life on our planet essay

A Life on Our Planet

61 pages • 2 hours read

A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Part 1, Chapters 1-5

Part 1, Chapters 6-10

Part 2, Chapter 11

Part 3, Chapters 12-14

Part 3, Chapters 15-18

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Further Reading & Resources

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

Part memoir and part call to action, renowned naturalist David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future invites readers to consider the state of the Earth today. Attenborough provides an account of his own life as a naturalist, his fears for the future, and his recommendations for how to make possible a better future for the planet and its inhabitants. He recounts evolving attitudes about humanity’s role within the planetary ecosystem, from the optimism of the 1950s—“nothing would limit our progress” (30)—to the grim pragmatism of the present.

A Life on Our Planet was also simultaneously released as a Netflix film in 2020. All quotations in this guide come from the Hachette Book Group, Inc. paperback edition, published 2022.

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A Life on Our Planet is part memoir—a brief selection of boyhood memories, a series of professional anecdotes, and details about encounters with other famous figures within the naturalist community—and part vision statement wherein Attenborough confronts a growing ecological crisis. During his long tenure as a public figure, Attenborough has seen the planet change; he acknowledges the difficult choices humanity now faces. While always hopeful, Attenborough is also realistic about the threats facing Earth—climate change, diminishing wildlands, loss of biodiversity—and the need to act swiftly and decisively.

Part 1 contains Attenborough’s personal recollections about his youth growing up in England and his storied career, first and foremost with the BBC. Attenborough recalls significant events, from collecting fossils as a child to witnessing the first picture of Earth from space, that occur throughout the decades. While these memories are personal, they are employed to illustrate the changes—often, the destruction—wrought by human-generated activity across the planet. This is evidenced by the heading at the beginning of each chapter, detailing a set of statistics: the world population, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere , and the area of wilderness then remaining.

Part 2 projects the predictable—though not inevitable—results for the future of the planet and humankind alike should the statistics Attenborough cites in Part 1 continue apace. Earth will eventually reach a tipping point from which it may not recover. In the near future, humanity will witness an historic loss of biodiversity, while long-term indicators suggest an oncoming sixth mass extinction (the fifth ended the dinosaurs). Natural disasters such as floods and droughts, along with super-charged weather events, will follow as global temperatures continue to rise. This would engender the worst humanitarian crisis the world has ever seen, with millions of people displaced because of disaster and/or extreme heat. The global food supply will also be threatened, leaving more millions to starve in both hemispheres and setting the stage for viral pandemics.

Part 3 outlines Attenborough’s ideas—honed by years of travel and research, backed by the latest scientific evidence and current ecological views—about how humans can confront these challenges and re-envision a more sustainable future. Each chapter in this part tackles a different problem: “Moving Beyond Growth” encourages nation-states to consider measuring success by means other than monetary wealth, while “Switching to Clean Energy” envisions a future without fossil fuels. Attenborough also addresses the need to rewild the seas and the land, which would, in turn, halt the loss of biodiversity and create areas that can capture and store carbon. He also argues that humanity must face some simple, if controversial, facts: eating meat is harmful to the planet on a significant scale, and managing human populations is necessary if the Earth is to continue to support life at all. In the end, all of this would help humanity in “Achieving More Balanced Lives,” as his chapter title has it: “A revolution in sustainability, a drive to rewild the world and initiatives to stabilise our population would realign us as a species in harmony with the natural world about us,” he writes (203).

It is telling that Part 2, which details the worst-case scenario for the planet in the wake of climate change, is the shortest. Attenborough spends much more time recalling the bucolic days of his youth and career in Part 1, and an equal amount of space on his healing prescriptions for the future of the planet in Part 3. In this book, as in his innumerable television appearances, he portrays his characteristic persona: a charismatic optimist, one still fascinated with all of Earth’s natural bounty, confident that its splendor can yet be salvaged. 

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4 Key Takeaways From David Attenborough’s ‘A Life on Our Planet’

In 2020, world-renowned naturalist David Attenborough released a new film – “A Life on Our Planet” – which he calls his “witness statement” for the environment. The film traces his 60-year career, outlining how steeply the health of the planet has declined in his lifetime. It also makes grim predictions for the future should humanity continue on its current path, predictions that Earth.Org has covered extensively. Here are some of the key takeaways and predictions from A Life on Our Planet. 

David Attenborough maps out how humanity’s wanton destruction of nature will render the planet totally degraded and barren, uninhabitable for millions of people and bringing biodiversity populations crashing. Since the 1950s, animal populations have more than halved, while domestic birds’ populations have skyrocketed; 70% of the mass of the birds on the planet are domestic birds- mostly chickens. Humans account for over one-third of the weight of mammals on Earth. A further 60% of animals are those that are raised for us to eat. The rest- “from mice to whales”- make up just 4%. Domestic animals require vast swathes of land and half of the fertile land on the planet is now farmland. 

Humans cut down up to 15 billion trees per year; this is just one facet of the planet’s degradation thanks to humans, which has resulted in 30% of fish stocks being fished to critical levels and freshwater populations declining by over 80%. The Arctic, one of the coldest and remote places on Earth, has experienced summer sea ice reducing by 40% in 40 years. 

David Attenborough makes horrifying predictions for the 2030s, 2040s, 2050s, 2080s and 2100s:

If deforestation in the Amazon rainforest continues, it will degrade to a point where it can no longer produce enough moisture, transforming into a dry savanna. Not only will this decimate the biodiversity in the rainforest, but it will also alter the global water cycle. 

Additionally, the Arctic will start experiencing ice-free summers. Without the white ice caps, less of the sun’s energy will be reflected back into space, which will accelerate global warming. 

In the North, frozen permafrost soils will thaw, releasing methane into the atmosphere.

As oceans continue to heat and become more acidic, coral reefs around the world will bleach and die. This will cause fish populations to crash, which will affect millions of people who rely on the ocean for their livelihoods. 

You might also like: Improving the Resilience of Coral Reefs

Global food production will enter into a crisis as soils become exhausted by overuse. Pollinating insects will disappear and the weather will become more unpredictable. 

The planet will be four degrees Celsius warmer, rendering large parts of the Earth uninhabitable and leaving millions of people homeless. Scientists predict that the sixth mass extinction will be well underway at this point, causing irreversible damage to the planet. The security and stability of the Holocene era- our “Garden of Eden,” as Attenborough calls it, will be lost.

David Attenborough: What Can We Do?

All hope is not lost however, David Attenborough asserts. We still have time to halt and even reverse the damage we have caused to the planet. The film lays out several fairly simply and feasible solutions, including:

1. Stabilise the Global Population

We need to slow the rate at which the global population is growing; by 2100, the population is expected to reach 11 billion people. To slow the population growth rate, we need to raise people out of poverty, improve access to healthcare globally and enable children, especially girls, to stay in school for as long as possible.

2. Shift to Renewable Energy

We need to shift to renewable energy, a process which is already happening at a rapid- albeit not rapid enough- pace. At the turn of the century, Morocco relied on imported oil and gas for almost all of its energy. Today, it generates 40% of its needs at home from renewable sources, boasting the world’s largest solar farm. With its rapid advancements in this area, Morocco could be an energy exporter by 2050. Globally, renewable energy may be the dominant source of energy in 20 years. David Attenborough calls for divestment from fossil fuels, and points out the irony of banks and investment firms investing pension funds in fossil fuels when it’s these dirty fuels preventing the future that we are saving for.

3. Restore Biodiversity

We need to restore-or “rewild”- biodiversity on the planet. When ecosystems are more diverse, they are better able to perform essential ecosystem services, like carbon sequestration. An example of this is the oceans. Palau is a western Pacific island nation dependent on its oceans for food and tourism. When fishing stocks were rapidly depleting, the government restricted fishing practices and banned fishing entirely in some areas. The protected fish populations soon became so healthy that they spilled into areas where fishing was allowed. These no-fish zones resulted in increased catches for fishermen and recovered coral reefs. Globally, if no-fish zones were implemented over a third of the world’s oceans, we would have all the fish we would need. The UN is trying to do just that- create the largest no-fish zone in international waters. 

Additionally, we need to reduce the space we use for farmland to instead make space for returning wilderness. The easiest way to do this is to change our diets. If we all had a largely plant-based diet, David Attenborough says, we would need half the land we use now. In nature, large carnivores are fairly rare; for every predator on the Serengeti, there are more than 100 prey animals. The Netherlands is one of the world’s most densely populated countries. This has forced Dutch farmers to use land much more efficiently. Through creative and innovative changes to farming practices, in two generations, the nation has raised yields tenfold while using less water, fewer pesticides and fertilisers and emitting less carbon. Today, the Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of food. 

4. End Deforestation

Finally, we need to halt deforestation as forests are the planet’s biggest ally in locking away carbon. Further, forests must be more biodiverse as this will make them more effective at absorbing carbon. Crops like oil palm and soya should only be grown on land that was deforested long ago. The example of Costa Rica is used. A century ago, more than three-quarters of the nation was covered with forest. By the 1980s, thanks to rampant deforestation, this was reduced to one quarter. The government intervened, giving grants to landowners to replant native trees. Thanks to this initiative, forests now cover half of Costa Rica once more.

The problem is immense, but we already have the knowledge and skills to halt and reverse it. We need to reexamine our relationship with nature, working with it instead of against it, to restore our planet to its former glory. 

Featured image by: Flickr

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DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: A LIFE ON OUR PLANET

SUBJECTS — The Environment;

SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL LEARNING — Surviving;

MORAL-ETHICAL EMPHASIS — Respect;

AGE:  Rated PG, age 9+;

2020; 1 hour 23 minutes; Color.

Give your students an image that could change their lives.  C heck out “ The Sealed Petri Dish  Assignment! “

In this  Learning Guide citations to Mr. Attenborough’s book, A Life on Our Planet – My Witness Statement and a Vision for the  Future, written with Jonnie Hughes, will be to “Attenborough” with a page reference.

Benefits of the Movie Possible Problems Parenting Points Selected Awards & Cast

Helpful Background Using the Movie in the Classroom Discussion Questions Assignments and Projects

CCSS Anchor Standards Bridges to Reading Links to the Internet Bibliography

MOVIE WORKSHEETS & STUDENT HANDOUTS

TWM offers a worksheet for students to review before seeing the film and then to fill out after they have watched the movie. While not required for the lesson plan, teachers may want to review it. See Film Study Worksheet for a Documentary Seeking to Persuade the Viewer On a Matter of Political or Social Significance .

DESCRIPTION

This film is one man’s witness statement about the degradation of the world’s environment over his lifetime. Mr. Attenborough ends the film with a message of hope that with human birth rates going down all over the world we’ll be able to establish a modern sustainable ecological balance halting the progress of the Sixth Mass Extinction.

SELECTED AWARDS & CAST

David Attenborough and Max Hughes;

Alastair Fothergill, Jonathan Hughes;

Three award nominations: BAFTA Awards 2021: nominated for Best Documentary; 2021 ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards: nominated for Documentary Score of the year; and Cinema Audio Society, USA 2021: nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing for Motion Pictures – Documentary

BENEFITS OF THE MOVIE

This film poses questions that citizens must answer about the most serious and pressing existential threat to humankind.

POSSIBLE PROBLEMS

Parenting points.

Watch the film with your children. Read magazine articles or books, or watch other films about the environmental crisis . Try Fly Away Home (ages 10+) and Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (ages 13+).  Then talk about ways to help reduce environmental degradation in your lives. Mr. Attenborough’s book, A Life on our Planet , is excellent reading for high level high school and up.

