David Attenborough has turned 100

We at Farandaville are fans of Attenborough; so many wonderful documentaries* on nature and our planet’s history. So, fine article in the NY Times linked below with very short excerpts.

*The word evolution is in one of the excerpts; there is no need to leave a comment or email me that the planet is 11,000 years old, or evolution is a fraud, or all scientific understanding of the planet was wiped out by the “Great Flood.” No need at all.

Mr. Attenborough was born in London in 1926 and spent his youth on the campus of what is today the University of Leicester, where his father Frederick Attenborough was second principal. In a moment that would define his life, he was scouring rocks in the English countryside in the late 1930s, when he split one open with a hammer — revealing the fossil of a marine mollusk. “My eyes were the first to see it since its occupant died 200 million years ago,” he said in a 2009 documentary.

In 1979, Mr. Attenborough released “Life on Earth” on the BBC, a four-year labor of love that was filmed in more than 100 locations and explored the evolution of life of the planet.

***********************

The series was the first to capture footage of several species and their behaviors, including the courtship displays of birds of paradise, according to the BBC. It also featured a striking moment in Rwanda, when Mr. Attenborough sat among a group of gorillas.

**************************

“In the early 1950s, when Attenborough joined the BBC, natural history television had been mostly conceived of as a specialist genre catering for amateur naturalists,” Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, a professor of science communication at University College London, wrote for The Conversation U.K. “By the 1980s, he had helped transform it into one of the most popular genres of TV programming and a powerful conduit for science communication.”

************************

In 2017, he narrated “Blue Planet II,” which raised an alarm about plastic pollution, and in 2019, he narrated Netflix’s “Our Planet,” a series that stressed the harm humankind has done to the natural world.

***********************

“All we require is the will,” he wrote in the book. “The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.”