Legacy and Secrets to Longevity

This is the Guardian . Tomorrow is Sir David Attenborough's 100th birthday. It's astonishing to imagine how different the world was when he was born and the changes he's witnessed . If you'd have gone onto the streets of London, you would have seen men in bowler hats and flat caps, horse-drawn carriages, and perhaps heard jazz floating out from a nearby gramophone . And in the countryside, calls of nightingales and cuckoos echoing through the The BBC, where Attenborough eventually found his home, launched its first ever regular television service when he was 10 years old . He's lived through the Second World War, the invention of the nuclear bomb, the swinging 60s, Watergate, the space race, the internet, and the rise of computers . Over the past cent ury we've transformed our planet and in doing so reshaped the natural world. The world depends upon plants and we treat them with so little thought and so little care , and exterminate them without little thought or care . And we will pay the price. Attenborough has spent seven decades bringing the beauty and majesty of life on earth to our screens. These engaging chicks are so inquisitive that you only have to sit down to their own level for them all to gather around you. There's more meaning and mutual understanding and exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know. His shows continue to inspire millions and more than ever implore us to remember we have a world worth saving. I mean we have a responsibility and if there's only a fragment of hope left. You have a responsibility to do something about it . So today a hundred years on earth with David Attenborough . From The Guardian, I'm Madeline Finley and this is Science Weekly . Patrick Barkom, you're a natural history writer, and you've been lucky enough to meet and interview David Attenborough. So what is he like? Well, I guess the impression I come away with is just of his amazing intelligence. I spent a good couple of hours with him at his home a few years ago now. His mind is way quicker than mine still, and he's now obviously turning 100. And he's a brilliant storyteller, a great raconte ur , and someone who's just endlessly curious about the world. You know, it was very much like interviewing another journal ist in that he ends up asking me lots of questions and I'm like, hang on, I've got nothing of interest to say to you, you know, but there he was, curious about the world and what I knew about it. So tell me a little bit about his early life and how his interest in the natural world began. So David grew up in a family of teachers on the edge of Leicester, and it was in that era where small boys and girls roamed the countryside and that's what David did and he kept tanks of tropical fish at home and he cycled for miles and miles in search of fossils. My favourite place was a woodland in the middle of England and it had uh rocks around it which are full of fossils. And sometimes you could hit a rock, you could sometimes they were sitting out there and you just turned over the rock and there it was and it and it was you were the first person ever to see that and it hadn't seen the sun for maybe a hundred and fifty million years And so he grew up with just that natural sort of casual intima cy with the wild nature of Britain in that era, which of course was much more plentiful than it is today. And so he begins to kind of cultivate this passion for nature. Eventually, he ends up making TV about it. How does that journey happen? Well, his TV career is so interesting because his presenting duties came about completely accidentally. He studied natural sciences at Cambridge University and then he got a job in publishing and he decided it was quite boring. So he pitched to get into the more glamorous world of the new TV programs. So he became a producer director, and he was put onto a new show called ZooQuest, where he went out with the presenter who was called Jack Lester, who was a curator at London Zoo. And after one episode out in Sierra Leone, Jack Lester fell ill, and so David was propelled in front of the cameras and of course he became this colossus on our screens for decades and decades. We've got a lot to thank Jack Lester's immune system for. Now during the 60s he rose the ranks in the BBC. He ends up as controller of BBC Two, and then he's even the director of programming across BBC. But in the late 70s , he returns to the camera with this epic series, Life on Earth. Why was that such a landmark program? Well, it's very interesting how Life on Earth came about because as you mentioned, David Atmarath became controller of BBC Two and he was a big innovator. And one of his innovations, apart from bringing Snooker to the small screen, was to create the landmark documentary series. He commissioned Civilization, which was an epic twelve parter, and it told the story of culture through the ages. And then he thought, why don't I make a similar epic documentary, but make it about my passion and the thing that I'm really quite expert in, which is natural history. And so Life on Earth was a thirteen episode series and it took David around the world three times. He wrote every word of the script, and probably to the BBC's amazement, it was a huge success. It attracted audiences of 14 million, which was as big as Telly could get in those days. And it set the vocabulary really for natural history filmmaking, which the BBC then followed through the 80s to create all these series that it calls blue chip or blockbuster natural history documentaries. And they're still one of Britain's greatest kind of cultural productions, really. Attenborough has certainly proved there's a big public appetite for natural history. And when he first started out with ZooQuest, where he goes around the world bringing