The 100th birthday on Friday of Sir David Attenborough has triggered a deserved torrent of tributes for his role as the world’s most authoritative voice on nature and the environment. He is not only the pre-eminent “national treasure” in his native UK but admired globally for the way he has deepened popular appreciation for life on Earth, while warning of its vulnerability to human activity and climate change.
The ingredients that enabled Attenborough to achieve so much over 70 years of broadcasting are so personal that we cannot expect any single individual to match his impact in future. Besides a warm yet authoritative presence and an infectious sense of curiosity in front of the camera, his earlier parallel career as a pioneering executive with BBC television gave him a strong feeling for how to engage audiences.
Although Attenborough did not work as a scientist after his undergraduate course in natural sciences at Cambridge university, his wildlife programmes have a scientific rigour that commands respect among professional zoologists and biologists. There has been plenty of emotion in his filmmaking, exemplified by the famous encounter with a family of mountain gorillas in Rwanda in 1979, but he takes care not to let feelings override ecological facts.