A Life on Our Planet: Sir David Attenborough tells Billie Eilish how he copes with personal feelings about extinction

New Netflix documentary has been widely praised as an ‘angry, powerful film’

Sir David Attenborough took part in a celebrity Q&A, in which he was asked about his career by figures including Billie Eilish, Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams, Dame Judie Dench, and David Beckham.

The promotional video was released by Netflix to celebrate the launch of Attenborough’s new show, A Life on Our Planet.

Eilish asked: “How do you cope with your personal feelings about all the animals that are losing their lives, and/or going extinct? How do you actually deal with that as a human being?”

Attenborough responded by revealing that he feels “desperate” about the situation. 

“I think the most astonishing sight in the natural world that I’ve ever seen, and one I shall never forget, [was] the first time I dived on a coral reef,” he said.

“You go into a new world, and it’s a world of extraordinary beauty and complexity and wonder,” he said. “You see all kinds of wonderfully-coloured fish, and lots of creatures you don’t even know exist.”

Attenborough recalled that, upon returning to the coral reef years later, he was met with a scene that reminded him of a cemetary.

“It was stark white, it had died. It had been killed by the rising temperature that we, humanity, have created. That was a terrible sight, and a terrible vision of what we are doing to the natural world,” he said.

The Independent awarded A Life on Our Planet five stars in its review, and praised the documentary as “a powerful, angry film from a man who has witnessed the destruction of Earth’s habitats”.

“Much of A Life on Our Planet has the pacing of a horror film,” critic Ed Cummings wrote. “The story begins happily, in Attenborough’s childhood and early broadcasts, where the world seemed like a paradise, and then quickly worsens.”

He added: “Three measures of progress appear in stark type on screen: the Earth’s human population, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the percentage of Earth’s wilderness remaining.

“Two of the numbers rise rapidly, one falls just as fast. In the most terrifying sequence, he projects what we might expect from future decades if we continue to trash the Earth.”