HELPFUL BACKGROUND

Mr. Attenborough describes this film as his “witness statement.” He is referring to the tradition in (1) religion, (2) in support of movements for social reform, or (3) in the presence of great evil, of people stating an important but perhaps unwanted truth. It is sometimes called “bearing witness.”   An example of (1) occurs in the New Testament when Jesus tells his disciples to bear witness about him and their faith. See e.g., Acts 22:15 and 23:11.  Examples combining (2) and (3), occurred on many occasions before the Civil War in the U.S. when Abolitionists would bear witness to the evils of slavery and the need for reform, calling attention to the nation’s “original sin” through public prayer services and vigils.  An example of (3), bearing witness to great evil, occurred at the end of WW II in Germany.  General Eisenhower, Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, upon discovering the horrific Nazi death camps said, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” Even today, Animal Rights activists feed water to pigs crammed together in the large trucks used to transport them to slaughter both to relieve the pigs of a little of their suffering and to bear witness to that suffering.

Chernobyl Nuclear Accident

In April 1986 a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine went into an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction and exploded. The accident was due to a flawed Soviet reactor design and serious errors by operators acting in a work environment that lacked a strong safety culture. It was the worst nuclear disaster in history. At least 5% of the radioactive reactor core was ejected into the environment. Thirty firefighters and other first responders died of acute radiation exposure and 300,000 people had to be evacuated from surrounding areas. While most of the radioactive debris was deposited locally, some was carried by air currents to many parts of Europe. Clean-up efforts are ongoing and are not expected to be completed until 2065.

Vocabulary:

Bearing Witness — to make a statement acknowledging that something exists or is true; often it refers to stating what other people need to hear but what they don’t want to hear.

Holocene – “A geological epoch, beginning about 11,700 years ago after the last glacial period.  It has been a strikingly stable period of [geological] history, and corresponds with a rapid growth in humankind brought about by the invention of agriculture.”  Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet, p. 231  It is the accepted term for the present epoch, which is the second epoch in the Quaternary period and followed the Pleistocene.

Anthropocene – “A proposed geological age, or more technically, epoch, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and environment. There is an ongoing debate as to when the Anthropocene would begin, but many suggest the 1950s since it will coincide with the presence in future rocks of an abundance of plastics and radioactive isotopes from nuclear testing.” Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet, pp. 223 & 224.

Biodiversity — the variety of life on Earth at all its levels, from genes to ecosystems  It encompasses the evolutionary, ecological, and cultural processes that sustain life.

Mass Extinction — a loss of three-quarters or more of all species in existence across the entire Earth over a “short” geological

period of fewer than 2.8 million years. There have been five previous mass extinctions; we appear to be at the beginning of the sixth.  Mr. Attenborough in his book explains the meaning of mass extinction as follows:

For different reasons  at different times in the Earth’s history, there had been a profound, rapid, global change to the environment to which so many species had  become so exquisitely adapted. The Earth’s life–support machine had stuttered and the miraculous assemblage of fragile interconnections which held it together had collapsed. Great numbers of species suddenly disappeared leaving only a few.  Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet, p. 16.

He comments that all the evolution that led to the extinct species was undone  by the five great extinctions.

Rewild – To allow a geographic area the has been disrupted by human activity to return to its natural state.

Chart of World Population, Atmospheric Carbon, and Remaining Wilderness

Below is a chart taken from Mr. Attenborough’s book, A Life on Our Planet – My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future .  A few of these entries are shown in the film.  The chart can be printed and given to the class before and briefly reviewed before they see the film.  For a pdf file containing the chart, click here .

1937:  World population: 2.3 billion; Carbon in atmosphere: 280 ppm; Remaining wilderness: 66%

1954  (+17 years): World population: 2.7 billion; Carbon in atmosphere: 310 ppm; Remaining wilderness: 64%

1960  (+16 years) World population: 3.0 billion; Carbon in atmosphere: 315 ppm; Remaining wilderness: 62%

1968  (+8 years) World population: 3.5 billion; Carbon in atmosphere: 323 ppm; Remaining wilderness: 59%

1971 (+3 years) World population: 3.7 billion;  Carbon in atmosphere: 326 ppm;  Remaining wilderness: 58%

1978 (+5 years) World population: 4.3 billion; Carbon in atmosphere: 335 ppm; Remaining wilderness: 55%

1989  (+11 years); World population: 5.1 billion; Carbon in atmosphere: 353 ppm; Remaining wilderness: 49%

1997  (+8 years) World population: 5.9 billion; Carbon in atmosphere: 360 ppm; Remaining wilderness: 46%

2011  (+4 years) World population: 7.0 billion; Carbon in atmosphere: 391 ppm; Remaining wilderness: 39%

2020   (+9 years) World population: 7.8 billion; Carbon in atmosphere: 415 ppm;  Remaining wilderness: 35%

Text of the short subject entitled “How to Save Our Planet” from the David Attenborough website .

Suddenly, saving our planet is within reach. We’ve worked out all the problems. We’re working on all the solutions. Most of them we can do now. And over time all of them help the economy. Our population growth is actually slowing down and by the end of the century, it will plateau. There’s never been a better opportunity to take control. The plan is obvious. Stop doing the damaging stuff. Roll out the new green tech systems as they arrive. Stabilize the human population as low as we fairly can. Keep hold of the natural wealth we’ve currently got. And in 80 years’ time, we’ll be past the worst of it.

More than that we’ll have built a world with eternal energy, clean air, and water. A stable, healthy world that we can benefit from, forever.

So, what’s stopping us? This opportunity is out of sight. Each of us is blinkered by the demands of here and now. “Big picture.” “long term,” they’re not in our field of vision. That must change if we’re going to change.

We now have the choice to create a planet that we can all be proud of. Our planet: the perfect home for ourselves and the rest of life on earth;

We have a plan. We know what to do. There is a path to sustainability. If enough people can see the path, we may just start down it in time.

USING THE MOVIE IN THE CLASSROOM

The website for the film David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet has the following short subjects that might be helpful in presenting the issues raised by the film.

How to Save our Planet 8:07;

Five Steps to Help Save Our Planet 25 seconds;

A Reason for Hope 2:45;

Our Changing Planet 1:05;

How to Save our High Seas 8:27;

How to Save our Grasslands 8:36; and

How to Save Our Jungles 8:24.

Acquaint the class with the important concept of “bearing witness” and its role in social change. See Helpful Background .

The Five Steps to Help Save Our Planet outlined by Mr. Attenborough are:

1. Make your diet as plant-based as possible; 2. Shop for sustainable fish and meat; 3. Switch to a clean energy provider; 4. Choose deforestation-free palm oil products; and 5. Buy wood and paper from well-managed forests.

The Sealed Petri Dish Assignment

Have the class read the following section from Mr. Attenborough’s book  A Life on Our Planet and then write a one-page essay about how the situation of human beings on earth is similar to and different from the bacteria in the petri dish.  When the assignments have been graded have the authors of the best read their essays to the class.  Then conduct a class discussion on the topic.

When a few bacteria are placed on a bed of food in a sterile, sealed dish —  a perfect environment free from competition, sitting on abundant nutrients  — they take some time to adapt themselves to the new medium  — a period called the lag phase.   This can last just one hour, or a few days, but at some point it ends suddenly —  the bacteria solve the problem of how to exploit the conditions of the dish, and begin to reproduce by dividing, doubling their population as frequently as every 20 minutes. So begins the log phase , a period of exponential growth, the bacteria splitting and spreading and surges across the surface of the food.  Each individual bacterium grabs its own plot and seizes is what it needs. Ecologists called this a scramble competition – every bacterium for itself!  It’s a type of competition that does not end well in a closed system such as the finite, sealed dish. When the bacteria reproduce to such a degree that they reach the edge, every individual cell will begin to disadvantage every other at the same moment. The food begins to run out beneath the bacteria. Exhaust gases, heat and effluents begin to accumulate and poison with increasing speed.  Cells start to die tempering the growth rate of the population for the first time. These deaths also occur exponentially due to the worsening environment, and soon there is a moment when the death rate and the birth rate equal each other at that point the population has peaked, and may plateau for a period. But within a finite system this won’t continue forever — it’s not sustainable .  Food starts to run out everywhere, the gathering waste becomes deadly throughout the dish and the colony crashes as quickly as it rose. Ultimately, the seal dish becomes a very different place – a place with no food, it’s environment ruined, hot, acid and toxic.  David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet, pages 106 & 107.

Good discussions will cover the following points:  1) The earth has various biochemical cycles that cleanse and replenish the environment.  The carbon cycle and the oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle are two of the most important.  However, our overpopulation and interference in the environment is disrupting these beneficial cycles.  For example, over the last three hundred years, human beings have introduced massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning

fossil fuels such as wood, coal, oil, and natural gas, thus disrupting the carbon cycle. This has contributed to global warming, acidification of the oceans, and other environmental problems.  Our increasing population and continuing interference with the natural cycles of the earth bring the world ever closer to the petri dish experiment.  2) People have intelligence and technology.  If we really care about saving our civilization and other animals we can use our ingenuity to adjust our impact on the sealed environment of the earth and its atmosphere.  We already employ technology to make our lives more comfortable and to increase the number of people who can live on the planet.   Examples are all around us.  We have systems to bring food to our cities and to remove sewage.  Without them we would starve or be awash in our own effluents.  What we need to do is to apply our inventiveness to restoring the natural cycles of the earth.  3)  Similarities between the world and the sealed petri dish are that: we are all alive (bacteria and human beings); in the process of living we create waste products that are toxic to us and harmful to the environment; we share the inability to control our populations; neither bacteria nor homo sapiens can our greed in grabbing more than our share of the available resources.

Before the end of the time allotted for this exercise, lead the class to discuss what human beings can do to avoid the fate of the bacteria in their sealed petri dish.   Teachers seeking to further explore these issues, can have students investigate the Gaia Hypothesis and Gaia 2.0.    A suggested essay prompt: What does the Gaia Hypothesis tell us about how to avoid the fate of the bacteria in the petri dish experiment?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. [Before asking this question show the class the 25-second video on the movie’s website called: Five Steps to Help Save Our Planet .] Mr. Attenborough has Five Steps to Help Save Our Planet. The first step is to “Make your diet as plant-based as possible.” Why does he say this?

Suggested Response:

This topic is more fully explored in the Learning Guide to Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret , but in short, animal agriculture (production of meat and dairy) is responsible for more pollution than the entire transportation sector. The crops necessary to feed those animals consume more than 50% of the potable water in the U.S.  One hamburger with 1/3rd of a pound of beef requires 660 gallons of water to produce. The deforestation of the Amazon is primarily to grow crops to feed livestock. The grazing land necessary to produce meat is a major cause of deforestation all over the globe.  The pollution caused by the many hundred million tons of animal waste generated for the production of meat and dairy each year is immense. Methane gas from the digestive tracts of cows (yes, cow farts) is a more long-lasting and potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

2. Do people have a right to have as many children as they please – even if the numbers of our population are destroying the world ecosystem?

Students will disagree. The goal is to raise the issue and have a respectful airing of differing views.   Many people consider  having children to be a fundamental right and believe that having as many children as they desire is part of that right.   The argument against this view is that (1) rights are granted by society and what is a fundamental right in one society  may be a crime in another society; and (2) having more than 2 or 3 children is destructive to the environment and harms everyone.

3. What is the quickest and best thing that you can do to help protect the oceans?

The best thing to do is to stop eating any wild-caught fish, including canned fish. Reduced demand means fewer fishing boats and fewer lost nets and lines in which aquatic animals can become entangled.

