In April, Liz Bonnin returned from a three-month stint of island-hopping around the Caribbean in a surprisingly upbeat mood. The science and wildlife presenter, 47, is well aware that statement could sound a bit ridiculous. She is careful never to describe her job – which often takes her to exotic locales in pursuit of the world’s rarest and most awww-inducing animals – as a grind. But it does come with a Faustian price: loss of innocence. It’s impossible to work in the environment, to read the academic papers, to witness the degradation of nature first-hand, without reaching the conclusion that our planet is on the precipice of being kind of screwed.
But this trip was different. “I came home full,” she says, over coffee in west London. “All my friends were like, ‘Normally when you come back from shoots, you’re just wrecked and a bit grumpy. You can’t put two sentences together. But look at you: you’re just shining! What happened?’ I’m like, ‘Wait till I tell you…’”
The glow, weirdly, had little to do with swapping winter in the UK for Belize, Costa Rica, Trinidad and Venezuela. Instead, it came from spending time with local conservationists and naturalists who devote their lives to protecting the native species and imperilled ecosystems of the region. Bonnin’s encounters with these individuals and the animals they work with – white-fronted capuchin monkeys, Guiana dolphins, a sunset of thousands of scarlet ibises – are showcased in a vivid, hopeful, four-part BBC Two series titled Liz Bonnin’s Wild Caribbean, which started last Sunday.
“You’ve met amazing people and you think you know who you are,” says Bonnin now, shaking her head. “But there are people out there who still know how to be human – and most of them live in developing countries. They’re more closely connected to nature, because they live alongside it in a way that we don’t in the west, and certainly in this country. We’ve been completely removed from that. I’ve lived in London for too long. And it’s true, it’s not a criticism. But just when you think there’s no hope left, you meet people like that.”
Bonnin is a fast, impassioned talker and she somehow remains optimistic about the potential to find solutions to our environmental crises. She hopes this spirit comes across in the programmes she makes, which have included Blue Planet Live, Galápagos, Super Smart Animals and Our Changing Planet. These programmes are invariably visually spectacular. But what she really wants to do is shift behaviour, to nudge viewers into thinking of the world beyond our living rooms. Finding and telling the stories of these conservationists in the Caribbean, she believes, is a powerful way to provide inspiration. “That’s my mission in life,” she says. “To change hearts and minds.”
Such positivity, though, is not always easy to sustain. In 2018, Bonnin made a feature-length documentary for BBC One, Drowning in Plastic. It was a harrowing watch: she cried on-screen as she watched 20 shards of plastic being vomited by a three-month-old shearwater chick that had never even been in the sea. When she returned home, the experiences stayed with her. Her mental state was summed up by a line in the film as, again in tears, she watched a plastic net being removed from a dead grey seal pup: “Can you believe this is what goes on when we carry on with our lives?”
“I couldn’t sleep for months,” Bonnin tells me. “It’s really hard to know where we’re heading and to see us just blindly ignoring it. I had to get therapy, I was really struggling.”
Therapy, Bonnin reveals, is disconcertingly common among people who work in the environmental sector. “I’m going to tell you this, because what the hell! We have to normalise these conversations,” she exclaims. “I would always do anything to push what I was feeling away: just ram it away, ignore it, go and meet my friends… whereas working through it, I’ve learned there’s some really interesting processes where you lean into the discomfort of it and the discomfort dissipates.
“Don’t get me wrong, I still have really bad days,” Bonnin goes on. “I had this ridiculously embarrassing awakening where I said to my therapist: ‘Wait a minute, so what you’re telling me is, I’ll do all this work and still life won’t be easy? I’m paying all this money, but I’m not going to be happy all the time?’”
Bonnin laughs, but one of the low points came in September with the release of a report, compiled from 2,000 studies, that the Earth was so damaged it was “well outside the safe operating space for humanity”. As cheery as Bonnin tries to remain, the past few weeks have been a test. “We are destroying our life-support systems,” she says. “And if we don’t figure it out, we will drag thousands, if not millions, of species with us. The rest that survive will continue and the planet will go on.”
Another place you might have seen Bonnin is on the BBC family-history series Who Do You Think You Are? Her episode in 2016 was an absolute humdinger. Bonnin knew a little of her heritage going in: her mother was from Trinidad with Indian and Portuguese ancestors, and her father was from French Martinique. But she wasn’t fully prepared for where the research would take her. The most dramatic line of inquiry led to her discovery that her great-great-great-great grandfather, François Alexandre Gros Désormeaux, was an enslaver in Martinique. Then there was the twist when Bonnin learned that he freed one of his enslaved people, Pauline Zoé, with whom he had children. Ultimately, Pauline would inherit François’s estate, including his enslaved people, and receive compensation from the French government following abolition.
Bonnin describes the Who Do You Think You Are? experience as “just ridiculous” and it still resonates with her now. “One of the more positive aspects of the fallout was, for months afterwards, when I was brushing my teeth, I’d look in the mirror and, it’s probably a romanticised thing, but I could see in my eyes, the eyes of the freed slave who six generations ago ended up running the plantation in Martinique. And I felt strong. And I felt like my stubbornness probably came from that.”
