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May 8th is David Attenborough’s 99th birthday, and in his new documentary, Ocean, he’s marking the occasion with a veritable call to arms. “If we save the sea, we save our world,” says Sir David.

Over the last seven decades, the beloved English presenter has made many films focused on our marine world, but this latest one is something different. Of course, there’s awe-inspiring cinematography aplenty, as you’d expect, but this time, the camera shows us the full extent of the tragedy occurring on the high seas today: The colorful reefs teeming with fish abruptly give way to vast deserts of broken, gray, lifeless coral—the aftermath of dragging huge nets along the ocean floor, killing everything in their path.
 

“When I first saw the sea as a young boy, it was thought of as a vast wilderness to be tamed and mastered for the benefit of humanity," says Attenborough in Ocean. “But now, as I approach the end of my life, we know the opposite is true.” Elsewhere, he admits: “After living for nearly 100 years on this planet, I now understand the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea.”

While Sir David may have been criticized in the past for not doing enough to sound the alarm regarding the destruction of the natural world, in this documentary he doesn’t mince his words as he explains all the shocking ways we are harming our seas—with a particular emphasis on the blanket destruction caused by bottom trawling. Not only is he enraged that this practice is legal, but he’s also incensed by the fact that it is actively encouraged by governments through subsidies. “Three billion people rely on our ocean for food,” he points out in Ocean. “But ships sent by a few wealthy nations are starving coastal communities of the food source they have relied on for millennia. This is modern colonialism at sea.”
 

Ultimately, though, Sir David is still hopeful. What he calls the “most remarkable discovery of all”—that the ocean can “recover faster than we had ever imagined”—has kept him from despair. He remembers a time, as a young man, when large-scale commercial whaling had all but wiped out our ocean’s largest inhabitants, but how—against all odds—a global powers bowed to public pressure and worked together to save the whales by enacting a moratorium on commercial whaling. In Ocean, he shows us places where conservation measures have been effective and marine life is thriving, and he’s optimistic about the global commitment to protect 30 percent of the world’s ocean by 2030, established at the 2022 UN Ocean Conference.

At 99, Attenborough’s mellifluous voice is still strong: “It is my great hope that we all come to see the ocean, not as a dark and distant place with little relevance to our lives on land, but as the lifeblood of our home," he says.

Ocean is in cinemas from May 8th, and will stream on Disney+ on June 8th—UN World Oceans Day.