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When Sir David Attenborough was a boy, he spent much of his free time bounding through abandoned quarries in the English countryside, hammer in hand. His prey: fossilized ammonites, spiral-shaped mollusks that lived in the time of the dinosaurs.

To a young Attenborough, the fossils were like buried treasures and he was amazed to be the first to set eyes on them in tens of millions of years. 

The natural world would keep him enthralled for the rest of his life.

Today, Attenborough, 95, is arguably the world’s best-known natural history broadcaster. During a career that began with the dawn of television, he has penned and presented some of the most influential documentaries on the state of the planet, including his decade-spanning, nine-part Life series.

With what the New York Times called his “voice-of-God-narration” and an insatiable curiosity, he has spent 70 years revealing the beauty of the natural world – and laying bare the threats it faces. Along the way, he has offered hundreds of millions of viewers a vision for a more sustainable future.

“If the world is, indeed, to be saved, then Attenborough will have had more to do with its salvation than anyone else who ever lived,” wrote environmentalist and author Simon Barnes.

The United Nations has recognized Attenborough’s outsized impact on the global environmental movement, presenting him with the UN Champions of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award. The award is the UN’s highest environmental honour and celebrates those who have dedicated their lives to tackling crises like climate change, species loss and pollution.

“You have been an extraordinary inspiration for so many people,” said Inger Andersen, the Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), as she presented Attenborough with the award.

“You spoke for the planet long before anyone else did and you continue to hold our feet to the fire.”

Along with his work in the media, Attenborough is one of the leading voices of the global environmental movement. He has appeared at landmark summits, like the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference, where he has called for a unified global effort to combat the threats to the Earth.

He has also collaborated with UNEP for at least four decades, lending his voice to a series of campaigns and short films that have cast a spotlight on the organization’s efforts to counter the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and pollution. That work is driven by a belief that no one country alone can solve the planet’s environmental ills.

“We are living in an era when nationalism simply isn’t enough,” Attenborough said in accepting the UNEP Champion of the Earth Lifetime Achievement Award. “We must feel like we are all citizens of this one planet. If we work together, we can solve these problems.”

Attenborough graduated from Cambridge University in 1947 with a degree in natural sciences, but soon found he didn’t have the disposition for a life of research. And so, he made his way to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) just as television was creeping into homes.

His first tv appearance came on 21 December 1954, in Zoo Quest, a globe-trotting series that introduced rapt Britons to exotic creatures, like orangutans and Komodo dragons.

As talented an administrator as he was a presenter, Attenborough would rise through the ranks of Britain’s national broadcaster, eventually coming to helm BBC Two. There, he commissioned Monty Python’s Flying Circus, among other series.

But administration wasn’t really for him, and in 1973 Attenborough left the executive suite to return to making films.

The result would be his landmark 1979 series Life on Earth, an epic that charted the history of the living world, from the first microbes to humankind.

The series took three years to make and Attenborough travelled 1.5 million miles during filming. With its scope and ambition, Life on Earth would redefine the natural history documentary and be viewed by some 500 million people.