David Attenborough on the Variety and Resiliency of Nature

In the nineteen-thirties, in Leicester, England, a future knight of the realm named David Attenborough developed an obsession with finding fossils. He would ride his bicycle to old iron quarries and knock on rocks with a little hammer—some would fall apart and reveal an ammonite shell, perfectly preserved, unseen for a hundred and fifty million years. “That mine were the first human eyes to fall on it? Well, that’s thrilling!” he told The New Yorker, in an interview. Sir Attenborough, who is now ninety-three and going strong, never lost his deep well of wonder, his drive to find the unseen, or his electric sense that the world out there contains magic. Luckily for the rest of us, he wanted to share this joy, and had the style, command, wit, and voice—the voice!—to do so incomparably. “I don’t make these programs out of some kind of proselytizing view that people ought to be interested in them,” he has said. “I do it because I’m interested in them and it gives me huge pleasure.”