4. What is your plan for how human beings are going to save the planetary ecosystem and how are you going to contribute to that effort?

The point of this question is that given the current situation everyone will need to have an idea of what they want for the planet in the future and how society can attain the goal of a balanced sustainable ecosystem.   As Mr. Attenborough points out, our actions should be lead to a balanced sustainable world.   As this Learning Guide is written, very few people, students or adults, have such a plan, but it is something we should all be thinking about.  Not everyone will be able to develop a comprehensive plan, but certainly we should be thinking about how we can change our lives to reduce our ecological footprint.  If we all contribute to the effort, the change will be enormous.

5. We are all guilty of participating in the environmental degradation that is destroying our world. Describe some actions that we can all take to reduce that guilt.

Students will have many good ideas.  Examples are:

Become an environmental activist;

Restrict our consumption of meat and dairy;

Sell one of the family’s automobiles.

6. What can you say to a person from a poor developing country who wants to live the rich and environmentally destructive life-style now enjoyed by many affluent people in the U.S.?

There is no one correct response. The idea is to get the class thinking. Here are some thoughts.

We’d be in a much better position to talk to a person from a developing country about safeguarding the environment if: 1) we had reduced our own consumption and 2) our country or we ourselves had personally assisted them in attaining sustainable development in their country.

7. So, what’s stopping you from doing something to help the environment and to preserve humanity and the non-human animals at risk from climate change?

There are many reasons. The bias toward normalcy is a big factor.  In addition, as Mr. Attenborough tells us, the problem is often out of sight and we are blinkered by the demands of here and now.   These are “big picture” “long term” problems and it is easy to put them our of our minds.  That must change if we’re going to change.

8.  What is “cultured meat” and why does Mr. Attenborough call it “clean meet”?

For Attenborough’s reference to this, see A Life on Our Planet p. 226.  Cultured meat, also called clean meat, is “Meat for consumption produced as a cell culture of animal cells rather than from the slaughter of animals. It is a form of cellular agriculture. Research suggests that clean meat production has the potential to be much more efficient and environmentally friendly than traditional meat production, as it requires a fraction of the land, energy needs and water, and emits far fewer greenhouse gases per kilogram produced. It also has fewer animal welfare issues.”

Social-Emotional Learning Here.

MORAL-ETHICAL EMPHASIS (CHARACTER COUNTS)

Moral-Ethical Here.

ASSIGNMENTS, PROJECTS & ACTIVITIES

TWM recommends The Petri Dish Assignment , above.  In addition, m any of the discussion questions can be the subject of an essay. Students can be assigned to research and write essays on the current state of different parts of the environmental collapse and how that might affect our lives.  Examples include:

• the loss of the ice-caps of at the North and South Poles; • the destruction of the Amazonian and other rain forests; • the over-fishing of the seas; • the acidification of the Oceans; • the threat caused by methane emissions from factory farming and the melting of the permafrost;

Students who are interested in expressing themselves through the visual arts can create a sketch or painting inspired by the film. If there are enough interested students this project  can be turned into a competition with outside judges picking the winners.

Students can write a poem describing their reaction to the film or inspired by the film.

CCSS ANCHOR STANDARDS

Multimedia: Anchor Standard #7 for Reading (for both ELA classes and for History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Classes). (The three Anchor Standards read: “Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media, including visually and quantitatively as well as in words.”) CCSS pp. 35 & 60. See also Anchor Standard # 2 for ELA Speaking and Listening, CCSS pg. 48.

Reading: Anchor Standards #s 1, 2, 7 and 8 for Reading and related standards (for both ELA classes and for History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Classes). CCSS pp. 35 & 60.

Writing: Anchor Standards #s 1 – 5 and 7- 10 for Writing and related standards (for both ELA classes and for History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Classes). CCSS pp. 41 & 63.

Speaking and Listening: Anchor Standards #s 1 – 3 (for ELA classes). CCSS pg. 48.

Not all assignments reach all Anchor Standards. Teachers are encouraged to review the specific standards to make sure that over the term all standards are met.

BRIDGES TO READING

The following books are recommended for excellent high school level readers.

• A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future by Attenborough, David and Hughes, Jonnie, Grand Central Publishing, New York, 2020;
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, Adam Grupper, et al.;
• Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman, Adam Grupper, et al.

LINKS TO THE INTERNET

• The Website for the Movie has resources for teachers. Most are included in this Learning Guide.
• What is Biodiversity? American Museum of Natural History; accessed April 19, 2021
• The Five Mass Extinctions That Have Swept Our Planet – Discover Magazine; by Gemma Tarlach Jul 18, 2018; accessed April 19, 202
• What is a ‘mass extinction’ and are we in one now? The CoQersation, November 12, 2019; accessed April 19, 2021;
• Gaia 2.0 Could humans add some level of self-awareness to Earth’s Self-Regulation? Latour, Bruno. 2018. “Gaia 2.0: Could humans add some level of self-awareness to Earth’s self-regulation?”  Science  361 (6407): 1066-1068.

Bearing Witness:

• National Commemoration of the Days of Remembrance , U.S. Capitol, April 27, 2006, Address by Robert B. Zoellick, Deputy Secretary of State, (General Eisenhower on bearing witness to the Holocaust); accessed April 19, 2021
• Must bear witness, Studying the Holocaust by Matthew H. Lee and Molly I. Beck Arkansas Democrat-Gazette | April 4, 2019; accessed April 19, 2021

Chernobyl Explosion:

• World Nuclear Association article on Chernobyl Accident 1986 accessed April 19, 2021
• Wikipedia article on Chernobyl Disaster accessed April 19, 2021

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The books listed in the Bridges to Reading section.

This Learning Guide was written by  James A. Frieden . It was published on April 18, 2021 and updated on May 22, 2021.

LEARNING GUIDE MENU:

Benefits of the Movie Possible Problems Parenting Points Selected Awards & Cast Helpful Background Using the Movie in the Classroom Discussion Questions Assignments and Projects CCSS Anchor Standards Bridges to Reading Links to the Internet Bibliography

MOVIE WORKSHEETS:

Additional resources:.

• For other films relating to the environment, click here .
• For a movie describing some unexpected ways in which non-human animals have temporarily improved their lives during the Covid-19 Pandemic shutdowns, see The Year the Earth Changed .
• For a 2019 eight-part series — each segment about 54 minutes — by David Attenborough celebrating the natural wonders that remain and revealing what we must do to preserve them and to ensure that people and nature thrive, go to Our Planet .

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David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet Movie Analysis Essay

Climate change is a controversial topic that has been an issue for many years now, but is it a fact or a myth? We get answers to a few of our questions from David Attenborough's documentary film, “A life on our planet.”

This documentary is truly an eye-opening experience, the audience gets the chance to understand what is going on and how it affects us as a human race. Climate change is a serious issue that has only escalated throughout the years that we have ignored, but what is climate change? Climate change is “a change in global or regional climate patterns, in particular, a change apparent from the mid to late 20th century onwards and attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels.”  Both natural and human causes affect this reaction.  Some human causes are burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and developing land for farms, cities, etc. All of these actions cause the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Some natural causes are changes in the earth's orbit, volcanic activity, and the sun's intensity. 

There are multiple ways we can help our planet before it becomes too late. Some of the actions we can take are as simple as recycling and picking up after ourselves. Group activities such as beach clean-ups are also a great way to help. Our next step should be trying to decrease as much pollution as possible and start the process of reforestation. Not would this help natural life grow, it would also be beneficial to human health. 

In conclusion, unless we can ignore the facts stated, climate change is real. It is our future actions that will determine whether or not life on earth will be possible. David Attenborough used an abandoned city in Ukraine as an example of what our planet could become, and I rather not see it come to that.

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Critic’s Pick

‘David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet’ Review: Ruin and Regrowth

In this moving documentary, the famed naturalist maps how steeply the planet’s biodiversity has diminished over his lifetime.

By Natalia Winkelman

The majestic documentary “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet” opens with its title subject standing in a deserted location. It’s the territory around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, a once buzzing area that was evacuated after human error rendered it uninhabitable. Only later will the directors, Alastair Fothergill, Jonnie Hughes and Keith Scholey, pull their camera back to reveal that the territory, in its vacancy, has grown into a lush wildlife paradise.

Calling the film ( streaming on Netflix ) his “witness statement” for the environment, David Attenborough goes on to trace his more than 60-year career as a naturalist, mapping how steeply the planet’s biodiversity has degenerated before him. Global air travel was new when he began his work, and footage of him as a young producer encountering exotic flora and fauna lends a moving, even haunting, note to his plea to restore ecological balance.

Astonishing nature photography accompanies his retrospective. To illustrate the emptying of oceans, the directors intercut thriving coral habitats with images of large gutted fish, frozen and stacked for market. Equally upsetting is the loss of rain forests, showcased through the stark cutoff between flourishing vegetation and uniform rows of oil palms planted for profit. Such cinematic juxtapositions are persuasive: A dying planet is an ugly one, while healthy ecosystems please the eye and the earth.

The most devastating sequence finds Attenborough charting the disasters we face in future decades — global crises that he, as a man now in his 90s, will not experience. Yet he finds hope by extrapolating small successes. Sustainable farming in the Netherlands has made the country one of the worldwide leaders in food exports. Fishing restrictions around the Pacific archipelago nation of Palau enabled marine life to rebound. The film’s grand achievement is that it positions its subject as a mediator between humans and the natural world. Life cycles on, and if we make the right choices, ruin can become regrowth.

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Netflix .

Scientific researchers on a bat-collecting expedition in Sierra Leone. Photo by Simon Townley/Panos

There’s no planet B

The scientific evidence is clear: the only celestial body that can support us is the one we evolved with. here’s why.

by Arwen E Nicholson & Raphaëlle D Haywood   + BIO

At the start of the 22nd century, humanity left Earth for the stars. The enormous ecological and climatic devastation that had characterised the last 100 years had led to a world barren and inhospitable; we had used up Earth entirely. Rapid melting of ice caused the seas to rise, swallowing cities whole. Deforestation ravaged forests around the globe, causing widespread destruction and loss of life. All the while, we continued to burn the fossil fuels we knew to be poisoning us, and thus created a world no longer fit for our survival. And so we set our sights beyond Earth’s horizons to a new world, a place to begin again on a planet as yet untouched. But where are we going? What are our chances of finding the elusive planet B, an Earth-like world ready and waiting to welcome and shelter humanity from the chaos we created on the planet that brought us into being? We built powerful astronomical telescopes to search the skies for planets resembling our own, and very quickly found hundreds of Earth twins orbiting distant stars. Our home was not so unique after all. The universe is full of Earths!

This futuristic dream-like scenario is being sold to us as a real scientific possibility, with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future. For decades, children have grown up with the daring movie adventures of intergalactic explorers and the untold habitable worlds they find. Many of the highest-grossing films are set on fictional planets, with paid advisors keeping the science ‘realistic’. At the same time, narratives of humans trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth have also become mainstream.

Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our worries behind? No. All these stories are missing what makes a planet habitable to us . What Earth-like means in astronomy textbooks and what it means to someone considering their survival prospects on a distant world are two vastly different things. We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere. Without them, we cannot survive. Astronomical observations and Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one we evolved with. There is no plan B. There is no planet B. Our future is here, and it doesn’t have to mean we’re doomed.

D eep down, we know this from instinct: we are happiest when immersed in our natural environment. There are countless examples of the healing power of spending time in nature . Numerous articles speak of the benefits of ‘forest bathing’; spending time in the woods has been scientifically shown to reduce stress, anxiety and depression, and to improve sleep quality, thus nurturing both our physical and mental health. Our bodies instinctively know what we need: the thriving and unique biosphere that we have co-evolved with, that exists only here, on our home planet.

