"65 million years ago, an environmental catastrophe wiped out the dinosaurs and over half of all other species then living on the planet." "There is now strong evidence that similar losses are about to happen again." "This is Hawaii." "It's the most isolated group of islands on the planet, 2,400 miles away from the Californian coast." "From the air, it may look like an island paradise, but the history of its animals and plants, since humanity first reached it 1,700 years ago, is very alarming." "It can be seen as an example in miniature of what mankind has done to the planet as a whole." "In environmental terms, it is tragically impoverished." "Small islands are especially vulnerable to the environmental changes that so often follow the arrival of humans." "Hawaii, not so long ago, had more unique kinds of plants and animals than any other group of islands on earth." "But this lush beauty is deceptive." "These mountain slopes, forests and lowlands, which once teemed with such unique species, have today been emptied of their biological riches." "The islands give us all a dramatic warning of the level of losses that could soon occur right across the planet." "Hundreds of species of both animals and plants have disappeared since humanity first came to Hawaii." "It's absolutely clear from research, both here on Hawaii and on other islands, that whenever human beings settle on an island, great loss of species occurs." "If we are to control our impact on the environment, it's absolutely essential that we understand just why this should be." "Across the world, from the tropics to the icecaps, we are surrounded by an extraordinary variety of life." "We have so far named one and a half million different species." "There could be as many as a hundred million." "This great abundance of life is known as biodiversity." "It's this richness that today is threatened as our species attempts to fulfil its biological needs." "In this programme, we will identify the five human activities that are causing such destruction that they lead some experts to foresee a mass extinction of other species during this present century." "To begin with, it may help to get an idea of the scale of environmental change necessary to cause a global mass extinction of life." "To do this, we can look back 65 million years to the last great wave of extinctions that left the dinosaurs as nothing more than fossils for us to study and display." "Many scientists believe that this event was largely due to the environmental after effects of the collision with the earth of a ten-mile wide meteor travelling at 25,000 miles an hour." "This was the equivalent to the simultaneous detonation of 10,000 times the world's total arsenal of nuclear warheads." "Superheated fragments of rock set half the world's plants on fire." "Dense clouds of dust blocked out the sun for months on end, sending temperatures plummeting in what had previously been a largely tropical world." "The rain that fell was acid and poisonous." "The cumulative result of all that was the extinction of over 50% of all species on the planet." "There's a place in Arizona where a meteor, only a tiny fraction of the size of the one thought to have led to the disappearance of the dinosaurs, has left its mark." "On a global scale, it's a mere pinprick, but that mark is enormously impressive." "Many are now suggesting that the impact of our own species may represent for the rest of life on earth the biological equivalent of a modern meteor strike." "It may seem somewhat fanciful to compare the effect humanity is having on biodiversity with the worldwide catastrophe caused by a massive meteor impact." "But there's a lot of evidence to show that we are on the very brink of an extinction event." "So the comparison is not without relevance." "If we want to see what humanity has done to its environment, a very good place to start is where humanity itself started, in Africa." "(MELODIC AFRICAN SINGING)" "Here, on the savannahs, we can still see great herds of what scientists call mega fauna, the big mammals." "Why is it, if you want to see big herds of large mammals, you have to come to Africa?" "The answer's pretty obvious - it's the only place where there are such things." "If you went anywhere else, you'd be in for a big disappointment." "But it wasn't always that way." "50,000 years ago, there were big herds of big animals on every continent on the planet except Antarctica." "Then, around that time, in a very short period, those animals began to go extinct." "At the same time, human beings were beginning to expand from the continent where they began, in Africa, right across the planet." "Was that a coincidence?" "0r was it the first evidence that human beings could have an effect on the rest of the animals on earth, unlike that of any other species?" "In North America, two thirds of all big mammal species were lost." "What was it like there before that happened?" "Biologist Jared Diamond has made a detailed survey of the mega fauna extinctions worldwide." "Here around us in Los Angeles, the mega fauna that went extinct consisted largely of mammals;" "there were camels, we had a lion here." "If we could have been standing here 14,000 years ago, it would have looked like the Serengeti Plains, with lions and cheetahs and elephants." "(ATTENBOROUGH) Could the hunting of big mammals by those ancestral humans really have played a role in their disappearance?" "(DIAMOND) The one correlation around the world is that the mega faunal extinctions happened whenever humans arrived in the area - arriving in Australia 40,000 years ago, in the Americas 13,000 years ago, in New Zealand, 1,000 years ago " "that, I think, is enough to convict humans." "There are still a few kinds of big mammals left in North America, such as these carefully protected bison on the plains of South Dakota." "These are big animals and potentially very dangerous, which is why I must stay in a car if I approach them as closely as this." "These are small compared with some of the huge animals that once roamed these plains." "There was the mammoth, the size of the African elephant, sabre-toothed cats, a ground sloth weighing three tons, a beaver the size of a bear." "And that raises the question of how human beings, on foot, armed with nothing more than bows and arrows and spears, could hunt such monsters so successfully that they contributed significantly to their extinction." "Surprisingly, the answer is to be found back in Africa - by investigating