The New Yorker Radio Hour - David Attenborough’s Planet (We Just Live on It)

Episode Date: January 19, 2018

David Attenborough’s films for the BBC—impeccably researched, ambitiously filmed, and executed with style and imagination—have set a high bar for nature documentaries in our time. Over sixty years, his films have taught generations of us about the extraordinary diversity of life on the planet. His latest project is a seven-part survey of the world’s oceans, called “Planet Earth: Blue Planet II,” which débuts this week on BBC America. The series uses every technological advance, including drone-mounted and submersible cameras, to bring us closer to nature’s extremities. Attenborough talks with David Remnick about breaking precedent to give the film an overtly environmental message; about his determination at age ninety-one to keep working; and about the only creatures he really can’t stand. Plus, a look at how the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver finds spiritual meaning in the natural world. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

I basically just think it would be interesting to look at the emergence of a criminal economy. And also, I'm always amazed that there aren't more profiles of her out there. This really subversive, strange thing, in rap especially, and see what their lives are like on both sides of the border. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I take up my hearing aids.

And put on the lines. Yes, and they're on the line for you now. They're there now. They're there now. Okay, well, I can hear. Is anybody there? Sir David, it's David Remnick from the New Yorker magazine. How are you?

How nice to meet you? How are you? I'm terrific, and all the better for talking to you. I just, I'm just thrilled to be talking to you. And if you don't already recognize who that voice belongs to, it's David Attenborough. He's been documenting the world and its creatures for 60 years, and in Britain, he's often called a national treasure.

In a far corner of Southeast Asia, lies the coral triangle, cluster of the richest coral reefs in the world, undersea cities crammed full of life. Attenborough's films for the BBC impeccably researched, ambitiously filmed, and executed with incredible style and imagination, have set the high by. for nature documentaries in our time. His latest project is a seven-part survey of the world's oceans called Planet Earth, Blue Planet 2, and it debuts this week on BBC America.

It captures aspects of the animal world that we've never seen before, fish that use tools and eat birds and octopus, building itself an armor of discarded shells. And amidst our astonishment at all this, it makes you think hard about human beings and our place in the world. So, David, I have to tell you, over the past weekend, a long weekend, I just watched and watched and watched the world of the ocean.

It was an incredible experience. I've got to that. Well, over the past 60 years, you've told the story of life on Earth from every continent, every habitat, and have probably documented as many animals as Linnaeus. What gives you the perpetual sense of awe about the natural world? Well, I suppose infinite variety is what gives you awe. I mean, the fact that there is almost every problem has had more solutions to it by evolution than you can imagine. It doesn't matter what it is, whether it's chewing vegetation or whether it's flying or whether it's concealing yourself. There is an infinity of answers that the natural history has produced.

and many of them are perfectly logical. You can sort of imagine how it happened. Quite a lot aren't. And one of the great astonishments is why so many of them are so beautiful. I suppose we're not time to get too hoist hoist hoist about it all. But, I mean, why butterflies are so beautiful is a matter of all? It's a good question. And why a sea slug is so beautiful?

Who knew? I have to tell you on a story. To start this conversation, I'm a confirmed city boy. I go by the terrible rubric of I am at two with nature. Nature is not something that's natural to me. But then I'm the same. I'm a city boy. I was brought up in a city in Leicester in the middle of England.

And perhaps it is the city people who haven't grown up with the natural world as intimately as country boys, for whom that perception of awe comes as so bewitching an emotion, a response. This has been six decades of making these films. I have to ask, of all the creatures you've seen, what sticks out in your mind as the strangest and most beautiful and incomprehensible? Well, those are conflicting adjectives. But one of the things in Blue Planet, which I never see, to wonder about and take joy from,

is a creature called the weedy sea dragon. It occurs in the waters of South Australia. It's like a sea horse, and it swims not vertically with its body vertical, but horizontally. And it's disguised as seaweed to a simply unbelievable degree. I mean, its limbs and its flanks and its tail and its eyebrows and one thing another. They all like bits of seaweed. You can't tell the difference.

