A hope infused narrative to course correct our planet from imminent ruin

The data driven argument David Attenborough makes about our planet’s future, using his own lifetime as the scale of measure, in the recently released film on Netflix “A life on our planet”, is hard to ignore, despite the fatigue that may have desensitized us to this topic by the relentless barrage of largely “doom and gloom” predictions of our planet all around us. For one, the film is not a doom and gloom story. It is one of hope with plausible course correcting actions, ambitious as they may be, to avert the imminent ruin of our planet, which doomsayers foretell, we are inexorably heading towards.

To narrowly focus only on the aggregate data shown in the figure above, which in the film, is scattered across the entire movie as brief time point markers, hardly does justice to the argument he makes, given his argument draws its strength not just from those numbers, sobering/shocking as they may be, but from the backdrop of the breathtaking visual narrative those numbers are embedded in.

The crux of his argument is quite simple and logically sound, grounded on irrefutable evidence. Our planet has witnessed five mass extinctions in its approximately 4 billion years of existence, with the most recent one that occurred 65 million years ago, decimating nearly 75% of all species. Evidence of those…