why big animals did not die out here, despite this being the very place where humans first developed their hunting skills." "The big animals of Africa had been evolving along with humans for five million years." "As humans started out as ineffective hunters, then gradually evolved to be effective hunters, so the big animals of Africa had a long time to learn fear of humans." "Unfortunately for the big animals around us here in Los Angeles, the first humans they saw were the best professional game-hunters in human history." "(ATTENBOROUGH) None of those big mammals outside Africa had ever seen human beings before and didn't recognise them as predators." "So instead of being fierce, they probably appeared almost tame." "As a consequence, they were easy to hunt." "But that was not all." "Human beings are what biologists call switching predators." "John Lawton is an expert in the study of animal populations." "A switching predator is a predator with a variety of prey available to it, able to attack a wide range of prey items, so if any one prey gets rare, it can switch to an alternative kind of prey." "That way he can work his way through a smorgasbord of prey items, sustaining its population on whatever happens to be common at the time." "To get an idea of how a switching predator like those early humans can have such a damaging affect on other species, we can look at a modern story involving another and rather surprising switching predator from Europe." "In the mid-1970s, five hedgehogs were taken from the Scottish mainland, where they're common, and released as garden pets on the island of South Uist, off the west coast." "It's an island too remote for the hedgehog ever to have reached by itself." "They and their descendants took to living in old rabbit burrows." "The island turned out to be a virtually perfect place for hedgehogs, with no predators to control their numbers." "Being a switching predator, the hedgehog will feed on anything of the right size it can find." "Slugs, snails and worms are among its favourites and they're hugely abundant in the damp climate here." "So well did the island suit the hedgehog that those original five have given rise to a population today of around 10,000 hedgehogs." "Originally, other animals also benefited from the lack of predators." "The dunlin had always nested here successfully, for although it lays its eggs on the ground, there was nothing here to take them..." "but the hedgehog changed all that." "In the way of a switching predator, it's always looking for new kinds of food." "It turns out that hedgehogs will happily switch from feeding on slugs and worms to dunlin eggs." "This switch led to a drastic collapse in the dunlin's breeding success." "Unfortunately, the story doesn't end there." "At low tide, South Uist is connected to other islands by sandbars." "The hedgehogs can simply walk from one island to another, devastating the populations of breeding birds as they go." "Some islands that are not naturally connected by sandbars have now been joined by causeways, and there they do not even have to wait for low tide." "Humans, however, are no ordinary switching predator." "The loss of the mega fauna was just the first sign that they can kill their prey at a faster rate than their prey can reproduce." "Over-harvesting of both animals and plants is the first of the five ways in which we are affecting the diversity of life on earth." "As the growing human population devises ever more efficient technology, its ability to over-harvest becomes ever greater." "Trees illustrate this tendency only too clearly." "If we cut them down faster than new ones can grow, then a forest will inevitably get smaller or disappear altogether." "The natural processes of regeneration will no longer be sufficient to maintain them." "This over-harvesting will inevitably affect all the other species that interact with trees or depend on them." "Today, trees are being felled worldwide ten times faster than they're being replaced by new growth." "The sea is being over-harvested too." "70% of the major fish species are now being removed at or above the rate at which they can reproduce." "Sylvia Earle is an expert in marine biology." "We're getting too good at removing wildlife from the sea." "Fish have no escape any more." "Perhaps there was a time 50 years ago, certainly 100 years ago, when our numbers were smaller and our ability to capture wildlife in the sea was less sophisticated than now, but with acoustic methods we can find every last tuna," "every last squid, every last... shrimp in the sea." "This kind of use of technology is wonderful in some respects... is terrible in others, because it is encouraging us to just take too much out of the natural systems." "Recent figures suggest that each year up to half of the entire planet's new growth of plants, and a large percentage of animal growth too, is harvested for the use of just one species, our own." "The second way in which human activities are changing the diversity of life also began, like over-harvesting, when humans first spread across the globe." "This is the damage that's caused when animals and plants are introduced to places where they've never lived before." "Australia is famous for the number of alien species that have gained a foothold on its land, often to the detriment of its native species." "A dramatic example is the European rabbit." "Without their natural predators and diseases, rabbit populations in Australia sometimes explode." "These rabbits can graze bare hundreds of square miles of grassland, affecting everything else that lives there." "Over-grazing eventually affects the rabbits too and they die of starvation by the million." "However, alien species cause the most damage on small oceanic islands, and nowhere more so than on Hawaii." "Here, one alien introduction after another has driven many local species to extinction." "When you arrive on Hawaii, it looks wonderful, it's a tropical paradise." "What most tourists don't realise is almost everything they see there in the lowlands is introduced - there is essentially no native birds and very little vegetation." "Many of those that remain have become isolated on mountain tops by this tide of introduced animals and plants." "Hawaii once had about a hundred species of birds that were found nowhere else on earth." "More than half have gone forever." "Many of those that survive are critically endangered." "Snails, better than any other Hawaiian animal, illustrate