"This is Nairobi National Park in Kenya." "Ten years ago, black rhino were being poached quicker than they were reproducing." "It seemed certain that they were doomed to extinction." "And yet... here they are." "How's that happened?" "It's happened because one species, ourselves, decided that it could happen and should happen." "Today, we have the ability to make a difference, and what the human species does to the planet over the next 50 to 100 years will determine the future of all life on earth." "In the case of the rhino, we may have saved the species but not necessarily its habitat." "This city was once far away, but over recent years it's grown so much it's now hard against the park fence." "It's a scene that's been repeated over and over again across the planet." "The rhino is just one of the more obvious endangered species." "But if things go on as they are, it's likely that over half of all species will become seriously endangered or extinct within the next hundred years." "As the human species increases in numbers, so inevitably do the demands that it makes on the earth and the other creatures that live there." "Somehow, we must find ways of reducing the pressures we're putting on the planet." "In only too many places, our interests and those of wildlife seem to be in direct conflict." "Rwanda in Africa is one such place." "There, the Virunga mountains are home of one of the most charismatic of all species, the mountain gorilla." "Just over 20 years ago, I went to Rwanda to see them for myself, as part of a documentary that we were making." "Then, it was comparatively easy to see gorillas in the wild, in their very rough country, and even to interact with them." "If ever there was a possibility..." "of escaping the human condition, living imaginatively in another creature's world, it must be with the gorilla." "There were only about 240 of them in the Virunga mountains at that time." "This friendly youngster was known as Pablo, but he and his family were in real danger." "Part of their forest was being felled for farms and they were being killed by poachers." "It was only when their plight was brought to international attention in the seventies that things began to change." "Park guards, supported by conservation charities, reduced poaching." "So many tourists paid to see the gorillas that the government recognised officially that these magnificent animals were a major economic asset." "But during the 1990s, another, much bigger tragedy started to unfold." "Rwanda was devastated by civil war and genocide." "Immense refugee camps formed on the slopes of the mountains where the gorillas lived." "Humanitarian aid provided food but not the fuel to cook it." "The people took that from the forests." "They had no choice." "What had been lush mountain vegetation where the gorillas came to forage became a wasteland." "Some of the gorillas were killed, but despite the shooting and the reduction in the size of their forest, the gorilla community survived." "Pablo is now fully grown." "Miraculously, he and his family came through the turmoil relatively unscathed." "But there are still dangers in this forest." "This gorilla lost his hand in a poacher's snare." "Even so, the Virunga population has begun to increase." "At the last count, there were 320." "What future do they have?" "Ian Redmond is a biologist who's been studying and working to protect the gorillas for over 20 years." "(REDMOND) Now that those gorillas are seen as an economic resource, then the quality of lives of all the people associated with the park is going to be increased by the fact that there are still mountain gorillas there." "More importantly, the gorillas are part of the ecosystem of those mountains, and that's one of the most densely populated parts of Africa; most people are farmers." "They depend on the rainfall that those mountains generate, on the streams that flow out of those mountains, which wouldn't flow year round if the forest was gone." "To save the forest, you need the animals in the forest, which means the people around that forest can benefit from it." "(ATTENBOROUGH) It's not just in developing countries that humans and wildlife can be at odds." "That can also happen in prosperous parts of the world." "The state of Oregon in the north west of the United States still has vast wilderness areas, but even here there's a species threatened with extinction." "This time it's a bird, the northern spotted owl." "Its diet is quite varied for an owl - frogs, lizards, even insects." "But it relies mainly on small rodents." "One pair of spotted owls needs around eight square kilometres of old growth forest in which to catch enough prey to feed themselves and their chicks." "But part of this territory, in recent decades, has become a major centre for logging." "When the forest is cleared, the owl can no longer hunt, and it takes about 60 to 100 years for an area to recover sufficiently for the owl to return." "Around 60% of its former habitat has now been lost." "The timber industry here is big, powerful and very important." "If it were to go entirely, over 30,000 jobs and millions of dollars in revenue would be lost." "It's hardly surprising that the issue caused bitter divisions among the people of the area, many of whom couldn't accept that they should lose their jobs just because of a bird." "But fundamentally, the argument was not just about a bird, but about the whole complex community of animals and plants living in these magnificent forests, and eventually it was decided that logging should be restricted." "However, shutting off large areas of land to protect wildlife and finding