At a time when precious few are prepared to put their head above the parapet, scream ‘this is wrong’, yet do little about it, Sir David Attenborough and Prince Willliam lead the race against time and tide on an international calling to preserve the envionment, wildlife, their habitats and our oceans.
Alan Wares looks into the docuseries recently produced and promoted by the prince and Sir David, and the impact both hope they will have on global societies
Prince William has been actively speaking out about the urgent need to protect the world’s oceans. He recently addressed the Blue Economy and Finance Forum in Monaco, emphasising the critical role healthy oceans play in supporting life on Earth and calling for collective action to address threats like rising sea temperatures, plastic pollution, and overfishing. He highlighted the interconnectedness of the ocean and human well-being, stating that “If we save the sea, we save our world”.
At the same time, the Prince of Wales has described Sir David Attenborough as a “big inspiration” to him during his childhood, and the motivation behind his new wildlife documentary, Guardians, which highlights the work of wildlife rangers around the world. He credited the veteran nature presenter with “being able to present wonderful parts of the world to many of us, most of us will never get a chance to visit”.
The prince, like his father and grandfather before him, and Sir David share a passion for conserving the natural world, and have supported each other’s projects in the field. The heir to the throne has attended private screenings of the broadcaster’s documentaries, while Sir David has been a champion of Prince William’s environmentally focused Earthshot Prize since its inception.
THE EARTHSHOT PRIZE
The Earthshot Prize is a global environmental award presented to five winners each year for their contributions to environmentalism. It was first awarded in 2021 and is planned to be awarded annually until 2030. Each winner receives a grant of £1 million to continue their environmental work.
The prize was launched in 2020 by Prince William and Sir David Attenborough. The winners are selected by the Earthshot Prize Council, which includes Prince William and Sir David Attenborough.
A £1 million prize will be awarded annually between 2021 and 2030 to a winner in each of the following five categories, inspired by The UN Sustainable Development Goals:
• Protect and Restore Nature
• Clean Our Air
• Revive Our Oceans
• Build a Waste-Free World
• Fix Our Climate
This was extended in 2023 with the added
• Advance a Plant-Based Food System
In a brief film Prince William made with actor and Earthshot advocate Hannah Waddingham while - of all things - playing darts at Alexandra Palace, he outlined the approach of the prize, outlining the roles financial investment being introduced to progressive innovators was taking, and offering positive messages, rather than, as he put it, “Nagging everyone all the time.”
Now taking a lead from the 99-year-old host of Ocean and Planet Earth, the prince said his new series “reminds people that there are still wonderful parts of the world and there is still hope, and there’s still amazing work being done”.
He surprised those attending the screening of the series when he walked into a central London hotel and sat with journalists to watch the first three episodes.
Guardians will focus on how the work of rangers - who protect endangered animals whose role has become significantly more risky. Around 1,400 rangers have died in the past decade.
“This is now one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet,” the prince told reporters. It shouldn’t be. Protecting the natural world shouldn’t be that dangerous. Being a soldier, a police officer, the emergency services - these jobs are dangerous, people put their lives on the line. I don’t think people realise it’s the same for these guys and girls around the world.”
He attributed the increased threat to “community conflicts or civil wars, or illegal fishing, or poaching - whatever it might be is just spreading further and further across the globe”.
A spokesperson for the prince said he turned up to emphasise the importance of the series to him on a personal level.
“The project was driven by him,” the spokesperson told the BBC. “He wanted to show the incredible work rangers do for people around the world.” Each episode will feature an on-screen introduction by Prince William, who also appears in a trailer for the project.
The prince also spoke about the challenge of recruiting the next generation of rangers. He says, “They ask, why would I do that? Why would I go and risk my life to do that? No one seems to notice, and no one seems to care. I’m not necessarily paid enough, and I’m not valued enough by society.
“The rangers do so much more than just protecting wildlife. It’s about the community initiatives they do, it’s the education, it’s the teaching, the scientific research,” he said. “And if we are to reach our goals, and we do generally as a world care about the natural environment, then we need more of these people.”
Rangers are tasked with overseeing natural areas and the wildlife within them, but increasingly have to fend off poachers, who seek to traffic or kill animals, such as elephants, tigers and rhinos, that have body parts prized by some. Poachers can be armed, and encounters with rangers can prove fatal. In the year to May 2024, 38 out of 140 deaths were homicides, according to the International Ranger Federation (IRF).
