Great Throughts Treasury

"A hundred years ago, there were one and a half billion people on Earth. Now, over six billion crowd our fragile planet. But even so, there are still places barely touched by humanity."

"After this series I no longer watch, say, a pigeon drop from the sky into my garden in the same way as I used to. I know more about it; I have more empathy with it. I understand its problems and its abilities more than I ever did before. It?s not enough for us to just put a name to a bird and look at because it?s pretty. We see only a tiny fraction of a bird?s existence. There is a huge amount of its life that we have no knowledge of. I hope this series will enable people to get inside the mind of a bird."

"And this is where it went. In places all around the eastern Mediterranean the sea is separated from the mainland by strips of flat marshy land like this. Made up of the soil that once clothed the hills beyond. All this was deposited during the last 2000 years. This is the marsh that now separates the sea from the city of Ephesus. These ruined buildings mark the edge of the quay where once merchant ships lay moored. As the harbor died, so did the trade upon which the city's wealth was based, and so, well, ultimately did Ephesus itself. What was once one of the most splendid cities in the Roman Empire fell into decay and was abandoned."

"An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment."

"All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people."

"And in a few special places, these seasonal changes create some of the greatest wildlife spectacles on earth."

"All life is related. And it enables us to construct with confidence the complex tree that represents the history of life"

"And yet, today the harbor is silted up, most of the city lies buried beneath sand dunes and the land has become a desert. As the population had grown and more people wanted more fields, so more of the forest that once stood around the city was cut down, until eventually it was all gone. With no roots to hold the soil, and no attempt to conserve it, it was carried away by the wind and the rain."

"An eye from another world; a smell-detector, investigating the path ahead. We don't often see a snail that way, and that's because we've only recently had the tiny lenses and electronic cameras that we need to explore this miniature world. But when we meet its inhabitants face to face, we suddenly realize that their behavior can be just as meaningful to us as the behavior of many animals more our own size."

"All we can hope for is that the thing is going to slowly and imperceptibly shift. All I can say is that 50 years ago there were no such thing as environmental policies."

"Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist."

"Apart from anything else, I am designed by evolution, like we all are: if we see a little thing like that, big eyes, tiny nose, we go 'aaah'. That's what evolution does. We are programmed to do that. So to find babies the most amazing, isn't surprising, I don't think."

"As the dominant species on this planet it is our moral duty to protect and preserve all forms of life. For species such as elephants and rhinos to be fighting for their existence due to human exploitation and interference is unacceptable and we must do everything within our power to turn this dire situation around. We are responsible for the problem and we must be held responsible for the solution. It will indeed be a very sad indictment on our species if Rhinos and Elephants are no more, and that day will come sooner than we think if we do not take action."

"Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel."

"At a time when it's possible for thirty people to stand on the top of Everest in one day, Antarctica still remains a remote, lonely and desolate continent. A place where it's possible to see the splendors and immensities of the natural world at its most dramatic and, what's more, witness them almost exactly as they were, long, long before human beings ever arrived on the surface of this planet. Long may it remain so."

"As far as I'm concerned, if there is a supreme being then He chose organic evolution as a way of bringing into existence the natural world... which doesn't seem to me to be necessarily blasphemous at all."

"As I see it humanity needs to reduce its impact on the Earth urgently and there are three ways to achieve this: we can stop consuming so many resources, we can change our technology and we can reduce our population. We probably need to do all three."

"Birds are the most popular group in the animal kingdom. We feed them and tame them and think we know them. And yet they inhabit a world which is really rather mysterious. Once they take off from our bird tables or our lawns they disappear into a world of their own. What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it. This is what the series is about."

"Birds were flying from continent to continent long before we were. They reached the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica, long before we did. They can survive in the hottest of deserts. Some can remain on the wing for years at a time. They can girdle the globe. Now, we have taken over the earth and the sea and the sky, but with skill and care and knowledge, we can ensure that there is still a place on Earth for birds in all their beauty and variety. If we want to. And surely, we should."

"Birds are the most accomplished aeronauts the world has ever seen. They fly high and low, at great speed, and very slowly. And always with extraordinary precision and control."

"Being in touch with the natural world is crucial."

"Bringing nature into the classroom can kindle a fascination and passion for the diversity of life on earth and can motivate a sense of responsibility to safeguard it."

"Cameramen are among the most extraordinarily able and competent people I know. They have to have an insight into natural history that gives them a sixth sense of what the creature is going to do, so they can be ready to follow. They need the eye of the artist as well as the certainty of mind to turn to the director and say ?You now have the sequence you wanted.?"

"Can a growing human population still leave space for wildlife?"

"Children start off reading in books about lions and giraffes and so on, but they also-if they're lucky enough and have reasonable privileges of any human being-are able to go into a garden and turn over stone and see a worm and see a slug and see an ant."

"Dwarfed by the vast expanse of the open ocean, the biggest animal that has ever lived on our planet. A blue whale, 30m long and weighing over 200 tons. It's far bigger than even the biggest dinosaur. 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 you could swim down them. Its tail alone is the width of a small aircraft's wings. Its streamlining, close to perfection, enables it to cruise at 20 knots. It's one of the fastest animals in the sea. The ocean's largest inhabitant feeds almost exclusively on one of the smallest krill, a crustacean just a few centimetres long. Gathered in a shoal, krill stain the sea red. A single blue whale in a day can consume 40 million of them. Despite the enormous size of blue whales we know very little about them. Their migration routes are still a mystery and we have no idea where they go to breed. They are a dramatic reminder of how much we still have to learn about the ocean and the creatures that live there. Our planet is a Blue Planet."

