Public Intellectual: Sir David Attenborough

When discussing public intellectuals, the initial thought is always to think about thinkers who are involved in religion, politics, etc. However, after reading Stephen Mack’s blog, “The Decline of the Public Intellectual” I began thinking differently. At the end of the blog Mack wrote, “if public intellectuals have any role to play in a democracy – and they do – it’s simply to keep the pot boiling. The measure of public intellectual work is not whether the people are listening, but whether they’re hearing things worth talking about” (http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2014/01/index.html). After reading this I thought about what some of the most important topics are in our society and I began to think about the environmental crisis. The first public figure who came to mind when thinking about this topic was Sir David Attenborough. He has always been an important figure in the world of animals as well as the environment, and the role has grown exponentially, especially over the last few years. While Sir David Attenborough is not the most traditional example of a public intellectual, the issues he has brought up and discussed in his work as well as the global conversations that he has started make him one of the most influential public intellectuals in the modern era in the fields of animal conservation and environmentalism.

While there are so many important public intellectuals in our modern world, one who stands out to me above all is Sir David Attenborough. Attenborough is most commonly known for being the narrating voice in the Netflix series’ “Planet Earth,” “Planet Earth II,” “Blue Planet,” “Blue Planet II,” “A Life on Our Planet,” and most notably, “Our Planet.” However, what most young people don’t realize is that Attenborough’s start in the creation of documentaries about planet Earth started long before Netflix. Sir David Attenborough was born on May 8, 1926 in London, England but grew up in Leicester, England with his older brother Richard Attenborough. Richard grew up to be a successful actor as well as a movie producer, similar to his brother. Even at a young age, David always had an interest in natural history. After attending Clare College in Cambridge, Attenborough completed a training program at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and ultimately became a television producer there in 1952. His first show was created with the reptile curation, Jack Lester in 1954. On the show, Zoo Quest they filmed live animals in the wild and in zoos, “this show proved enormously popular and widened the scope of the education programming offered by the BBC” (https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Attenborough). After his success with the show as well as a few others, Attenborough was appointed as the director of television programming for the BBC from 1968 to 1972, but then resigned to write and produce his own television series on a freelance basis. His earlier, award-winning work includes Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984), The Trials of Life (1990), Life in the Freezer (1993), and The Life of Birds (1998). On top of these series, he also wrote numerous books detailing his observations as well as opinions. His later Netflix documentaries, especially Our Planet also started a global conversation about the climate crisis and how it is affecting our planet. He described his documentary David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet as “his ‘witness statement.’” (https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Attenborough). On top of being knighted in 1985, Attenborough also won numerous awards including several BAFTA Awards, Emmy Awards, and a Peabody Award. The ideas brought forth in these extensive documentaries as well as books on top of Attenborough’s constant desire to inform the public makes him the pinnacle public intellectual in the environmental and animal conservation fields.

Arguably, Attenborough’s most impactful documentaries were the ones that were put on the most popular video streaming service, Netflix. Planet Earth, Planet Earth II, Blue Planet, Blue Planet II, and Our Planet are potentially the most popular and well-known nature documentaries across today’s popular culture. Planet Earth was the first one put on Netflix and although it is no longer available there it can still be watched for free on BBC iPlayer. Each episode of this docuseries features a different geographical location of the earth including the North and South Poles, the mountains, the great plains, and the jungles. Each episode is around an hour long and allows its audience to get to know unique animal species. The success and popularity of this series led to the creation of Planet Earth II as well as both Blue Planet’s where Attenborough dives deep into the lesser-understood world of our oceans. After realizing how popular these series grew, Attenborough and his team knew they could capitalize on the audience they had captivated. They then created the well-known series, Our Planet, which was in short, a long public service announcement regarding the climate crisis. Attenborough and his brilliant team were able to captivate audiences by telling the stories of these animals while integrated how their lives have changed because of human society. For example, Attenborough would tell the story of an adorable polar bear cub traveling the North Pole with its mom but would show how the pair would struggle to find food and shelter because of global warming which is causing all of the ice to melt and destroying the cute polar bear cub’s home. The docuseries shined a light on the constant struggles the animals in environments across the world were feeling at the hands of humans. Netflix even tweeted a warning for animal lovers to skip certain parts of the docuseries because they were unsettling. For example, in one scene of the episode titled “Frozen World” Attenborough showed a walrus family that had been forced on a small patch of dry land while Attenborough narrates that the reason why they were forced onto this land was because of the melting ice caps. Viewers then watch in horror as walruses plunge to their deaths on rocks because there is no more room on that stretch of land. While this may seem far too graphic for an animal docuseries, Attenborough and his team insisted on keeping these scenes in the series because they show the harsh reality of climate change. Attenborough knew that it was time for people to finally see for their own eyes the damage our society has done on animal populations across the world in order to convince people that it was time to make a change. Attenborough’s creative choices, although graphic, enlightened the population on the problems facing our planet that can be fixed by humans caring more about the ecosystems around them and enforces the fact that he is the very definition of a public intellectual in the field of animal conservation and the environmental crisis. By putting these scenes and this series on Netflix, the most popular web streaming site, Attenborough and his team were reaching the biggest audience possible in order to get the word out and get people talking about what they can do to help this every-growing problem.

