Great Throughts Treasury

"In the old days... it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programs, I didn't use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual programs."

"In the south west of India lies the long narrow coastal state of Kerala. Most of its thirty-two million inhabitants live off the land and the ocean, a rich tropical ecosystem watered by two monsoons a year. It's also one of India's most crowded states - but the population is stable because nearly everybody has small families... At the root of it all is education. Thanks to a long tradition of compulsory schooling for boys and girls Kerala has one of the highest literacy rates in the World. Where women are well educated they tend to choose to have smaller families... What Kerala shows is that you don't need aggressive policies or government incentives for birthrates to fall. Everywhere in the world where women have access to education and have the freedom to run their own lives, on the whole they and their partners have been choosing to have smaller families than their parents. But reducing birthrates is very difficult to achieve without a simple piece of medical technology, contraception."

"It is vital that there is a narrator figure whom people believe. That's why I never do commercials. If I started saying that margarine was the same as motherhood, people would think I was a liar."

"It used to be said, that in places like this, nature eventually failed to support man, the truth is exactly the reverse, here man failed to support nature. Ten thousand years ago man regarded the natural world as divine, but as he domesticated animals and plants so nature lost some of its mystery and appeared to be little more than a larder that could be raided with impunity."

"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."

"It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole thing - rather than just one or two stars."

"It?s a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species."

"It was regarded as a responsibility of the BBC to provide programs which have a broad spectrum of interest, and if there was a hole in that spectrum, then the BBC would fill it."

"It never really occurred to me to believe in God."

"It is curiosity, quite right-a divine curiosity. A characteristic of the gods is curiosity."

"It seems to me that an understanding of the natural world is crucial for all of us ? after all we depend upon it for our food, for the air we breathe and, some would say, for our very sanity. It?s a relationship that we're stretching to breaking point as we continue to grow in numbers."

"It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living."

"It?s about cherishing the woodland at the bottom of your garden or the stream that runs through it. It affects every aspect of life."

"It's about cherishing the woodland at the bottom of your garden or the stream that runs through it. It affects every aspect of life."

"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."

"It's extraordinary how self-obsessed human beings are. The things that people always go on about is, 'tell us about us', 'tell us about the first human being'. We are so self-obsessed with our own history. There is so much more out there than what connects to us."

"It's a fully wild bird - we see it flying away into the distance. Why does it come so close? We have no idea."

"It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species."

"It's like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five ... Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066."

"It's very easy to say everything is outrageous. But if you have an oil company that's setting up its own environmental department, for example, what do you do? Do you spit in its eye, or do you make sure that what they do actually has some substance?"

"It's lost on me. I can just about tell if it's got a jet engine or one of those funny things on the front!"

"It's not just that we are dependent on the natural world for our food and for the very air we breathe-which is, of course, the case-and that the very richness of the natural world continues to provide us with all kinds of assistance."

"I've been to Nepal, but I'd like to go to Tibet. It must be a wonderful place to go. I don't think there's anything there, but it would be a nice place to visit."

"Just as the human population was starting its unprecedented growth spurt in the late eighteenth century, this was published. It's a first edition of an essay on population by the English clergyman Thomas Malthus. Malthus made a very simple observation about the relationship between humans and resources and used it to look into the future. He pointed out that "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man." Food production can't increase as rapidly as human reproduction. Demand will eventually outstrip supply. Malthus goes on to say, if we don't control human reproduction voluntarily, life could end in misery, which earned him a reputation as a bit of a pessimist. But Malthus' principle remains true. The productive capacity or the Earth has physical limits and those limits will ultimately determine how many human beings it can support."

"London has fine museums. The British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world... It's got everything you want, really."

"I've been bitten by a python. Not a very big one. I was being silly, saying: 'Oh, it's not poisonous...' Then, wallop! But you have fear around animals."

"Just recently we were coming out of Niger and it so happened that there was a great pilgrimage so all the hotels were full. We ended up sleeping on the floor in tin huts with bed bugs and fleas."

