David Attenborough and our last chance to change

In today’s Story from the Museum Floor, Jake takes a look at climate change and the recent works of Sir David Attenborough, while looking back on the great naturalist’s visit to our museum’s Vivarium.

For more information on our Vivarium and the valuable conservation work they do please see the curator’s blog.

David Attenborough with a critically endangered lemur leaf frog in Manchester Museum’s Vivarium.

David Attenborough and our last chance to change

Across the globe, the natural world is in decline. Our planet is experiencing an unprecedented loss of biodiversity, and according to the WWF, wildlife populations have fallen by an average of 68% since 1970. Of the estimated eight million species on Earth, one million are now threatened with extinction. It is also thought that more than 500 species of land animals are believed to be on the brink of extinction and are likely to be lost within the next twenty years. Human activity and the changing climate are driving what has become known as the Holocene extinction, the sixth mass extinction event in our planet’s history.

Over a career which has spanned almost seventy years, Sir David Attenborough has journeyed across the globe to record the wonders of nature for enthralled audiences who have been educated and inspired by his work in the wild. Throughout his recently released autobiographical documentary film David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, he delivers his ‘witness statement’, which details his first-hand observations on the decline of the natural world during his lifetime.

The film is a rousing call to action, and Sir David explains the precarious situation that our planet’s biodiversity is experiencing at this very moment. Not only does the natural world face a real and terrifying risk of destruction, he also highlights the dangerous position that we as humans will find ourselves in if we don’t act now to cease our exploitation of nature. However, there is room for hope. His vision for the future illustrates what can be done if we work together to halt the decline of wildlife on our planet and repair the damage that has been already been done.

‘The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel. Yet, the way we humans live on Earth is sending it into a decline.’ – Sir David Attenborough, ‘Witness Statement’.

When David Attenborough speaks, people listen. The 94-year-old naturalist has the unique and inimitable ability to capture the attention and imagination of people from all over the globe through his expeditions into the natural world. Over a lifetime, he has journeyed across the planet to explore the wonders of the biodiversity found on Earth. The expanse of the natural wilderness seemed almost everlasting, and living organisms appeared to be abundant. It is only now, on reflection, that Sir David has realised that much of this was an illusion, a façade which covered the reality of a steady decline of wildlife.

The natural world is now facing perhaps its greatest threat, and it has become one of humanity’s ultimate challenges to prevent its devastation from happening.

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (trailer)

‘I have been lucky enough to explore the wild places of our planet. I have travelled to every part of the globe. I have experienced the living world first-hand in all its variety and wonder. In truth, I couldn’t imagine living my life in any other way. I’ve always had a passion to explore, to have adventures, to learn about the wilds beyond. And I’m still learning. As much now as I did when I was a boy.’ – Sir David Attenborough

The Holocene period has been one of the most stable periods in our planet’s history. The temperature on the planet has not wavered up or down by more than 1°C for more than 10,000 years. Biodiversity has flourished and humanity has been able to settle, farm, and build civilisations across the globe. On his travels, Sir David was able to journey to some of the most remote places on our planet, and his experiences with nature have shown him the importance of nature and humanity co-existing together.

‘Wherever I went, there was wilderness. Sparkling coastal seas. Vast forests. Immense grasslands. You could fly for hours over the untouched wilderness.’ – Sir David Attenborough

It wasn’t until 1978, when he embarked on the monumental BBC series Life on Earth, that David began to realise that human activity was the driving cause behind the decline of wildlife around the world. His famous and memorable experience meeting mountain gorillas in Rwanda was a moment that Attenborough has said that he will never forget, but one that was ‘tinged with sadness’, as he suspected at the time that he may have been with some of the last of their kind.

In the 1970s, the mountain gorilla population was estimated at around 250-300 individuals. Their forest habitats were being rapidly replaced by agricultural fields to meet the demand of human consumption. Rangers had to stay with them every day to protect them from poachers, and the future of the species looked increasingly bleak. However, with governmental support and conservation efforts, mountain gorilla numbers have grown to exceed 1,000 individuals. This is a shining example of the enormous efforts that can be made to protect wildlife, though it has taken over forty years to reach this point. We are now moving into a new geological epoch; the Holocene is coming to its end as we move into the Anthropocene, ‘the age of humans’, and the stability of the last 10,000 years has come to an end. It may not be so successful for many other species across the globe which are still facing perilous threats in the wild.

How one community came together to save the gorilla, Extinction: The Facts

‘He has witnessed a serious decline in the living world over his lifetime…a decline that will have a more limited impact on his life, but will come to define the lives of all those who follow him. He is dedicated to lending his considerable profile to efforts to halt and then reverse this decline.’ – Jonnie Hughes, Producer of David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet

In the 1950s, rainforest covered three-quarters of the island of Borneo. By the end of the century, Borneo’s rainforest had been reduced by half. More than half of the species on land live in rainforests, and rainforests also absorb much of the carbon that is released on Earth. Since 1999, Borneo’s orang-utan population has halved in size due to deforestation in order to make space for the growth of palm oil. Overconsumption has driven the need to deforest the planet’s rainforest in order to meet the demand, despite the fact that nearly a third of the food that we produce goes to waste each year.

What is Palm Oil?

What the future holds

If we don’t act now to change the ways in which humanity exploits the natural world, commonly accepted science predicts the following timeline:

2030s

At the current rate of deforestation the amazon rainforest will be cut down until it can no longer produce enough moisture, degrades into a dry savannah. It alters the global water cycle and has catastrophic biodiversity loss.

