David Attenborough's Witness Statement for the Natural World

Summary notes after watching A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough

To restore stability to our planet, we must restore it's biodiversity.

The only way out of this crisis we have created (climate change) - we must re-wild the world.

Re-wilding the world can be achieved through:

~ Stabilization of the human population across the globe

The sooner the human population peaks the easier it makes everything we have to do. The human population can peak sooner and at a lower level by:

• Raising people out of poverty
• Giving all access to healthcare
• Enabling girls in particular to stay in school as long as possible

~ Raising the standard of living around the world without raising our impact on that world

Ways to do this:

• Phase out fossil fuels and run our world on the eternal energies of nature: sunlight, water and geothermal. Renewables to be the only source of power. A renewable future; more affordable energy; cleaner and quieter cities. Renewable energy will never run out.

• Healthy oceans are our critical ally in reducing carbon in the atmosphere. The more diverse it is, the better it does that job. Ocean important as a source of food for all of us. Fishing is the world's greatest wild harvest and if we do it right, it can continue. The healthier the marine habitat, the more fish there will be and the more there will be to eat. Restricting fishing practices/protected fish populations ('no fish' zones) to over a third of our coastal seas around the world would be sufficient to provide us with all the fish we will ever need.

• Radically reduce the areas we use to farm to make space for returning wilderness. The quickest and most effective way to do that is for us to change our diet. The planet can't support billions of large meat-eaters. There just isn't the space. If we all had a largely plant-based diet, we would only need half the land we use at the moment. By dedicating to raising plants, we could increase the yield of this land substantially. Applying both low-tech and high-tech solutions to produce much more food from much less land. 

• Forests are a fundamental component of our planet's recovery. The best technology nature has for locking away carbon. They are centres of biodiversity. The wilder and more diverse forests are, the more effective they are at absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. We must immediately halt deforestation everywhere and grow crops like oil palm and soya only on land that was deforested long ago. But we can do better than that... replanting native trees on a global scale. The return of the trees would absorb as much as two thirds of the carbon emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by our activities to date. 

There is one overriding principle: Nature is our biggest ally and our greatest inspiration. In this world, a species can only thrive when everything around it, thrives too. We can solve the problems we now face by embracing this reality. If we take care of nature, nature will take care of us. It's now time for our species to stop simply growing; to establish a life on our planet in balance with nature; to start to thrive. 

We need to rediscover how to be sustainable; to move from being apart from nature to becoming a part of nature once again.

This is not about saving our planet. It's about saving ourselves.