Sir David Attenborough | 60 Minutes Archive

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:01]60 Minutes rewind.

[00:00:06]>> For nearly 70 years, Sir David Adinburgh has been exploring the planet, taking hundreds and millions of television viewers on eye-opening journeys through the natural world. Jungles and island archipelos, deserts, and deep under the sea. No place has been too remote, no animal too elusive for Sir David and his talented team of filmmakers to document.

[00:00:27]The man known as a national treasure in his native Britain is 94 years old now, but age and the pandemic haven't slowed him down. He's coming out with a new book and a remarkable and stunning new film, A Life on Our Planet, which premieres on Netflix next week. They are what he calls a witness statement, a firstirhand account of what he's seen happen to the planet and a dire warning of what he believes awaits us if we don't act quickly to save it.

[00:00:57]>> [music] >> The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel.

[00:01:07]>> In his new film, Sir David Adenboroough's voice is the same.

[00:01:11]>> Sonorous and soulful, reassuringly familiar, >> dazzling in their variety and richness.

[00:01:18]>> But his message is uncharacteristically alarming. The way we humans live on Earth is sending it into a decline.

[00:01:29]>> Human beings have overrun the world.

[00:01:33]We're replacing the wild with the tame.

[00:01:39]Our planet is headed for disaster.

[00:01:45]You call the film a witness statement. A witness statement is given when a crime has been committed.

[00:01:51]>> Yeah. Well, the crime has been committed and uh and it so happens that that I'm of such an age that I was able to see it beginning and and so just that I enjoy saying doom, doom, doom. On the contrary, I'd much rather enjoy thrill, excitement, pleasure, joy, joy, joy, joy. But if you've got any sense of responsibility, you can't do that. Sir David spoke to us via Zoom near his home in London where he's been living in isolation due to the pandemic.

[00:02:22]>> I imagine you living in a house full of things that you have collected from travels around the world. A sort of cabinet of curiosities.

[00:02:30]>> Well, that is true. Uh in a sense I mean certainly I've got a cellar full of rock, lots of rocks. And sometimes you pick it up and you say, "Good lord, what on earth is this?" Or indeed, why on earth would I bother to pick this up?

[00:02:43][laughter] He studied geology and zoology in college and was working as a producer at the BBC in 1954 when he convinced his bosses to let him loose and start traveling the world. He was just 28 years old.

[00:03:00]Wherever I went, there was wilderness, sparkling coastal seas, vast forests, immense grasslands.

[00:03:13]You could fly for hours over the untouched wilderness.

[00:03:19]It was the best time of my life.

[00:03:23]David Edinburghough became a household name in 1979 with his groundbreaking BBC series Life on Earth, which was seen by an estimated 500 million people worldwide.

[00:03:35]>> I know it sounds like a publicist slogan, but it is the greatest story ever told. The story of how life developed on this planet and led to you and me sitting here talking across an ocean.

[00:03:49]Viewers were drawn in by Edinburgh's enthusiasm and sense of wonder.

[00:03:54]This was his first filmed encounter with endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda.

[00:03:59]>> It was really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolize all that is aggressive and violent when that's the one thing that the gorilla is not and that we are.

[00:04:15]I remember it very vividly.

[00:04:18]They ended up two of them sitting on me.

[00:04:20]Two babies sitting on me. Was I alarmed?

[00:04:24]Was I frightened? Was I concerned that the mother of those two babys was going to turn on me? Not at all. Not for a microscond. It was the biggest compliment I can remember receiving. You were you were being accepted into that family and it was unforgettable.

[00:04:41]Unforgettable moments in the wild is what Sir David Edinburgh has become known for. There's barely a corner of the earth he hasn't been to or a species he hasn't shown us in a new way.

[00:04:54]He's done more than just bring the natural world into our homes. He's helped us make sense of it, given it a story full of characters and complexity, not to mention excitement. Take a look at this from BBC's Planet Earth 2.

[00:05:10]I saw that on a plane and I started talking to the person next to me in my seat saying, "You have to watch this.

[00:05:16]This is extraordinary. They thought I was crazy." [laughter] >> Well, I mean, it's the job of a narrator for natural history films is is a great is a bit of a dotle. I mean, >> a bit of a dotle.

[00:05:28]>> A bit of a a piece of cake. How's that?

[00:05:31]It's it's really pretty easy because the animals are so fantastic.

[00:05:36]Sir David has always been an animal advocate. In the early 1960s, he was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, but in his films, he rarely focused on the destruction of their habitat or climate change. You were skeptical of of climate change. I think that's interesting because I think it makes your warnings now all the more powerful.

[00:05:59]>> Yeah. Yeah. Certainly. So, and and if you if you're going to make um a statement about the world, you better make sure that isn't just your own personal reaction. And the only way you can do it do that is to see the the work of scientists around the world who are taking observation as to what's happening as what's happening to temperature, what's happening to humidity, what's happening to radioactivity, what's happening ecologically. You you've said that that climate change is the greatest threat facing the planet for thousands of years.

