David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (2020) on Netflix

Plot summary

David Attenborough calls his account a witness statement. Speaking from Pripyat, left deserted by the nuclear disaster, he gives an overview of his life. He was born in 1926 and studied fossils as a child; his documentary work began in the 1950s at the BBC. Beside footage from his career and from many ecosystems, he recalls the Serengeti, where native animals need vast areas of land to keep their grazing patterns, his search for fish and orangutans in Borneo, and Arctic and Antarctic regions where melting ice differed from what the filming crew expected. He notes a decline in wildlife over time. He traces the causes to climate change and the loss of biodiversity, and describes what a further lifetime of unchanged human activity could bring, along with the actions he argues could prevent it.