A Life on Our Planet – a powerful and personal message from David Attenborough. This film is not only a testimony on how we have an enormous impact on our planet and biodiversity, but also his vision. A vision on how we can create more sustainable solutions, together in balance with nature, that will benefit us and our planet.  

Our planet is changing

After living on this planet for 93 years, traveling to all continents, discovering wild places and wild animals, he has seen it all. He has seen how much this world has changed and how it is unfortunately still changing. The population number that keeps rising, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere that keeps increasing and the remaining wildness that keeps decreasing. The saddest thing? We, humans, are creating this, because of our poor planning and human errors.

Poor planning and human error

A city in Ukraine, where 50,000 people had once lived, was declared uninhabitable in April 1986. Why? Because of the Chernobyl blast. The city was immediately evacuated and no one has lived there since then. It was an environmental disaster that had, and still has a major impact on all of Europe. The disaster was, according to David, the result of poor planning and human error. And sadly, this is only one of the many examples.

Because of us, biodiversity is declining due to disasters that we are responsible for. We create places where people and animals can no longer live. There is little left of the living world, because we are destroying it. For example: monkeys that get killed by poachers, whales being slaughtered, trees that are cut down and oil palms that are planted in their place and so on.

Make our planet wild again

The earth is losing its balance because of humans. We need to take action and start creating sustainable solutions. Like Davis says: we need to make the planet wild again. By for example: changing our diet, make technologies run on energies from the earth, decreasing the population growth by increasing living standards and so on. Something that we should keep in my mind, is the following:

The living world will always move on. We, on the other hand, will not. Chernobyl is proof of this, where the forest has taken over the city, and it has become a safe place for wild animals.We don’t need to save our planet, but save ourselves, with or without us the world will restore.

David Attenborough

How? By taking care of nature, stop growing and living in balance with nature. Sustainable living was the only option in the past, and it must come back. We need to change the way we live in this world. Taking advantage of the wilderness, in a good way, and don’t destroy it. Working with nature and not against it. We can do this, there’s no doubt about it! The only thing we need is: the will to do it. I couldn’t have said it any better!

Haven’t seen the documentary yet? Certainly do! Goosebumps! You can watch it on Netflix. Enjoy and get inspired, Rebels!