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environmental scientist Ralph Cicerone that convinced him of what was happening. It was a 2004 presentation by the late U.S. “It’s very dangerous to take a worldwide phenomenon and think you’re going to find just one scene in one locality that will prove it’s actually happening,” he says.

It sounds surprising given his body of work, but as he tells it, he didn’t want to base his judgment on observation alone. In one jaw-dropping sequence, after thousands of Pacific walruses are forced by vanishing ice sheets to crowd on a rocky strip of land, hundreds leap off a cliff to their doom, a scene Attenborough says is “almost heartbreaking” to watch.īut it wasn’t until relatively recently that Attenborough became certain of mankind’s role in climate change. This is in part because the filmmakers, freed from the rigorous impartiality of the state-funded BBC, teamed up with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), a conservation NGO.

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“These days it’s a lot more … professional.”Īlthough Planet Earth, as well as his other acclaimed BBC series Blue Planet and Frozen Planet, did raise concerns among some viewers about the state of the environment, Our Planet is more explicit in its messaging. “In the old days I wrote every shot,” he says. He didn’t travel to remote locations for the new series, focusing his efforts instead on helping producers craft a script that would suit his signature narrative style while also fulfilling the show’s brief to sound the alarm about a changing planet. His profile is evidently now high enough for Netflix to tout him as the narrator of Our Planet for English-speaking viewers (Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek narrate for Spanish-language audiences), although he admits his creative role was mostly limited to the voice-over. environment ministry to check statistics. He desperately boned up on figures on climate change, even calling the U.K. “I thought, I mean apart from my work, what’s he doing talking to me?” he says. But he was astonished to discover the President wanted it the other way round. “I remember saying, ‘We’re going to start from the very beginning of the primordial oceans and see when life begins to appear.’ And he said, ‘You mean the first program’s all about green slime?’ I said, ‘Well, yes.’ ‘No, thank you,’ he said.”Īttenborough initially assumed he would be the one interviewing Obama. network trying to describe Life on Earth to an executive. He remembers being in a pitch session with a major U.S. Its most famous sequence shows Attenborough cavorting with a family of mountain gorillas in Rwanda.īut while Attenborough’s filmography made him a household name in the U.K., his fame didn’t immediately transfer stateside.

The 13-part broadcast took viewers around the world, bringing them into close contact with a range of animals and using then cutting-edge filming techniques like the slow-motion capture of animal movements. He soon began work on Life on Earth, the seminal 1979 series that traced the arc of evolution from primordial ooze to Homo sapiens.

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In the early 1970s, he resigned from the BBC to dedicate himself full time to wildlife filmmaking. “But in between, I had to do all these other things … politics and finance and engineering, which was never my bag.”

“I’d go away for three months and make some programs, which was lovely,” he says.

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Having studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, Attenborough juggled his TV duties with making wildlife films every few months his series Zoo Quest, which ran from 1954 to 1963, followed the London Zoo’s attempts to gather rare animals for its menagerie from West Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. As he walked into the Royal Botanic Gardens for TIME’s portrait shoot on the day of our interview, the mere sight of him caused members of the public and staff alike to break into goofy smiles. He was knighted by the Queen in 1985 and is usually referred to as Sir David. Over decades–first as a television executive, then as a wildlife filmmaker and recently as a kind of elder statesman for the planet–he has achieved near beatific status. In his native U.K., Attenborough is held in the kind of esteem usually reserved for royalty. Sitting in his home in the Richmond neighborhood of west London for one in a series of conversations, I feel compelled to drink a second cup of tea when he offers. Ninety-two years of use may have softened its edges, but still it carries the command of authority. In person, David Attenborough speaks in the same awestruck hush he has used in dozens of nature documentaries, a crisp half whisper that is often mimicked but seldom matched.

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