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 from Palawan in the 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 football,” explains Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, professor of Scientific Communication at UCL University 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, inseparable from the BBC, began in the early 1950s. His natural gift for storytelling, his warm, recognizable voice, quickly captivated viewers.
Since then, he has never stopped, and his almost childlike enthusiasm has never left him.
Like when he played with mountain gorillas in Rwanda in 1978.
Attenborough traveled the planet dressed in beige pants and a blue shirt, capturing often unseen images of jungles, deserts, and oceans.
An estimated 500 million people worldwide watched his first major nature series he produced in 1979, “Life on Earth.” “I just wish the world were twice as big and half of it is still unexplored,” he said then.
“He has brought nature into our living rooms. He has taken us to places we would never have gone otherwise; it is an immense gift,” pays tribute Sandra Knapp, 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 fairly complex scientific concepts,” she says.
For years, she showed her evolutionary biology students his mission on birds of paradise, “a wonderful illustration of sexual selection.”
He has also sparked vocations. “Many biologists are where they are because they watched David Attenborough programs as children,” says Jean-Baptiste Gouyon.
Although holding a degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University, 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 has warned about the ravages caused by humans.
In the 2025 documentary, “Ocean,” he denounced the methods of industrial fishing by wealthy countries, “a modern colonialism of the sea.”
Many 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, always directing viewers’ gaze to what he wants to show,” underscores Jean-Baptiste Gouyon. In that regard, he differs from the Frenchman Jacques Cousteau (1910-1997), who was “the adventurer with his red beret, the one who tells his own story.”
But “every time David Attenborough releases a new documentary, even if he is 100 years old, it is an event,” emphasizes Jean-Baptiste Gouyon.
David Attenborough no longer treks through the jungle or desert but continues to narrate our planet.
In “Wild London,” a documentary broadcast in early 2026 on the BBC, he becomes passionate about the extraordinary wildlife of London, his birth city.
After all his travels, Attenborough has revealed that his favorite place remains Richmond, an affluent and verdant suburb in southwest London where he lived most of his life with his wife Jane, mother of their two children, who passed away in 1997.
