‘The Garden of Eden is no more’: David Attenborough’s warning at WEF
Sir David, 92, was in Davos to present a special screening featuring never-before-seen footage from his new series, Our Planet, which will be aired on Netflix in April . He said humanity really needs to be to aware of the destruction it is causing before the damage becomes irreversible.
The “Garden of Eden is no more,” Sir David Attenborough warned the world’s movers and shakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and called for a renewed global endeavour to contain fallout of climate change. The world has changed since he first began his television career six decades ago, the legendary broadcaster and naturalist said.
“The world then seemed unexplored, it was a wonderland. You’d step off the beaten track and it was primary jungle, unexplored and exciting. Everywhere you turned you saw something exciting. The human population was only a third of what it is now, and you really did get the feeling you were in the Garden of Eden,” he added.
Sir David, 92, was in Davos to present a special screening featuring never-before-seen footage from his new series, Our Planet, which will be aired on Netflix in April and was in discussion with the Duke of Cambridge, Prince William.
It’s difficult to overstate the crisis humanity is now facing, he said. “We are now so numerous, so powerful, so all-pervasive, the mechanisms that we have for destruction are so wholesale and so frightening, that we can actually exterminate whole ecosystems without even noticing it because the connection between the natural world and the urban world since the Industrial Revolution, has been remote and widening,” said Sir David.
“I was born during the Holocene – the period of climatic stability that allowed humans to settle, farm, and create civilisations,....; (but)the Holocene has ended. The Garden of Eden is no more. We have changed the world so much that scientists say we are in a new geological age: the Anthropocene, the age of humans,” he added.
Humanity really needs to be to aware of the destruction it is causing before the damage becomes irreversible. “Almost everything we do has its echoes, duplications and implications across the natural world. The natural world, of which we are a part, is incredibly complex and it has connections all over the place. If you damage one, you can never tell where the damage is going to end up, because of all the broken connections. And if you break all of them, then suddenly the whole fabric collapses and you get eco -disaster,” he warned.
It isn’t just about animals, Sir David said.
“It’s not just a question of beauty, or interest, or wonder, the essential part of human life is a healthy planet. We are in danger of wrecking that.”
