Attenborough returns with stern warning

For more than 60 years, David Attenborough has brought the wonder and majesty of the natural world into our living rooms.

Now, he is returning to BBC One with a series that is guaranteed to be one of the television events of the year. Premiering on Sunday, Seven Worlds, One Planet will be the nineteenth major series Attenborough has written and presented.

Its seven episodes will span the planet’s seven continents, soaring with the albatross and delving into the earth with Austrian hamsters.

Born 17 days before the Queen in 1926, the veteran broadcaster is a symbol of stability in troubled times and, according to YouGov, the most popular man in Britain.

But that doesn’t mean that the 93-year-old is immune from attacks. For years, Attenborough and the BBC Natural History unit were criticised for tacking on brief segments about pollution, while avoiding a frank conversation about humanity’s impact on the planet.

In spring this year, Our Planet saw a radical shift in tone — marking Attenborough out as a sage-like guardian of the environment.

“He’s seen more of the natural world than any human being that has ever lived on the planet, and he’s also seen more change than anyone else. And he feels a responsibility,” says his long-time collaborator, Alastair Fothergill.

Attenborough maintains that it is not he who has changed, but the public.

“I don’t think I’ve made a series in the last 40 years where I haven’t made at the end an appeal about caring for the natural world,” says Attenborough. His message has always focused on “not wasting things, not polluting things”, but “suddenly […] you hit the right note”.

Seven Worlds, One Planet comes at a time when the media is growing more conscious of its responsibility to present the brutal reality of the climate crisis.

Earlier this week, The Guardian pledged to use fewer polar bears and more humans in its coverage of the climate crisis. While cuddly animals can stir emotions in readers, these images can make the crisis feel “remote and abstract”, as opposed to an urgent human problem.

As Attenborough knows, the right coverage can have a huge impact. In 2017, Blue Planet II showed the plastic filling our oceans, and the world woke up. It was arguably the catalyst for a raft of anti-pollution laws that have come in since. But it’s not an easy formula to perfect.

“Quite what it is that makes the messages ring the bell is very difficult to say. I daresay if we knew how to do it, we would do it more frequently,” he says.

Dying planet?

Do Attenborough and the BBC avoid blaming humanity for Earth’s destruction? Of course not, say Attenborough and his supporters. These programmes have done more to promote the precious value of the natural world than anything else in our lifetime. As society has woken up to environmental breakdown, Attenborough has bravely put himself at the forefront of the fight.

But Lucy Jones disagrees. Our Planet was their first series to show “the realities of ecocide, environmental collapse and climate breakdown”, but “it doesn’t explain why, or in whose name, or with what power fossil fuels continue to be burnt”. By declining to take on the giants of fossil fuels, agriculture and plastic manufacturing, Attenborough and the BBC are shying away from the forces driving the crisis.