There is no planet B. These days, everyone is throwing around this catchy slogan. Most of us have seen it inscribed on an activist’s homemade placard, or heard it from a world leader. In 2014, the United Nations’ then secretary general Ban Ki-moon said: ‘There is no plan B because we do not have [a] planet B.’ The French president Emmanuel Macron echoed him in 2018 in his historical address to US Congress. There’s even a book named after it. The slogan gives strong impetus to address our planetary crisis. However, no one actually explains why there isn’t another planet we could live on, even though the evidence from Earth sciences and astronomy is clear. Gathering this observation-based information is essential to counter an increasingly popular but flawed narrative that the only way to ensure our survival is to colonise other planets.

The best-case scenario for terraforming Mars leaves us with an atmosphere we are incapable of breathing

The most common target of such speculative dreaming is our neighbour Mars. It is about half the size of Earth and receives about 40 per cent of the heat that we get from the Sun. From an astronomer’s perspective, Mars is Earth’s identical twin. And Mars has been in the news a lot lately, promoted as a possible outpost for humanity in the near future . While human-led missions to Mars seem likely in the coming decades, what are our prospects of long-term habitation on Mars? Present-day Mars is a cold, dry world with a very thin atmosphere and global dust storms that can last for weeks on end. Its average surface pressure is less than 1 per cent of Earth’s. Surviving without a pressure suit in such an environment is impossible. The dusty air mostly consists of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and the surface temperature ranges from a balmy 30ºC (86ºF) in the summer, down to -140ºC (-220ºF) in the winter; these extreme temperature changes are due to the thin atmosphere on Mars.

Despite these clear challenges, proposals for terraforming Mars into a world suitable for long-term human habitation abound. Mars is further from the Sun than Earth, so it would require significantly more greenhouse gases to achieve a temperature similar to Earth’s. Thickening the atmosphere by releasing CO 2 in the Martian surface is the most popular ‘solution’ to the thin atmosphere on Mars. However, every suggested method of releasing the carbon stored in Mars requires technology and resources far beyond what we are currently capable of. What’s more, a recent NASA study determined that there isn’t even enough CO 2 on Mars to warm it sufficiently.

Even if we could find enough CO 2 , we would still be left with an atmosphere we couldn’t breathe. Earth’s atmosphere contains only 0.04 per cent CO 2 , and we cannot tolerate an atmosphere high in CO 2 . For an atmosphere with Earth’s atmospheric pressure, CO 2 levels as high as 1 per cent can cause drowsiness in humans, and once we reach levels of 10 per cent CO 2 , we will suffocate even if there is abundant oxygen. The proposed absolute best-case scenario for terraforming Mars leaves us with an atmosphere we are incapable of breathing; and achieving it is well beyond our current technological and economic capabilities.

Instead of changing the atmosphere of Mars, a more realistic scenario might be to build habitat domes on its surface with internal conditions suitable for our survival. However, there would be a large pressure difference between the inside of the habitat and the outside atmosphere. Any breach in the habitat would rapidly lead to depressurisation as the breathable air escapes into the thin Martian atmosphere. Any humans living on Mars would have to be on constant high alert for any damage to their building structures, and suffocation would be a daily threat.

F rom an astronomical perspective, Mars is Earth’s twin; and yet, it would take vast resources, time and effort to transform it into a world that wouldn’t be capable of providing even the bare minimum of what we have on Earth. Suggesting that another planet could become an escape from our problems on Earth suddenly seems absurd. But are we being pessimistic? Do we just need to look further afield?

Next time you are out on a clear night, look up at the stars and choose one – you are more likely than not to pick one that hosts planets. Astronomical observations today confirm our age-old suspicion that all stars have their own planetary systems. As astronomers, we call these exoplanets. What are exoplanets like? Could we make any of them our home?

The majority of exoplanets discovered to date were found by NASA’s Kepler mission, which monitored the brightness of 100,000 stars over four years, looking for dips in a star’s light as a planet obscures it each time it completes an orbit around it.

Kepler observed more than 900 Earth-sized planets with a radius up to 1.25 times that of our world. These planets could be rocky (for the majority of them, we haven’t yet determined their mass, so we can only make this inference based on empirical relations between planetary mass and radius). Of these 900 or so Earth-sized planets, 23 are in the habitable zone. The habitable zone is the range of orbits around a star where a planet can be considered temperate : the planet’s surface can support liquid water (provided there is sufficient atmospheric pressure), a key ingredient of life as we know it. The concept of the habitable zone is very useful because it depends on just two astrophysical parameters that are relatively easy to measure: the distance of the planet to its parent star, and the star’s temperature. It’s worth keeping in mind that the astronomical habitable zone is a very simple concept and, in reality, there are many more factors at play in the emergence of life; for example, this concept does not consider plate tectonics , which are thought to be crucial to sustain life on Earth.

Planets with similar observable properties to Earth are very common: at least one in 10 stars hosts them

How many Earth-sized, temperate planets are there in our galaxy? Since we have discovered only a handful of these planets so far, it is still quite difficult to estimate their number. Current estimates of the frequency of Earth-sized planets rely on extrapolating measured occurrence rates of planets that are slightly bigger and closer to their parent star, as those are easier to detect. The studies are primarily based on observations from the Kepler mission, which surveyed more than 100,000 stars in a systematic fashion. These stars are all located in a tiny portion of the entire sky; so, occurrence rate studies assume that this part of the sky is representative of the full galaxy. These are all reasonable assumptions for the back-of-the-envelope estimate that we are about to make.

Several different teams carried out their own analyses and, on average, they found that roughly one in three stars (30 per cent) hosts an Earth-sized, temperate planet. The most pessimistic studies found a rate of 9 per cent, which is about one in 10 stars, and the studies with the most optimistic results found that virtually all stars host at least one Earth-sized, temperate planet, and potentially even several of them.

At first sight, this looks like a huge range in values; but it’s worth taking a step back and realising that we had absolutely no constraints whatsoever on this number just 20 years ago. Whether there are other planets similar to Earth is a question that we’ve been asking for millennia, and this is the very first time that we are able to answer it based on actual observations. Before the Kepler mission, we had no idea whether we would find Earth-sized, temperate planets around one in 10, or one in a million stars. Now we know that planets with similar observable properties to Earth are very common: at least one in 10 stars hosts these kinds of planets.

Let’s now use these numbers to predict the number of Earth-sized, temperate planets in our entire galaxy. For this, let’s take the average estimate of 30 per cent, or roughly one in three stars. Our galaxy hosts approximately 300 billion stars, which adds up to 90 billion roughly Earth-sized, roughly temperate planets. This is a huge number, and it can be very tempting to think that at least one of these is bound to look exactly like Earth.

One issue to consider is that other worlds are at unimaginable distances from us. Our neighbour Mars is on average 225 million kilometres (about 140 million miles) away. Imagine a team of astronauts travelling in a vehicle similar to NASA’s robotic New Horizons probe, one of humankind’s fastest spacecrafts – which flew by Pluto in 2015. With New Horizons’ top speed of around 58,000 kph, it would take at least 162 days to reach Mars. Beyond our solar system, the closest star to us is Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 40 trillion kilometres. Going in the same space vehicle, it would take our astronaut crew 79,000 years to reach planets that might exist around our nearest stellar neighbour.

S till, let’s for a moment optimistically imagine that we find a perfect Earth twin: a planet that really is exactly like Earth. Let’s imagine that some futuristic form of technology exists, ready to whisk us away to this new paradise. Keen to explore our new home, we eagerly board our rocket, but on landing we soon feel uneasy. Where is the land? Why is the ocean green and not blue? Why is the sky orange and thick with haze? Why are our instruments detecting no oxygen in the atmosphere? Was this not supposed to be a perfect twin of Earth?

As it turns out, we have landed on a perfect twin of the Archean Earth, the aeon during which life first emerged on our home world. This new planet is certainly habitable: lifeforms are floating around the green, iron-rich oceans, breathing out methane that is giving the sky that unsettling hazy, orange colour. This planet sure is habitable – just not to us . It has a thriving biosphere with plenty of life, but not life like ours. In fact, we would have been unable to survive on Earth for around 90 per cent of its history; the oxygen-rich atmosphere that we depend on is a recent feature of our planet.

The earliest part of our planet’s history, known as the Hadean aeon, begins with the formation of the Earth. Named after the Greek underworld due to our planet’s fiery beginnings, the early Hadean would have been a terrible place with molten lava oceans and an atmosphere of vaporised rock. Next came the Archean aeon, beginning 4 billion years ago, when the first life on Earth flourished. But, as we just saw, the Archean would be no home for a human. The world where our earliest ancestors thrived would kill us in an instant. After the Archean came the Proterozoic, 2.5 billion years ago. In this aeon, there was land, and a more familiar blue ocean and sky. What’s more, oxygen finally began to accumulate in the atmosphere. But let’s not get too excited: the level of oxygen was less than 10 per cent of what we have today. The air would still have been impossible for us to breathe. This time also experienced global glaciation events known as snowball Earths, where ice covered the globe from poles to equator for millions of years at a time. Earth has spent more of its time fully frozen than the length of time that we humans have existed.

We would have been incapable of living on our planet for most of its existence

Earth’s current aeon, the Phanerozoic, began only around 541 million years ago with the Cambrian explosion – a period of time when life rapidly diversified. A plethora of life including the first land plants, dinosaurs and the first flowering plants all appeared during this aeon. It is only within this aeon that our atmosphere became one that we can actually breathe. This aeon has also been characterised by multiple mass extinction events that wiped out as much as 90 per cent of all species over short periods of time. The factors that brought on such devastation are thought to be a combination of large asteroid impacts, and volcanic, chemical and climate changes occurring on Earth at the time. From the point of view of our planet, the changes leading to these mass extinctions are relatively minor. However, for lifeforms at the time, such changes shattered their world and very often led to their complete extinction.

Looking at Earth’s long history, we find that we would have been incapable of living on our planet for most of its existence. Anatomically modern humans emerged less than 400,000 years ago; we have been around for less than 0.01 per cent of the Earth’s story. The only reason we find Earth habitable now is because of the vast and diverse biosphere that has for hundreds of millions of years evolved with and shaped our planet into the home we know today. Our continued survival depends on the continuation of Earth’s present state without any nasty bumps along the way. We are complex lifeforms with complex needs. We are entirely dependent on other organisms for all our food and the very air we breathe. The collapse of Earth’s ecosystems is the collapse of our life-support systems. Replicating everything Earth offers us on another planet, on timescales of a few human lifespans, is simply impossible.

Some argue that we need to colonise other planets to ensure the future of the human race. In 5 billion years, our Sun, a middle-aged star, will become a red giant, expanding in size and possibly engulfing Earth. In 1 billion years, the gradual warming of our Sun is predicted to cause Earth’s oceans to boil away. While this certainly sounds worrying, 1 billion years is a long, long time. A billion years ago, Earth’s landmasses formed the supercontinent Rodinia, and life on Earth consisted in single-celled and small multicellular organisms. No plants or animals yet existed. The oldest Homo sapiens remains date from 315,000 years ago, and until 12,000 years ago all humans lived as hunter-gatherers.

