Environmental activists, when pleading their case, usually make a false assumption — that humans care about the wild or want to save the planet. True, some of us surely do but the ones with actual power to do so will always choose power and wealth first over the planet.
In this book, Sir David Attenborough tackles a far more practical approach. Establishing the cause and effect, he succinctly put how it’s about saving humanity, our very own hide, and not saving the planet. In truth, whatever we do, after we’re gone the planet will recover at her own pace, bringing forth new life. Our demise would not halter her in any way. It has done so five times before, it will do it again. If we want to save our own species from going extinct, the only way we have is to reintroduce biodiversity and mitigate the effect of climate change.

Sir David is 94 years old now and he has been observing the changes in our climate for a very long time. In this autobiography/science book, he recalls the past century and the major factors that laid waste to and destroyed once sustainable ecosystems that are no longer. There’s a Netflix film based on the book, which Sir David also stars in.

However, the documentary film and the book are not exactly the same, the book is more detailed. It explains the dependency of each ecological agent in a biodiverse ecosystem in a more persuasive manner. I’ll give one example. He mentions in the documentary that the herd of wildebeests graze the vast grassland and keep it rich and productive. This is a simple statement spoken in a matter-of-fact tone.
Yet in the book he encourages the reader to question if such a large number of beasts graze the land aggressively, shouldn’t the grassland die out? Aren’t wildebeests actually threats to the land itself? He explains then that— one, the nature of the land is supposed to be vast in order to sustain the animals (if it was a small space, the grassland would surely perish, so would the wildebeests), two, the animals only eat what’s peeking out of the ground but the stems of those grasses are under the soil are safe, three, their hoofs plow the land and added dung works as fertilizer. Their relationship, although may seem destructive up close, is actually in total harmony.

He also writes more about his personal life and journeys—the events that happened chronologically. His feelings anent his interaction with the wild animals and memories he cherishes. The rise of documentary films, their growing popularity, and the effect they had on people can be found in the book in detail.

There is another aspect climatologists usually miss. They say the earth is 1-degree Celcius hotter than it was before. 1-degree celsius didn’t seem a lot to me when I first heard about it. I live in a tropical area, in the summer the temp varies from 33-40 degree celsius, what’s one degree more? What’s the big deal?

I realized the picture is far direr reading David Wallace’s non-fiction book “The Uninhabitable Planet”. What the climatologists forget to mention is that the ocean absorbed most of the heat we pumped into the air. The increased heat in the ocean is destroying habitats, i.e. the coral reef, setting off a chain of devastating ecological consequences that in turn is cutting off our food supply from the ocean, that is whatever is still left after our mass-scale fishing.
And then Even a 0.5-degree Celsius increase in the temperature inland can wreak havoc on our crop production. Droughts will stay longer, heat waves will stay longer, natural disasters like cyclones and tornadoes are already happening more frequently than before, their recurrence would increase further. We may not feel much about a half-degree increase on our skin, but we’ll surely perish by the environmental changes it brings about.
Sir David projects what is likely to happen in the nearest decade in the film but he goes on further into the future, to 2100 in the book. Even then, I think, he hasn’t said enough.

Sir David also summarizes the adversities we are facing in our attempts at reintroducing biodiversity. Practical ones, political ones. GDP (gross domestic product), for instance, is commonly used as a metric to indicate the progress of a nation, which doesn’t really take into account the living standards of people or ecological sustainability. It’s a flawed indicator of true growth. He speaks in favor of the Triple Bottom Line framework, also called PPP (Profit, People, Planet).

But there’s some special merit to the film. What it lacks in information, it makes up with vivid imagery and the music that imprints those images in us.
You can see Sir David’s sorrow when he says we’ve destroyed the wild world, we overrun it with our machines and artificiality.
And I share the same tears the audience is showered with when they are faced with walrus falling from cliffs to certain death unknowingly, hoping there’s the ocean, which we took away from them.

So if you’ve only seen the film, I think reading the book is not entirely unnecessary, rather, it would compliment the viewing experience. Another strong case for picking up the book is that there’s an audiobook version and Sir David himself narrates the entire thing. He’s a fantastic narrator as we are well aware. In many parts of the book, you can sense anger, regret, and urgency in his voice, which likely would not be the case if another professional narrator was on the job.

Sir David Attenborough is one of the most influential people alive today and one of the few of them whose influence is measured in terms of progress and perseverance—not how powerful they are politically or how much power/dominance they can assert on a certain nation. I only hope this influence is enough to change the view of decisions makers of the offending nations.

I loved and enjoyed this account of his life and overview of our planet, titled “his witness statement” as a whole. This book can be a solid entry point to anyone who wants to know more about the impending doom that awaits us and the possible options we have to escape it.