local people new jobs is not always an option." "Elsewhere, there may not be enough space to give each its own territory." "In Africa, in Kenya's Shimba hills, there is such a problem." "What was once wild bush is being gradually taken over by farms." "The area, however, is particularly rich in animals, such as elephant, and also contains a great range of plants." "Within the Shimba hills reserve, there's an area of 35 square kilometres containing a once migratory population of 500 or so elephants." "This has been fenced off to protect growing numbers of farms from crop raiding by elephants." "Unfortunately, closed reserves may be beset by many problems." "And this area has one - too many elephants." "Elephants may push over trees to get at the leaves of the higher branches." "But with so many animals restricted to this small area, there's a risk that the carefully protected environment will be severely damaged." "A solution has to be found." "In this case, around 30 of the worst offenders are tracked by helicopter and tranquillised, to be moved elsewhere." "This solution is only temporary because the population that remains is still too large." "It does, however, buy time until a more long-term solution can be found." "This is a dangerous procedure that can only be tackled by specialists such as the Kenyan Wildlife Service." "Paula Kahumbu is their scientific advisor." "This is a particularly difficult area to work in because it's forest and bush land." "A team from the Kenyan Wildlife Service includes our chief vet and his veterinary assistants and a capture team with all the equipment." "We're planning to move 30 bulls, so it's one of our biggest operations we've ever conducted." "This may be a distressingly undignified procedure, but it's the only way to translocate an elephant." "The elephants will go to Tsavo East National Park, 200 kilometres away." "It's a much larger reserve, less densely populated by elephants." "Is there a danger of having increasing numbers of small, isolated patches of natural environment?" "I do think it will happen more and more." "We've been unable to stop the fragmentation of these habitats, all across Africa." "In Kenya, it's particularly bad because our protected areas only cover 7.9% of the total landscape." "But more small reserves may require ever more damage limitation exercises like this." "Even small areas of natural habitat may contain thousands of animal and plant species." "They may be smaller and less glamorous than elephants, but equally important to the health of the area." "Over several weeks, 28 elephants were translocated." "What are the benefits of concentrating great effort and expense on just a few of the larger species?" "An expert in African conservation is Walter Lusigi." "Although we must use a single species as a flagship, we must always remember that the species survive within an ecological system and they are related to their surrounding environment, and protecting that species means protecting that whole environment for it to be able to survive." "But to conserve an elephant on its own, that does not work." "We now know that many of the reserves created in the past are too small." "One way to deal with that is to join them up." "Across Africa, there are several hundred protected areas and national parks, but they're isolated from one another." "Here in southern Africa, where Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa meet, the borders are being opened up to connect existing parks so that wildlife can migrate between them, as much of it once did." "There is now a plan to link this huge area with other reserves across southern Africa." "It's known as the Peace Parks Initiative and it's headed by zoologist John Hanks." "We stress three important things about Peace Parks." "The first is the role that these larger areas play in the conservation of global biological diversity." "The second is that Peace Parks really do promote a culture of peace... and that's something Africa needs." "The third thing we stress is bringing in the local people as partners, so they benefit from it." "That hasn't always been the case." "This is all that is left of one of the villages belonging to the Makeleki people after they were forcibly removed to make way for the Kruger National Park three decades ago." "Thirty years on, the Makeleki have achieved something unique." "They appealed to the law and won back their land." "Now they've decided to manage it to encourage wildlife." "(MUSIC. ;" "AFRICAN SINGING)" "They hope that in the next few years such a wild and beautiful area as this, properly conserved, will attract tourists and bring money and jobs, so both people and wildlife will benefit." "(HANKS) Trying to get across the message that biological diversity is not just conservationists saying you've got to conserve these spectacular mammals because we like to look at them." "We're talking about quality of life, human survival, and the commercial value of a range of species that really can make a difference to communities in these marginal areas." "(REDMOND) Conservation tends to focus on protected areas." "Protected areas are fine as an absolute bottom line, but they're not enough." "We have to develop methods of living in amongst nature, not separating humans from nature, and all those projects where communities benefit from wildlife and natural resources in a sustainable way are the way forwards." "Enabling both wildlife and people to live alongside one another appears to be working in parts of Africa." "But in many densely populated countries, places where wildlife can flourish are now only tiny