It is so esteemed that his name has been given to animals and plants, like a tiny Australian spider – Prethopalpus attenboroughi – and a carnivorous plant in Palawan, Philippines, Nepenthes attenboroughii.
For American singer Billie Eilish, David Attenborough is a “living treasure.”
“He has made natural history a mainstream subject, something that can be as popular as sports or soccer,” explains Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, a professor of Scientific Communication at UCL in London.
“He has instilled a passion and wonder for the natural world that is unparalleled,” continues this Frenchman, who discovered David Attenborough upon moving to the UK.
David Attenborough’s career, synonymous with the BBC, began in the early 1950s. His natural gift for storytelling and his warm, recognizable voice quickly captivated viewers.
Since then, he has never stopped, and his almost childlike enthusiasm has not waned.
Like when he played with mountain gorillas in Rwanda in 1978.
Attenborough traveled the globe dressed in beige pants and a blue shirt, capturing often unseen images of jungles, deserts, and oceans.
It is estimated that 500 million people worldwide watched his first major nature series, “Life on Earth,” in 1979. “I would just like the world to be twice as big and that half of it remains unexplored,” he said at the time.
“He brought nature into our living rooms. He took us to places we would never have gone otherwise; it’s an immense gift,” pays tribute Sandra Knapp, a botanist and research director at the Natural History Museum in London.
Sandra Knapp explains that for the scientist she is, he is “a true inspiration.” “He manages to make very simple quite complex scientific concepts,” she says.
For years, she showed her evolutionary biology students his program on birds of paradise, “a wonderful illustration of sexual selection.”
He also sparked vocations. “Many biologists are where they are because they watched David Attenborough programs when they were children,” says Jean-Baptiste Gouyon.
Although he holds a degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge, he has always presented himself as a man of television, not a scientist.
Knighted in 1985 by Queen Elizabeth II, with whom he was friends, he warned about the devastation caused by humans.
In 2025, in the documentary “Ocean,” he condemned the methods of industrial fishing in rich countries, “a modern colonialism of the sea.”
Many of the places filmed by Attenborough have since been destroyed by humans.
David Attenborough has always refused to be seen as a celebrity. “He is someone who fades into the background, who always directs viewers’ gaze to the thing he wants to show,” emphasizes Jean-Baptiste Gouyon. In this, he is different from the Frenchman Jacques Cousteau (1910-1997), who was “the adventurer with his red beret, the one who tells stories.”
But “every time David Attenborough releases a new documentary, even if he is 100 years old, it’s an event,” highlights Jean-Baptiste Gouyon.
David Attenborough no longer journeys through the jungle or the desert but continues to narrate our planet.
In “Wild London,” a documentary broadcast at the beginning of 2026 on the BBC, he is passionate about the extraordinary fauna of London, his birthplace.
After all his travels, Attenborough confided that his favorite place remains Richmond, an affluent and green suburb in southwest London where he lived most of his life, with his wife Jane, the mother of his two children, who passed away in 1997.
