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

“Pripyat is a place of utter despair because everything here, from the noticeboards that are no longer looked at, to the discarded slide rules in the science classroom, to the shattered piano in the café, is a monument to the capacity of humankind to lose everything it needs, and everything it treasures.”

This vivid description is of the town built in Ukraine for the workers at Chernobyl which had to be abandoned in the wake of the failing nuclear power plant. This was an environmental disaster on an epic scale, and radiation can still be detected at the site in high levels decades later.

“We are all culpable but, it has to be said, through no fault of our own. It is only in the last few decades that we have come to understand that every one of us has been born into a human world that was always inherently unsustainable. But now that we do know this, we have a choice to make.”

Attenborough implicates his readers in the ongoing ecological crisis that he confronts, even if he avoids placing blame (“through no fault of our own”). It is a purposeful rhetorical strategy for garnering the support of readers without alienating them. It is also clearly a call to action, not merely a statement of philosophy.

“Such mass extinctions have happened five times in life’s four-billion-year history. Each time, nature has collapsed, leaving just enough survivors to start the process once more.”

Specifically, there have been five mass extinction events in Earth’s history, according to geologists and other scientists. The most recent was the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, who dominated the planet for 165 million years (in contrast, humans have only been around 300,000 years). All of these mass extinctions show evidence that a “radical change in the level of atmospheric carbon was a feature” in the demise of multiple species (88). The difference, this time, is that the increase in carbon in the atmosphere today is directly caused by human activity—activity over which humanity has control.