Ocean with David Attenborough: Taking an Inspirational Plunge with the Old Man and the Sea

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

“After living for nearly 100 years on this planet, I now understand that the most important place on Earth is not on land but at sea,” declares David Attenborough in Ocean the latest documentary in the writer/director/presenter’s remarkable eight-decade career.

With Sir David as our guide, it’s a theme well worth plunging into.

Originally released theatrically in the United Kingdom on May 8 — Attenborough’s 99th birthday — Ocean streams worldwide through the National Geographic Channel on June 7, the eve of the United Nations’ World Oceans Day. The presentation is part of the UN’s international campaign to preserve 30 percent of the world’s oceans from exploitation.

This beautiful-looking film wraps around a highly persuasive argument, that the way to save the earth from climate change is to save the ocean.

As expected, there’s lots of awesome imagery here, from waving green kelp forests with purple urchins at their base, to dolphins and birds swarming around a gyrating silver ball of fish, while Steven Price’s orchestral score throbs along enthusiastically. 

The anchoring image here is Attenborough, the grand old man of the sea himself, standing on an empty beach or cliff top, speaking directly to the camera, in a blue hoodie framing his snowy hair. Attenborough’s age is an asset, not only because of his trustworthy familiarity, but because he can speak about how dramatically our understanding of the ocean has changed in the century of his own life.

The film’s first segment focuses on the deep ocean. Even today, he says, we know more about other planets than we do about the giant saltwater bath that surrounds us where life on earth began. The key takeaway about the deep-sea is that it’s a far livelier place than originally thought. Underwater mountains or “seamounts,” some only recently detected by satellite, force ocean currents upwards, creating nutrient rich areas of the sea and creating ecosystems around them.

From there, he moves to the more familiar coastal waters, or “the magical world where everything is bathed in sunlight.” But, no surprise, the wonder vibes don’t last.

Contemporary nature documentaries take place in an ecological war zone, and Ocean is no exception. Attenborough says an area about the size of the Amazon rainforest is destroyed each year by mega-trawlers, which can reduce a century-old ecosystem to silt in a day, while tossing out three-quarters of what they catch.

He calls the way these factory ships deplete the waters of poorer countries “a new form of colonialism.” Catastrophic news abounds: Two thirds of all large predatory fish are gone. The coral reefs, the largest biological structures in the world, are dying from global warming. Four hundred thousand industrial ships harvest fish in every part of the world.

The crisis is not only for the estimated three billion people who depend on the sea for survival, but the entire atmosphere: About half of the oxygen on earth comes from the sea, mostly from oceanic plankton.

“You could be forgiven,” says Attenborough, for believing “there is no hope left at all.”

The last half hour of the film aims to refute despair with the possibility that, with enough public will, there is a way forward. A handful of “no-take zones,” such as those established in the U.S. Channel Islands or Scotland’s Isle of Arran, has shown that ocean life has a remarkable ability, not only to recover, but to spread its healthfulness to the sea around it.

Working to create a system of these protected zones, says Attenborough represents “the greatest opportunity for humanity in my lifetime.”

Thanks to public awareness and pressure, the world’s whale populations are slowly recovering.  Somewhere out there, Attenborough notes, a new blue whale will be born and, with luck, will see what the next hundred years brings.

 Ocean with David Attenborough. Directed by Colin Butfield, Toby Nowlan and Keith Scholey. Ocean with David Attenborough is available for streaming on the National Geographic Channel on June 7.