David Attenborough has a new film for his 99th birthday – and it’s surprisingly optimistic

David Attenborough is doing what he does best for his 99th birthday next Thursday … presenting a new film.

The legendary British natural historian, broadcaster and documentary filmmaker, who has hosted such landmark series as Life on Earth, The Living Planet and Frozen Planet over more than 70 years, is still hard at work. His latest documentary, Ocean with David Attenborough, opens in cinemas around the world on his birthday.

“He’s remarkable,” co-director Colin Butfield says on a Zoom call from England. “He’s coming to the premiere, he’s in fantastic form. I’ve just written a book with him, which is tiring enough for me, and I’m 52. I don’t think he’s ever going to stop working.”

“If we save the sea, we save our world”: David Attenborough in Ocean with David Attenborough.Credit: Conor McDonnell

Ocean has Attenborough reflecting – in that famously authoritative voice – on what he has learnt over his lifetime.

“After living for nearly 100 years on this planet, I now understand that the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea,” he says. “To this day, we have seen more of other planets than we have of the ocean. Now we are making discoveries that completely change our understanding and could offer a better future for everyone on Earth forever.”

The film shows some alarming threats to the ocean’s vitality, including industrial bottom-trawling. A chain or metal boom is dragged across the seabed, turning it into an underwater desert, to catch a single species, with almost everything else caught in a net discarded.

Ocean with David Attenborough highlights threats to the seabed.Credit: Olly Scholey

“Lines of baited hooks 50 miles long reel in millions of sharks every year,” Attenborough adds. “We have now killed two-thirds of all large predatory fish.”

Also concerning are huge trawlers harvesting krill in Antarctica, threatening the food supply of almost every creature there, to supply fish farms, health supplements, and pet food. Another bad sign is mass coral bleaching in Florida, the Caribbean, the Maldives, and the Great Barrier Reef, attributed to heatwave conditions around the world.

Yet Ocean is a surprisingly optimistic film about the sea’s ability to recover faster than was previously thought possible from even devastating over-fishing.

In the Channel Islands, the Mediterranean and Hawaii’s Papahānaumokuākea, the introduction of marine protected areas has seen sea life return in abundance after years of depletion.

“Wherever we have given the ocean time and space, it has recovered faster and on a greater scale than we dared to imagine possible,” Attenborough says.

Another encouraging discovery is that ocean plankton “removes almost a third of our carbon emissions, [which] could be our greatest ally in avoiding climate catastrophe”.

The film, which will be released before the UN Ocean Conference in France next month, is a passionate plea for nations to create fully protected marine reserves in 30 per cent of their waters, ending the most damaging fishing methods while supporting local fishing communities.

Ocean is surprisingly optimistic about the sea’s ability to recover.Credit: Olly Scholey

As Attenborough says, “If we save the sea, we save our world”.

According to Butfield, the aim was to present an optimistic story.

“We wanted to tell a story of a hundred years of the ocean,” he says. “That obviously spans David’s lifetime, but it also spans that period of discovery of how the ocean works and the damage we’ve done to it.

“We [hoped] there’d be some really good recovery stories, but it wasn’t until we dug into the research that we found we could stand them up scientifically – the optimism was really valid.”

Butfield says that after an agreement to protect 30 per cent of the world’s land and sea by 2030 at the 2022 UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, it is time for “real commitments to proper marine protected areas” at the UN Ocean Conference.

“It’s a win-win,” he says. “Everybody knows fish stocks are in trouble, the fishing industry is in trouble. There’s a chance you can actually improve everything.”

Australian underwater cinematographer Tom Park, who shot some of the footage for Ocean, says sections of the Great Barrier Reef have bounced back to life after bleaching last year.

“Reefs are far more resilient than we’ve been giving them credit for,” he says. “But we’re seeing [more] bleaching events happening in shorter and shorter time periods.

“If we actually buy them time, if we do what we can to allow them time to bounce back, they will recover.”

Park, who calls Attenborough an inspiration for generations of filmmakers, says Australia has a high percentage of marine protected areas by world standards, but they are enforced to varying degrees around the country.

“We have a long way to go in terms of protecting our protected areas,” he says.

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