Great Throughts Treasury

"Right, we'd better have a bloody revolution."

"Since when has Finland been a rotten place to live in?"

"Some of the research we have come across provides extraordinary insights to demonstrate that the world of birds is so much more than we thought it was."

"So it's ?Look, his mate has come as well, and he?s guarding her, and see how he reacts to a threat.? You now have this insight; things suddenly fall into place, and you start to see things that have been going on before your eyes all your life and never understood. It is not until you get this kind of directed curiosity, with a very knowledgeable ornithologist at your elbow, that you really begin to see these things."

"Reptiles and amphibians are sometimes seen as simple, primitive creatures. That's a long way from the truth. The fact that they are solar-powered means that their bodies require only 10% of the energy that mammals of a similar size require. At a time when we ourselves are becoming increasingly concerned about the way in which we get our energy from the environment and the wasteful way in which we use it, maybe there are things that we can learn from "life in cold blood.""

"Reptiles and amphibians are sometimes thought of as primitive, dull and dimwitted. In fact, of course, they can be lethally fast, spectacularly beautiful, surprisingly affectionate and very sophisticated."

"Steve Irwin did wonderful conservation work but I was uncomfortable about some of his stunts. Even if animals aren't aware that you are not treating them with respect, the viewers are."

"Television of course actually started in Britain in 1936, and it was a monopoly, and there was only one broadcaster and it operated on a license which is not the same as a government grant."

"That people will object very much to seeing a predator killing its prey, and yet, in the news, will accept showing shots of people shooting one another."

"The climate suits me, and London has the greatest serious music that you can hear any day of the week in the world - you think it's going to be Vienna or Paris or somewhere, but if you go to Vienna or Paris and say, 'Let's hear some good music', there isn't any."

"The fundamental issue is the moral issue."

"The fact is that no species has ever had such wholesale control over everything on earth, living or dead, as we now have. That lies upon us, whether we like it or not, an awesome responsibility. In our hands now lies not only our own future, but that of all other living creatures with whom we share the earth."

"The future of life on earth depends on our ability to take action. Many individuals are doing what they can, but real success can only come if there's a change in our societies and our economics and in our politics. I've been lucky in my lifetime to see some of the greatest spectacles that the natural world has to offer. Surely we have a responsibility to leave for future generations a planet that is healthy, inhabitable by all species"

"The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrollable way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us and it is the poor people of the world who will suffer most"

"The idea that the Lord had given us a present, that the world is a gift from God... well, the amount of stuff, back then that the Lord was giving away was limited. We do not have dominion."

"The climate, the economic situation, rising birth rates; none of these things give me a lot of hope or reason to be optimistic."

"The correct scientific response to something that is not understood must always be to look harder for the explanation, not give up and assume a supernatural cause."

"The only way Prescott is going to get through something to do with transport policy, is if the public think there are too many damn things on the road, and use the railways."

"The money that is given to the World Land Trust, in my estimation, has more effect on the wild world than almost anything I can think of."

"The more you go on, the less you need people standing between you and the animal and the camera waving their arms about."

"The nighttime is a very active time."

"The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?"

"The most extraordinary thing about trying to piece together the missing links in the evolutionary story is that when you do find a missing link and put it in the story, you suddenly need all these other missing links to connect to the new discovery. The gaps and questions actually increase - it's extraordinary."

"The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing."

"The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there?s a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants."

"The Roman public's thirst for blood and pleasure in witnessing pain seems to have been unquenchable and without limit." "The caged animals were kept in dungeons below the main arena. The terrified animals in their cages were hoisted up from this pit. And not only animals, human beings too, criminals, slaves and prisoners of war. And here in this arena they were set one upon the other to provide the crowd with spectacles of the most appalling carnage. It still continues to this day in Spain."

"The reverse side of the coin in having this extraordinary ability to go anywhere, is that no one anywhere is remote any more."

"The thing about a bush baby is that the male establishes its territory by peeing on his hands and putting it all on the walls. And after you've had a pair for about six months, you can see people coming into the house, sniffing and going: ?Now, that?s definitely not mulligatawny soup.?"

"The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about."

"The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it."

"The savage, rocky shores of Christmas Island, 200 miles south of Java, in the Indian Ocean. It's November, the moon is in its third quarter, and the sun is just setting. And in a few hours from now, on this very shore, a thousand million lives will be launched."

