A Life on Our Planet
A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future by David Attenborough
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
All we have is the world we live in. Yet, we are close to destroying the very thing that allows us to live.
If we continue we are likely to create unpreventable damage, and potentially a mass extinction.
But if we act now we can halt and reverse the damage caused. Attenborough calls for more sustainable and efficient fishing and plant farming, more renewable energy being used, a change in how we measure countries progress through People, Planet and Profit targets, merging more nature with cities, eating meat more rarely. Ultimately achieving more balance with nature.
🎨 Impressions
Attenborough managed to put lots of complex processes and a multitude of causes of climate change into a understandable, succinct way. It was also interesting to hear about Attenborough's unique stories from his time travelling around the globe, his time on TV, his interaction with many species.
How I Discovered It
Having watched the Netflix documentary, A Life on Our Planet, I thought I would also read the book.
Who Should Read It?
If you want to have a compact but holistic overview of climate change, and ways we can change for the better this is a good place to start.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
We moved from being a part of nature to being apart from nature.
We live our comfortable lives in the shadow of a disaster of our own making. That disaster is being brought about by the very things that allow us to live our comfortable lives.
We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves. With or without us, the wild will return.
📒 Summary + Notes
In his 94 years, David Attenborough has visited every continent on the globe, exploring the wild places of our planet and documenting the living world in all its variety and wonder. Now, for the first time he reflects upon both the defining moments of his lifetime as a naturalist and the devastating changes he has seen.
We Need to Change
Many have called Chernobyl the most costly environmental catastrophe of the planet. But this is not true. Something else has been unfolding, everywhere across the globe, barely noticeable day to day for much of the last century. This is happening as a result of bad planning and human error. Not one hapless accident but a damaging lack of care and understanding the affects everything we do. it didn't begin with a single explosion. It started silently before any realised it, as a result of causes that are multifarious, global ad complex. Its fallout can not be detected by a single instrument. It has taken hundreds of studies around the world to confirm that it is happening. Its effects will be far more profound than contamination of soil and waterways in a few unfortunate countries - it could lead to the destabilisation and collapse of everything we rely upon.
The long story of gradual change of the Earth has been interrupted at points. Every hundred million years or so, after all those painstaking selections and improvements something catastrophic happened - a mass extinction.
The Importance of Culture in our Development
As we evolved our brains grew in size at such a rate to suggest that we were acquiring one of our most characteristic features - a capacity to develop cultures to a unique degree. The term culture describes the information that can be passed from one individual to another by teaching or imitation. Copying ideas or actions of others seems to us easy but that is because we excel at it. Only a handful of other species (chimpanzees and bottle-nose dolphins) show any sign of having a culture.
Culture transformed as we evolved. It was a new way by which our species became adapted for life on Earth. We could produce an idea that brought significant change within a generation. Key skills, like lighting a fire or cooking a meal could be passed form one human to another in a single lifetime. It was a new form of inheritance that didn't rely on the genes which an an individual received from its parents. So now the pace of change increased.
The Mindset Change of the Worlds Population
At Christmas, 1968, one image, the earth with everyone on it (minus the 3 astronauts taken the picture) enabled humankind to understand something that no-one before had been able to visualised in such a vivid and way. The important truth that our planet is small, isolated and vulnerable. It is the only place we where life exists as far as we can tell and it is uniquely precious. This picture from Apollo 8 had transformed the mindset of the population of the world. "We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth"
Shifting Baseline Syndrome
We have become too skilled at fishing, deforestation and whaling and have done so not gradually but suddenly. Exponential gains are a characteristic of cultural evolution. Invention accumulates. If you combine a diesel engine, GPS, echo sounder, the opportunities they create are not just added to each other, they are multiplied. But the ability of fish to reproduce is limited.
There are fewer fish in the sea today. We don't realise this because of shifting baseline syndrome. Each generation defines normal by what is experiences. We judge what the sea can provide by fish populations today, not knowing what they once were. We expect far less from the ocean because we never have known for ourselves what riches it once provided and what it could again. This is distorting our perception of Earth. We have forgotten that once there were forests that would take days to climb through, herds of bison that would take four hours to pas flocks of birds so vast and dense that they darkened the sky's. These things were normal only a few lifetimes ago. We have become accustomed to an impoverished planet.
Becoming too Dominant
96% of the mass of all mammals on earth is made up of our bodies and those of animals we raise to eat. Our own mass makes up 33%, domestic mammals like cows and pigs make up over 60% meaning there is just 4% of other mammals from mice to elephants to whales.
The Planetary Boundaries Model
Research found that there were nine critical thresholds built into the Earth - nine planetary boundaries. If we keep our impact within these thresholds we can we can occupy a safe operating space and a sustainable existence. If we push any one of these boundaries, we risk destabilising the life-support machine, permanently debilitating nature and removing its ability to maintain the safe, benign environment of the Holocene.
See more information here
A Better Way to Measure Progress
We need to globally detach from our addiction to growth. To move away from GDP as a measure towards something that takes into account: Profit, Planet and People - eg the Happy Planet Index that measures a countries ecological footprint, human well-being elements such as life expectancy, happiness levels and equality.
Solutions
The global population is growing is expected to reach 11 billion people by 2100. If we can reduce the population growth rate by raising people out of poverty, improving access to healthcare globally and enabling children to stay in school for as long as possible, this would be beneficial.
We need to shift to renewable energy. At the start of the century, Morocco relied heavily on imported oil and gas. However, it currently generates 40% of its energy needs at home from renewable sources, with the world’s largest solar farm. With this rapid advancement, Morocco could be an energy exporter by 2050. We need to move towards these sustainable, renewable sources and divest from fossil fuels. He points out the irony of banks and investment firms investing pension funds in fossil fuels when it’s these fuels preventing the future that we are saving for.
Ecosystems that are more diverse, with more biodiversity, better stabilise life and our Earth. Therefore by reducing fishing and reducing farming space for a return to wilderness, we will be able to restore some of this. We can change our diets, learn to use land more efficiently and through creative and innovative practices change farming practices.
If we halt deforestation and allow forests, the planet’s biggest ally in locking away carbon, this will create biodiversity and make them more effective at absorbing carbon. The government intervened in Costa Rica, giving grants to landowners to replant native trees. Thanks to this initiative, forests now cover half of Costa Rica compared to just one quarter in the 1980's.
