David Attenborough’s Exploration of Nature’s Marvels and Brutality

No trip to the American Museum of Natural History in New York is complete without a visit to the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life. It’s a blue-tinged room, booming with surf-roar and the cries of gulls and rimmed with marine dioramas: teeming kelp forests and coral reefs, a walrus lost in thought, dolphins and tuna fleeting through twilit seas. The hall’s vaulting showcases a life-size blue whale, midway through an eternal dive. Whenever I crane to look up at the expanse of its light-dappled underbelly, I think of how Sir David Attenborough described this leviathan in his television series “The Blue Planet”: “Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant. Its heart is the size of a car. And some of its blood vessels are so wide that you could swim down them.” Of all Attenborough’s eyeopeners—and there have been many since the BBC’s groundbreaking 1979 series “Life on Earth” set both the bar and the template for nature documentaries—this one continues to shake me. Not just because the statistics are eminently quotable, equally impressive to distracted adults and too-cool children, but because they put humans right in their place: small enough to swim in a blue whale’s veins, and yet, by 1970, responsible for that species’ near-extinction.