patches." "This is eastern England, part of Cambridgeshire." "Over the past 50 years, pasture and woodlands, highlighted here in green, have been greatly reduced, and it now has some of the largest fields in the country." "This has had a considerable effect on many species." "Bats can live for up to 25 years, so many individual bats in Cambridgeshire, like these long-eared, have had to make major adjustments to their lives in order to survive." "They feed on moths and are able to detect them by listening for the sound of beating wings." "One bat may catch up to 20 moths a night." "Bats depend upon hedgerows for their food, insects and for shelter." "But hedgerows are also extremely important from another point of view." "They act as corridors between the bats' roost and the woodlands where they feed." "After the Second World War, new agricultural machinery was introduced that needed big fields." "So hedgerows were torn up and with them went many of the bats' highways and feeding grounds." "It takes only a few minutes to rip up a hedgerow but over a century for a hedgerow to build up a richly varied population of animals and plants." "This may seem a rather odd and specialised example, but corridors can be crucially important for animals both small and big." "We now recognise the importance of hedgerows for wildlife, and laws have been passed to protect them and other wild habitats, even in the overcrowded English landscape." "The natural environment can be destroyed in less obvious ways, by alien species that have infiltrated some of our seemingly unspoilt wildernesses." "This is the Snowdonia National Park, set aside as a national treasure, and protected for the sake of its wonderful landscape, its wildlife and for public appreciation." "This Welsh park has one of the highest concentrations of different kinds of mosses in the country." "It's also a place where rhododendrons in flower bring vivid colour to whole hillsides." "But rhododendrons are not native to this part of the world." "They were introduced to Britain 200 years ago as an ornamental shrub for gardens, originally from Spain and Portugal and the Himalayas." "They like high rainfall and humidity, with an acid soil, and in these conditions they thrive." "But rhododendrons combine the characters of beauty and the beast." "Here they grow into a great wall of foliage, 20, 30 feet high." "Nothing grows beneath them, the ground is absolutely bare." "They simply take over from native species." "Removing them, as is being done here, is a very big job." "You might think that was the end of the matter..." "Not so." "The reason that nothing else grows here is not just because of the lack of light." "Rhododendrons, like many plants, rely for their nourishment on a partnership between their roots and a fungus." "The fungus that grows with rhododendrons produces a chemical that is highly toxic to anything else except rhododendrons." "So the fact of the matter is that this soil is poisoned and dead." "Not only that, but most British mammals, birds and insects that try to live here would also be poisoned." "The park is getting rid of the rhododendron, but it's a massive task." "Once you've cleared an area, you can't immediately plant it with native species because the rhododendron root fungus remains poisonous for up to seven years." "The only thing that can come back into this soil in that time is more rhododendrons." "The rhododendron is the most widespread invasive plant in Britain." "What may appear to be just a harmless, pretty shrub is in fact an implacable invader that exterminates everything in its way." "Biologist E.0. Wilson is an expert in plant and animal communities." "A growing problem for biodiversity worldwide is the invasive species." "We're just also waking up to the fact fully... that due to the increased commerce all around the world, quarantine systems of many countries are weak and more and more species are getting introduced where they're not needed." "A small percentage of those species will become destructive to the environment and economically." "But how do we prevent aliens from taking over new territories?" "Biologist Sir Robert May has a solution." "For some of the problems of invasive species, the answer is indeed just tighter regulation." "But that gets harder and harder in a more crowded world with more and more movement." "The root of the problem is that we ourselves in recent years have become incessant intercontinental travellers." "Each year, there are around eight million commercial flights." "As our technology makes the world a smaller place and as it becomes easier for us to move around, it also becomes easier for animals and plants to do so." "Each year, around ten million reptiles, three million captive wild birds, 30,000 monkeys and apes and many other species are transported around the world, some legally and some not." "There are regulations trying to control their movement." "Customs officers working for CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, are responsible for monitoring the movement of endangered wildlife." "Here at London's Heathrow Airport, they check to see if a cargo is legal." "(FEMALE) These aren't endangered, are they?" "(MALE) No, none of this lot." "...down there..." "Detecting the import of species that are endangered or potentially invasive is a tough and skilled job." "Last year, customs officials made over 30,000 seizures of CITES-listed plants and animals illegally entering the UK." " This is an uncontrolled lot, isn't it?" "Burchelli?" " Yeah." "These are just some of the illegally exported animal products - ivory, skins, feet, fur, coral - that have been confiscated at London's Heathrow Airport." "As creatures like these become rarer in the wild, so the value of their products increases and the price on their heads goes up." "If you over-harvest a species, taking more than can be replaced by natural reproduction, then that species is heading for disaster." "That's happening in the West African forest." "Many monkeys, apes and other animals are already threatened by loss of habitat... but in the last ten years a new threat has appeared - the commercial bush meat trade." "Meat from wild animals, bush meat, has always been part of the staple diet of people who live in the forest, but as the population grows and people move increasingly into towns, they all still want their traditional bush meat, and commercial hunters supply it." "It is a multi-million dollar business, the selling of bush meat, but great apes have such slow reproductive cycles that losing a part of a group can have a huge effect, and populations are declining." "Taking too much out of the wild to sustain the human population isn't something that happens just in less developed countries." "Across the globe, forests are being cut down faster than they can regenerate, and stocks of fish are being plundered so heavily that whole populations are being exterminated." "The obvious way to prevent over-harvesting is to bring in regulations to control the amount we take from the wild." "Whales have been hunted for centuries, but the introduction of explosive harpoons and electronic techniques for finding the animals have reduced many species to dangerously low numbers." "At the height of the hunt, 50,000 whales were being killed each year." "One species, the grey whale, was reduced to a few hundred individuals." "Then an international ban on commercial whaling was introduced and some species were rescued from the brink of extinction." "But now, after fourteen years, that ban may be lifted." "Over-harvesting is a particular concern of biologist John Lawton." "I believe that it will be in the interest and it is in the interest of rich, developed nations to help developing nations move to more sustainable development, to pay for the protection of forests, to pay for the protection of wildlife and so on." "And that is exactly what has happened in a far distant corner of Indonesia, in the Arfak mountains of western New Guinea." "Birdwing butterflies live here, and they are among the largest butterflies in the world, with a wingspan of up to a foot across." "Ever since they were first seen by Europeans, they've been highly prized by collectors." "The forests are also home to the Moili people." "They earned money by catching and selling butterflies, which fetch big prices around the world." "But so many of the birdwings were being taken that their numbers fell dangerously low." "Now, with the assistance of a conservation organisation, the Moili are being encouraged to harvest the butterflies in a different way." "Inggris Wonggor and other men in his village recognise that the birdwings rely on one particular vine, aristolochia, and they plant it in special gardens on the edge of the forest." "Wild butterflies come to lay their eggs in these gardens and then fly off." "Caterpillars hatch from the eggs, feed on the aristolochia leaves, and eventually turn into pupae." "A few days before the adults emerge, the pupae are collected and taken down to the nearest town, a day's walk away." "Here, there's a butterfly co-operative, which helps the villagers get the best price for the butterflies on the world market." "(CONVERSE IN OWN LANGUAGE)" "Inggris is paid 5,000 rupiah, just less than one dollar, for each butterfly pupa he brings in." "The co-operative has special temperature-controlled rooms, where the adults emerge without any problems." "The butterflies are killed, packed and sent to collectors around the world." "The income from the butterfly co-operative is the only source of money for most villagers like Inggris Wonggor." "(INGGRIS TALKS IN OWN LANGUAGE)" "(TRANSLATION) The environment is very important to us." "If the forest is devastated, it means no butterflies, so we can get nothing." "(ATTENBOROUGH) The project also helps wild butterflies." "Not all the pupae in the aristolochia gardens are collected." "A significant proportion hatch there, and the adults fly off into the forest, where they replenish the original population." "So both the people and the butterflies in these mountains now have a more secure future." "There's another strange and romantic species that has found a market internationally." "You can find examples of it, if you know where to look, in Chinese communities all over the world, including London's Chinatown." "At least 50 different countries are involved in the trade for seahorses." "Some are caught for keeping in aquaria or as curios, but many, like these dried ones, are for use in traditional medicine." "Worldwide, up to 20 million seahorses are caught each year, and the demand for them seems to be limitless." "Needless to say, this is having a dramatic effect on some local seahorse populations." "In the Philippines, there are some local people who depend upon the seahorse trade for their living, so there a conservation programme has been started which tries to ensure that their needs, as well as those of the seahorses, are being considered." "Most of the seahorses are gathered at night." "They rely for their defence on camouflage, but these divers are very skilled at spotting them among the coral and seaweed." "Few escape their practiced eye." "Seahorses are more prone to the dangers of over-harvesting than most species