The industrial revolution happened less than 500 years ago. Since then, human activity in burning fossil fuels has been rapidly changing the climate, threatening human lives and damaging ecosystems across the globe. Without rapid action, human-caused climate change is predicted to have devastating global consequences within the next 50 years. This is the looming crisis that humanity must focus on. If we can’t learn to work within the planetary system that we evolved with, how do we ever hope to replicate these deep processes on another planet? Considering how different human civilisations are today from even 5,000 years ago, worrying about a problem that humans may have to tackle in a billion years is simply absurd. It would be far simpler to go back in time and ask the ancient Egyptians to invent the internet there and then. It’s also worth considering that many of the attitudes towards space colonisation are worryingly close to the same exploitative attitudes that have led us to the climate crisis we now face.

Earth is the home we know and love not because it is Earth-sized and temperate. No, we call this planet our home thanks to its billion-year-old relationship with life. Just as people are shaped not only by their genetics, but by their culture and relationships with others, planets are shaped by the living organisms that emerge and thrive on them. Over time, Earth has been dramatically transformed by life into a world where we, humans, can prosper. The relationship works both ways: while life shapes its planet, the planet shapes its life. Present-day Earth is our life-support system, and we cannot live without it.

While Earth is currently our only example of a living planet, it is now within our technological reach to potentially find signs of life on other worlds. In the coming decades, we will likely answer the age-old question: are we alone in the Universe? Finding evidence for alien life promises to shake the foundations of our understanding of our own place in the cosmos. But finding alien life does not mean finding another planet that we can move to. Just as life on Earth has evolved with our planet over billions of years, forming a deep, unique relationship that makes the world we see today, any alien life on a distant planet will have a similarly deep and unique bond with its own planet. We can’t expect to be able to crash the party and find a warm welcome.

Living on a warming Earth presents many challenges. But these pale in comparison with the challenges of converting Mars, or any other planet, into a viable alternative. Scientists study Mars and other planets to better understand how Earth and life formed and evolved, and how they shape each other. We look to worlds beyond our horizons to better understand ourselves. In searching the Universe, we are not looking for an escape to our problems: Earth is our unique and only home in the cosmos. There is no planet B.

Alien life is no joke

Not long ago the search for extraterrestrials was considered laughable nonsense. Today, it’s serious and scientific

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David Attenborough’s Witness Statement: ‘A Life On Our Planet’

David Attenborough graces our screens again in his most poignant documentary yet. Over the course of his 60-year career as a naturalist and beloved wildlife narrator, the landscape of the natural world has changed dramatically. Now, at 93, Attenborough is taking the opportunity to reflect on the changes that have occurred over the span of his lifetime.

It is clear from the start that this is both a personal love letter for the world he grew up in and a stark warning of how – as a society – we have squandered this gift.

A household name synonymous with wildlife documentaries, Attenborough has always championed conservationist causes. His iconic nature documentaries have increasingly touched on the issue of declining biodiversity and the impact of climate change on the natural world. It would be difficult – if not impossible – to avoid addressing these issues in wildlife programs where the consequences can be so palpably witnessed. 

However, quintessential series like “ Planet Earth ” continued to tread carefully around “politicising” the topic and stuck largely to the expected content of traditional programming. Perhaps in the hopes it would still spark enough concern in its viewers to become more environmentally conscious. 

In contrast, “ A Life On Our Planet ” is an explicit call to action never quite expressed before in his documentaries. In an intimate address to the viewer, Attenborough calls this his “witness statement” detailing the world’s devastating biodiversity loss at the hands of humanity, along with his vision for the future. 

The documentary was released on Netflix on Sunday, 4 October 2020 and it is clear from the start that this is both a personal love letter for the world he grew up in and a stark warning of how – as a society – we have squandered this gift. 

In one uncharacteristically raw scene we see a glimpse of the full weight of Attenborough’s emotions. Ever the professional, the sombre moment almost feels like a fourth wall break from his usual role as the narrator. While he takes a quiet moment to reflect during the interview, he expresses a foreboding sentiment, “We have overrun the world.”

The documentary is a perfect blend of both the sentimental and the facts. It still provides the stunning visuals viewers will have come to expect from any nature documentary with his name attached, along with special footage of Attenborough’s various exploits during his extraordinary career. But this time the captivating footage is also accompanied by visual time cards indicating the extent of population growth and the decline of wild spaces and biodiversity in context to the timeline, acting as a solemn reminder of the extent of humanity’s impact.   

Related Articles: UN Summit on Biodiversity   | World Fails to Meet Any of Aichi Biodiversity Targets

Looking back at his legacy, Attenborough fondly describes the balanced and diverse natural world he experienced early in his career as “our garden of eden.” Also known as the Holocene , this period of stability has followed the last major ice age – the fifth mass extinction on our planet in four billion years. But he warns that this usually dependable environment can no longer be relied on as temperatures rise from global warming and biodiversity is gutted.     

The documentary details how the fast pace of human progress has led to an unconstrained consumption of finite natural resources, noting how we are overwhelmingly replacing the wild with the tame and with nothing to stop us but ourselves. But this reality cannot be sustained. As the timeline rolls forward past 2020, the documentary depicts a sobering vision of future ecological disaster if we continue on this path.

Biodiversity, Attenborough argues, is the answer to these problems. The significance of biodiversity in maintaining ecosystems both in our oceans and on land is not just so animals and plants can flourish, but so humanity can survive. 

Attenborough remarks that healthy and diverse oceans and forests are one of our most important natural allies in removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere – acting essentially as “ carbon sponges ” – and that rewilding the majority of these spaces is our key to survival.  

The overarching message as the documentary draws to a close is that it’s still not too late if we act now. It paints a picture of a future world where society has finally achieved harmony with the natural world. This includes rewilding vast expanses of nature and shifting from a dependency on fossil fuels to renewable energy sources as well as fine tuning our agricultural processes and diets to minimise our damaging impact. 

This means cutting down on meat consumption, implementing sustainable fishing tactics and using new techniques to increase produce yields to reduce the amount of land needed for farming.

There is a sense of finality and urgency to Attenborough’s message throughout the film. A last ditch appeal to the conscience of the public at large, after decades of advocacy on screen for the inherent beauty and value of the natural world. But it also serves as a warning of where the real threat lies.

The real threat is not to the survival of the planet, Attenborough warns, but to the survival of humanity.

The opening and closing scenes are filmed in Chernobyl, Ukraine. As the camera pulls back, the healed aftermath of the explosion is revealed: an entire city overgrown with foliage, reclaimed by local wildlife. 

In the absence of humans, the environment has re-established a balanced ecosystem. The real threat is not to the survival of the planet, Attenborough warns, but to the survival of humanity. And if we want to survive, “we need to learn to work with nature, not against it.”

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by Impakter.com columnists are their own, not those of Impakter.com. — In the Featured Photo: Sun Over Earth (NASA, International Space Station, 07/21/03). This view of Earth’s horizon as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean was taken by an Expedition 7 crewmember onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Anvil tops of thunderclouds are also visible. Featured Photo Credit: NASA

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Charlotte is a former junior editor at Impakter. She is based in the UK and has a BA (Hons) degree in Journalism from the University of Kent. She is interested in health, equality and environmental issues and enjoys producing compelling, data driven stories.

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Short Essay on Our Planet Earth [100, 200, 400 words] With PDF

Earth is the only planet that sustains life and ecosystems. In this lesson, you will learn to write essays in three different sets on the planet earth to help you in preparing for your upcoming examinations.

Short Essay on Our Planet Earth in 100 Words

Earth is a rare planet since it is the only one that can support life. On Earth, life is possible for various reasons, the most essential of which are the availability of water and the presence of oxygen. Earth is a member of the Solar System. The Earth, along with the other seven planets, orbits the Sun.

One spin takes approximately twenty-four hours, and one revolution takes 365 days and four hours. Day and night, as well as the changing of seasons, occurs due to rotation and revolution. However, we have jeopardized our planet by our sheer ignorance and negligence. We must practise conservation of resources and look after mother earth while we have time.

Short Essay on Our Planet Earth in 200 Words

Earth is a blue planet that is special from the rest of the planets because it is the only one to sustain life. The availability of water and oxygen are two of the most crucial factors that make life possible on Earth. The Earth rotates around the Sun, along with seven other planets in the solar system. It takes 24 hours to complete one rotation, and approximately 365 days and 4 hours to complete one revolution. Day and night, as well as changing seasons, are all conceivable due to these two movements. 

However, we are wasting and taking advantage of the natural resources that have been bestowed upon us. Overuse and exploitation of all-natural resources produce pollution to such an alarming degree that life on Earth is on the verge of extinction. The depletion of the ozone layer has resulted in global warming. The melting of glaciers has resulted in rising temperatures.

Many animals have become extinct or are endangered. To protect the environment, we must work together. Conversation, resource reduction, reuse, and recycling will take us a long way toward restoring the natural ecosystem. We are as unique as our home planet. We have superior intelligence, which we must employ for the benefit of all living beings. The Earth is our natural home, and we must create a place that is as good as, if not better than, paradise.

Short Essay on Our Planet Earth in 400 Words

Earth is a unique planet as it is the only planet that sustains life. Life is possible on Earth because of many reasons, and the most important among them is the availability of water and oxygen. Earth is a part of the family of the Sun. It belongs to the Solar System.

Earth, along with seven other planets, revolves around the Sun. It takes roughly twenty-four hours to complete one rotation and 365 days and 4 hours to complete one revolution. Rotation and revolution make day and night and change of seasons simultaneously possible. The five seasons we experience in one revolution are Spring, Summer, Monsoon, Autumn, and Winter.

However, we are misusing resources and exploiting the natural gifts that have been so heavily endowed upon us. Overuse and misuse of all the natural resources are causing pollution to such an extent that it has become alarming to the point of destruction. The most common form of pollution caused upon the earth by us is Air Pollution, Land Pollution, Water Pollution, and Noise Pollution.

This, in turn, had resulted in Ozone Layer Depletion and Global Warming. Due to ozone layer depletion, there harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun are reaching the earth. It, in turn, is melting glaciers and causing a rise in temperature every year. Many animals have either extinct or are endangered due to human activities.

Some extinct animals worldwide are Sabre-toothed Cat, Woolly Mammoth, Dodo, Great Auk, Stellers Sea Cow, Tasmanian Tiger, Passenger Pigeon, Pyrenean Ibex. The extinct animals in the Indian subcontinent are the Indian Cheetah, pink-headed duck, northern Sumatran rhinoceros, and Sunderban dwarf rhinoceros.

The endangered animals that are in need of our immediate attention in India are Royal Bengal Tiger, Snow leopard, Red panda, Indian rhinoceros, Nilgiri tahr, Asiatic lion, Ganges river dolphin, Gharial and Hangul, among others. We have exploited fossil fuels to such an extent that now we run the risk of using them completely. We must switch to alternative sources of energy that are nature friendly. Solar power, windmills, hydra power should be used more often, and deforestation must be made illegal worldwide.

We must come together to preserve the natural environment. Conversation, reduction, reuse and recycling of the resources will take us a long way in rebuilding the natural habitat. We are as unique as our planet earth. We have higher intelligence, and we must use it for the well-being of all living organisms. The Earth is our natural abode, and we must make a place as close to Paradise, if not better.

Hopefully, after going through this lesson, you have a holistic idea about our planet Earth. I have tried to cover every aspect that makes it unique and the reasons to practise conversation of natural resources. If you still have any doubts regarding this session, kindly let me know through the comment section below. To read more such essays on many important topics, keep browsing our website. 

Join us on Telegram to get the latest updates on our upcoming sessions. Thank you, see you again soon.

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Essay on Earth

500 words essay on earth.

The earth is the planet that we live on and it is the fifth-largest planet. It is positioned in third place from the Sun. This essay on earth will help you learn all about it in detail. Our earth is the only planet that can sustain humans and other living species. The vital substances such as air, water, and land make it possible.