The arctic becomes ice free in the summer. Without the white ice caps, less of the sun’s energy is reflected back into space, and the speed of global warming increases.

2040s

Throughout the north, frozen soils thaw and release methane, dramatically accelerating the process of global warming.

2050s

As the ocean continues to heat and becomes more acidic, coral reefs around the world die. Fish populations crash.

2080s

Global food production enters a crisis as soils become exhausted by overuse. Pollinating insects disappear. The weather is more and more unpredictable.

2100s

0ur planet becomes 4°C warmer and parts of our planet become uninhabitable. Millions of people are displaced and the sixth mass extinction event continues.

Vision for the Future

‘So, what do we do? It’s quite straightforward. It’s been staring us in the face all along. To restore stability to our planet, we must restore its biodiversity, the very thing that we’ve removed. It’s the only way out of this crisis that we’ve created. We must rewild the world.’ – Sir David Attenborough

Listed here are just some of the steps that we as a species can take to halt and reverse the destruction of the natural world according to Sir David Attenborough:

1. Reduce global population growth- On current projections, there will be 11 billion people on Earth by 2100, but there are ways to reduce this before we reach that number. As healthcare and education improve across the world, expectations and opportunities grow. The number of children being born worldwide every year is about to level off, and at some point in the near future, the human population will peak for the first time. By raising people out of poverty, providing healthcare for all, and enabling girls to stay in school for longer, it will enable it to peak sooner and at a lower level.

2. Phase out fossil fuels- Sunlight, wind, water and geothermal energy would provide an abundance of energy to meet our needs without having to burn fossil fuels. Within twenty years, renewables are expected to be to main source of power, but we could make it our only source of power. Energy would be more affordable and our cities would be cleaner and quieter. Renewable energy will never run out.

3. Protect fish populations to allow recovery- Fishing is the world’s greatest wild harvest. The healthier the marine habitat, the more fish there will be. Estimates suggest that no fish zones over a third of our coastal seas would be sufficient to provide us with all the fish we would ever need. The UN is attempting to create the biggest no fish zone of all in international waters, the world’s greatest wildlife reserve.

4. Radically reduce the area we use to farm- To allow the space needed for the wilderness to return, the quickest and most effective way for us to do this is to change our diet. The planet cannot sustainably support billions of large meat eaters. If we all had a largely plant-based diet, we would need only half the land that we currently use. We could then increase the yield of this land substantially.

5. Halt deforestation everywhere- Crops like oil palm and soya can be grown on land that was deforested long ago. Native trees can be replanted on recently deforested land to increase the size of the rainforests again. The forests would then absorb much of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The future need not be doom and gloom. All that we need as a species is the will to make the changes that are necessary to save the planet for ourselves, and for the natural world around us.

‘We need to move from being apart from nature, to becoming a part of nature once again.’ – Sir David Attenborough

What is Manchester Museum doing?

Here at Manchester Museum, we are working extremely hard to become the foremost hub of sustainability and climate action in the North of England. It is important for us as an institution to provide an open, honest, and urgent discourse surrounding the climate emergency and loss of biodiversity worldwide. Over the last few years, we have highlighted the plight of the Javan rhino, collaborated with the Panama Wildlife Conservation Charity to welcome the critically endangered harlequin frog into our collection, curated a temporary exhibition on extinction caused by humanity, and have been one of the leading institutions in the country to declare a climate and ecological emergency.

On top of this, our Vivarium remains at the very heart of our museum, and we continue to house and care for live reptiles and amphibians in optimum conditions to support conservation, public engagement, teaching, and non-invasive research. This is vital so that we can educate our visitors about the perilous situations that many of these species are facing in the wild, and also to build a safety-net population of endangered species to help to prevent extinction.

The Vivarium: It All Starts With You

In 2014, Manchester Museum has the pleasure of welcoming Sir David Attenborough to our vivarium to film an episode of the BBC’s Natural World series. David was welcomed by our Curator of Herpetology Andrew Gray, who stated that ‘it was such a pleasure to share time with him and show him our amphibian collection’. He also contributed to the series by fronting the web exclusive addition to Attenborough’s Fabulous Frogs, where he discussed the threat of extinction to the lemur leaf frog.

Manchester Museum’s Curator of Herpetology Andrew Gray and Sir David Attenborough behind the scenes in the museum’s Vivarium.

Over his long and storied career, Sir David Attenborough has educated people across the globe about the natural world, and in recent times, he has brought much needed attention to the climate crisis. As the sixth mass extinction begins to accelerate, we must all do our part to protect biodiversity worldwide so that we can bring an end to our exploitation of nature. We must rewild the world and learn to co-habit it with the wonderful creatures all around us. The severity of the situation cannot be overstated, but there is room for hope, if only we can all find the will to make the changes necessary to create a world that can support both humanity and the natural world.

A gift of an origami Darwin’s frog (Rhinoderma darwinii), presented to David Attenborough on his visit to the museum.

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet is out now on Netflix, with an accompanying book also available. To support Manchester Museum in our goal of promoting conversation and building a more sustainable world, you can sponsor a frog in our Vivarium here.

‘What we do in the next years will determine the next few thousand years.’ – Sir David Attenborough

Jake Gill

Further information

For more information, resources, news, and events, visit the official website of the film

The WWF’s guide to help save our planet

To find out more about David Attenborough’s visit to our Vivarium, check out this blog post from Mancunian Matters

The student guide to the climate crisis

Sir David Attenborough sends a message to world leaders at the UN Climate Action Summit