In November 2024, the prince announced a new life insurance scheme to cover 10,000 rangers who safeguard Africa’s wildlife.
The screening was also attended by Rohit Singh, vice-president of the International Rhino Foundation (IRF), who described rangers as “essential planetary health workers” and echoed the prince’s concerns.
He said: “One statistic that always comes to my mind is that 82% of rangers say they don’t want their kids to become rangers - so if we don’t change this, how are we going to get more rangers? There are more hairdressers in the UK than there are rangers in the world’s protected areas.”
Ahead of the screening of Attenborough’s own series, ‘Ocean’, he sat down for a conversation with Prince William. Sir David began talking about a time early in his television career, in the 1950s, when he was asked to put on a diving suit and go underwater, only for a leaky problem to become apparent.
Sir David comments, “It’s rather when you put it on, you won’t get off. I put mine on for the first time, and suddenly felt water coming around. I thought, This can’t be right.
“But by the time we got around about nose-depth, I thought, I’m sure this is not right. And of course, if you’ve got this thing screwed on top of you, you can’t breathe, you can’t even make yourself heard.
“I said ‘it’s a fault’. The director said, ‘No, no, come on.’ And he put it on. And I’m happy to say that he went underwater and came out even quicker. There was actually a fault on it.”
Prince William is now spellbound by Sir David’s storytelling, many of which go back 70 years and more. “When you first went diving, we knew so little about the underwater world. Was that not fascinating for you to be one of the first people to be able to talk about that and see it?”
Sir David, thus enthused by the prince’s question, replies, “Oh yes. Once Jacques Cousteau invented the Aqua Lung and the face mask, that was the moment when you suddenly moved into a new world. You were flying alongside fish, which was an extraordinary experience.
“And the fish, of course, take no reaction to you, because they’ve never seen anything like you before. The underwater camera people are fantastic. They’re people who are happier underwater than they are on land.”
The prince was also keen to find out what changes Sir David had seen in the oceans in his years in broadcasting. Sir David responded that he felt the worst part of the destruction was that it was hidden from view, therefore hidden from mind. “The thing which I am appalled by when I first saw the shots taken for this film is what we have done to the deep ocean floor; it’s just unspeakably awful.
“If you did anything remotely like it on land, everybody would be up in arms. If this film does anything, if it just shifts public awareness, it will be very important, and I can only hope that people who see it will recognise that something must be done before we destroy this great treasure.”
Prince William finished by wondering if Sir David had anything to be optimistic about, whether he still had hope, and if anything still inspired him.
“What is heartening, Sir David pitched back to the prince, “Is that we have the entree to people’s front rooms. Whole families sitting at home in comfort can suddenly find themselves facing this. Films like this can expose something new and interesting.”
Attenborough said he hoped that by confronting the destruction of the ocean, the next generation would be inspired to save it. “There are things down there we’ve never seen. We’re in the situation now, when, in fact, it’s possible to go into places where nothing like you has ever been there before. It’s a huge privilege and excitement.”
THE OCEAN’S PLASTIC – IT’S NOT FANTASTIC
• There are an estimated 171 trillion pieces of plastic currently in the oceans.
• Approximately 11 million tons of plastic enter the ocean each year (the equivalent of us dumping 2,000 garbage trucks full of plastic into the world’s oceans, rivers, and lakes every single day with 75-199 million tons already present. There are 269,000 tons of floating plastic alone
• 80% of plastic finds its way to the oceans via rivers.
• The plastic pollution poses a significant threat to marine life, causing entanglement, ingestion, and habitat destruction. Large plastic items degrade into microplastics over time, but never fully disappear.
• Over a third of all fish caught for human consumption contain plastic
• Only 9% of plastic ever produced has been recycled. The rest? It has been burned, buried or has ended up polluting our environment.
• More than 100,000 marine mammals and 1 million sea birds are killed by marine plastic pollution every year (UK Government, 2018).
• 80% of all studied marine debris is plastic. (IUCN, 2021)
• There are five major islands of floating plastic in the northern Pacific Ocean, the largest of which – ‘The Great Garbage Patch’ – is around 2.4 million km2. That’s about the size of western Europe.
• However… Scientists and environmentalists are confident that this trend of dumping plastics can be reversed, and the oceans cleaned up, with marine life balance restored, although it will require a huge international collective effort.