“Ridiculous” is not a bad description for Bonnin’s own path. She was born in Paris, but moved to Dublin aged nine, because her mother wanted her to have a convent education (Bonnin herself was less keen). She studied biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin and, on graduation, she had to choose between doing a PhD at Oxford or joining an all-girl pop band, Chill. She went with the latter, but it was a bust: Polydor, their label, dropped them before releasing a record. But it eventually led to television, after she moved to London in the early 2000s and became a presenter on Channel 4’s chaotic breakfast programme RI:SE, interviewing Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio, and then hosting Top of the Pops.
“I was having a ball!” she says. “Presenting Top of the Pops, I used to watch it religiously. There were moments you are just like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.’ But it wasn’t where my heart was. I was going to parties and I was doing the thing, but I wasn’t enjoying it any more. I just really missed academia, it sounds really up my own… But I wanted to get back to reading research papers.”
So Bonnin was opposite DiCaprio thinking: what I really want is to trawl through some scientific journals? “He was amazing, though,” she concedes. “Before I met him, I was like, ‘No, he’s not my type.’ But when I sat opposite him I was like, ‘Oh my God, this man’s charisma!’ And in a really understated way. It kind of threw me. It was quite amazing, actually, as an experience. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, what is this aura thing going on with you?’”
Next for Bonnin was a masters in wild animal biology at the Zoological Society of London and the Royal Veterinary College. “I wanted to be a scientist in India and just work with tigers,” she says. “I was like, ‘I’m going to escape the crazy world and just…’ But the truth is, if you really care for the planet, you’re not going to be a biologist amassing data. We have all the data we need.”
The best way to make an impact, Bonnin decided, was to return to presenting. Her timing was perfect: in 2009, BBC One was looking for hosts for a new science magazine series, Bang Goes the Theory. Bonnin was given the gig and made eight series of the show until 2014. She worked prolifically during this period, popping up on Stargazing Live, Horizon and Tomorrow’s World, and co-presenting ITV’s Countrywise with Ben Fogle from 2013 onwards.
But Bonnin’s schedule was taking its toll and in 2015 she was overwhelmed by what she now realises was burnout. The first sign came when she was on live TV, working on Big Blue Live at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. The show, which won a Bafta for best Live Event, had just shown extraordinary footage of a blue whale when the cameras cut back to Bonnin. “And I was just away with the fairies,” she recalls. “I was standing on this pier and reading the Autocue on live TV and I was going, ‘I just want to jump in the water and go for a swim, I’m so exhausted…’ I was smiling, but inside I was a wreck.”
Bonnin ignored the signs, kept on working, but then had another panic attack when she was diving in the Bristol Channel. “I’ll never forget it,” she says. “I was like, OK, this isn’t funny any more, you know? I still ignored that! And then my back went. Just completely gave up on me. So I think that’s burnout.”
These days, Bonnin is happier and healthier than she can remember being. She works less, which fits with a personal resolution to only fly when she feels she can justify it. She’s sorted out her back, with the help of a physio and regular yoga. She doesn’t have children and prefers not to say if she has a partner, but she leans on her friends and her therapist. “So I learned a lotttttt,” says Bonnin. “I sometimes say the burnout is the best thing that happened to me.”
How so? “What came out of it: growth,” she replies. “Growth and self-awareness and self-care. And also, with age, it’s very true what they say: you stop caring what other people think. It’s really liberating! So if I was to take stock right now I’d go, ‘I like who I’ve become.’ Does that sound really arrogant? But I quite like who I’ve become. And my closest friends say that to me. Not that I’ve changed, but that I’ve settled into who I am.”
Career-wise, things are falling into place, too. In November 2020, Bonnin was elected as president of the Wildlife Trusts, the conservation charities managing the UK’s nature reserves. “I became president because the amazing David Attenborough suggested to them that they should have a meeting with me, which I was just like… I cried,” she says, beaming. “And I’m the first woman. And I’m also the first brown person to be the president. So that’s beautifully challenging.”
Despite this groundbreaking role, though, Bonnin will sometimes feel the twitch of impostor syndrome. She’s increasingly in demand with big companies – the likes of Unilever – to advise on their green strategy, but she questions if she’s the right person to be giving those presentations. Why does she feel like an impostor? “Why are you asking me that?” she responds playfully. “You know the answer to that.”
Who should be giving that talk? “Well, men are more invited to give those talks than women are, let’s just put it that way. There’s so much subconscious bias and, as a woman in this industry, yes, I will say, I’m just not heard in the same way.”
It will be a battle, but Bonnin is ready. A battle to empower women and people of colour in the wildlife sector. A battle to keep making programmes that change those hearts and minds. I ask if she can see herself, like Attenborough, still working and campaigning well into her nineties. “Yes – not a hesitation,” says Bonnin. “Because I look to Jane Goodall. I look to David Attenborough. I look to Sylvia Earle. I look to Chris Packham, not that he’s much older than me. Also, nobody should retire: your whole body and mind just crumbles. Continue doing what you love, giving back to the planet, growing, understanding what it means to be human till the day you die.”
Then Bonnin stops, remembering something vital she’s forgotten. “And do a lot of yoga so you stay a bit bendy and you can actually do your job.”
Liz Bonnin’s Wild Caribbean continues on BBC Two at 9pm on 12 November, and on BBC iPlayer
Fashion editor Jo Jones; makeup and hair by Jade Bird using Giorgio Armani and Innersense; styling assistant Sam Deaman