The Eco-Evolution of Famed Naturalist David Attenborough
- Mal Cole
- Jun 21
- 7 min read
From Curiosity to Conservation, from Explorer to Activist
In celebration of his 99th birthday, broadcaster, naturalist, and international treasure Sir David Attenborough released a new film, Ocean, on Hulu.
“After living for nearly one hundred years on this planet, I now understand the most important place on Earth is not on land but at sea,” Attenborough says in the trailer to his latest project.
The film, released on May 8 in Britain and June 8 in the US, is not just a love letter to the sea but a call to action. Attenborough beseeches his audience to fight for change and demonstrates how preservation and recovery of ocean life is possible.
The film reviews the course of ocean discoveries throughout Attenborough’s lifetime, current threats to the ocean’s ecosystems, and his vision of a brighter, more sustainable future. In this way, the film reflects Attenborough’s own lifelong evolution from a young explorer to one of the natural world’s most passionate advocates.
Early Days: Fascination With Nature
When the naturalist was growing up in Leicester, England, in the 1930s, he reveled in his freedom to explore the countryside on his bicycle. He discovered tiny worlds under rocks, looked for newts and frogs, and collected fossils. “It never occurred to me to be anything other than fascinated when watching what was going on in the natural world about me,” Attenborough wrote in his 2020 book, A Life on Our Planet.
This fascination led him to study natural sciences at Cambridge University and eventually to a career producing nonfiction programs for the BBC in the 1950s. His early work in documentaries and television focused on discovering and filming animals in their natural habitats. Many of these animals were ones Western television audiences had never seen filmed in the wild, including the sloth, pangolin, and Komodo dragon, he wrote.
Those early programs were a part of Attenborough’s Zoo Quest series. Some of the animals in the program were also captured to study and exhibit at the London Zoo. Attenborough has said that he reflects on this early period with “mixed feelings.” To the young producer, the wilderness appeared pristine and infinite.
“Back then,” he said on the 2020 Netflix documentary, David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, “it seemed inconceivable that we, a single species, might one day have the power to threaten the very existence of the wilderness.”
“Back then, it seemed inconceivable that we, a single species, might one day have the power to threaten the very existence of the wilderness.”
Advocating for Conservation and Extinction Prevention
The need for habitat preservation became evident to Attenborough through the passion of conservationists and experts he encountered while making his documentaries.
When he first visited East Africa in 1960, he learned through the work of nature preservation advocate Bernhard Grzimek that the Serengeti is a delicate ecosystem, and its sheer vastness is necessary for the herds of animals that make their home there. The word “serengeti” means “endless plains” in the Maasai language, but as Attenborough discovered, “the wild was far from unlimited; it’s finite. It needs protecting.”
Because of his degrees in zoology and geology, and his fossil-hunting missions as a boy, Attenborough knew about mass extinctions. But the possibility of the death of an entire species in his lifetime shocked him. In 1978, he visited seriously endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda as part of his 13-episode Life on Earth series. Through the work of American biologist Dian Fossey, who would go on to write the 1983 memoir Gorillas in the Mist, Attenborough learned that there were fewer than 300 mountain gorillas left in Rwanda due to habitat loss and brutal poaching.
Attenborough wanted his audience to know how gentle the mountain gorillas were and how similar they were to human beings. “The awful truth,” he wrote in his 2020 book, “was that the process of extinction that I had seen as a boy in the rocks was happening right here around me, to animals with which I was familiar—our closest relatives. And we were responsible.”
Before Attenborough left Rwanda, Fossey asked him to promise to help protect the gorillas, and he began raising money as soon as he returned to London.
“The awful truth was that the process of extinction that I had seen as a boy in the rocks was happening right here around me, to animals with which I was familiar—our closest relatives. And we were responsible.”
Attenborough became a vocal advocate for conservation and an international ambassador for the World Wildlife Fund as early as their founding in 1961. In 2021, he was honored with the UN Champion of the Earth - Lifetime Achievement Award, the UN’s highest environmental honor, with many other accolades in between.