All About Essay on Earth

The rocks make up the earth that has been around for billions of years. Similarly, water also makes up the earth. In fact, water covers 70% of the surface. It includes the oceans that you see, the rivers, the sea and more.

Thus, the remaining 30% is covered with land. The earth moves around the sun in an orbit and takes around 364 days plus 6 hours to complete one round around it. Thus, we refer to it as a year.

Just like revolution, the earth also rotates on its axis within 24 hours that we refer to as a solar day. When rotation is happening, some of the places on the planet face the sun while the others hide from it.

As a result, we get day and night. There are three layers on the earth which we know as the core, mantle and crust. The core is the centre of the earth that is usually very hot. Further, we have the crust that is the outer layer. Finally, between the core and crust, we have the mantle i.e. the middle part.

The layer that we live on is the outer one with the rocks. Earth is home to not just humans but millions of other plants and species. The water and air on the earth make it possible for life to sustain. As the earth is the only livable planet, we must protect it at all costs.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

There is No Planet B

The human impact on the planet earth is very dangerous. Through this essay on earth, we wish to make people aware of protecting the earth. There is no balance with nature as human activities are hampering the earth.

Needless to say, we are responsible for the climate crisis that is happening right now. Climate change is getting worse and we need to start getting serious about it. It has a direct impact on our food, air, education, water, and more.

The rising temperature and natural disasters are clear warning signs. Therefore, we need to come together to save the earth and leave a better planet for our future generations.

Being ignorant is not an option anymore. We must spread awareness about the crisis and take preventive measures to protect the earth. We must all plant more trees and avoid using non-biodegradable products.

Further, it is vital to choose sustainable options and use reusable alternatives. We must save the earth to save our future. There is no Planet B and we must start acting like it accordingly.

Conclusion of Essay on Earth

All in all, we must work together to plant more trees and avoid using plastic. It is also important to limit the use of non-renewable resources to give our future generations a better planet.

FAQ on Essay on Earth

Question 1: What is the earth for kids?

Answer 1: Earth is the third farthest planet from the sun. It is bright and bluish in appearance when we see it from outer space. Water covers 70% of the earth while land covers 30%. Moreover, the earth is the only planet that can sustain life.

Question 2: How can we protect the earth?

Answer 2: We can protect the earth by limiting the use of non-renewable resources. Further, we must not waste water and avoid using plastic.

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'The future of life on Earth lies in the balance' – a picture essay

Almost 600 conservation experts have signed a letter by the wildlife charity WWF, published to coincide with UN report into loss of biodiversity

Almost 600 conservation experts have signed the Call4Nature open letter written by wildlife charity WWF, which is being published to coincide with the IPBES report (see letter below).

Overfishing

“We are overfishing our oceans at an alarming rate and choking them with plastic and other pollutants. If we want to see healthy seas that will continue to provide us with food, we need to stop this over-exploitation, protect our incredible marine environments and make sustainable fishing the norm, as we see here.” Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, chef and vice- president of Fauna and Flora International

A boat fishing for bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean Sea, which is only allowed for one month a year, from 15 May to 15 June

“I spent a month on a bluefin fishing boat and from what I have seen all the ICCAT (International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna) regulations were respected. Fishermen I talked with seemed to have developed an environmental awareness – at least they understand the importance of keeping the bluefin protected from overfishing, in order to continue fishing and making a living out of it.” Antonio Busiello, photographer

Deforestation

“Every year millions of hectares of pristine tropical rainforest are lost for the production of beef, soy, timber and palm oil. These magnificent forests store huge amounts of carbon and are home to some of our planet’s greatest wildlife. Their protection is critical to stop runaway climate change and halt the sixth mass extinction.” Jack Harries, film-maker activist and WWF ambassador

Elephants walk through an oil palm plantation and eat the trunks of felled old oil palm trees at Sabah Softwoods in Sabah, Borneo, Indonesia

“I had very mixed emotions when taking this image. I was struck with a sense of sadness at seeing the elephants in a seemingly unnatural environment for them. Equally, I was taken aback by watching them use this environment to their advantage as a food source, and the efforts of plantation owners to create wildlife corridors within their plantations to enable elephants to travel to connecting forest areas. I feel that it really highlights the threats that the species faces, yet also demonstrates the resilience they have to being able to adapt to a changing landscape.” Chris Ratcliffe, photographer

Wildlife trade

“The world is waking up to the fact that pangolins are facing extinction as a result of the illegal wildlife trade. Sadly, their natural defence is a gift to traffickers. When threatened they roll into a tight ball. This protects them from predators in the wild, but enables criminals to transport them with ease, just like footballs. To save these remarkable creatures, we need to spread the word and push to stop this illegal trade.” Paul De Ornellas, chief wildlife adviser at WWF

One of the ‘pangolin men’ of Zimbabwe, volunteers who spend their lives rehabilitating the animals after being rescued from poachers

“The man in this photo tends to this pangolin every day, ensuring its rehabilitation after being seized in anti-poaching operations. The image reflects the weight of human responsibility involved in the species and our world’s tomorrow. What we do to the animals we will end up doing to ourselves. Our very futures are intertwined for ever.” Adrian Stern, photographer

Plastic pollution

“Nature is our life support system and without it our lives on this earth would be impossible and unimaginable. We have to stop seeing the natural world as something to be exploited and taken for granted. Nature matters to me and it should matter to you. We need to put more value on our natural assets and stop destroying our precious planet.” Chris Packham, TV presenter, naturalist and founder of Wild Justice

A gannet hangs from a cliff, entangled in plastic fibres at RSPB Grassholm Island, Wales, UK

“Just eight miles off the Welsh mainland, RSPB Grassholm Island should be a paradise for gannets, but in recent years it has become a living hell . I visited the island with a rescue team, who visit each year to cut free the entangled birds. This panicked adult gannet struggled as it dangled from a cliffside, with ropes twisted around its neck like a hangman’s noose. The brave volunteers risked their own lives to creep to the edge of the clifftop and rescue this bird from its death sentence.” Sam Hobson, photographer

Land degradation

“Humankind has already seriously altered three-quarters of Earth’s land surfaces – with no hint of respite. If we are truly to live within the sustainable bounds of our extraordinary planet and leave the space for nature that it so desperately needs, we have to step back and be more considerate about the way we treat our world. More than that, we must actively work to repair the blatant damage we have done. And we have to do that immediately; starting today.” Mark Wright, director of science at WWF

“Trucks the size of a house look like tiny toys as they rumble along massive roads in a section of a mine. The largest of their kind, these 400 ton-capacity dump trucks are 47.5ft long, 32.5ft wide, and 25ft high. Within their dimensions you could build a 3,000 sq ft home. The scale of what we see in this image is truly unfathomable. It’s been reported that the landscape being industrialised by Tar Sands development could easily accommodate one Florida, two New Brunswicks, four Vancouvers, and four Vancouver Islands.” Garth Lenz, photographer

Polar ice cap melting

“The Arctic is in meltdown – it is warming over twice as fast as the global average. Climate change means that walrus, polar bears and people may soon face an ice-free Arctic ocean during the summer, unless we take urgent action now. Though it may seem remote, the impacts felt in the Arctic are not limited to national borders … Nature is crying out for help in every corner of the planet, and it is time for us to listen before we lose the wonders we take for granted.” Rod Downie, chief polar adviser at WWF

Waterfalls cascades in to the sea from the Austfonna polar ice cap on Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway

“I found the image I wanted whilst leading an expedition to Svalbard.The holy grail is to get the waterfalls from it, like we see in the image, a natural phenomenon that only used to occur in the warmest few weeks of the arctic summer. Not now. In recent years I’ve seen the waterfalls at times of the season when I’ve never expected to. And not just one or two waterfalls but many. This dramatic difference is a warning of things to come and one I was determined to record.” Andy Rouse, photographer

Freshwater habitats

“River dolphin populations in Asia are plummeting due to human activities such as dam building, fishing, boat traffic and pollution. We cannot allow that to happen to one of the Amazon’s most charismatic mammals. We need to act fast to save this species and avoid the fate of the baiji, the first river dolphin species driven to extinction by humans. Our freshwater habitats – including lakes, rivers and wetlands – are the most threatened of all our global habitats. We know that populations of freshwater species have suffered huge declines since 1970 - falling an average of 83%. That’s a staggering and depressing figure. Our rivers and streams are the blue arteries of our world. Without thriving freshwater habitats, our planet will not survive.” Damian Fleming, director of conservation at WWF

Federico Mosquera, endangered species coordinator from Omacha Foundation, a Colombian non-profit working in wildlife conservation issues, with a captured Amazon River Dolphin

“Federico Mosquera soothes a recently captured Amazon river dolphin, the first of its kind to be tagged with a GPS tracker. Amazon river dolphins are extremely tactile animals and direct contact seems to have a calming effect.

In 2017, WWF Bolivia, Brazil, and Colombia coordinated a tri-national effort to tag and study Amazon river dolphins, applying satellite GPS technology in a ground-breaking project, to better understand river dolphin health and migratory patterns.

Many net casts were unsuccessfully and the exhaustion and despair were starting to take a toll on the team until finally, on the sixth day, they managed to successfully tag one dolphin. Only after the dolphin was released, did they allow themselves to explode in joy and tears.

It was a memorable moment and I believe this image captures very well the profound respect that Federico, the team’s leading biologist, has for this species of dolphins and the immense pressure that he was under during the project. It also symbolises the intimate connection that we have with wildlife.” Jaime Rojo, photographer

Wildlife corridors

“Tigers can travel over 100km to establish their own territories, so these connecting habitats are critical for wild tiger population recovery, and to help achieve the global goal to double the number of wild tigers by 2022, from as few as 3,200 in 2010. However, they are under pressure from habitat loss and poaching. It’s crucial that we do all we can to maintain and connect their habitats, and protect tigers from being hunted. We are seeing tiger populations recover in areas where this is happening, which gives us great hope of protecting these incredible creatures for the future.” Rebecca May, tiger conservation manager at WWF

A wild tiger is captured on a camera trap in corridor eight one of a series of dedicated wildlife corridors between the National Parks of Bhutan

“When I look at this image , I can’t help thinking that we live in an incredible planet. All in this image is the result of millions of years of evolution, of work, to make it as perfect as it is. It reveals another world, unknown to most humans, something more beautiful and jaw-dropping than any science fiction movie. It makes me want to fight twice as hard to stop the current madness of the world.” Emmanuel Rondeau, photographer

The Call4Nature letter

Dear world leaders Nature provides us with the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink. We depend on it to grow our crops, to source our medicines, to house us and to clothe us. When we destroy nature, we destroy the essentials on which we all depend. Today IPBES (Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, www.ipbes.net) – the independent global scientific body on biodiversity of more than 130 governments – publishes its report on the current state of life on Earth. The report paints an alarming picture of species extinctions, wildlife population declines, habitat loss and depletion of ecosystem services − adding to the existing wealth of evidence that we are losing nature at a dramatic and unsustainable rate. The report also makes clear the cause of this destruction: us. We are cutting down our forests, overfishing our seas, polluting our rivers, degrading our soils and changing our climate. This poses an urgent threat to all life on Earth – including ourselves. There is still time to protect what is left and to start restoring nature. But to do that, we must radically change the way we live, including how we use energy to power our societies, grow our food, and manage our waste. This is an immense task but many of the solutions are already at hand. Each of us has a role to play in bringing about this transformational change. But we need you, our political leaders, to lead − and to set us on a path to a future where people and nature thrive. Next year, there is an unmissable opportunity to choose a new direction for people and the planet. Important global decisions will be made on biodiversity, climate change and sustainable development at a series of UN meetings in 2020. Together, these form an action plan for change, a real New Deal for nature and people. But for this to happen, we need decisive and ambitious action from you. That’s why today: We call on you to stop funding activities that destroy nature. We call on you to put an end to deforestation and land degradation. We call on you to protect our oceans and marine life, especially against plastics. We call on you to encourage the transition to sustainable agricultural practices. We call on you to implement the Paris Agreement to halt climate change. The future of all life on Earth lies in the balance. We urge you to act now.

