David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'
(thetimes.com)227 points by herbertl 17 hours ago
227 points by herbertl 17 hours ago
I watched David Attenborough's recent film 'Ocean' on a big screen. The footage of bottom trawling was really shocking. I don't understand how that has been allowed to continue in UK coastal waters, let alone to be subsidised in marine protected areas. Madness. It's like napalming a forest to get a few deer. Thankfully things may be changing:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-proposes-to-ex...
Don't know how much of that was due to the film.
Greenpeace used to drop boulders into the ocean to prevent bottom trawling circa 2021-2022. Unsure if they still do. Fairly straightforward to solve for if you’re willing to drop chunks of rock (granite, non reactive) or concrete in the ocean at the right spots.
Bans are nice, destructive force against adversaries works better though. Hard to take the selfish out of the human, so you have to engineer systems accordingly.
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/live-greenpeace-boulders-...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-marin...
You had this nice story about unusual "boulders" to prevent trawling.
https://www.wired.com/story/underwater-sculptures-stopping-t...
Just the possibility of boulders that might destroy your very expensive dredge might be enough.
I think it would be a great PR idea for a billionaire to buy a few old ships and use them to drop rocks over the most popular/vulnerable fishing grounds. What happened to rich people who were all not evil?
Ray Dalio is involved with Ocean research and education: https://www.daliophilanthropies.org/ocean/
In a terminally capitalistic age (or whatever we should call the last 30 years, we are actually "capitalistic" the same way the URSS was "communist" in the '80s) being rich and being ethical are mutually exclusive.
The relevant excerpt. [0]
Watch it in a cinema, to get the full effect.
There are some before and after scenes of the sea bed, which are pretty shocking as well.
I'm not sure how that got that footage. Surely fisherman would not want that to be seen?
Found this:
"Technically, probably the hardest thing was trying to film bottom trawling because it's never been filmed before and we didn't know if it was possible. You have to film the wonder but you also have to film the destruction. Capturing that was absolutely essential and it took a lot of research to find some scientists planning bottom trawling experiments who decided that adding cameras would help their research and also help to share it with the world."
At:
https://www.arksen.com/blogs/news/ocean-with-david-attenboro...
It is like bulldozing a garden full of lots of different fruits and then only taking the apples above a certain size.
That part of the film is horrifying. Like genuinely, sick-to-the-stomach horrifying. I can't believe that anyone would willingly cause that much destruction.
> I can't believe that anyone would willingly cause that much destruction.
I interact with fishermen as part of a marine SAR role and there's a significant subset who treat the sea with contempt. Not usual to see them dump rubbish overboard in littoral areas, flicking cigarettes butts into the sea, etc.
Stop eating fish. The fishing industry is destroying the oceans.
Individual actions won’t change the system, you need collective organised action
Be the change you want to see in the world.
You can only control your actions.
Also taking the action of starting to organise some collective action is a good thing. But don't continue eating fish until everyone else agrees not to, because that becomes self-defeating.
Exactly. The tragedy of the commons makes it so that individual action of eating the fish is the most rational move.
Mobilizing people to act irrationally is challenging unless they are forced to do it by law.
Besides, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-04272-1#Sec3
>For rainbow trout, an estimated 10 (1.9–21.7) minutes of moderate to extreme pain (Hurtful, Disabling and Excruciating pain combined) are endured by each trout due to air asphyxia (Fig. 1).
and that's why things like ikejime are needed. It instantly kills the fish and destroys its nervous system in the same way we do for cattle. It's absolutely unbelievable that it is not a common practice. And it also extends the quality of the fish and the duration for conservation.
I am a freshwater fisherman myself, and I do it on any fish I intend to keep, and release them very quickly otherwise.
I like fishes. Fishes are healthy and main source of Omega-3 fatty acid for many.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid
Be aware of pharma propaganda that for sure support any narrations that would make benefit for them, like making any kind of natural sources good for humans as threat, like sunshine or.. Fishes?
what, how is it allowed in marine protected areas? I mean, what are they protected from if not BT?
I think the EU planned to ban bottom trawling completely by 2030 and that got nowhere, but it still upholds a ban on bottom trawling in marine protected areas[0][1], in addition to national ruling (e.g. Italy bans it near the coast and in shallow waters).
