David Attenborough’s New Netflix Documentary Urges the Public to Go Plant-Based
David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet recounts the 94-year-old’s extraordinary encounters with the natural world, exploring some of his defining experiences as a naturalist, and also the devastating changes he has seen unfold over six decades in the field.
“The way we humans live on Earth is sending it into a decline,” says Attenborough in the official trailer for the film set to release in cinemas on the 28th of September. “The planet is headed for disaster. We need to learn how to work with nature, rather than against it.”
A Life On Our Planet unpacks the deterioration of Earth’s environment, focusing on the loss of biodiversity as a result of industrialised agriculture. Sir David Attenborough’s message urges people to reduce the amount of meat that they consume, just as he has in recent years, because “the planet can’t support billions of meat eaters.”
By taking on a lower-impact plant-based diet, human beings could increase the yield of the land, reducing the need to clear forests to create the space needed to meet current agricultural demands.
Despite the pressure placed on the planet by modern farming practices, Attenborough explains that it’s not too late to stop the deterioration of Earth’s ecosystem. “We must restore biodiversity. We must rewild the world – and rewilding the world is easier than you think. A century from now, our planet could be a wild place again.”The documentary will be available on Netflix before the year’s end, hopefully resulting in a shift in the way we consume and encouraging sustainable behaviour across the globe.