I have been interested in animals and their behavior since I was old enough to understand what animals were, but when I watched Planet Earth for the first time I was immediately drawn in because of the story telling and description given by Sir David Attenborough. I have always had a love for nature and animal documentaries, I started when I was young watching Animal Planet on cable and when I got older my YouTube history always included a vast selection of lesser-known documentaries that I had taken a deep interest in. I also spent a lot of my time in quarantine researching new documentaries to watch as well as watching live streams from cameras placed directly in Africa at watering holes and other places animals like to congregate. However, in my mind, even with my vast knowledge of nature documentaries, Sir David Attenborough’s work have always been my favorites and my “go-tos.” They are always my first recommendation to people who ask me what to watch on Netflix and while writing this blog I started to wonder why. At first, I thought it was because of the incredible camera quality, but then when I really thought about it, I realized it was because of Attenborough’s voice and narration. There are plenty of other documentaries that have incredible camera quality, but I always turned to Attenborough’s work when I wanted to watch a nature documentary. He has always had a knack for storytelling, evident by his countless series, which is what I think makes him such a strong public figure and public intellectual in the fields of animal conservation and environmentalism. After watching both Planet Earths and both Blue Planets, Our Planet made a tremendous impact on me. After years of learning about the behaviors of the animals in the earlier series’ Our Planet was absolutely heart-breaking and gut-wrenching for me. So much so that after watching I have made conscious efforts to change my own habits as well as the habits of my family and friends in order to reduce our impact on the planet. I convinced my family to fully walk away from the use of plastic water bottles as well as encourage my friends to do the same, I also try my best to recycle and reduce my single-use plastic use as much as possible. I know that there is always more I can be doing but I am grateful that Our Planet helped me understand that I needed to make changes in my life in order to take care of the ecosystems around me. I fully credit Sir David Attenborough and Our Planet for the changes I made in my life and now always try to encourage the people around me to make the same changes. Attenborough’s position as a public intellectual has hopefully encouraged many other people to do the same. I don’t think that when Attenborough started his work with BBC that he intended to make all the environmental crisis known across the globe but I think he grew into the role of public intellectual which allowed him to make an impact on the people who watched his shows. The platform and following he grew from his early days at the BBC allowed him to become such an important public intellectual in his respective field and ultimately allowed him to make an actual impact on the planet that he clearly cares so much about.

From his early days at the BBC until now, Sir David Attenborough has been one of the most notable public intellectuals in the fields of animal conservation and environmentalism. However, Attenborough is certainly not your typical public intellectual. He did not start making his shows and documentaries because he wanted to change the world, he started making them because he wanted to show people how many different amazing creatures co-exist with us on this planet. His unique creative direction in the way he wrote and filmed all of the series he worked on made his work unique and appealing to the public which ultimately gave him a platform he probably never thought he would have. His early series show his passion and drive for nature and animals and as he went through his life, observing and storytelling, he ultimately realized the peril that our planet was facing. Instead of running away from the challenge of explaining it too the public, he embraced it and created the series Our Planet which started a huge global conversation about what we as humans need to do to help the animals and our environment. Sir David Attenborough is the epitome of a public intellectual who is not just sharing his knowledge and world view for the sake of fame and recognition but because he actually cares about the creatures he is talking about and their fate. Because Attenborough is 95 years old, who knows how much longer we will be lucky enough to have him on our planet but I hope that when he moves on to another place, his spot as a public intellectual is taken over by someone who equally cares about the fate of our planet.