Talking With Attenborough

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Hey, Vau! Michael here. This is the song of the Kawaii oo bird. In 1987, this species of bird became extinct; there are no more. But before the last living one died, its song was recorded. Ed, this is that song. It is the song of an endling, the final member of a species asking to know one: "Hey, where are we all?" It's a male calling for a mate that will never come. For what it's worth, the song is still here. We are listening to it now because it was recorded. The species is lost, but the song isn't, and that's the heart of something really big.

Remember that the word "record" comes from "core," meaning "heart." To record is to recore, to bring something back into your heart. Echoes, fossils, bones, footprints—nature's memory is only so immediate. I mean, even light itself scatters, is absorbed, and dims according to the inverse square law. The universe forgets slowly, but we humans have created special ways to preserve moments, to take them and turn them into stories; things that can be shared, recorded, retold, disappear perhaps much later than they would otherwise.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Sir David Attenborough, the mind and voice behind so many important stories and natural history programs, like the very new "Planet Earth II" from BBC Earth. I even got to see an episode, and of course, it's phenomenal. It's also a time capsule of sorts; a gift that perhaps humans alone on this planet can give: Earth, a record of itself.

I'd like to share our conversation with you. We covered many things: technology, science, communication, humans, life, language. But let's start with one of the most immediate effects the program has on viewers. It's a mirror. In nature, in animals, we see ourselves: despair, love, hope, heroes, and villains.

Now, whether the animals themselves are aware of these emotions or themes is difficult to know or even investigate. But I asked Sir David Attenborough about storytelling and the responsibilities that come with that power.

"This whole program is like a night at the movies, but the characters are animals and they haven't been scripted. It makes me wonder if, you know, all the things that pull at our hearts that we write for the screen for actors are just us replaying the same dramas that have been around since Earth began."

"Well, that's true. Life has the same, um, heart-swelling moments: the first life, the emergence of a new individual creature onto this planet. The end is in between, well, there's mating and there's aggression and so on. These are the eternal stories, and you neglect them or ignore their power at your peril. I mean, these are the important stories, and you try to do justice to them, both fundamental truth, profound truth, and in the trimmings."

"Do you have advice for younger science communicators when it comes to reaching a large audience, enacting the change that they want to see?"

"I don't think I have any advice, honestly. I'm still learning and still struggling with things. It's a very presumptuous chap who starts handing out advice. People know what they're after, by and large. If there are any good in the business, they know what they're after and they know what to do. In any case, the advice I give is bound to be about yesterday's technology or yesterday's way of doing things, and tomorrow is what we're on about.

It's the young people today who are using the new technology in ways that I can't dream of. I wouldn't give advice to people. I mean, people talk about learning to make documentary films, and I say, 'Don't come to me! I used yesterday's equipment. You've got to be using tomorrow's equipment.' And you'll do it in your way, and that equipment will, if you're true to it, dictate the way in which you deal with it, in which you handle these things. That's the way you get advances in whatever technology or, indeed, whatever art we're talking about."

Technology is a big part of "Planet Earth II." We can document, record, track, and film animals now like never before. In the 10 years since the first "Planet Earth," drones have become smaller and quieter. We have learned how to better find, study, and predict animal behavior. "Planet Earth II" captured things that science had not yet seen happen and, in some cases, didn't even know did happen.

"I just was really struck today by the landmark nature of the program. That's why I think it's so important. I think that we're documenting things that 50 years ago no one even had seen, and I think we have a responsibility, for better or worse, to document these things for ourselves, for others, and for the future.

I think we have a very fortunate time, living at a fairly fortunate time; technology has enabled us to do things, and we ought to use it with some sense of responsibility for the next generation. It is absolutely the case that animal species are disappearing, and it's quite possible that things that I filmed 20 years ago, in 30 years' time, will not exist. So we have that as a responsibility. I mean, what would we not give to be able to see a titanosaur, a dinosaur, or something people had been around at that time?"

"The time scale is different. Silly better to say a mammoth. It would be great to see a mammoth, would it not? Or even a dodo bird?"

"I'd like to, yeah. I wouldn't mind seeing a dodo. Do we have photographs of them or just paintings?"

"No, no, no, no, we don't even have a complete genuine individual body, really. No. The last complete one was a specimen in Oxford's Museum and, uh, in the middle of the early 19th century, developed maggots and so on, so they burnt it. But then some chap pulled out one or two of the bones. But now you can put together enough bones from different individuals to have a complete dodo skeleton. So you know the shape of every bone, but you don't have the individual. And even the ones you see in museums, nearly all is made of sort of chicken feathers and suitably dyed and painted with a plaster head."

