Let's All Salute Sir David

I have a life crush on Sir David Attenborough. I’m not sure if I want to be him (traveling to exotic locales to watch wildlife up close), or hang out with him and chat about his life over tea, or have him softly narrate to me and stroke my hair as I fall asleep. I just know that his documentaries fill me with wonder, and his voice fills me with calmness.How do I love Sir David? Let me count the ways:1)      An amazing career as Britain’s most beloved naturalist and broadcaster. David Attenborough’s career has spanned nearly five decades. He is best-known for the natural history programs he created and narrated with the BBC Natural History Unit. He is also a former senior manager at BBC, serving as controller of BBC Two and director of programming for BBC Television in the 1960s and 1970s. Understandably, he is a great proponent of public broadcasting.2)      The Nature Programs. Attenborough has been involved with many natural history programs (Go watch them! Right now!). The most ambitious may have been the Life on Earth series, nine films which collectively form a survey of life on the planet. Installments of the series were filmed from 1979 to 2005. This influential series used ever-evolving technology to capture events and animals that had never been filmed before. In Life of Mammals, low-light and infrared cameras were used to film the behavior of nocturnal animals, while advances in macro photography enabled filmmakers to capture behavior on a very small scale for Life in the Undergrowth.3)      Environmental Activism. Attenborough’s nature films often include references to how human society and development are affecting the natural world, but he is also an active public figure in many environmental campaigns. He has supported BirdLife International, World Wildlife Fund, and World Land Trust. In 2003 he helped launch ARKive, a digital library of natural history media focused on endangered species. Human overpopulation has long been a concern of his, and in 2009 he became a patron of Population Matters, a UK charity advocating sustainable human populations. Most recently, Attenborough has written and spoken publicly about the seriousness of the threat from global warming and the role of human activity in climate change. Endearing him to me further, Attenborough said he considered George W. Bush to be the era’s “top environmental villain” in a 2005 interview with BBC Wildlife magazine.4)      Anti-Creationism Stance. Attenborough, along with Richard Dawkins and other top scientists, has signed a campaign statement put together by the British Humanist Association calling for creationism to be banned from the school science curriculum and for evolution to be taught more widely in schools. He is an agnostic who admits that he never found much of a reason to believe in any god. In 2009, he criticized the Book of Genesis for teaching that the world and its animals were created to be dominated by people, stating that this philosophy had resulted in the devastation of vast areas of the environment.5)      He’s Still Going. Attenborough, well into his ninth decade, continues to work on a number of projects. One that I am personally excited for is Frozen Planet, a new series for BBC One taking a look at how climate change is affecting the people and wildlife of the polar regions. This production took Attenborough to the North Pole for the first time in his life – at the age of 85. Watch the breathtaking trailer here.If you want more of Sir David (and really, who doesn’t?) I recommend this recent interview from The Guardian. I was also thoroughly charmed by the documentary “Attenborough in Paradise” that I watched on Netflix recently.Good day to you, Sir David!