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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.

-David Attenborough

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Very Few Species Have

David Attenborough

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I'm Against This Huge Globalisation On The Basis Of Economic Advantage.

I Think We're Lucky To Be Living When We Are, Because Things Are Going To Get Worse.

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No, Not A Feminist. I'm A Humanist. I'm Neither One Side Nor The Other.

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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.

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.

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Humanity Is Facing A Very Big, Slow, Long, Drawn-out Threat, And That Is To Do With The Way The Weather Is Changing And The Size Of The Population.

When I Was A Boy In The 1930s, The Carbon Dioxide Level Was Still Below 300 Parts Per Million. This Year, It Reached 382, The Highest Figure For Hundreds Of Thousands Of Years.

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Before The Bbc, I Joined The Navy In Order To Travel.

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I'm Not A Propagandist, I'm Not A Polemicist; My Primary Interest Is Just Looking At And Trying To Understand How Animals Work.

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.

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

I'm Swanning Round The World Looking At The Most Fabulously Interesting Things. Such Good Fortune.

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.

Children Start Off Reading In Books About Lions And Giraffes And So On, But They Also-if Theyre 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.

It Is Curiosity, Quite Right-a Divine Curiosity. A Characteristic Of The Gods Is Curiosity.

Characteristics

All The Modern Devices We Have Enable Us To Investigate Things And Have Enabled Us To Do Better.

Since When Has Finland Been A Rotten Place To Live In?

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You'll Find People Where Their Conditions Aren't Changing In Any Way, Its Rather Rare For Them To Be Happy.

Well, I'm Having A Good Time. Which Makes Me Feel Guilty Too. How Very English.

It's A Moral Question About Whether We Have The Right To Exterminate Species.

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.

If You Watch Animals Objectively For Any Length Of Time, You're Driven To The Conclusion That Their Main Aim In Life Is To Pass On Their Genes To The Next Generation.

The Fundamental Issue Is The Moral Issue.

I Suspect That Happiness Is Not A State But Rather A Transition.

You'll Discover In Countries Where Women Have Control Over Their Own Bodies, Where They Have Education, Where They Have Birth Control, Where They Have Facilities And Where They Are Literate, When Those Things Happen, The Birth Rate Falls.

If We Were All To Reduce Our Demands For Energy, It Would Make An Enormous Amount Of Difference.

Nature Isn't Positive In That Way. It Doesn't Aim Itself At You. It's Not Being Unkind To You.

Natural History Is Not About Producing Fables.

Natural History

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.

I Remember When We Were In The World Cup In Australia And I Had To Win The Singles Against Tony Payne, Best Of Seven Legs, To Win It. I Was 2-0 Down But Ended Up Beating Him I Suffer Much Less Than Many Of My Colleagues. I Am Perfectly Able To Go To Australia And Film Within Three Hours Of Arrival.

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.

Sentimentalising Is Anathema, As Far As I Am Concerned. It Leads You Into Ethical Problems About Violence And Killing And Eating Meat. The Whole World Becomes Topsy-survy If You Impose Moralities That Were Evolved Within Human Society On What A Blowfly Or What A Parasite Does... There Are Lots Of Emotions You Can Deduce From An Animal's Behaviour That Are Correct, But When You Start Saying It's Feeling Guilty Or Thinking Or A Loved One Or Mourning, You Must Be Very Careful Of Those Feelings.

I Don't Run A Car, Have Never Run A Car. I Could Say That This Is Because I Have This Extremely Tender Environmentalist Conscience, But The Fact Is I Hate Driving.

Now, I Find That Very Difficult To Reconcile With Notions About A Merciful God.

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.

There Are Perfectly Good Independent Small Nations.

You Know, It Is A Terrible Thing To Appear On Television, Because People Think That You Actually Know What You're Talking About.

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 Mean, It Is An Extraordinary Thing That A Large Proportion Of Your Country And My Country, Of The Citizens, Never See A Wild Creature From Dawn 'til Dusk, Unless It's A Pigeon, Which Isn't Really Wild, Which Might Come And Settle Near Them.

Human Beings, Because We're So Clever, Have Removed Every Single One Of Those Population Limiting Factors... So Nothing Controls Our Increase In Numbers Except Our Own Wish. Since I First Started Making Television Programs, The Population Of The World Has Increased Three Times. That's An Extraordinary Notion. Can It Increase Four Times? Can It Increase Five Times? The Earth Is A Finite Size. So A Point Will Eventually Come When We Run Out Of Food, When We Run Out Of Space And When We Will Have Destroyed Most Of The Natural World. So Ought We To Do Something About It Before That Happens?

I Often Get Letters, Quite Frequently, From People Who Say How They Like The Programmes A Lot, But I Never Give Credit To The Almighty Power That Created Nature.

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'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.

We Keep Putting On Programmes 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.

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.

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.

Can A Growing Human Population Still Leave Space For Wildlife?

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.

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.

Anyone Who Thinks That You Can Have Infinite Growth On A Planet With Finite Resources Is Either A Madman Or An Economist.

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.

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