And then they have this wonderful dance in which the male and courts are female. And then the female, having got the eggs being fertilized, a female hands over the eggs to the male. And he looks after them. The whole business is Disney-esque. I mean, it is quite unbelievable. And very often there are creatures that, at least in your films, and in reality, perhaps, have a real person. At one point in this series, one of your filmmakers describes a particular octopus as having a personality. Is it like celebrities somehow?

Does some animals just, you know, as they say in Hollywood, have it? Yes, some do and some don't, and it depends on how they live their lives. I mean, it's difficult to imagine that herrings in a shoal of 10,000 can have individual personalities because they go with the shoal. but octopus in particular, which are living in a solitary way for most of their lives, they certainly have personalities and people who've actually kept them in laboratories know perfectly well. They're artful, they're cunning.

You almost wonder at times where they've got sense of humour. Do they have a sense of humor? Do you think there's some wit to these creatures? I think chimps have a sense of humour, actually. I think chimps do things just for the hell of it and see what's going to happen. Are there any creatures that you can't stand? I don't care for rats, I have to say. I mean, I've had rats run over my face when I'm asleep, and that's not fun.

Where did that happen? Not at home. Where? Yeah. And the Solomon's, yes, in the Solomon Islands sleeping. Yeah, it's not too good. And I've had rats leap out of the loo as you're sitting on the loo and they come up between your thighs. That is not to be recommended either.

Oh, I'm having a moment. And when you're crafting a story about a creature, do you look for the animal's most essential characteristic or the characteristic which is most, you know, I hate to say to use the word, but relatable to the person watching at home? Well, I was going to say the anthropomorphizing temptation is great, but actually we have got over the rather Saint-Plis view of this. I mean, when I was making these films 30 years ago, the idea that you credited any animal. with any emotion that you might remotely call human, was anathema. I mean, you thought, oh, you mustn't do that on scientific. But the fact of the matter is that if you follow individual animals,

which 50 years ago was not something in the way in which zoologists normally worked, they generalised all the time. But when you get to know a particular animal, then you begin to realize and study them, as you do when you're making films, you suddenly realize that they are different, you know, I mean, and that's not just monkeys and apes, or even octopods.

That happens to me with spiders. I remember very clearly making a film about spiders, or this was 20 years ago, I suppose. This was a spider occurs in the middle of the United States called a bolus spider, which actually it spins silk, it puts a little blob on the bottom of the thrine, and then it whirls it like a bolus. I said to the cameraman, look, that's what it does, oh boy, go away. and do it and film it. And in due course, I went down there.

It was in Georgia, I remember. And he had a number of milk bottles. He had ten milk bottles in a line. And he had sprigs of vegetation in each one of them. And on each one of them, there was a spider. He said, this one, he said, is absolutely hopeless. I mean, if you're shown a light, she won't do anything at all. She simply won't show her spolus.

The one next to it, it's not a question of light. She hates sound, and if I make a click or something, she stops. This one is just bone idle. Never does anything at all. But that one, she's absolute darling. You just put a butterfly, put a moth anywhere near her, and she swings her bolus, and it's absolutely dead sir. You've got a great shot.

Well, okay, spiders with individual personalities. Come on. How did you first get addicted to this as a kid? Finding fossils, I think. It's one of the mysteries, isn't it? that a lot of kids love collecting things. And it's easy to be toffee-nosed about this rather trivial, childish thing, of collecting things. Actually, it's very, very important.

All the great naturalists were, and natural scientists were collectors when they were boys. Darwin was absolutely obsessed with Beatles. And I'm not putting myself in the same bracket as Darwin, but just collecting fossils in the Jurassic on the... the rocks where I grew up outside the city of Leicester, I used to find all these amazing things. I used to knock a rock with a hammer

and then suddenly see it fall apart and realize that there was a most wonderfully beautiful shell perfect in every detail and that had not seen the life of day for 150 million years and that mine were the first eyes ever to human eyes to fall on it. Well, that's thrilling.

And then when you discover that they're not all the same, and that you can find a dozen different kinds, and that some are rare and some aren't. That's a never-ending fascination. I've never got tired of it and never cured myself. Well, Darwin had a hammer. He had the ability to collect, but he didn't have the technology that you had, that making Blue Planet 2. What's gotten away?