[0] https://www.bluemarinefoundation.com/2025/05/22/eu-court-uph...
[1] https://www.bairdmaritime.com/fishing/regulation-enforcement...
People did indeed used to set fire to forests to get a few deer - you’d use the flames to drive them to a cliff edge, or to a river, where you would either let gravity do the work, or just pick off the panicked mass with spears or rocks.
Le plus ca change…
I guess you could get away with it when humans were nomadic and population density was low.
'Seaspiracy' is a polemic with little attempt at balance or objectivity IMO. But I think it is still worth watching.
"Bottom trawling in seas globally emits as much carbon as aviation, and in Europe costs society up to €11 billion annually while governments subsidize it with €1·3 billion."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
"A wealth of studies also show that bottom trawling generates significant amounts of CO2 emissions and is fuelled by government subsidies."
https://www.bluemarinefoundation.com/2025/05/07/thebottomlin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_protected_area
> A marine protected area (MPA) is a protected area of the world's seas, oceans, estuaries or in the US, the Great Lakes. These marine areas can come in many forms ranging from wildlife refuges to research facilities. MPAs restrict human activity for a conservation purpose, typically to protect natural or cultural resources. Such marine resources are protected by local, state, territorial, native, regional, national, or international authorities and differ substantially among and between nations. This variation includes different limitations on development, fishing practices, fishing seasons and catch limits, moorings and bans on removing or disrupting marine life. MPAs can provide economic benefits by supporting the fishing industry through the revival of fish stocks, as well as job creation and other market benefits via ecotourism. The value of MPA to mobile species is unknown.
I think that not seeing how the story ends will be a blessing in disguise.
(I do not share his optimism that we fix this, the forces of Line Must Go Up are going to win... at least until we all rapidly lose)
I interpreted his "optimism that we will fix this" as the continuation of his lifelong practice of science communication in service of ecosystem preservation. I believe he grasps that people are far more motivated by having a positive vision to run towards than by a negative one to flee.
In that, I think he's being incredibly strategic with his voice in what he knows are his final years. He could leave us saying "everything is fucked, you absolute idiots", but what is there for us to do then besides lie down in the mud?
Instead he's signing off with "We have come so far, I wish I could witness the spectacular recovery you're all about to usher into being!"
Gentle parenting the apocalypse. What a legend.
"Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine; the people are fucked! Difference! The planet is fine! Compared to the people, The planet is doing great: been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat?"
-George Carlin
A large enough object coming close enough to our planet could also do that.
Humans have and will continue to destroy lots of living and non-living material. Unless some huge global awareness or higher sentience will reduce that immensly very quickly, humanity as we know it, will end on this planet. With the rising CO2 levels i doubt our intelligence will get any better.
And the planet will quietly do its dance around its star..
My theory: The forces of Line Must Go Up are going to keep winning. Mitigating the impact of climate change will be part of Line Goes Up. Whether it will be cheaper or more expensive than avoiding it in the first place will remain to be seen (but won't really matter in the end), but we will be facing whatever impacts we will be facing, and we will face them, and we will deal with them.
If you have any doubt, look at how the Netherlands dealt with storm surge.
For the Netherlands, the entity that pays the cost is the same that benefits from preparedness. For climate change, the plastic doohickey plant in misc country who would have to pay the cost of losing their asset, is entirely divorced from the entities who will benefit from CO2 reduction: everyone in the world. It's a prisoner's dilemma played at every level from the individual to the corporation to the region, and country. I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups. Especially when basically every existing business in the world will fight it tooth and nail. We got lucky with solar that its naturally cheaper than coal power, but there's no law that has to be the case with anything else.
Exactly, we cannot expect to bring individual responsibility to a global problem. There will always be individual entities not puling their weight. The train of climate agreements and collective effort has left the station, the climate accords were aiming for under 1,5C and we are very much into 2,5-3C territory.
I'm not talking about CO2 reduction, I'm talking about living with the result that the emissions have caused. And for that, the entity that pays the cost and benefits will again be the same.
