Great Throughts Treasury

"?Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever increasing population. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it's time we controlled the population to allow the survival of the environment."

"Trade is a proper and decent relationship, with dignity and respect on both sides."

"Until now I had always shied off birds, because I felt there are so many people who know so much more about them than I do. But I was persuaded that that was an advantage, for me to look at them from the general naturalist's point of view."

"Today we're living in an era in which the biggest threat to other species and to the Earth as we know it might well be ourselves. The issue of population size was controversial because it touches on the most personal decisions we make, but we ignore it at our peril."

"Vast movements of ocean and air currents bring dramatic change throughout the year."

"Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that."

"Very few people in the history of biology could have seen as much of the actual things that I have, and the sad thing is that I do so little with it. I'm so busy gobbling it up that I don't sort of digest it."

"Wallace would have none of it. In reviewing The Descent of Man he wrote, ?Are we to believe that the actions of an ever varying fancy for a slight change of color could produce and fix the definite colors and markings which actually characterize species?? Furthermore, he said, it was unacceptable to suggest that birds had an aesthetic sense. That would be crediting a bird with a human characteristic for which there was no evidence. It would be anthropomorphism at its most unjustified."

"Wallace's emotions on discovering such marvels must surely be echoed by all of us who follow him. This is what he wrote: "I thought of the long ages of the past during which the successive generations of these things of beauty had run their course. Year by year being born and living and dying amid these dark gloomy woods with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness, to all appearances such a wanton waste of beauty. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man, many of them have no relation to him, their happiness and enjoyment's, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone.""

"We can now destroy or we can cherish-the choice is ours."

"Warm-bloodedness is one of the key factors that have enabled mammals to conquer the Earth, and to develop the most complex bodies in the animal kingdom. In this series, we will travel the world to discover just how varied and how astonishing mammals are."

"We are a plague on the Earth. It?s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It?s not just climate change; it?s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now."

"We really need to kick the carbon habit and stop making our energy from burning things. Climate change is also really important. You can wreck one rainforest then move, drain one area of resources and move onto another, but climate change is global."

"Well, I'm having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English."

"We are not overpopulated in an absolute sense; we've got the technology for 10 billion, probably 15 billion people, to live on this planet and live good lives. What we haven't done is developed our technology."

"We've lived here for 38 years. This is where our kids were born, and this is my place. As far as I'm concerned, if I can't have this, I don't want anything."

"We keep putting on programs about famine in Ethiopia; that?s what?s happening. Too many people there. They can?t support themselves ? and it?s not an inhuman thing to say. It?s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it?s going to get worse and worse."

"What humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet."

"What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it."

"When Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], ?Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all- merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child?s eyeball? Because that doesn?t seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy."

"When we look at the graphs of rising ocean temperatures, rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and so on, we know that they are climbing far more steeply than can be accounted for by the natural oscillation of the weather ... What people (must) do is to change their behavior and their attitudes ... If we do care about our grandchildren then we have to do something, and we have to demand that our governments do something."

"When I was right in the middle of Borneo, you thought you were in a different world. There was no radio, no ways of communicating."

"You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programs should be for."

"You don't meet many 5-year-olds who are not interested in a hedgehog or a stickleback."

"You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else's. But it's inevitable, so you'd better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean."

"You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you're talking about."

"You know, we could say yes, they were about to exterminate sea horses and now they aren't... But it isn't a solution to the world's problems."

"You have to steer a course between not appalling people, but at the same time not misleading them."

"You?ve got to be fairly solemn [about the environment]. I mean the mere notion that there are three times as many people on Earth as there were when I started making television. How can the Earth accommodate them? When people, including politicians, set their faces against looking at the consequences?it?s just unbelievable that anyone could ignore it."

"You ought to think of? well, think of a parasitic worm that lives only in the eyeballs of human beings, boring its way through them, in West Africa, for example, where it's common, turning people blind. So if you say, ?I believe that God designed and created and brought into existence every single species that exists,? then you've also got to say, ?Well, he, at some stage, decided to bring into existence a worm that's going to turn people blind.? Now, I find that very difficult to reconcile with notions about a merciful God. And I certainly find it difficult to believe that a God ? superhuman, supreme power ? would actually do that."

"You were never quite sure which were pickpockets or loose ladies."