Our Planet: Created in partnership with WWF, Our Planet is a stunning book for children and adults, featuring a foreword by Sir David Attenborough: ... with Special Foreword by David Attenborough

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It gives a good overview of the things that can be done to make the world a better place again, is highly readable, informative, inspiring, and comes from the heart. In 2020 he was 93, and things changed quite a bit: population 7.8 billion, atmospheric carbon 415 ppm, and remaining wilderness 35%. Hungarian: Egy élet a bolygónkon: A szemtanú vallomása - és látomás a Föld jövőjéről. Translated by Benjamin Makovecz. Budapest: Park Könyvkiadó. 2020. ISBN 9789633557006. Those small moments illustrate how mammals, reptiles, arthropods, fish, cephalopods and other “dynasties”, as the programme likes to call them, established themselves via natural selection. “Throughout history, life has been waging an unending war,” says Morgan Freeman’s film-trailer voiceover, slightly nonsensically. “One dynasty rising, only to be vanquished by the next.” Bulgarian: Живот на нашата планета, romanized: Zhivot na nashata planeta. Translated by Tsvetelina Yakova. Sofia: IK Khermes. ISBN 9789542621201.

In the first part of the book he takes us on a journey to revisit some important moments of his life, starting in 1937 when as a young boy he developed a fascination with fossils. We then see how he joined the BBC and as a naturalist and broadcaster traveled the world to bring animal and plant life on Earth into people’s living rooms. He also talks about other significant events like the Apollo 8 mission or the Chernobyl disaster. All these stories are always connected to the topic of the book and the reader learns about the importance of biodiversity and how with the Holocene the living world settled into a gentle, reliable annual rhythm. Before we disrupted it. This book is the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake, and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right. Clark, Pilita (18 November 2020). "Best books of 2020: Environment". Financial Times . Retrieved 21 November 2020.You know the climate crisis is getting bad when David Attenborough—a man who epitomizes feel-good, apolitical television—is issuing dire warnings about the future of humankind. By now, we do not even need scientists and their graphs to understand the gravity of our situation. Extreme weather events are becoming commonplace. Consider the record temperatures set last month in, of all places, Canada, with thermometers soaring to nearly 50 C (121 F). Welcome to the new normal. We regard the Earth as our planet, run by humankind for humankind. There is little left for the rest of the living world. And of course, it's not all about climate change/global warming. He covers other issues, such as population and impact of plastic waste - but manages to connect all the dots. The bottom line is we need to change and act. The last part of the book gives an outlook on what lies ahead in the decades from 2030 to 2100 (if we do nothing or if we do certain things). Here, Sir Attenborough talks about how to rewild the world (the land and the seas), how to live more balanced lives, e.g. not destroy as much of nature and more.

The difficulties are not ‘sugar coated’ as things that can be easily fixed. We are cautioned that some reversal strategies will be difficult to implement, but reminded that it is the sum of all the parts that count. This is a global call for action. You can see why Life on Our Planet has gone in that direction: epochal events are hard to capture in images, so it’s trying to make us feel the hugeness of what’s happening with words. But if the series was less concerned with constantly reinforcing how incredible everything is, it could have found room to be more informative. Watch the show with an inquisitive child and you might find them asking questions that the programme doesn’t answer, such as what caused the spikes and falls in oxygen/CO2 levels that led to the mass extinctions of the ancient past. As it is, Life on Our Planet is the sort of empty spectacle we no longer have time for. We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is we have to do these things to save ourselves. With or without us, the wild will return like the forest has taken over the city of Pripyat after the Chernobyl disaster forced people to evacuate the city." of the mass of all the mammals on Earth is made up of our own bodies and those of the animals that we raise to eat...The remainder - all the wild mammals, from mice to elephants and whales - account for just 4%.We all know about the ongoing climate debate and, like the author, some of us are willing to accept the indisputable evidence that climate change is seriously affecting our planet. Like him, some of us have witnessed the changes. Bloodworth, Adam (4 October 2020). "What Do Chernobyl And Climate Change Have In Common? Quite A Lot According To David Attenborough". HuffPost . Retrieved 21 November 2020.

This will prove to be an unpopular critique of someone who is considered a national treasure, but I ask you this: how many people would go vegan, for the planet, if Attenborough asked them to?This book has a lot of statistical data and data from various scientific studies. This can make the reading experience monotonous in some areas of this book. But the author's absorbing writing skills and the gravity of the topic discussed counterpoises it to a certain extend.