"Many individuals are doing what they can. But real success can only come if there is a change in our societies and in our economics and in our politics."

"Let?s find out what they exactly mean when they sing that particular song, or why they flutter their wings in a certain way, or why the colors of nestlings? mouths change as they grow up."

"Make a list of all the environmental and social problems that today afflict us and our poor battered planet. ? not just the extinction of species and animals and plants, that fifty years ago was the first signs of impending global disaster, but traffic congestion, oil prices, pressure on the health service , the growth of mega-cities, migration patterns, immigration policies, unemployment, the loss of arable land, desertification, famine, increasingly violent weather, the acidification of the oceans, the collapse of fish stocks, rising sea temperatures, the loss of rain forest. The list goes on and on. But they all share an underlying cause. Every one of these global problems, environmental as well as social becomes more difficult ? and ultimately impossible - to solve with ever more people."

"Midwinter, and the countryside is so still, it seems almost lifeless. But these trees and bushes and grasses around me are living organisms just like animals. And they have to face very much the same sort of problems as animals face throughout their lives if they're to survive. They have to fight one another, they have to compete for mates, they have to invade new territories. But the reason that we're seldom aware of these dramas is that plants of course live on a different time-scale."

"Many people would like to deny this. They would like to believe in that oxymoron ?sustainable growth.? Kenneth Boulding, President Kennedy?s environmental advisor forty five years ago said something about this. ?Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet,? he said,? is either mad ? or an economist.?"

"My reaction used to be like most peoples? when a bird come into my garden. I would look at it in the same way. It flutters down. Aren't its wings nice? Look, it's feeding. Now it?s flown away. But if you have just done a program about warning behavior or mate guarding, you see quite different things."

"Natural history is not about producing fables."

"Nature isn't positive in that way. It doesn't aim itself at you. It's not being unkind to you."

"Neither have I said we have got to do this because of some pharmaceutical advantage there may or may not be. The moral issue is that we should not impoverish this world."

"My last trip was to the States, and on the way back I sat in the cockpit for take-off and landing. In a funny way, I think aircrew know that I've travelled a lot and therefore feel we are fellow professionals to some degree-which is nice, very complimentary."

"Oh, my capacity for guilt is enormous. I'm all the time thinking I'm not doing the things I should be doing, not doing enough of it, or I said I'd be vice-president of something or other, and what I have I done? Nothing."

"One in eight plant species face extinction."

"No one will protect what they don't care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced."

"Nothing in the natural world makes sense - except when seen in the light of evolution."

"Now, I find that very difficult to reconcile with notions about a merciful God."

"Opponents say natural selection is not a theory supported by observation or experiment; that it is not based on fact; and that it cannot be proved. Well, no, you cannot prove the theory to people who won't believe in it any more than you can prove that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. However, we know the battle happened then, just as we know the course of evolution on earth unambiguously shows that Darwin was right."

"Our planet may be home to 30 million different kinds of animals and plants. Each individual locked in its own life-long fight for survival."

"Our planet, the Earth, is, as far as we know, unique in the universe. It contains life. Even in its most barren stretches, there are animals. Around the equator, where those two essentials for life, sunshine and moisture, are most abundant, great forests grow. And here plants and animals proliferate in such numbers that we still have not even named all the different species. Here, animals and plants, insects and birds, mammals and man live together in intimate and complex communities, each dependent on one another. Two thirds of the surface of this unique planet are covered by water, and it was here indeed that life began. From the oceans, it has spread even to the summits of the highest mountains as animals and plants have responded to the changing face of the Earth."

"People knew that animals were nocturnal but they didn't really know what they did because they couldn't see it."

"People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile."

"People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure."

"People say we have all got to join Europe for reasons which even the economists themselves aren't clear on-at the same time we're saying, well yes of course Scotland has got to be independent. And why don't we make Wales independent too? And the north of England."

"People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can't sustain them."