"Dealing with global warming doesn't mean we have all got to suddenly stop breathing. Dealing with global warming means that we have to stop waste, and if you travel for no reason whatsoever, that is a waste."

"Crying wolf is a real danger."

"Ever since we arrived on this planet as a species, we've cut them down, dug them up, burnt them and poisoned them. Today we're doing so on a greater scale than ever [?] We destroy plants at our peril. Neither we nor any other animal can survive without them. The time has now come for us to cherish our green inheritance, not to pillage it ? for without it, we will surely perish."

"Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?"

"Everywhere you look, on land or in the ocean, there are extraordinary examples of the lengths living things go to stay alive."

"Fifty years ago, a group of far-sighted people in this country got together to warn the world of an impending disaster. Among them were a distinguished scientist, Sir Julian Huxley; a bird-loving painter, Peter Scott; an advertising executive, Guy Mountford; and a powerful and astonishingly effective civil servant, Max Nicholson. They were all, in addition to their individual professions, dedicated naturalists, fascinated by the natural world not just in this country but internationally. And they noticed what few others had done ? that all over the world, charismatic animals that were once numerous were beginning to disappear. The Arabian oryx which once had been widespread all over the peninsula had now been reduced to a few hundred. In Spain, there were less than a hundred imperial eagles. The Californian condor was down to about sixty. In Hawaii, a goose that had lived in flocks on the lava fields around the great volcanoes were reduced to fifty. The strange little rhinoceros that lived in the dwindling forests of Java ? to about forty. Wherever you looked there were examples of animals whose populations were falling rapidly. This planet was in danger of losing a significant number of its inhabitants ? both animals and plants. Something had to be done. And that group determined to do it. They would need scientific advice to discover the causes of these impending disasters and to devise ways of slowing them and hopefully, stopping them. They would have to raise the awareness of the threat to get the support of people everywhere; and - like all such enterprises - they would need money to take practical action. They set about raising all three. Since the problem was an international one, they based themselves, not here, but in the heart of Europe in Switzerland. And they called the organization they created the World Wildlife Fund"

"Fifty years ago, when the WWF was founded there were about three billion people on earth. Now there are almost seven billion. Over twice as many - and every one of them needing space. Space for their homes, space to grow their food (or to get others to grow it for them), space to build schools and roads and airfields. A little of that space might be taken from land occupied by other people but most of it could only come from the land which, for millions of years, animals and plants have to themselves. The impact of these extra millions of people has spread even beyond the space they physically occupy. Their industries have changed the chemical constituency of the atmosphere. The oceans that cover most of the surface of the planet have been polluted and increasingly acidified. We now realize that the disasters that continue increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all - the unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet."

"Getting to places like Bangkok or Singapore was a hell of a sweat. But when you got there it was the back of beyond. It was just a series of small tin sheds."

"For most people the idea of someone else telling them how many children they should have is simply unacceptable so when governments attempt to do just that it always causes controversy. In 1979 the Chinese government introduced its infamous one-child policy, changing family life in China forever. Families were encouraged to have fewer children. Those that didn't were fined. The policy was a direct response to the preceding decades of famine and starvation. It's still in place today. According to official figures, without the one-child policy, there'd be four hundred million more people in China, that's more than the entire population of the USA. It?s unlikely that other governments could undertake such an extreme path without major civil opposition. In the 1970s the Indian government also sought to bring down its birthrate. To start with it took a less aggressive path, setting up festivals around the country where vasectomies were carried out for small incentives."

"How could anyone believe they actually deserved something like this?"

"Here we are with even the most obvious things like a fishing policy or a transport policy-we know what the consequences are."

"How could anyone believe they actually deserved something like this? ... I can only think that it is because I have been able to reach so many people through television."

"Human beings are good at many things, but thinking about our species as a whole is not one of our strong points."

"I am an ardent recycler. I would like to think that it works. I don't know whether it does or not."

"How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I knew what was happening to the world and did nothing."

"I am at the very center of the great white continent, Antarctica. The South Pole is about half a mile away. For a thousand miles in all directions, there is nothing but ice. And, in the whole of this continent, which is about one-and-a-half times the size of the United States and larger than Europe, there is a year-round population of no more than 800 people. This is the loneliest and coldest place on Earth, the place that is most hostile to life. And yet, in one or two places, it is astonishingly rich."

"I believe the Abominable Snowman may be real. I think there may be something in that."

"I am not over fond of animals."

"I asked the airline staff what I was going to do with all the animals as I didn't have any food for them. They were very unhelpful."

"I can mention many moments that were unforgettable and revelatory. But the most single revelatory three minutes was the first time I put on scuba gear and dived on a coral reef. It's just the unbelievable fact that you can move in three dimensions."

"I can't pretend that I got involved with filming the natural world fifty years ago because I had some great banner to carry about conservation - not at all, I always had a huge pleasure in just watching the natural world and seeing what happens. - I made those films because it was a hugely enjoyable thing to do. But as I went on making them it became more and more apparent that the creatures that were giving me so much joy were under threat. The fun is in delighting in the animals but if you do that you owe them something so you have an obligation to speak out and to do what you can to protect them."

"I don?t like rats but there?s not much else I don?t like."

"I do an awful lot of appearances, and to have one person always grinding the same axe would not be a good idea."

"I don?t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ?Why don?t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?? And I always say, well, when you say that, you?ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that?s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate?"