What animal has eluded your grasp or lens? Is there a quest still in front of you? I still want to find the fill in the blank. I could easily have answered that question to you 30 years ago. There were dozens of things. I mean, I remember writing into a script, oh, 20 years ago, a sequence about snow leopards. And all I did in those days when I was writing scripts, I wrote as though everything was accessible. It's just a question of application or working it out. And then when they saw it,

they said, look, nobody's ever filmed Snow Leppardop before ever. And it's very, very rare, and it lives in very, very remote places. And so a blue pencil goes through that lot, because you can't, there's a limit the amount of time and money you can spend on things. But now, or not now, but a sea is called Planet Earth, where we have all the modern, of tracking collars you can put on the things. We were able to get shots of this. We were able to put up, not even cameraman. We put up remote camera traps, unattended cameras,

switched on by the action of the animal coming along, turning it on, taking pictures of it, spraying the rocks with urine, and then after two minutes when the animal had left, turning itself off. And we've got a terrific sequence. So there are solutions now to almost everything you can think of. I mean, we can film at night, We can film at the bottom of the sea.

We can speed things up. We can slow things down. And we can film from the air. We can film remotely. It's just extraordinary what we can do. Even, I mean, in this series, we couldn't possibly have shown sea lions trapping tuna. Because the only way you could see how they actually did it was from the air.

Well, five years ago, we couldn't have done that. now we have drones and we were able to send it up and get these extraordinary shots and nobody ever seen before of sea lions doing just that herding in these two into this bay which is a contestant

this time when the shoal tries to escape he blocks them and drives them back into the next blind alley pick them off one by one there is no doubt that compared to all of your previous work blue planet two makes the clear statement about the peril that the world's oceans are in.

In the final episode, you say, for years we thought the oceans were so vast and the inhabitants so infinitely numerous that nothing we could do could have an effect on them. But now we know that was wrong. When you finish this project, you and your colleagues, a lot of colleagues, do you leave it with a sense of optimism or the opposite? I don't think that either optimism or pessimism are the most appropriate words, really, because making a global generalisation is a difficult thing to do. What it leaves me with is the thought that I can see problems that have got to be solved,

and I think they have to be solved. We have to face up to them and have to do something about them, and that I couldn't look my grandchildren in the eyes if they said, Granddad, you could see that was happening and you didn't tell anybody or you didn't do anything about it or you didn't mention it. That would be terrible. And I have no alternative, but you have to speak about this sort of thing. And there are things that can be done. There are instances for us to realise that we can do things.

I mean, after all, we have saved the whales. It was pioneers who, 20, 30 years ago, got together the maritime nations of the world and saying, if we go on killing whales at the rate we're doing, we're going to exterminate them. And human beings from all around the world, governments got together and said, okay, then we will actually sort out this question. And indeed, in this last program, we explained that sperm whales, which were on the verge of disappearing, nobody knew where they'd gone or how many had gone, have suddenly come back. And around the waters of Sri Lanka, there are now actually great numbers of sperm whales.

quite extraordinary, which is a marvelous demonstration that if you give the natural world just half a chance, it bounces back in an extraordinary way. That is what gives you optimism. What gives you pessimism, of course, is the fact that there are people still people who denied that it's happening. Some of them are in very high office. Some of them are in very high office. So, David, how does this immersion in the natural world, in the animal world, in the ocean, affect your day-to-day view of human beings. How is it different than most of us walking along 8th Avenue or wherever we are?

Well, I suppose I mustn't talk about elevating or putting down. But you do realize that we're one. You do realize that the natural world. that life, this mysterious thing, which nobody's actually being able to identify. You can't define it. The difference between something that was just living five minutes ago and is not anymore is very difficult to define. But you know when other things have it, and you know when they don't. And we are the same, you know, from that point of view.

And that's what that sort of mortality is. what links us all. I guess that's what I was going to ask, is how does it make you view the end of things for yourself or for your friends or for humanity differently? Yeah, I mean,

the things affect you in the same way as they affect you when you see watching any other kind of animal. And the closer it comes, the more you're aware of it. People say, do you think about death? Of course I think about death.

Think about death every time. you get up in the morning. But it's a matter of luck, isn't it? I mean, entire luck. I have, after all, contemporaries of mine who can't walk. I have contemporaries who can't even remember things. Well, I can't remember things, but I mean, most seriously, I can't remember things. And that is entirely a matter of luck.