> I'm not optimistic about our ability to coordinate the entire species to all suddenly start spending a bunch of money on each other instead of our own groups
The opposite needs to happen. Less consumption needed, overall. Less spending. It kind of already is, via lower and lower total fertility rates. Might not be declining quickly enough to cause sufficient decline in consumption.
Entire companies have been wrecked by "line must go up" thinking. I see no reason why it should preserve the planet when it can't even preserve its own livelihood. Never underestimate the complete destructive nihilism some are willing to engage just to earn some status and/or dollars. The feedback mechanism from climate change is far too slow. This kind of "ah it'll be grand like" attitude is completely naïve.
Relying on market forces to mitigate/address the impact of climate change will require us to collectively impose actual market pressure (i.e. regulation, constraints) to do so. Not seeing much sign of that among the major contributors of emissions right at the moment.
That's because very few people are being meaningfully affected right now. For most, climate change exists as an abstract idea and not an immediate, physical problem. It doesn't help that claims like those made by Al Gore about the polar ice caps being gone by 2016 turned out to be untrue.
I wouldn't expect society to transform itself if told that an asteroid may impact Earth in eighty years, for similar reasons.
Market pressure is required to avoid climate change by keeping companies from externalizing climate impacts.
Market pressure is not required for a city to decide that having the city flooded is bad, and start a tender for building a sea wall. This makes the line go up for the sea wall companies.
This is not what's going to happen planetwide.
What's going to happen instead is that the rich will mitigate the effects only for themselves.
They will spend a small percentage of their wealth to protect themselves and their property from all the ill effects of climate change.
- “Yes, the patient might die, but we’re confident that given enough resources, we’ll bring him back to life.”
Well, to be fair, it’s basically what’s happening with LLMs atm. So, maybe feathering up Mammon and aiming for the sun will be the tech industry’s most lasting legacy.
I agree. I reflect on this from time to time when I consider that my mom, having died a few years back, would not be enjoying much of anything going on in the world right now. (Further, that she was born at the close of WWII in the U.S., she may have been lucky enough to have lived in the best part of recent history here.)
“No one cares about the bomb that didn’t go off.” - Tenet
Preventing “bombs” from going off is not rewarded. And indeed the Line Must Go Up Crowd is reliant upon someone else fixing the problem while they get theirs. But when the majority think that way we’re f**ed.
The bombs not dropped here today remain available to be dropped elsewhere tomorrow, so perhaps we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back just yet.
It’s a good comparison especially in the context of mutually assured destruction, whether administered directly or indirectly, the same grim pragmatic political truth of wedge issues remains:
why solve today what can be put off til tomorrow?
The human population is set to crash quite hard in the next 100 years. It's backed into the cake.
Not all human population is going to crash. Africa population in 1950 was 228.7 million, in 2025 is 1549 million. Fertility rate in 2025 is 4.05.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/afr/afr...
Africa's fertility rate is dropping fast: 40 years it was above 6, 20 years ago it was above 5, and it dropped by 0.6 in the last ten years.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/afr/afr...
most projections expect Africa's population to peak around 2070, which is less than the timeframe GP considered.
This is where I find hope: ten million years from now we'll all be gone, and the earth will be a beautiful, thriving place once again.
The short term doesn't look so good, but at least I will only have to watch a few more decades of it.
As I am 48, I can't help but feel "old", especially given the spaces I find myself (ie, a continually changing industry, with the most active feeling like they're much younger). I really appreciate the perspective of someone who is still "active" and who spent more time living before I was born than I have since.
On mobile Firefox with blocking I still see - cookie consent - some self add for subscription - an altert that I have to login
Can't read it
It’s inspiring to see someone at 99 still speak with so much passion about the ocean. Hearing him say he won’t see how it ends feels heavy.
The part comparing bottom trawling to bulldozing underwater forests was powerful. But the recovery of sea otters and whales gives some hope.
Started reading and immediately hearing it narrated in his voice.
The sad part of our human existence is that none of us ever live to see how our story ends. We "spawn" at a random point in time and "vanish" at another. Ageing is being worked on vigorously and while we did change our lifespan from 40 years to 80 years of existence thanks to modern science, in order for us to truly comprehend changes on a universal scale, average human lifespan would need to be 50000 years long. That way you'll see species evolve, continents move, quasars explode, maybe even Betelguese explode?