[00:06:31]>> Yes. Even the biggest the most awful things that humanity has done and civiliz so-called civilizations have done pale to significance uh when you think of what could be around the corner unless we pull ourselves together.

[00:06:44]Deserts in Africa have been spreading.

[00:06:47]There could be whole areas of the world where people can no longer safely live.

[00:06:53]the hottest temperatures yet recorded in Death Valley. And and yet we are such optimists that we say we go to bed night, oh well that was exceptional.

[00:07:02]Gosh, that was interesting, wasn't it?

[00:07:03]That was the highest temperature. Good lord. Oh, well that's the end of that.

[00:07:07]Not at all. Wait, wait another few months. Wait another year. See you again.

[00:07:14]>> Over the years, Sir David has repeatedly visited Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

[00:07:19]Now, a coral reef is one of the most dramatic and beautiful and complex manifestations of life you can find anywhere.

[00:07:27]>> But on his last trip, he was stunned by what he saw.

[00:07:31]>> And we went on this reef, which I knew, and it was like a cemetery because all the corals had died. They died because of a rise in temperature and acidity.

[00:07:41]>> There are still people who are going to see this and say, "Well, look, it's not that bad." And >> who are these people saying >> and technology will evolve to come up with some sort of a solution that we can't even imagine?

[00:07:54]>> No, we live in a finite world.

[00:07:58]Ultimately, we depend upon the natural world for every mouthful of food that we eat and indeed every lungful of air that we breathe. I mean, if it wasn't for the natural world, the atmosphere would be depleted from oxygen tomorrow. If there were no trees around, we would suffocate.

[00:08:22]I mean, and actually in the course of this um particular pandemic that we're going through, uh I think people are discovering that they need the natural world for their very sanity. People who've never listened to the bird song are suddenly thrilled, excited, supported, inspired by the natural world and they realize that they are not a part from it. They are part of it.

[00:08:49]>> So by saving nature, we are saving ourselves.

[00:08:51]>> Oh, without question.

[00:08:53]>> You're saying in the film, we're not just ruining the world, we've destroyed it. Is it is it that far gone?

[00:09:01]Uh, it's not beyond redemption.

[00:09:06]>> Redemption, he says, depends on a complete shift to renewable energy and an end of our reliance on fossil fuels.

[00:09:13]The fossil fuel industry does not want the world to move off fossil fuels.

[00:09:18]>> No, it doesn't. But in fact, we know ways in which we can get from the sun up there just a tiny fraction of the amount of energy that sprays on this earth 24 hours a day one way or another for nothing. If we could solve the problems of storage and transmission, the world is ours. We have all the power we need.

[00:09:42]Why should we go on poisoning life on Earth?

[00:09:47]>> It sounds simple when you say it.

[00:09:49]So it is.

[00:09:51]>> Sir David also wants to see what he calls a reing of the planet, giving plants and animals on land and in the ocean time and space to bounce back. The World Wildlife Fund says that twothirds of the Earth's wildlife has disappeared in the past 50 years. Repopulation of the oceans can happen like that in a decade if we had the will to do it. But we require everybody to agree that >> if you were to pick up the phone and speak with President Trump or or President Xi of China or Prime Minister Modi in India, what would you say?

[00:10:30]>> I would say that the time has come to put aside national ambitions and look for an international ambition of survival. It seems politically the tide is moving in the opposite direction from that of of nations more looking inward and not as being part of a larger international community.

[00:10:54]>> That's what's going to sink us in the end.

[00:10:58]That's what's going to sink us.

[00:11:01]>> Can you be optimistic at all?

[00:11:03]>> We don't have an alternative.

[00:11:06]Um I mean what good it is to do is say, "Oh, tell it. I don't care." You can't say that.

[00:11:13]Not [laughter] not if if you if you love your children, not if you love the rest of humanity.

[00:11:20]How can you say that?

[00:11:22]>> It's the young that Sir David now puts his faith in. And they, it seems, have faith in him. [cheering] Just listen to the reception he received last year when he popped up on stage at Britain's largest music festival.

[00:11:36]>> Thank you very much.

[00:11:39]There is a huge movement around the world of people from all nations, young people who can see what is happening to the world and demanding that their government should take action. That's that's the best hope that I have. I mean, it's obviously my generation failed. We've allowed it to happen.

[00:11:59]>> We've allowed this to happen, Sir David Adinburgh says, despite being the smartest creatures that have ever lived.

[00:12:05]Now he warns we need more than just intelligence. We need wisdom. After all, this planet is all we have. There is nowhere else to go.

[00:12:16]>> Do you believe there's life elsewhere?

[00:12:18]>> No, not really. But also, I think that that's a um I mean, it's an interesting theoretical question, but it's a theoretical question. Why would I want to go and live on the moon? I've got this world of badgers and thrushes and jellyfish and corals. Why would I want to go and live in the moon?

[00:12:43]Because there's nothing else there does.

[00:12:46]I'd say, "Well, thank you very much.

[00:12:47]I'll stay where I am and watch hummingbirds.