of fish because of the extraordinary way in which they breed." "Instead of laying several thousand eggs, like many fish, seahorses produce only a few hundred, and incredibly it's the male that becomes pregnant and gives birth to the young, alive." "Males and females form bonds for life." "If one of them is taken, then the other may not find another mate for a very long time." "But, commonly, both partners are caught since they tend to live close to one another." "But in this village, a new method of seahorse fishing has been introduced, thanks to the support of an international conservation group organised by marine biologist Dr Amanda Vincent." "Project Seahorse is trying to ensure the long-term persistence of healthy seahorse populations, healthy populations of their relatives and healthy habitats in which seahorses live." "We're doing this in a way that respects human needs and we're also focused on education." "(SPEAK L0CAL DIALECT)" "The fishermen bring their catches to a local buyer in the village." "On a good night, a man can reckon to earn a couple of dollars." "The seahorses will be dried and sent abroad." "Records are made of what was caught so that the effects on the population can be monitored." "Scholarships have been set up for local students, who help with the record taking." "With this information, the harvesting of seahorses can be properly planned to prevent the over-fishing of any one area and to conserve a healthy breeding population." "The villagers still go out fishing for seahorses, but the project is helping them to make a better living through associated crafts and some tourism." "So now a chain of carefully guarded sanctuaries has been created, where the seahorses can breed in safety." "Both the seahorse and the birdwing butterfly projects are concerned with sustainability." "That means not taking too much out of the wild so that species of animals and plants will continue to flourish." "If you do take too much, of course, then those populations can decline dangerously, sometimes beyond recovery, and then there's nothing for anyone to take out, now or in the future." "Protecting a population from over-exploitation is essential, but even that may not be enough if another threat to their environment is not tackled quickly." "That threat comes from pollution." "Pollution is often localised and sometimes even reversible, but one kind is not reversible - the continual release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the earth's atmosphere." "This has a long-term effect on the earth's temperature." "Stephen Schneider is a climatologist." "The world is going to warm up something like one to five degrees in the next century." "One being mild, five being catastrophic." "Not satisfying, but we have to tell the truth." "The truth is it's likely that something significant will happen." "But it gets much more complicated." "The big problems occur when the warming gets to several degrees, because that starts to get to be the number where some species really want to move hundreds to thousands of kilometres, and it'll be very difficult for those migrations to take place" "across the world's factories, farms, freeways and urban settlements, and at a rate at which climates could change." "But is there any real evidence to suggest that species might be able to move in this way?" "Here in King's Canyon in California's Sierra Nevada there is proof, and it comes in the form of a butterfly called Edith's checkerspot." "Like most butterflies, this species is sensitive to changes in temperature or climate." "It's at its most vulnerable not when it flies as an adult but when it feeds as a caterpillar." "It lays its eggs in summer." "When the caterpillars hatch out, they feed on a particular plant, figwort, as they prepare to hibernate until the next spring." "But if spring comes too early due to climate change, then the plants flower and die before the caterpillars have a chance to eat them." "Studies going back as far as 20 years have shown that in order to survive, this species has gradually moved its range farther up the mountains to get to the cooler temperatures, where the plants put out their leaves at the right time" "for the caterpillars to feed, and it's been found the butterflies have extended their range northwards by 200 kilometres." "The earth has gone through many changes of temperatures and climate in its history." "But now conditions are changing at such speed that some species will have to move really rapidly." "So what happens if they can't do so?" "These are the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean." "They have one of the least polluted habitats on the planet and their spectacular reefs make them one of the top spots for divers." "Although coral reefs occupy less than 1% of the vast space taken up by oceans, they support 25% of all species of marine fish." "Corals are extremely sensitive to changes in water temperature." "This is what one of the many coral reefs in the area usually looks like." "But during the month of April, 1998, it suddenly changed." "The whole reef turned white, exposing its naked skeleton." "The majority of the tiny coral polyps that had built these structures had been killed by a rise in the water temperature of just one degree centigrade." "Marine biologists believe this to have been caused by a fluctuation in the earth's climate known as El Niño, combined with the beginnings of global warming." "Eighteen months later, this is what the same reef looked like." "Between 80 and 90% of the corals were dead, their skeletons covered with brown slime." "It may be decades before the reefs of