A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

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Sir David is a Trustee of the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; an Honorary Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge; a Fellow of the Royal Society and was knighted in 1985.

He visited places such as the African Serengeti, in which native animals require vast areas of land to maintain grazing patterns. If you’re anything like me, you won’t be able to help reading the book with Attenborough’s voice in your head.The book is divided into three parts: My Witness Statement, What Lies Ahead, and A Vision for the Future. Attenborough emphasizes that there’s no room for continued growth - population, GDP, consumption — on a closed-system planet worth limited resources.

It is human activity that seeks to simplify this complex arrangement into something approximating a line—petroleum fertilizer, to corn, to animal feed, to cow, to steak—a process that boosts short-term yield at the expense of long-term sustainability. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. In the last chapter, he also presents some information on what we can do to improve the lifestyle of all the people around the world, giving some examples that are currently working for some people - we just need to apply what they are doing around the world so we can have a greener future. With his extraordinary charm and sense of wonder, bringing together science, philosophy and art, Carlo Rovelli unravels this mystery.

Each chapter begins with three statistics about the period which it covers: world population, atmospheric carbon dioxide and remaining wilderness. Why is it that our home is crying and instead of succumbing to our love for home, we are growing aloof from it? The tragedy of our time has been happening all around us, barely noticeable from day to day - the loss of our planet's wild places, its biodiversity. The benign environment of the Holocene and the marvellous biodiversity is more important to us than ever.