species back to house in London Zoo, you know, that was a very colonialist setup. Although if you watch it, Annborough approach es everything with curiosity and neutrality. Even so, the programmes have changed a lot over the years, and now he speaks out about environmental issues. So how much of that change has come from reflecting the public mood, or did his programs shape it in any way? It's a good question, Madeline. And I honestly think the answer is that his programmes have rather reflected the public mood rather than shaping them, and certainly over the years his filmmaking has changed hugely. But even when you look at Life on Earth back in nineteen seventy nine, it contains some very strong environmental messages and in the famous scenes where David meets the gorillas, he comments on how sad it is that gorilla is used in human society as a sort of byword for aggression when actually the actual species lives incredibly peacefully and lightly on the planet. very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolize all that is aggressive and violent when that's the one thing that the gorilla is not and that we are but not going certainly he doesn't develop explicit we must save the planet, we must save these species messages within the programs themselves for for quite some years. And that's changed in the last ten years. And I think that came about through a kind of growing criticism of his output for not revealing the true scale of the human destruction of the natural world. He's always been in that BBC tradition of neutrality, political impartiality, kind of diplomacy and care about what he said. Um he had a scientific background. He wanted evidence for everything that he said publicly, but he doesn't shape the programs in perhaps the way that people imagine. They are shaped by a team of biologists, wildlife experts, TV people who for a long time were quietly saying we can't include scenes of human devastation on the natural world because we're not gonna get the ratings, we're not gonna get a prime time BBC slot and they've changed their view over the last twenty years as the public mood shifted and people are becoming more aware of the environmental problems. But there is some influence the other way too, I guess. Like when you think about Blue Planet 2. That was maybe the first big blue chip BBC natural history series that had an unashamed environmental message that really had an impact on people. That program really sparked a level of popular awareness and outrage about plastic and a mood of something must be done in a way that previous programs haven't done. And certainly ever since then, every one of David's programmes has been explicitly environmental with The trouble is that the the the problems are getting worse and worse and worse by the day and we don't have time to spare. That's the difficulty Well Patrick, let's discuss a little more about how humans have changed the planet over the past a hundred years that Attenborough has been with us on it. We almost live in another world entirely from the one Attenborough was born in. And so as a natural history writer yourself, what does your mind go to when you think about how nature and biodiversity has transformed in this time? It is another world, Madeline, exactly. I mean looking back to nineteen twenty six is incredible really, because David was born into a different geological epoch. He was born in the Holocene and we're now in the Anthropocene, which is defined by our sort of disruptive destruction of the planet. And in nineteen twenty six the planet's human population was two billion. Today it's eight point two billion. In terms of carbon emissions, parts per million, back in nineteen twenty six it was approximately three hundred and five parts per million. And today it's up to 4 30. And of course the thing that's really transformed is our levels of consumption in the first world and the impact that's had on the planet. Roughly half of all the destruction of forests in human history has happened over the course of Sir David's lifetime. That's an area larger than the size of China. We have since nineteen seventy a seventy three percent decline and the average populations of monitored vertebrates. Among invertebrates it's less certain, but certainly in Britain there's good data. Since nineteen seventy there's been a 37% decline in invertebrates found on farmland. And that's the honest picture of the last hundred years. It's just astonishing to think of the losses that have occurred over his lifetime and those losses are continuing. But there is some hope too and a lot has changed for the better over the course of certainly the last fifty years of David's life. Well let's talk about those positives. What kind of things have we seen over the past fifty years that bring you a smile or some hope? We we've seen the birth of conservation in Sir David's lifetime. The wildlife trusts actually celebrate their hundredth birthday a few weeks before David's hundredth birthday. So the conservation movement in Britain was essentially born in the same year as David Attenborough. And I mean one of the things we've touched on is David's own influence on conservation science. It's virtually impossible to meet a conservation scientist anywhere in the world who won't cite David Attenborough as one of their influences and sources of inspiration. So Patrick, what have we managed to conserve? We've seen and demonstrated enormous successes with saving individual species, particularly charismatic predators and mammals towards the top of the food chain. We've seen tiger populations double in India over the past decade, thanks to focused conservation efforts. The gorillas that David, of course, famously filmed in Life on Earth numbered 2 50 in Rwanda in the 70s. Poaching had decimated them. And