• The Guardian picture essay
• Biodiversity
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Life on Other Planets Essay

Article review.

The article chosen for this part of the assignment is titled “The Extremely Halophilic Microorganisms, a Possible Model for Life on Other Planets,” written by Sergiu Fendrihan, and published in 2017 in Current Trends in Natural Sciences journal. The researchers have analyzed the microscopic life that exists in areas of extreme heat, where water supply exists in the form of salt lakes (Fendrihan 148). Such areas include the Dead Sea, located in the Middle East, as well as various smaller salt lakes found in Africa and Australia.

What these locations have in common is the extremity of conditions in which microorganisms have to exist. According to Fendrihan (148), there is a multitude of halophilic and halotolerant microorganisms inhabiting these areas, up to 159 different subspecies belonging to the Halobacteriaceae family. In addition, these organisms prove to be very resistant to other extremes, such as UV radiation, heat, and lack of nutrients necessary for other bacteria.

Due to the extreme resistance of these bacteria to various hazards, this study provides important data for discovering life on other planets and moons. Mars exhibits signs of water having been present on its surface. In addition, evidence of salty underground oceans has been found on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter (Enceladus and Europa).

Thus, studying halophilic microorganisms supports the possibility of the existence of life on planets previously deemed uninhabitable. Low requirements for water and nutrients as well as high resistance to the elements increases their chances of survival. Investigating these planets would enrich the existing knowledge of space and biology.

Article Discussions

The article titled “Life on Mars: Exploration and Evidence” by Nola Taylor Redd provides cursory information about the state of research regarding life on Mars. The planet used to have large water deposits that were lost due to irradiation and exposure to harsh temperatures. The article suggests that life on Mars may still exist underneath the surface of the planet (Redd). Question: What exactly happened that altered Mars’s climate and caused it to lose so much of its water?

The second article titled “Aliens May Well Exist in a Parallel Universe, New Studies Find” by Brandon Specktor speculates about the existence of life in other dimensions. This article seems more like speculation rather than a contribution to the scientific community, as evidence of the existence of other dimensions is purely theoretical (Specktor). Question: If parallel universes exist, can they influence the events in our universe?

The third article titled “The Four Best Places for Life in Our Solar System” by Nicole Mortillaro provides a summary of four potential places for finding life. These planets and moons include Mars, Europa, Enceladus, and Titan (Mortillaro). This article outlines the requirements currently used to determine the feasibility of life on other planets. Question: Why did NASA restrict itself to studying Mars instead of sending a drone on one of the moons?

The fourth article written by Mike Wall speaks of the protective gravitational barrier of our solar system, which filters out charged particles coming from outside of the solar system. The existence of this protective field makes life on Earth possible (Wall). Studying it would help determine which systems can potentially harbor life and which could not. Question: Is the gravitational barrier unique to the Solar system alone?

The fifth article written by Lisa Kaspin-Powell explores the potential of non-H2O-based lifeforms existing on Titan. The article informs the readers that the elements found in Titan’s atmosphere can form cellular membranes similar to phospholipid molecular chains (Kaspin-Powell). Question: What other elements could potentially form cellular membranes?

The last article written by Seth Shostack provides a list of eight planets within the scope of our solar system that has the potential of harboring life. Aside from the 4 candidates mentioned in the article by Mortillaro, the article adds Earth, Venus, Ganymede, and Callisto, which show gravitational signs of possessing underground water (Shostak). Question: How is gravity related to the presence or absence of water?

Works Cited

Fendrihan, Sergiu. “The Extremely Halophilic Microorganisms, A Possible Model for Life on Other Planets.” Current Trends in Natural Sciences, vol. 6, no. 12, 2017, pp. 147-151.

Kaspin-Powell, Lisa. “Does Titan’s Hydrocarbon Soup Hold a Recipe for Life?” Astrobiology Magazine . 2018. Web.

Mortillaro, Nicole. “ The Four Best Places for Life in Our Solar System .” Global News . 2014. Web.

Redd, Nola Taylor. “ Life on Mars: Exploration and Evidence. ” Space. 2017. Web.

Shostak, Seth. “ 8 Worlds Where Life Might Exist. ” Space. 2006. Web.

Specktor, Brandon. “ Aliens May Well Exist in a Parallel Universe, New Studies Find. ” Space. 2018. Web.

Wall, Mike. “ NASA Will Launch a Probe to Study the Solar System’s Protective Bubble in 2024. ” Space. 2018. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, December 13). Life on Other Planets. https://ivypanda.com/essays/life-on-other-planets/

"Life on Other Planets." IvyPanda , 13 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/life-on-other-planets/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Life on Other Planets'. 13 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Life on Other Planets." December 13, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/life-on-other-planets/.

1. IvyPanda . "Life on Other Planets." December 13, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/life-on-other-planets/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Life on Other Planets." December 13, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/life-on-other-planets/.

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Essay on Save Earth: Samples in 100, 150 and 200 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 11, 2023

There is a popular saying that goes, ’You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Well, then why harm the planet that is providing for you?’ We all should know that our planet Earth is the only planet where life can exist. Our planet provides us with basic necessities such as water, air, food to eat, and much more. So if you want to save our planet Earth for yourself and for the coming future generations then do give this blog a read. Today we will be talking about how you can save your planet Earth by taking all the required measures. We have also listed some sample essay on Save Earth which will help you to talk about the same in public. 

Table of Contents

• 1 Why is Saving Earth so Important?
• 2 Essay on Save Earth in 100 Words
• 3 Essay on Save Earth in 150 Words
• 4 Essay on Save Earth in 200 Words

Why is Saving Earth so Important?

Our planet Earth is the only planet that provides us with raw materials, oxygen, food which we need for fuel, and other essential materials.  

There are a number of reasons why saving the Earth is so important:

• Our Earth is the only planet that supports life. Despite signs of organic molecules and water on other planets and moons, life is only known to exist on Earth. There would be nowhere else for us to go if not Earth.
• Our Earth provides us with basic necessities such as medicine, food, clean water, and air to breathe. 
• The combustion of fossil fuels releases harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which traps heat and warms the earth. Rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and more extreme weather events are just a few of the negative effects of climate change that are already being felt.

Also Read: Essay on Social Issues

Essay on Save Earth in 100 Words

The only planet in the cosmos that is known to sustain life is Earth. Since it is our home, we must take care of it.

There are numerous reasons why protecting the planet is crucial. To begin with, it is our only place of residence. There won’t be somewhere else for us to go if we destroy Earth. Second, Earth gives us food, water, air, and shelter—everything we require to survive. Third, a wide variety of biodiversity exists on Earth, which is vital to human health.

Unfortunately, the health of Earth is being threatened by human activity. Among the difficulties we confront are deforestation, pollution, and climate change.

To save the Earth, we can all do our part. Here are some actions you may take:

• Cut back on the use of fossil fuels. Make more of an effort to walk or bike, drive less, and take public transit wherever you can.
• Make the switch to alternative energy sources like wind and solar energy.
• At home, use less energy and water.
• Reduce trash via composting and recycling.
• Encourage companies and groups that are engaged in environmental protection.

Both our own life and the survival of future generations depend on saving the planet. We can contribute to ensuring that our planet is healthy and habitable for many years to come by acting now.

Also Read: Essay on Save Environment: Samples in 100, 200, 300 Words

Essay on Save Earth in 150 Words

Since the Earth is our home, it is up to us to preserve it. However, the health of the planet is in danger due to human activity. Among the difficulties we confront are deforestation, pollution, and climate change.

The most important environmental issue of our day is climate change. Greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, which causes the earth to warm. Among the detrimental repercussions of climate change that are already being felt are rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and an increase in extreme weather occurrences.

Pollution poses a serious threat to Earth as well. Among the materials we use to damage the air, water, and land are chemicals, plastics, and trash. Not only can pollution harm humans and wildlife, but it can also ruin ecosystems.

Deforestation is another issue. In this, the trees are removed and instead, buildings are constructed.  Forests filter water in addition to providing habitat for species and regulating the climate. Deforestation is one of the primary causes of both climate change and biodiversity loss.

We must take action to safeguard Earth from these threats. We can potentially reduce our carbon footprint by switching to renewable energy sources and consuming less energy. We can also reduce pollution by using less plastic, recycling, and composting. We can also safeguard forests by planting trees and promoting sustainable forestry practices.

Preserving the planet is essential for our own existence as well as that of future generations. To keep our world safe, each of us has a responsibility.

Also Read: Essay on Unity in Diversity in 100 to 200 Words

Essay on Save Earth in 200 Words

The only planet in the solar system where humanity can survive is Earth. Since our planet gives us access to fundamental essentials like clean water, fresh air, and food to eat, it is our duty as humans to make sure that it is habitable for future generations.

We can see that, among all the urgent problems, one of the most significant ones that affect humanity is climate change. Among the detrimental repercussions of climate change that are already being felt are rising sea levels, melting glaciers, and an increase in extreme weather occurrences.

Pollution is another major problem. The majority of the materials that are key to pollution of the air, water, and land are harmful chemicals, plastics that are carelessly thrown away, and other materials. This is not only harmful to humans and wildlife but also to the environment. 

Deforestation is the third main issue; it is the removal of trees for construction or other purposes, like agriculture. One of the main contributors to both climate change and biodiversity loss is deforestation. Consequently, we need to act to defend Earth from these dangers. 

We hope this essay on Save Earth helped you with some knowledge of some of the pressing issues we face on a daily basis and what we can do to save our planet. 

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We can conserve the globe by avoiding contamination of the Earth and its natural resources, including the air and water.

Reducing carbon emissions is the first step towards saving our planet. This can be done by using environmentally friendly resources, conserving water and following the Reduce, Reuse and Recycling practices.

Clearing forest areas for agricultural, human settlement or any other commercial activities is known as deforestation.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay-writing page and follow Leverage Edu ! 

Malvika Chawla

Malvika is a content writer cum news freak who comes with a strong background in Journalism and has worked with renowned news websites such as News 9 and The Financial Express to name a few. When not writing, she can be found bringing life to the canvasses by painting on them.

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Life on Other Planets: What is Life and What Does It Need?

One day, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, a faraway planet could yield hints that it might host some form of life – but surrender its secrets reluctantly.

Our space telescopes might detect a mixture of gases in its atmosphere that resembles our own. Computer models would offer predictions about the planet’s life-bearing potential. Experts would debate whether the evidence made a strong case for the presence of life, or try to find still more evidence to support such a groundbreaking interpretation.

“We are in the beginning of a golden era right now,” said Ravi Kopparapu, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who studies habitable planets. “For the first time in the history of civilization we might be able to answer the question: Is there life beyond Earth?”

For exoplanets – planets around other stars – that era opens with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Instruments aboard the spacecraft are detecting the composition of atmospheres on exoplanets. As the power of telescopes increases in the years ahead, future advanced instruments could capture possible signs of life – “biosignatures” – from a planet light-years away.

Within our solar system, the Perseverance rover on Mars is gathering rock samples for eventual return to Earth, so scientists can probe them for signs of life. And the coming Europa Clipper mission will visit an icy moon of Jupiter. Its goal: to determine whether conditions on that moon would allow life to thrive in its global ocean, buried beneath a global ice shell.

