Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness

Award-winning broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough and longtime collaborator Colin Butfield present a powerful call to action focused on our planet’s oceans, exploring how critical this habitat is for the survival of humanity and the earth’s future.

Through personal stories, history and cutting-edge science, Ocean uncovers the mystery, the wonder, and the frailty of the most unexplored habitat on our planet--the one which shapes the land we live on, regulates our climate, and creates the air we breathe. This book showcase the oceans’ remarkable resilience: they can, and in some cases have, recovered the fastest, if we only give them the chance.

Drawing a course across David Attenborough’s own lifetime, Ocean takes readers on an adventure-laden voyage through eight unique ocean habitats, countless intriguing species, and the most astounding discoveries of the last 100 years, to a future vision of a fully restored marine world--one even more spectacular than we could possibly hope for. Ocean reveals the past, present and potential future of our blue planet. It is a book almost a century in the making, but one that has never been more urgently needed.

David Attenborough is Britain’s best-known natural history filmmaker. His career as a naturalist, broadcaster and author has spanned over seven decades. Born in 1926, his first job - after Cambridge University and two years in the Royal Navy - was at a London publishing house. Then in 1952 he joined the BBC as a trainee producer, and it was while working on the Zoo Quest series (1954-64) that he had his first opportunity to undertake expeditions to remote parts of the globe, to capture intimate footage of rare wildlife in its natural habitat. He was Controller of BBC 2 (1965-68), during which time he introduced colour television to Britain, then Director of Programmes for BBC Television (1969-1972). In 1973 he abandoned administration altogether to return to documentary-making and writing, and has established himself as the world’s leading Natural History programme maker with landmark BBC series, including Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984), The Trials of Life (1990), The Private Life of Plants (1995), Life of Birds (1998), The Blue Planet (2001), Life of Mammals (2002), Planet Earth (2006) and Life in Cold Blood (2008). He has also narrated other major natural history series including Blue Planet, Planet Earth, The Frozen Planet, Planet Earth II, Dynasties and Blue Planet II.

He has served as trustee of the British Museum, the Science Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and as President of the Royal Society for Nature Conservation. He continues to narrate landmark natural history programmes and write bestselling books.

Colin Butfield is co-founder and Director of Studio Silverback. He is also the co-founder and Chair of Open Planet. He is the Executive Producer of the BBC series Earthshot, YouTube Originals climate change series Seat at the Table, and The Climate Games. He is an advisor to The Earthshot Prize and author of the bestselling book Earthshot: How to Save Our Planet.

Prior to founding Studio Silverback Colin was WWF’s Executive Producer for the Our Planet project. He was the scientific and conservation advisor to the Netflix Our Planet series and is Executive Producer of the feature documentaries David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet and Breaking Boundaries. Over the past 10 years Colin has written and produced many high profile articles and events (often with Sir David Attenborough) on the climate and nature crisis. These includes Sir David’s speech at the opening of COP26, main stage events at Davos 2019 and 2020, World Bank and IMF spring meetings, COP26 Private Finance Agenda, G8 and UN Security Council.