A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH
(EBURY PRESS, 272 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

I have only twice as a journalist received hate mail. It may be about to happen again. The first time was after saying on air that Britain was a Christian country. The second was when I quoted (quoted, mind) Sir David Attenborough as saying that he had got into natural history through shooting things and collecting birds’ eggs. I was accused of lying. Attenborough is considered untouchable. The same age as the Queen, he is revered in much the same way.

At the end of this curious memoir-slash-manifesto, Attenborough tells us, “I was born in another time”, and yes, it shows. He doesn’t just mean that he is now 94, but that having been born in what geologists knew as the Holocene, he is now making his venerable way through the Anthropocene. The age of humans may be of short duration if his ­catalogue of calamities continues unchecked. We’re probably already numbed to the diagnostic: plastic in the oceans, rising temperatures, devastating technological failures (his starting point is Pripyat in the Ukraine, the Chernobyl dormitory), collapsing biodiversity, extinctions, aggressive monoculture, vast habitat loss. Nor will many be unfamiliar with the detail of his witness statement. It goes back to Zoo Quest days and takes in such signature television moments as his close encounter with mountain gorillas, the first wild filming of orang-utans, the discovery – still hard to take in – that 97 per cent of the earth’s inhabitable space is ocean, about which we know less than we know about Pluto, but which we exploit ruthlessly.