The camera can now capture things that nature and ourselves previously struggled to keep with such detail, like the dodo bird, which went extinct in the 1600s. It's easy to feel sad that such creatures are lost, that we can't pet them today or that there wasn't a "Planet Earth" program back then to at least film them. But speaking of that emotion—feeling hope and pity at the helplessness of an animal in the wild being hunted as prey, struggling to get back on land to feed its children, like these chinstrap penguins—should we do more than record them?

"I mean, in cases like this, ought we intervene and give them a helping hand? When it comes to interfering, where would you draw the line? What if I wanted to help the chinstrap penguins get onto land? Is that a good way to interfere? Or even then, should I let them grow at their own pace?"

"Well, I mean, if you see a little impala, a little antelope form, hiding in the grass, freezing still, refusing to move, and you see a cheetah stalking towards it, and you've been filming this little fawn because you've been in a relationship with its mother so you've only seen it suckling, and the temptation is to lean out of the Land Rover and say, 'Sho!' You know?

If you did that, certainly the fawn would run and would be terrified out of its wits and run probably so far it wouldn't be able to find its way back. The cheetah would have lost its prey and wouldn't have been able to catch up with it. So the cheetah would go back and have to find another impala. The first impala would probably not get back and be knocked off by something else because it's away from its own territory. So what you've done is actually make things worse."

I also asked about humans. "Where is the 'Planet Earth' episode about people?" He said, "Your own species is a different kettle of fish. It's why you can't make a natural history series about Homo sapiens that's any good, because I once wrote one. I once started to write a series about why don't we look at human beings just as though they are animals and film them in the same way as you would film monkeys or elephants or whatever. But then, at the penny drop, you can't make a series about any animal, how human or anything else, unless you deal with sexuality and courtship."

"So suddenly you find that you are actually peeping Toms that you're going to film people in courtship without telling them. It's impossible! But you can do that with animals, yeah, but yes, you do. But that's the point. You can do that for animals because we are not animals in that sense. We are animals in other senses, but we can't do it to our own species, in my view."

"Right, how are we different? The closer we look for differences, distinctions, hard and fast, discrete separations, the more blur we see. We aren't the only things that use tools, that play, that communicate, that have social structure. The differences we hope to find often turn out to be issues not of unprecedented features but of matters of degree. Even language now appears not to be a sudden invention or gift but rather a property that emerged from a happy accident of more primitive features. We happened to be in the right place to inherit."

Sir David Attenborough and I spoke about distinctions and words. When I asked about life, "What would you say defines life and defines 'defin life'?"

"Yeah, life, what is the difference between a particle that's alive and dead?"

"I don't know, because you can't simply say it's reproduction because little bubbles reproduce. It's funny that that line is so hard to define when we spend our whole lives alive. And that's why, when you're dealing with questions about, well, how did life start, you say, 'Well, I can't tell you how it started exactly, but I can tell you where it started from.' The sort of things that began, and they were things like complex molecules, which got a membrane around them. Eventually, before you knew where they were, they were viruses. But when that magic moment comes, that extraordinary moment, we still don't understand."

"I like that—I hadn't really thought of this before, but yeah, dead and alive are concepts we came up with. I once tried to ask someone who's an expert: 'Is a hyena a cat or a dog?' and he just refused to answer. He said, 'We make up these categories.' He's absolutely right.

We have this passion to classify and that's the basic class: because the only way you can handle a very, very complex subject, you have to start classifying in order to be able to get them into handleable bits. But that's a human concept; that's what we've done. We have to decide that that's a cat and that's a dog because those are the two things that we started off with. But then as you explore the world, you discover that there are things that are neither. And you can then, eventually, if you're clever enough and lucky enough to find the specimens, you can form a genetic tree and you can see the split, the time when at the base, the root, there is a thing which is what you might call a cog or a dag or a cat or whatever—neither one nor the other. That's the way it is. And then they diversified and then slowly became things. But it's a human construct."

"What do you want people to take away from 'Planet Earth II' as opposed to 'Planet Earth I' or other programs you've worked on?"

"The reality and the importance of the world. The recognition that we aren't the only species that inhabit it. The recognition that, in moral terms, we can't assume that everything is ours to do with exactly how we wish and that other creatures on the earth also have places in the grand scheme of things. And that actually we are part of that, and that if we damage them, in the end, we damage ourselves."

"Why is it important for us to record and document these things?"

"To give ourselves a perspective on ourselves, on our own futures and our own past. Our planet is amazing. Nature preserves itself as best it can, but the hill it rolls down—natural selection isn't about preserving the past; it's about survival. We, however, can tell stories about things, describe them, record them, measure them with more detail and voice than any other living or non-living thing.

Even if a story is just made up, it's still an attempt to articulate, encapsulate, and preserve something—a thought, an idea that otherwise would be forgotten. I don't know if this ability makes humans different from other animals, but it does in a way mean that we are our planet's autobiographers; the part of it that documents and records and tells about it. So let's tell as many stories as possible. And as always, thanks for watching.

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