the Maldives are recolonised." "10% of the world's coral reefs were severely damaged during this one episode, when the ocean temperatures for a short time changed." "We know from fossil evidence that during earlier mass extinctions, like the one in which the dinosaurs disappeared, many coral species also vanished, probably as a result of a change in temperature." "So what can be done about global warming?" "The solution to global warming is more sustainable energy sources, so we're not burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases." "It's also having fewer people and having more efficient energy and having less extravagant patterns of consumption." "All the problems we have recognised so far are being made greater by the increase in human population." "100 years ago, the world's population was around two billion people." "Today it stands at just over six billion, that's 6,000 million." "And the last thousand million was added in the last 12 years." "Ian Diamond is a demographer studying population growth." "If we don't see increases in the use of family planning and declines in child bearing, as we started to see in many parts of the world in the last few years, then we will have much, much bigger populations than nine or ten billion." "In the long term, into the 22nd century, the world's population will flatten out at around 11 billion." "What does that mean for the future of the planet?" "As far as food is concerned, agricultural technologists say that crop yields could be improved sufficiently to sustain around 11 billion people." "But if six billion people are already damaging the planet and its biological diversity, a population of 11 billion would put intense pressure on global resources, far beyond anything we've yet witnessed." "Are we content that that should happen?" "We understand what the problems are and what we can do about them." "And we have the ability to minimise the damage to biodiversity." "But how many species can we afford to lose during this immense increase in the human population, without seriously compromising the future?" "Conservation of biodiversity will depend on how we scale down our excesses in consumption." "But if things are decisively done at the political level, at the local level, at the governmental level, to be able to address this problem head on, without political excuses and different people getting excuses, then I think we have a chance." "If we don't take those measures, then we risk losing up to 50% of all species on earth." "Among them would be some of the most well known." "But also there would be many others which haven't even been discovered yet." "(WILSON) We'd all like to save biodiversity in the environment, the preservation of the creation, as it were." "We have to learn... a new ethic, that allows us to... care as much about the Brazilian rainforest as our own local reserve, and to think beyond just a few years or even a generation, to future generations," "and what it is we'd like to leave to them." "A warning of what the future could hold can be seen on one of the most remote places on earth, a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, two and a half thousand miles from anywhere." "This is Easter Island, and these astonishing stone sculptures are vivid evidence of the technological and artistic skills of the people who once lived here." "How did they survive?" "There are hardly any large animals to provide them with meat, there are very few different kinds of plants." "There are no trees to provide timber with which to build houses or ocean-going canoes." "In terms of human survival, this island is very barren indeed." "But Easter Island was not always like this." "1500 years ago, when the first Polynesian settlers landed here, they found a miniature world that had ample resources to sustain them." "They lived well, erected their spectacular monuments, and over the centuries their population grew to around 20,000." "So what went wrong?" "These are the remains of an early Easter Islander's house, and from excavations in the refuse dumps and around the kitchen, we can get a pretty good idea of what they had for meat." "There was a lot of fish, there was also shellfish and rats and chickens." "And there was a lot of pollen grains too, and that tells us what kind of trees there were on the island." "There were a lot of them." "Then, about 500 years ago, things changed." "Fish almost disappear from the diet, and changes in the pollen and the reduction of its quantity give us the reason why." "Almost the last of the trees had been felled by then." "So the islanders no longer had timber to build sea-going canoes." "And, at about the same time, the carving of the great stone statues came to an end." "Without wood to make canoes, the people couldn't leave their shores, even to fish." "Starvation threatened." "Warfare broke out between rival clans as they fought over the limited food and the remaining productive soil." "The old culture that had sustained them was abandoned and the statues toppled." "What had been a rich, fertile world in miniature had become a barren desert." "It seems we'll have to make further changes in our behaviour and attitude if we're not to inflict lasting damage on the other animals and plants with which we share this planet." "We ourselves, as a species, may well survive, come what may." "But it could also be that unless we change, we, like the ancient Easter Islanders, will be condemning generations to come to live in a poorer and impoverished world." "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 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."