today the population in the National Park where he filmed them is more than 600. Here in the UK, species of butterfly like the large blue, which became extinct in the year that life on Earth was broadcast, have been brought back from extinction, and Britain actually has a larger, large blue butterfly population than any other country in the world now. And by saving individual species, we not only inspire and galvanize people, but we often are saving a particular habitat or an ecos ystem . So it is important to see all the successes and what we're doing but obviously set them in the frame of ongoing challenges . Coming up, what will Sir David Attenborough's legacy be? And what can he teach us about reaching your second century in good health ? I'm Kai Wright. I'm Carrie Sherman. And we are here to tell you about our new show, which is rooted in this feeling that at least I have I know you have where you know it's kind of like when you wake up in the morning and you pick up your phone and you're just hit in the face with a fire hose of news, right? Like there's war, there's authoritarianism, our planet is learning. I could go on and on and on. And on and on and on, but like we're trying to figure out how to manage it, right? Like how do you manage it? I manage it by leaning in and trying to learn more and trying to figure out, okay, how can I be smarter about this particular topic? And who can I talk to that's going to make me feel better about it? And who can tell me who's responsible for the mess that I'm reading about. So that's our mission. That's the show. Welcome to Stateside with Kai and Carter. We're a new show from The Garden. We're talking to big thinkers and the best journalists, just trying to understand the world through smart conversation and honest reporting. We don't have billionaires telling us what to say. Stateside with Ky andle Carter will come out three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday starting May 13th. Follow on Apple Podcasts or catch us wherever you watch or listen. Patrick Attenborough has inspired us with these intimate views of the natural world. Now whether or not that makes any of us act is debatable, but as you said, it's almost impossible to find a conservationist who wouldn't cite him as an inspiration. But how would you sum up his endur ing influence? What do you think that has really been? Well the invisible side of the legacy is, as you say, in the hearts and minds of all the people who have watched Attenborough programmes and been inspired not simply to act but make their careers, their life's work one of acting to save species or help the planet. And so that's a very real legacy and he carries so much authority that people really do listen and they include world leaders and politicians desperate to be seen to be doing the right thing when gently admonished by David Attenborough. It's hard to put our finger on how much action has been down to him, but certainly specifically last summer he released a film Ocean that was incredibly successful at cinemas in Britain and around the world, and that highlighted very graphically for the first time the devastation caused by bottom trawling. And I know that David Attenborough had very specific ambitions there to see that practice banned. It hasn't been yet, but there's certainly more of a movement now to curtail it and constrain it than ever before. I think he will look at his own work and the astonishing number of glorious programmes that tell amazing stories about the natural world, and I don't see how he would not consider that a life's work well spent. And finally, Patrick, it is amazing that Attenborough is still doing as much as he is as he turns a hundred. What do you think the secret to his longevity is? Do you think it's potentially connected to this passion and curiosity about the natural world that he's had and cultivated since his childhood? My gosh, he's a model and an inspiration for all of us in terms of how to tackle old age. He would acknowledge, of course, his great privilege and his good fortune. But you really notice when you meet him his enduring curiosity about the world and obviously he's been blessed with a great intellect, but the only reason that's still there is because his mind is being used so much. He's a great advert for not retiring and I think that lifel ong work by him is the thing that's really kept him going and kept him in such good health and spirits for a hundred years and he's someone that we can look up to, admire and attempt to follow. Well Patrick, I know you and all of our listeners and probably millions of people out there will be wishing David Attenborough a very happy hundredth birthday tomorrow and it's just been such a joy to chat about him ahead of his centenary. So thank you so much. Oh thanks Madeline. Yeah, happy birthday David Attenborough. I hope he has a wonderful day. Thanks again to Patrick Barkom. You can find all his reporting at thegardian.com. And before you go, I wanted to tell you about a new video podcast that our New York office is launching. It's called Stateside with Kai and Carter, and it's hosted by our colleagues Kai Wright and Carter Sherman. Each week they're going to be trying to make sense of some of the biggest stories happening right now. The show will feature conversations with some of the smartest thinkers and reporters, not just from Guardian, but across the world. It's launching on the 13th of May with episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can find it in full video on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. And that's all from us. This episode was produced by me, Madeline Finley, and Ellie Sands. The sound design was by Joel Cox and the executive producer was Ellie Bure. We'll be back on Tuesday. See you then . This is the Guardian .