This passion for preservation and his understanding of how the actions of human beings were detrimental to the Earth’s wild places were evident in his work as early as the final episode of his Life on Earth. In 2000, Attenborough also made a report of various ecological crises in a three-episode series, State of the Planet. But he was slow to accept the concept of climate change as a man-made phenomenon.
In the early 2000s, Attenborough created some of his most stunning television and film work, including the Blue Planet and Planet Earth series, which largely celebrated the variety and beauty of the planet with some focus on threats to the environment and conservation efforts. But in 2006, Attenborough released an article in The Independent saying that he was no longer skeptical about humanity as the source of a changing climate and was convinced by the overwhelming scientific evidence.
Shifting Toward Climate Change
After the publication of this article, the focus of Attenborough’s work started to shift. In 2006, two films—Are We Changing the Planet? and Can We Save the Planet?—were broadcast in Britain and explicitly addressed the man-made nature of climate change and the scientific evidence supporting that conclusion.
“I’ve always believed that few people will protect the natural world if they don’t first love and understand it.”
But Attenborough still wanted to show his audiences the wonders of the natural world.
“I’ve always believed that few people will protect the natural world if they don’t first love and understand it,” he said at the premiere of his Netflix series Our Planet in 2020, but Attenborough’s more recent films have emphasized the devastating effects of climate change and the global collective action needed to fight it.
Also in 2020, Attenborough released David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, a film he called his “witness statement” that explained his growing concern for the state of the world from a more personal perspective. The film pits the intense beauty of the world’s ecosystems and their inhabitants against the pain of their struggle for survival in a changing climate. In a Q&A released before the documentary, the naturalist described his grief at the sight of a coral reef he revisited after 50 years.
The Great Barrier Reef, which he described as “the most astonishing sight in the natural world,” has been bleached to a stark white. “It had been killed,” said Attenborough, “by the rising temperature that we, humanity, have created.”
Oceans Essential for All Life on Earth
The new film Ocean with David Attenborough, and the companion book, also called Ocean, recount how in his 99 years, half of Attenborough’s beloved coral reefs have been lost, and four out of five humpback whales have died. He also saw losses in the blue whale population; it remains an endangered species, but it is slowly recovering, with between 10,000 and 25,000 blue whales in the world, according to World Wildlife Fund.
Currently, bottom trawling destroys areas of the ocean floor as diverse as a rainforest thousands of times every day. “We have drained the life from our ocean,” Attenborough says in the Ocean film. “Now we are almost out of time.”
Ocean’s vibrant images of sea life juxtaposed with this destruction are difficult to watch. In a review, the Associated Press called Ocean “a brutal reminder of how little we see and how much is at stake.”
But for all the dire warnings and desperation, the viewer is not left devastated. Attenborough shows his audience exactly how the world’s oceans, “the lifeblood of our home,” can be saved through establishing “no-take zones” where fishing is prohibited. According to the film, if 30% of the global ocean is conserved, the ocean will begin to heal—and rapidly.
With this new film, Attenborough asks his viewers to save the sea, not just for the animals who live there but because it could save humanity. “I’m sure that nothing is more important; for if we save the sea, we save our world,” he says.
Over his long lifetime, Attenborough has shown the deep beauty of the natural world. With this new film, he asks his devoted audience to learn and change as he has learned and changed, and in exchange he leaves them with the gift of hope.
*Mal Cole is a freelance science and nature writer based in Massachusetts.
Sources:
Attenborough, David. 2020. A Life on Our Planet : My Witness Statement and Vision for the Future. London, Uk: Ebury Press Uk.
Butfield, Colin, Toby Nowlan, and Keith Scholey, dirs. 2025. Ocean with David Attenborough. Hulu.
Hughes, Jonnie, dir. 2020. David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. Documentary. Netflix
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