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

Attenborough begins by describing the abandoned city of Pripyat. Built by the Soviet Union in order to house the Chernobyl nuclear power plant workers and their families, it is now “a place of utter despair” (3). After the worst recorded nuclear disaster—what Attenborough also notes is “the most costly environmental catastrophe in history” (5)—Pripyat has been left empty, devoid of human presence, a ghost city. Attenborough goes on to suggest that, actually, Pripyat is not the worst or the costliest environmental mistake that humans have made. Rather, it is the slowly unfolding destruction of ecosystems, biodiversity, and the natural world itself. It is, he bluntly states, “the true tragedy of our time” (6). He writes, “We are all people of Pripyat now” (7). Thus, the reader bears both witness and responsibility to the unfolding tragedy that is currently underway. His metaphor provides the mission statement for the book as a whole: “This book is the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake, and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right” (7).