"There are a multitude of things that the individual can do. There is the present debate going on about petrol, for instance. The fact is that we are poisoning the atmosphere and the less fumes we put in it, the better. And we are using up our fossil fuels."

"There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive. This is the story of how a few of them came to be as they are."

"There are birds far out on the open sea. Birds go to the poles, and survive extremely low temperatures. Birds go underwater. They have been seen diving to 1000 feet. Birds have colonized the air in a fantastic way. They even fly over the Himalayas. Swifts stay on the wing nearly all their lives, making nests of bits of fluff they catch in the air. They even mate in the air."

"There are perfectly good independent small nations."

"There have been prophets who have warned us of this impending disaster, of course. One of the first was Thomas Malthus. His surname ? Malthus ? leads some to think that he was some continental European savant, a German perhaps. But he was not. He was an Englishman, born in Guildford in Surrey in the middle of the eighteenth century. His most important book, An Essay on the Principle of Population was published over two hundred years ago in 1798. In it, he argued that the human population would increase inexorably until it was halted by what he termed ?misery and vice?. Today, for some reason, that prophecy seems to be largely ignored ? or at any rate, disregarded. It is true that he did not foresee the so-called Green Revolution which greatly increased the amount of food that could be produced in any given area of arable land. But that great advance only delayed things. And there may be other advances in our food producing skills that we ourselves still cannot foresee. But the fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth. There cannot be more people on this earth than can be fed."

"There is a shift... whether there will be some 180 turn-I don't think there can possibly be. But I think that we might move away from some of the appalling materialist considerations which have governed politics for a long time."

"There's a small worm called Loa Loa Filariasis. This parasite can survive in one environment exclusively- namely, underneath the skin and inside the eyes of human beings. Children and the elderly in tropical regions (usually the poorest) are the most widely affected. A painful, slow death is virtually certain. The worm can actually live in the host for 17 years before the host finally dies."

"They ate a pig?s anus? Oh, come on. I have to tell you there is nothing there to eat. Is it fair? I think the pig is past caring whether it is fair or not. Look, my view is that any bloody fool can be uncomfortable. I don?t go into harrowing circumstances for fun or entertainment. I mean, I am not a hair-shirt guy."

"There is no question that birds are the most widespread and successful kind of organism in the world. They are some of the great wildlife spectacles, among the most beautiful and fantastically decorative birds in the world. I have been besotted with them since I was a schoolboy, when I read the travels of the great 19th Century British naturalists, the first Europeans to see these things. These birds are so romantic and they all have legends surrounding them. They all do the most extraordinary things, each with its individual dance and display."

"There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it."

"This is the Earth - our planet, home to millions of different species, but only one species dominates everything - human beings. There are nearly seven billion of us living on the Earth, and the human population is increasing by more than two people every second; two hundred thousand people every day; nearly eighty million people every year. Each additional life needs food, energy, water, shelter, and hopefully a whole lot more."

"Things change... I don't think we should regard change as a disaster."

"They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

"This is the last program in this natural history, and it's very different from all the others because it's been devoted to just one animal: ourselves. And that may have been a very misleading thing to have done. It may have given the impression that somehow man was the ultimate triumph of evolution that all those thousands of millions of years of development had no purpose other than to put man on Earth. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for such a belief. No reason to suppose that man's stay on Earth should be any longer than that of the dinosaurs. He may have learned how to control his environment, how to pass on information from one generation to another, but the very forces of evolution that brought him into existence here on these African plains are still at work elsewhere in the world, and if man were to disappear, for whatever reason, there is doubtless somewhere some small, unobtrusive creature that would seize the opportunity and, with a spurt of evolution, take man's place. But although denying a special place in the world may be becomingly modest, the fact remains that man has an unprecedented control over the world and everything in it. And so, whether he likes it or not, what happens next is very largely up to him."

"This last chapter... may have given the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur."

"This series will take you to the last wildernesses and show you the planet and its wildlife as you have never seen them before."

"Three and a half million years separate the individual who left these footprints in the sands of Africa from the one who left them on the moon. A mere blink in the eye of evolution. Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever-increasing population. In spite of disasters when civilisations have over-reached themselves, that process has continued, indeed accelerated, even today. Now mankind is looking for food, not just on this planet but on others. Perhaps the time has now come to put that process into reverse. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it's time we control the population to allow the survival of the environment."

"To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see. The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn't believe that."

"Today we're doing so on a greater scale than ever."