Yes, I also want to congratulate David Attenborough on his special birthday today and personally thank him, along with all the teams supporting him, for the hundreds of hours of stunning footage of the natural world.

I’m thick into reading about the ‘Natural World’ at the moment in preparation for my Master’s dissertation. I am overwhelmed and warmed by how much is written about the subject, from every angle—scientific, philosophical, and anthropological. This week alone, I have read nineteen articles. Most are really heavy going, where I have to reread each paragraph twice to find meaning, and there is one difficult word on each page that I will need to translate into English: fecundity, parsimony, simulacra, pabulum. Don’t ask me. I’ve already forgotten.

There are two consistent themes in the writings. Firstly, we humans are biophilic (yeah, another one). This means we have an innate biological need to connect with nature. ‘Nature’ itself is a disputed term in academia, but to laypeople and Mr Attenborough, I will refer to animals (another disputed term). The second widely held view is summed up for me by John Berger: “in the last two centuries, animals have generally disappeared. Today we live without them.” This stung me, ” Today we live without them”. But I know it is true (for me). I know that my pets are not living their real lives, and I see almost no ‘wild’ animals in my day-to-day life. So, once again, I need to thank David Attenborough for showing me what ‘wildness’ is and trusting that he, as one of the first to film, had a minimal effect on the environments they were working in.

We know so little about the real man. My reading this morning suggests that he was rejected for his first job at the Beeb, has a pacemaker and two new knees, never took a driving test, hates crowds, and has a genuine fear of rats (who would have thought it?).

Now, David Attenborough has always been one of those people I would like to be stranded on a desert island with. Although, I think I would need to be marooned with my Collins Oxford Dictionary. I bet he knows lots of big words.

Pic : Nikolett Emmert, unsplash