But any hints of life beyond Earth would come with another big question: How certain could any scientific conclusions really be?

“The challenge is deciding what is life – when to say, ‘I found it,’” said Laurie Barge of the Origins and Habitability Lab at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

With so much unknown about what even constitutes a “sign of life,” astrobiologists are working on a new framework to understand the strength of the evidence. A sample framework, proposed in 2021, includes a scale ranging from 1 to 7, with hints of other life at level 1, to increasingly substantial evidence, all the way to certainty of life elsewhere at level 7. This framework, which is being discussed and revised, acknowledges that scientific exploration in the search for life is a twisted, winding road, rather than a straightforward path.

And identifying definitive signs remains difficult enough for “life as we know it.” Even more uncertain would be finding evidence of life as we don’t know it, made of unfamiliar molecular combinations or based on a solvent other than water.

Still, as the search for life begins in earnest, among the planets in our own solar system as well as far distant systems known only by their light, NASA scientists and their partners around the world have some ideas that serve as starting points.

Life That Evolves

First, there’s NASA’s less-than-formal, non-binding but still helpful working definition of life: “A self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” Charles Darwin famously described evolution by natural selection, with characteristics preserved across generations leading to changes in organisms over time.

Derived in the 1990s by a NASA exobiology working group, the definition is not used to design missions or research projects. It does help to set expectations, and to focus debate on the critical issues around another thorny question: When does non-life become life?

“Biology is chemistry with history,” says Gerald Joyce, one of the members of the working group that helped create the NASA definition and now a research professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

That means history recorded by the chemistry itself – in our case, inscribed in our DNA, which encodes genetic data that can be translated into the structures and physical processes that make up our bodies.

The DNA record must be robust, complex, self-replicating and open-ended, Joyce suggests, to endure and adapt over billions of years.

“That would be a smoking gun: evidence for information having been recorded in molecules,” Joyce said.

Such a molecule from another world in our solar system, whether DNA, RNA or something else, might turn up in a sample from Mars, say from the Mars sample-return mission now being planned by NASA.

Or it might be found among the “ocean worlds” in the outer solar system – Jupiter’s moon, Europa, Saturn’s Enceladus or one of the other moons of gas giants that hide vast oceans beneath shells of ice.

We can’t obtain samples of such information-bearing molecules from planets beyond our solar system, since they are so far away that it would take tens of thousands of years to travel there even in the fastest spaceships ever built. Instead, we’ll have to rely on remote detection of potential biosignatures, measuring the types and quantities of gases in exoplanet atmospheres to try to determine whether they were generated by life-forms. That likely will require deeper knowledge of what life needs to get its start – and to persist long enough to be detected.

A Place Where Life Emerges

There is no true consensus on a list of requirements for life, whether in our solar system or the stars beyond. But Joyce, who researches life’s origin and development, suggests a few likely “must-haves.”

Topping the list is liquid water. Despite a broad spectrum of environmental conditions inhabited by living things on Earth, all life on the planet seems to require it. Liquid water provides a medium for the chemical components of life to persist over time and come together for reactions, in a way that air or the surface of a rock don’t do as well.

Also essential: an energy source, both for chemical reactions that produce structures and to create “order” against the universal tendency toward “disorder” – also known as entropy.

An imbalance in atmospheric gases also might offer a tell-tale sign of the presence of life.

“In Earth’s atmosphere, oxygen and methane are highly reactive with each other,” Kopparapu said. Left to themselves, they would quickly cancel each other out.

“They should not be seen together,” he said. “So why are we seeing methane, why are we seeing oxygen? Something must be constantly replenishing these compounds.”

On Earth, that “something” is life, pumping more of each into the atmosphere and keeping it out of balance. Such an imbalance, in these compounds or others, could be detected on a distant exoplanet, suggesting the presence of a living biosphere. But scientists also will have to rule out geological processes like volcanic or hydrothermal activity that could generate molecules that we might otherwise associate with life.

Careful laboratory work and precision modeling of possible exoplanet atmospheres will be needed to tell the difference.

Going Through Changes

Barge also places high on the list the idea of “gradients,” or changes that occur over time and distance, like wet to dry, hot to cold, and many other possible environments. Gradients create places for energy to go, changing along the way and generating molecules or chemical systems that later might be incorporated into life-forms.

Plate tectonics on Earth, and the cycling of gases like carbon dioxide – buried beneath Earth’s crust by subduction, perhaps, or released back into the atmosphere by volcanoes – represent one kind of gradient.

Barge’s specialty, the chemistry of hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor billions of years ago, is another. It’s one possible pathway to have created a kind of primitive metabolism – the translation of organic compounds into energy – as a potential precursor to true life-forms.

“What gradients existed before life?” she asks. “If life depends so much on gradients, could the origin of life also have benefited from these gradients?”

Clearer mapping of possible pathways to life ultimately could inform the design of future space telescopes, tasked with parsing the gases in the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets.

“If we want to be sure it’s coming from biology, we have to not only look for gases; we have to look at how it’s being emitted from the planet, if it’s emitted in the right quantities, in the right way,” Kopparapu said. “With future telescopes, we’ll be more confident because they’ll be designed to look for life on other planets.”

Search for Life

This article is one in a series about how NASA is searching for life in the cosmos.

Beginnings: Life on Our World and Others

The Hunt for Life on Mars – and Elsewhere in the Solar System

'Life' in the Lab

Searching for Signs of Intelligent Life: Technosignatures

Finding Life Beyond Earth: What Comes Next?

Related Terms

• Terrestrial Exoplanets
• The Search for Life

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NASA Is Helping Protect Tigers, Jaguars, and Elephants. Here’s How.

Two Small NASA Satellites Will Measure Soil Moisture, Volcanic Gases

NASA’s Webb Maps Weather on Planet 280 Light-Years Away

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Black Holes

Unravelling life’s origin: five key breakthroughs from the past five years

Associate professor, Dublin City University

PhD Student in Astrobiology, Dublin City University

Disclosure statement

Seán Jordan receives funding from European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 1101114969) and from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI Pathway award 22/PATH-S/10692). He is affiliated with the Origin of Life Early-career Network (OoLEN).

Louise Gillet de Chalonge receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 1101114969). She is affiliated with the Origin of Life Early-career Network (OoLEN).

Dublin City University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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There is still so much we don’t understand about the origin of life on Earth.

The definition of life itself is a source of debate among scientists, but most researchers agree on the fundamental ingredients of a living cell. Water, energy, and a few essential elements are the prerequisites for cells to emerge. However, the exact details of how this happens remain a mystery.

Recent research has focused on trying to recreate in the lab the chemical reactions that constitute life as we know it, in conditions plausible for early Earth (around 4 billion years ago). Experiments have grown in complexity, thanks to technological progress and a better understanding of what early Earth conditions were like.

However, far from bringing scientists together and settling the debate, the rise of experimental work has led to many contradictory theories. Some scientists think that life emerged in deep-sea hydrothermal vents , where the conditions provided the necessary energy. Others argue that hot springs on land would have provided a better setting because they are more likely to hold organic molecules from meteorites. These are just two possibilities which are being investigated.

Here are five of the most remarkable discoveries over the last five years.

Reactions in early cells

What energy source drove the chemical reactions at the origin of life? This is the mystery that a research team in Germany has sought to unravel. The team delved into the feasibility of 402 reactions known to create some of the essential components of life, such as nucleotides (a building block of DNA and RNA). They did this using some of the most common elements that could have been found on the early Earth.

These reactions, present in modern cells, are also believed to be the core metabolism of LUCA, the last universal common ancestor , a single-cell, bacterium-like organism.

For each reaction, they calculated the changes in free energy, which determines if a reaction can go forward without other external sources of energy. What is fascinating is that many of these reactions were independent of external influences like adenosine triphosphate , a universal source of energy in living cells.

The synthesis of life’s fundamental building blocks didn’t need an external energy boost: it was self-sustaining.

Volcanic glass

Life relies on molecules to store and convey information. Scientists think that RNA (ribonucleic acid) strands were precursors to DNA in fulfilling this role, since their structure is more simple.

The emergence of RNA on our planet has long confused researchers. However, some progress has been made recently. In 2022, a team of collaborators in the US generated stable RNA strands in the lab. They did it by passing nucleotides through volcanic glass. The strands they made were long enough to store and transfer information.

Volcanic glass was present on the early Earth, thanks to frequent meteorite impacts coupled with a high volcanic activity. The nucleotides used in the study are also believed to have been present at that time in Earth’s history. Volcanic rocks could have facilitated the chemical reactions that assembled nucleotides into RNA chains.

• Hydrothermal vents

Carbon fixation is a process in which CO₂ gains electrons. It is necessary to build the molecules that form the basis of life.

An electron donor is necessary to drive this reaction. On the early Earth, H₂ could have been the electron donor. In 2020, a team of collaborators showed that this reaction could spontaneously occur and be fuelled by environmental conditions similar to deep-sea alkaline hydrothermal vents in the early ocean. They did this using microfluidic technology , devices that manipulate tiny volumes of liquids to perform experiments by simulating alkaline vents.

This pathway is strikingly similar to how many modern bacterial and archaeal cells (single-cell organisms without a nucleas) operate.

The Krebs Cycle

In modern cells, carbon fixation is followed by a cascade of chemical reactions that assemble or break down molecules, in intricate metabolic networks that are driven by enzymes.

But scientists are still debating how metabolic reactions unfolded before the emergence and evolution of those enzymes. In 2019, a team from the University of Strasbourg in France made a breakthrough . They showed that ferrous iron, a type of iron that was abundant in early Earth’s crust and ocean, could drive nine out of 11 steps of the Krebs Cycle . The Krebs Cycle is a biological pathway present in many living cells.

Here, ferrous iron acted as the electron donor for carbon fixation, which drove the cascade of reactions. The reactions produced all five of the universal metabolic precursors – five molecules that are fundamental across various metabolic pathways in all living organisms.

Building blocks of ancient cell membranes

Understanding the formation of life’s building blocks and their intricate reactions is a big step forward in comprehending the emergence of life.

However, whether they unfolded in hot springs on land or in the deep sea, these reactions would not have gone far without a cell membrane. Cell membranes play an active role in the biochemistry of a primitive cell and its connection with the environment.

Modern cell membranes are mostly composed of compounds called phospholipids, which contain a hydrophilic head and two hydrophobic tails. They are structured in bilayers, with the hydrophilic heads pointing outward and the hydrophobic tails pointing inward.

Research has shown that some components of phospholipids, such as the fatty acids that constitute the tails, can self-assemble into those bilayer membranes in a range of environmental conditions . But were these fatty acids present on the early Earth? Recent research from Newcastle University, UK gives an interesting answer. Researchers recreated the spontaneous formation of these molecules by combining H₂-rich fluids, likely present in ancient alkaline hydrothermal vents, with CO₂-rich water resembling the early ocean.

This breakthrough aligns with the hypothesis that stable fatty acid membranes could have originated in alkaline hydrothermal vents, potentially progressing into living cells. The authors speculated that similar chemical reactions might unfold in the subsurface oceans of icy moons, which are thought to have hydrothermal vents similar to terrestrial ones.

Each of these discoveries adds a new piece to the puzzle of the origin of life. Regardless of which ones are proved correct, contrasting theories are fuelling the search for answers. As Charles Darwin wrote :

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science for they often long endure: but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.

• Chemical reactions
• Origins of Life
• Charles Darwin
• Scientific discovery
• nucleotides

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