The importance of our natural world

Truly the word ‘veteran’ can be applied to the film maker and international respected conservationist, Sir David Attenborough. His is a face and a voice known to millions across the globe. He will shortly celebrate his 99^th birthday, and yet he shows no signs of wanting to stop filming and informing us all about the wonders and the threats to the natural World. This week in London in the UK, he sat down with King Charles to watch the premiere of his latest film ‘Ocean’.Sir David first met Charles when the latter was nine years old when he came down to the BBC studios to meet his cockatoo.The film will be released on Sir David’s actual birthday this week. When he spoke to journalists he said: 'After almost 100 years on the planet, I now understand the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea.' The film promises to explore the enormous changes and damage done to the World’s oceans during Sir David’s time on this planet – but it also promises to do something else; to show that with will-power and effort the oceans can recover at quite enormous speed. This is certainly the takeaway that Sir David wants us all to appreciate. In other words, all is most certainly not lost.

If fish and other sea life stocks can recover what about some of the more lasting forms of human pollution and in particular the damage caused by plastics both on ocean and land? With vast gyres of swirling plastic detritus circling areas, the size of whole continents in the Pacific Ocean, the task of tackling the effects of decades of using the ocean as a giant dump is herculean. And yet where there is life, there is hope, and in countries such as Morocco, efforts are being put into cleaning up where humanity is leaving out. Morocco produces some 8 million tonnes of household waste per annum, but only recycles around 7% of it. This does not make the country some kind of outlier – many other countries have the same struggle. But increasingly young Moroccans in particular, the people that Sir David Attenborough will be hoping will be queuing up to see his film, are concerned enough to take matters into their own hands. Last month, volunteers gathered in M’Hamid El Ghizlane for what was described as a ‘giant litter pick’. This coincided with the 20th International Nomads Festival and pulled together artists, activists, and tourists. All wanted to focus attention on the damage being caused by plastic pollution in desert ecosystems. And this plastic pollution is of course much more visible than that accumulating in our oceans, some penetrating deep enough to be found 3 or 4 miles down in the deepest part of our ocean, the Marianas Trench. According to Nomads Festival founder, Nouredine Bougrab ‘The desert also suffers from pollution’.  It was reported that 400–600kg of waste was collected in five hours by volunteers. All this activity is unlikely to have made much of a dent in the volumes of plastic pollution littering the Moroccan desert, but in publicity terms the activity was worth its weight in gold. Do we wait for our governments to take-action or so we take the lead ourselves? This is just one of the questions posed by Attenborough’s film and which had its answer in the work of those volunteers in the Moroccan Sahara.

*Mark Seddon is a former Speechwriter to UN Secretary-General Ban ki moon & former Adviser to the Office of the President of the UN General Assembly