Yes we die, the body goes. But if there is a further element to the experience - and near death experiences, out of body experience suggest there is - we perhaps do see how the story ends. In fact, this experience might not be the real 'story', just an opportunity of some sort to learn, grow. The point is that although many assume material reality to be all there is, it might not actually be the case.
I can understand there is an inherit sadness in not knowing the outcome of one's life's work, but as you say none of use ever see how it ends. In terms of our natural environment humankind has only ever observed in person, let alone recorded, what amounts to the blink of an eye.
Phoebe Bridgers also. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ9-xN6dCW4
Depends which story. Every death is the end of somebody's world.
Someone might. I think we stand a reasonable chance of self-selecting for extinction in the next few centuries. It's not the end of the story, but it's the end of our story. Someone will be the one who shuts off the lights on the way out.
Our generations of the last 10,000 years are seeing how the story decays.
When the food supply was abundant, families would jog every day doing BBQ every night hunting down mammoths
We have become red in tooth and claw. At the summit of civilisation, we are alienated with our screens, licking frozen TV dinners in our shared flat while we work hard to support our landlords
As long as we have surviving records people have been saying the past was golden and the present is decay with a long list of the present ills which are the downfall of the glorious past. It's a boring take and has been incorrect for thousands of years and will continue to be. Arguments about how some list of things haven't been on a monotonic increase during the last generation do not refute this.
It’s not boring, it explains the demise of the human experience, no matter how bigoted you pretend you are
David Attenborough narrated some of my favorite paleontology documentaries.
You seen Prehistoric Planet[0]?
The CGI is so good, you can practically smell the beasties.
One of the things I like most about David Attenborough is it never seems like he's reading a script. It feels like he's talking about something he knows about (which he does).
When it comes to the acting or performing worlds, is there a phrase describing this?
None of us see the end of the story but I do fear that the story could change when we inevitably lose a passionate advocate in Sir David whose credibility on this issue has been unchallengeable.
I take some comfort from the younger generations who are now growing up with a much greater awareness of the natural environment and the damage we humans can do to it and a much lower tolerance for political sophistry and capitalist all-about-the-money "ethics". With the selfishness of politics in much of the world today I think things will probably get worse before they get better. I still hope that we won't cross any points of no return as those younger people gain influence and those of older generations who are not always as enlightened and concerned as Sir David also leave us.
I think those younger generations will have better chances if there is a highly visible advocate for protecting the natural world for ordinary people to coalesce around. I don't know who the next David Attenborough could be. Perhaps one of his final gifts to humanity can be helping to find and establish the profile(s) of natural successor(s) who can carry on his work.
Someone like Bertie Gregory could be next? https://www.bertiegregory.com/
Attenborough will be incredibly difficult to follow though. The depth of his career has made him such an iconic and reassuring force for so many.
Here's the good news: we've done basically nothing about climate change even with him, so losing such an esteemed spokesman won't actually make it worse.
Admittedly that's only "good" in the sense that things are maximally bad and cannot get worse. But we might as well fake a smile because that's all we're going to get. I'd say we won't act until it's too late, but it is already too late.
There is no single "point of no return". We have obviously passed the point where bad consequences can be avoided, but every extra ton of CO2 and methane makes things a bit worse.
I worry that the sentiment of "we have passed the point of no return" induces an impotent apathy in people, when the truth is that every step in the right direction makes our future a little bit less dire.
Folks are worried about phase change, the flip from one set of patterns to a different set of patters. That is much different than a linear "every ton makes things a bit worse".
There is going to be big fundamental change, but people need to stop thinking about it like "the sky is falling" and instead ask "how are we going to adapt?"
People are going to have to move to where water is available, to where heat is less of a problem, and large scale infrastructure is going to change. A lot of struggle is going to go along with that change but starting to plan now and predict where is going to be habitable and how to prepare for that is what people should be doing instead of the shame and doom.
The narrative climax to the human story around climate change has yet to happen. Assuming we continue on the current trajectory, expect riots and wars over food and clean water, possibly more.
What do you think he means when he says “how the story ends”?
https://archive.md/CFCFn