring: David Attenborough. SIMON: You advocate what you call no-fish zones. Let's rewind to 1937 and some of the statistics of that time. Whales were being slaughtered by fleets of industrial whaling ships in the 1970s. Based on the comic book series by Mark Millar and Peter Gross. Half of the fertile land on earth is now farmland. So, I had the privilege of being amongst the first to fully experience the bounty of life that had come about as a result of the Holocenes gentle climate. Nobody wanted animals to become extinct. Filmmaker Sir David Attenborough has been documenting the natural world since the 1950s. It had everything a community would need for a comfortable life. Raising yields tenfold in two generations while at the same time using less water, fewer pesticides, less fertilizer and emitting less carbon. [Attenborough on video] Climbing over the tightly-packed bodies is the only way across the crowd. A thick belt of jungles around the equator has piled plant on plant to capture as much of the suns energy as possible, adding moisture and oxygen to the global air currents. We have overfished 30% of fish stocks to critical levels. Its all happened within the last 2,000 years or so. Urban farming is an option on rooftops, abandoned buildings, and exterior walls of city buildings. It was a feature of all five mass extinctions. I look at these images now and I realize that, although as a young man I felt I was out there in the wild experiencing the untouched natural world it was an illusion. Our intelligence changed the way in which we evolved. The Amazon rainforest could suffer from "forest dieback" and be starved of moisture, becoming an open savannah and destroying its biodiversity. The point for me was simple: the wild is far from unlimited. J.P. Morgan: How One Man Financed America is a fast-paced and informative portrait of Americas most prolific banker a man so powerful that when he died, the NYSE paused all trading for half a day out of respect. In this . Indoors, within cities. Nature is our biggest ally and our greatest inspiration. Its a sanctuary for wild animals that are very rare elsewhere. He and his son used a plane to follow the herds over the horizon. They capture 3 trillion kilowatt-hours of solar energy every day. Sitting on the edge of the Sahara, and cabled directly into southern Europe, Morocco could be an exporter of solar energy by 2050. Sunlight, wind, water and geothermal. We must rewild the world. Millions of people rendered homeless. And then we will suddenly discover that suddenly the seas are almost empty. The United Nations and World Trade Organisation are trying to establish new rules in international waters, which are notoriously overfished by large nations. There were twice the number of people on the planet as there were when I was born. It was a very different world back then. It was a brutal and unpredictable world. It was the first time that any human had moved away far enough from the earth to see the whole planet. Billions of individuals, and millions of kinds of plants and animals [birds chirping] dazzling in their variety and richness. Um, so, the world is not as wild as it was. David Attenborough: ( 00:48) For much of humanity's ancient history, that number bounced wildly between 180 and 300, and so too did global temperatures. Attenborough urges us to restore biodiversity. I noticed that in this transcript the years of the population, carbon & wilderness miss: 1937 & 1954 & repeat the year 1997 twice the last should be 2020. That without such an immense space, the herds would diminish and the entire ecosystem would come crashing down. The history of all human civilization followed. Algal forests would not attach to ice, damaging the ocean food chain. Clean energy has to replace fossil fuels. Many of the millions of species in the forest exist in small numbers. Rainforests are particularly precious habitats. SIMON: So what gives you hope? In previous events, it had taken volcanic activity up to one million years to dredge up enough carbon from within the earth to trigger a catastrophe. It was designed for employees working at Chernobyl, a nearby nuclear plant. Again, the two features work together. For 10,000 years, the average temperature has not wavered up or down by more than one degree Celsius. 1937 WORLD POPULATION: 2.3 BILLION CARBON IN ATMOSPHERE: 280 PARTS PER MILLION REMAINING WILDERNESS: 66%. And you could happily retire. Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. In just 25 years, the forest has returned to cover half of Costa Rica once again. Our planet, vulnerable and isolated. Their solution is to climb higher up the cliffs, but with their poor eyesight, they often fall from the tops of cliffs as the smell of the sea lures them closer. A sixth mass extinction event is well underway. No one has lived here since. And we've exterminated the great fisheries. In the end, after a lifetimes exploration of the living world, Im certain of one thing. We need to rediscover how to be sustainable. There are something like 4,000 million of us today, and weve reached this position with meteoric speed. Polar bears need ice as the launching pads for hunting. More than half of the species on land live here. [Attenborough] We had broken loose. Leading lives that interlock in such a way that they sustain each other. And the idea could be passed from one generation to the next. There we are, on it, and everybody in the entire world is in that picture except for the two people in the spacecraft. This particular one has a scientific name of Tiltonicerus, because the first one ever was found near this quarry here in Tilton, in the middle of England. This trajectory is unsustainable, and the Great Acceleration will inevitably result in a "Great Decline.". [reindeer grunting] [birds hooting] [buffalo snorting] [birds cawing] [elephants trumpeting]. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. A 12-year-old boy learns he's the returned Jesus Christ, destined to save humankind. Farming would be pushed to a crisis point. There are many differences between humans and the rest of the species on earth, but one that has been expressed is that we alone are able to imagine the future. Attenborough is famous for many of the truly epic natural history documentaries on our planet. They are the best technology nature has for locking away carbon. Coral reefs don't like acid, and 90% of our reefs could die off in a few years. In one person's lifetime, we have demolished our land and sea wilderness. In his 93 years, Attenborough has visited every continent on the globe, exploring the wild places of the planet and documenting the living world in all its variety and wonder. In international waters, the UN is attempting to create the biggest no fish zone of all. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, the nine natural history documentary series that form the Life collection, which form a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth. In addition to this, we have an increased life expectancy. Fewer trees and more carbon in the atmosphere would escalate global warming significantly. [thunder rumbling] [lowing] On the tropical plains, the dry and rainy seasons would switch every year like clockwork. In my time, Ive experienced the warming of Arctic summers. The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, and Optimizing Your Microbiome, Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are, An Introductory Guide to Deeper States of Meditation, Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind. The very thing that gave birth to our civilization. With this in mind, David Attenborough has dedicated his life to educating us about our planet, and making discourses visible, through his captivating storytelling. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying. To establish a life on our planet in balance with nature. We cut down over 15 billion trees each year. We must rewild the world!" David Attenborough The explosion was a result of bad planning and human error. What we see happening today is just the latest chapter in a global process spanning millennia. Fortunately, Tanzania and Kenya took far-sighted action to safeguard the sacred paths of the Serengeti migration. Summer sea ice in the Arctic has reduced by 40% in 40 years. Theres a chance for us to make amends, to complete our journey of development, manage our impact, and once again become a species in balance with nature. I advocate that there should be zones, parts of the ocean where they should be absolutely sacrosanct, where, in fact, populations of fish can build up and actually from that, colonize the rest of the seas that we've stripped. With nothing to restrict us, our population has been growing dramatically throughout my lifetime. 1978 WORLD POPULATION: 4.3 BILLION CARBON IN ATMOSPHERE: 335 PARTS PER MILLION REMAINING WILDERNESS: 55%. And tree diversity is the key to a rainforest. And then you clear that furthermore for cattle. We also have to rewild mangroves, salt marshes, and kelp forests to restore biodiversity. In the past, animals had to develop some physical ability to change their lives. 75% of all species were wiped out. The nearby nuclear power station of Chernobyl exploded. ATTENBOROUGH: That means that nothing is safe. 2020 | Maturity Rating: PG | 1h 23m | Documentary Films. A world that demanded more every day. That may sound impossible, but there are ways in which we can do this. The scale of the problem is so overwhelming .