And so I can do these things. And not to do them if you can do them seems to be an act of extraordinary ingratory. Jude. Sir David, thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much. David Attenborough is the host of Blue Planet 2, which debuts this week. Now we'll turn for a moment to another great admirer of the natural world in a very different form, the poet Mary Oliver.

From geese to crabs to insects to nearly an entire book about her dog, Oliver has turned again and again to animals and to the wilderness to look for meaning. A new collection of Mary Oliver's work called Devotions has just been published. Here's Mary Oliver reading from her work in 2012 at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The summer day. Who made the world? Who made the swan and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down, who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay it. attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and

blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Ruth Franklin wrote our review of Oliver's book, Devotions, and she's here with David Hagelin, the literary editor of New Yorker.com. Ruth, I'm curious, when did you first read Mary Oliver's work? And do you remember whether you liked her work right away, or did it take a while? You know, I don't have a distinct memory of the first time.

I did have a boyfriend in college who was a big fan of Mary Oliver and pressed her on me, so I'm suspecting that must have been it. I did always respond to just the directness of her approach. It feels so immediate and sort of focused on you as the reader. It's so unguarded, I think. There's something, and I admit that for me, sometimes it sort of takes me aback. It's not what I'm used to with poetry. One of my favorite poets is Wallace Stevens,

who once said that poetry should resist the intelligence, almost successfully, which is just not at all her approach, I don't think. Yeah, in general, I think that is what makes her work so almost universally appealing is that you don't feel like you need to have a degree in poetry in order to understand Mary Oliver. Although that's also maybe why she hasn't gotten the critical acclaim that you might expect from a writer who's won she has won some very big prizes and is enormously popular, as poets go, but there is a kind of looking down one's nose at her from some critics, maybe.

I don't know if you'd put it that way. Definitely. I think of them as sort of more academic poetry critics, you know, who are more interested in a kind of hermetic, almost coded kind of poetry. Do you think that she's very frank about her interest in God and in prayer, and, you know, for a particular kind of secular critic, maybe that's off-putting as well? Yeah, I think it probably is. I mean, as in the poem,

we just heard this summer day, there's this sort of introduction to the poem where we have a nature scene with a grasshopper. One nice detail that I read somewhere in an article about her, I don't remember where now, is that there was a real grasshopper that she used as a model, as it were, for that poem.

The grasshopper was eating a slice of birthday cake at a picnic, I think. So we have this little scene, and then there's an abrupt switch in the middle of the poem, and suddenly she starts talking about prayer. But, of course, if you're familiar with Mary Oliver, you know that that's in the background,

more or less, all the time. The summer day is typical of her work in another way, and that it's largely about the natural world. And at least for me, living in New York City, It does feel like a window into a kind of side of life that I maybe don't get to enjoy as often as often as I would. And I wonder if, to some extent, people kind of feel like opening a collection of Mary Oliver as like taking a walk outside.

Yeah, you know, I think if Mary Oliver were here with us, she would probably scold you for saying that. Because, of course, it's quite possible to experience the natural world even here in New York City. You know, that that's something her poetry kind of exhorts the reader to do, is to find, you know, find that moment of beauty in nature, if it's, you know, if we can call it the sublime or the spiritual or just something we might not have noticed, you know, what does she say? Attention is the beginning of devotion. that her poetic method, as she presents it,

is very much about that kind of directed attention, which presumably one could experience anywhere. Let's give the last word to Mary Oliver. Here she is reading another one of her poems, Mornings at Blackwater. For years, every morning I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me from the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say is that the past is the past and the present is what your life is and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond or the river of your imagination

or the harbor of your longing and put your lips to the world and live your life. Mary Oliver reading Mornings at Blackwater. The poem appears in the new collection, Devotions. We heard Ruth Franklin speaking about Oliver's work with the New Yorker's David Hagland.

And I'm David Remnick. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us today, and I hope you'll join us again. Till then, stay in touch with us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. The New Yorker Radio. Our Our Our Our Our Our production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Abe Carrillo, Rianne & Corby, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Mithalie Rowe, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Bernard Schwartz, Calla Lea, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment for. fund.