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

 

See the world. Then make it better

His voice must be one of the most recognisable voices across the globe. More so because of his latest David Attenborough: A life on our planet documentary on Netflix.

After watching the documentary, I decided to read the book as well. The book is on similar lines as the documentary and talks about his experience in the wild and how he has watched the world change throughout his lifetime. Scary honestly, to think about the change that can happen in one lifetime.

This book is written by David Attenborough and Jonnie Hughes, and the one good thing that I like about this is book is that it just doesn’t paint a gloomy picture, it also talks about how we can even now rein in the climatic disasters we have done in the last decade.

The fact that the book was published in 2020 and also talks about the pandemic, makes it even more relatable and current. It doesn’t read like other global warming and climate issue related books which are generally preachy and talk about the “ideals” which are difficult to achieve in the practical world.

The only drawback is that it could be like a repetition for those who have seen the show. But the book gets into a little more detail, and if you would like, you could just skip a few pages.

Here are some of the quotes from the book that I like:

Our bodies had not changed significantly in 200,000 years, but our behaviour and our societies had become increasingly detached from the natural environment that surrounds us. There was nothing left to restrict us. Nothing to stop us. Unless we stopped ourselves, we would continue to consume the Earth’s physical resources, until we had used them up.

It took a million years of unprecedented volcanic activity during the Permian to poison the ocean. We have begun to do so again in less than two hundred.

We are only just beginning to understand that there is an association between the rise of emergent viruses and the planet’s demise. An estimated 1.7 million viruses of potential threat to humans hide within populations of mammals and birds. The more we continue fracturing the wild with deforestation, the expansion of farmland and the activities of the illegal wildlife trade, the more likely it is that another pandemic will arise.

We are indeed the first to truly understand the problem–and the last with a chance to do anything about it.

You can buy the book on Amazon, here's a link: https://amzn.to/35qFh3P