‘A Life on Our Planet’ by David Attenborough takes us through a truly moving journey, watching how the Earth has been devastated by human’s ongoing pursuit of progress, just during David Attenborough’s lifespan.
Attenborough starts by showing us the current site of Chernobyl, and draws a shocking comparison of how our ongoing impact on the planet is leading us to a similar fate – a home which will be uninhabitable due to ‘human error and mistakes.’ He then takes us through his early years on screen, and tells us of various milestones in which he began to realise the increasingly worrying status of our planet and its wildlife. He shows us that simply during his lifetime alone, the remaining wilderness on Earth has reduced from 66% in 1937 to a harrowing figure of 35% in 2020. This documentary throws us head first into the reality of the current situation that we have been blindly living in, while our home ground gets exploited, our oceans are ransacked, our fauna and flora go extinct, and our forests are cut down to nothing.
It might make you cry (personal experience) but it will definitely open your eyes, and help you realise that, while we have brought our planet to the brink, there is still a chance that we might help the world recover, only if we act fast and decisively, leaving a very little margin of error.
As David Attenborough says in his documentary,
‘We need to learn how to live with nature, rather than against it‘
I think that many of us can feel helpless when we watch documentaries like this and we are bewildered by the suffering we see. And we may feel that the changes we make in our day-to-day life as an individual do not make a big difference, when the big corporations are still burning fuels, deforesting vast lands, and destroying marine life (to name just a few of our biggest challenges).
However, you can help by fighting against those corporations, and this doesn’t have to be big courageous acts like tying yourself to a tractor in the middle of a Costa Rica forest, but by simply avoiding them and boycotting their products, educating others, and hitting them where it hurts – their revenue – and, instead, we can support ecological and environmental organisations who genuinely try their best to reduce their emissions and have a positive impact on the planet. We’re lucky that we are seeing more and more corporations opening their eyes and trying to be the difference.
And this doesn’t have to be difficult – for example, when you see a product that contains palm oil, it’s very likely that in that same supermarket, there is a another version of the same product from a different company with a less harmful background to it. This Greenpeace report found a total of 25 palm oil suppliers had cleared more than 320,000 acres (130,000 hectares) of rainforest since the end of 2015. Yes, you read that number right. That is an area almost twice the size of Singapore that has been destroyed in less than three years. This is a devastating figure, and cannot be allowed to continue.
Palm oil and its link to deforestation is a very important problem, but not nearly the only one we’re currently facing, it’s likely that right now you may be contributing to another problem by simply having your light on, charging your computer, or your phone. Most electricity is still produced by non-renewable sources, at a power plant which burns fuel sources, such as coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear energy. While this is getting better, it still accounts for more than half of the electricity produced in the UK.
There are plenty of environmentally friendly energy providers that use 100% green electricity, and even offset the gas you use in your house or office, Octopus Energy is a very good example of such a company that operates in the United Kingdom, but there are more out there, so please do some research and consider changing your house to a 100% green energy. It is surprisingly affordable, and there’s a great sense of satisfaction that comes from charging your phone, or even your electric car completely from sun, wind and water.
Another massive problem we’re facing daily is the consumption of meat and fish. It is bad enough that we as humans decide when another being’s life should end just so we can indulge, even when we would survive without it! There are hundreds of cruelty-free alternatives out there, and a vegan lifestyle is so often linked to a healthier lifestyle.
Included in the issue of meat consumption is that in ‘producing’ and ‘processing’ these innocent lives we need double the amount of land that we would, if people led a largely plan based diet. In the UK, animal-based foods take up 85% of the land used for food. This equates to an area just a little smaller than England and Scotland combined! Only 15% of the food supply footprint in the UK is used for growing food that humans eat directly (rather than to feed animals which are then farmed for meat). In order to have fish on our plate, there is a knock on affect of disrupting a wider part of the ocean’s ecosystem, it really makes sense to reduce the consumption of these products and replace them with healthier alternatives – fruit and vegetables.
The last half an hour is full of hope, so even if you feel it’s too hard, please watch until the end.
A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough is phenomenal. #DavidAttenborough #RewildTheEarth
— Harlee Morphis (@harleemorphis) December 19, 2020
Want to have a good cry about the loss of biodiversity? watch ‘David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet’ Review: Ruin and Regrowth #climatechange #biodiversity #davidattenborough https://t.co/5slIJjZsBT
— Franky Frances Cannon (@FrancesArtist) December 20, 2020
