WellBeing’s 6 favourite climate revivalists
“It is now almost impossible to imagine a time when Attenborough wasn’t on our screens, narrating — in his signature comforting drawl — the epic fight between bison or the silent stalk of Africa’s biggest cats.”
David Attenborough
Sir David Frederick Attenborough is one of Britain’s most beloved figures; a broadcaster, natural historian and, at 93, a global superstar, his reign in the public eye has been defined by environmental benevolence.
Attenborough’s epic series about the natural world have been broadcast around the globe, making a name for him as the father of our planet. Travelling from the icy Edens of Antarctica to the momentous plains of Africa’s Serengeti, his documentaries established a new genre of wildlife film. It is now almost impossible to imagine a time when Attenborough wasn’t on our screens, narrating — in his signature comforting drawl — the epic fight between bison or the silent stalk of Africa’s biggest cats. At its finest, his storytelling reimagines the affairs of the natural world into awe-inspiring tales that have captured the imagination of the globe. The migration patterns of albatross and the reign of a queen ant in her colony are crafted into stories that sparkle and delight in a way only Attenborough has mastered.
Over the last 15 years, Attenborough’s stories have shifted from a natural history perspective to an environmental one. Initially peppered with conservation issues, they are now a rallying cry for a planet cracking under the weight of human impact. The arrival of Blue Planet II in 2017 ushered in a new urgency to Attenborough’s blockbuster epics and transformed popular attitudes towards single-use plastic and pollution. He is, on all accounts, credited with making the plastic straw the single most unfashionable accessory in the UK.
In his most recent films, no stunning sequence of animals is without Attenborough narrating the precariousness of their continued existence. Images of turtles tangled in plastic and polar bears stranded on a lone piece of ice explicitly tackle environmental harm caused by humans.
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