how one introduction after another can devastate local wildlife." "Millions of years ago, a small number of snail species arrived here on floating vegetation." "From them, over a thousand other species evolved, all unique to Hawaii." "Today, only a small fraction of these still survive." "Some that produced these colourful shells are now so rare that their total world population number less than ten individuals." "These huge collections of Hawaiian snails are the product of a collecting craze in the late nineteenth century." "Many of them will never be seen again;" "they're extinct." "Some of those were probably driven into extinction by the sheer intensity with which they were collected." "Others undoubtedly have their population sizes reduced." "But the final blow that drove so many Hawaiian snails into extinction was the introduction of alien species." "The rat was just one of the more damaging arrivals, eating its way through the great populations of ground-living snails and doing considerable damage to those that lived in huge numbers up in the trees." "Things became worse with the introduction of pigs and goats, which damaged or destroyed the plants on which the snails lived and so caused many extinctions." "But this was not all." "Alien snails now appeared." "These are giant West African snails." "They were introduced into Hawaii about a century ago because some people thought they were particularly delicious to eat." "Unfortunately, snails as big as this have pretty good appetites themselves, and before long they were out of control and chewing up peoples' gardens." "It was decided to try and control them by introducing killer snails, including this one from Florida." "Unfortunately, nobody thought to check whether or not the introduced cannibal snails would prefer the giant West Africans or the smaller native Hawaiians." "In the event, they chose the Hawaiian snails, and so another series of extinctions began in Hawaii." "These killer snails glide over branches, looking for the trails left by the native species." "They track them down and then they eat them." "Killer snails are now moving across Hawaii at the rate of one kilometre a year, destroying native snail populations as they go." "One might question whether the disappearance of a range of species of small snails in Hawaii really matters." "After all, there have been no ecological consequences or damage, as far as we know." "It could be that we won't be aware of any damage for some time to come." "But even if there's none, surely it is sad indeed that our descendants should inherit a natural world that is more impoverished than the one we inherited?" "The introduction of alien species, which we often make so thoughtlessly, is the second way in which we are damaging life's diversity." "The third and most damaging of all is the destruction of habitats." "There's a very clear example of the effects of habitat destruction in South Africa." "This is Cape Town." "Surrounding the city, on this tiny corner of the African continent, is a habitat known by the Afrikaans name of Fynbos." "It's one of the most remarkable plant communities on earth, with a higher concentration of species than even the Amazon rainforests of South America." "It's what scientists call a biological hotspot." "There are more than five and a half thousand plants growing here that are found nowhere else on the planet." "It's a remarkable place, too, because some of the plants here have ranges so small that the entire world population may be crammed into an area half the size of a football field." "This peculiarity, sadly, provides a clear demonstration in miniature of habitat destruction." "40% of the original area of Fynbos has been virtually destroyed by human activities such as agriculture and the spread of the city." "Clearly, if a plant has a world range of only a few hundred square metres, then that area is destroyed, then the plant will become extinct." "It's a simple idea." "Take away the home of a species and that species vanishes." "That is habitat destruction." "The damage may not stop there." "Other plants or animals may also use that patch of land, or depend on that rare plant, so they too will be affected, even if their range is larger than the area destroyed." "We ourselves are not immune from the effects of habitat destruction." "There's a startling example of how that can happen, in the United States." "This is Chaco Canyon, in the state of New Mexico." "It's part of a desert that covers hundreds of square miles." "When the first European travellers reached here, on horseback, about 350 years ago, they found very little water, hardly any trees to provide fuel for fires or timber for housing, and a soil that was very, very infertile." "The place seemed virtually uninhabitable." "Then they entered this canyon and were greeted by the most extraordinary sight." "This is the settlement of Pueblo Bonito, and it's just one of a number of structures in this desert." "They were built about 1,000 years ago by the Anasazi Indians and were abandoned a mere 300 years later." "Ever since they were discovered, the same questions have been asked about them." "Why should the Anasazi build their cities in a desert?" "Why should their civilisation be abandoned a mere 300 years later?" "We now know the answers to those questions and they still retain the power to shock, because they are as relevant to our civilisation as they are to that of the Anasazi 1,000 years ago." "Pueblo Bonito was five storeys high - the tallest building in North America until the advent of steel skyscrapers in the late nineteenth century." "About 215,000 wooden beams were used in the buildings that once stood in the canyon." "It's not just a question of why the Anasazi lived here, but how?" "Where did they find the trees needed for the timber for construction work and fuel for fires?" "There are signs of fields and irrigation systems round here, but the water table is well below the surface and the Anasazi didn't have pumps to raise it." "It required an inspired piece of detection work to solve the mystery of Chaco Canyon." "Rather surprisingly, the key to it was a little mammal called the pack rat." "The pack rat is nocturnal and very shy." "To see it, we have to use a sensitive night-vision camera." "They live in burrows." "At night, they emerge to collect sticks, pine needles, and pretty much anything else they can carry, which they deposit on a mound on top of their burrow." "This mound is their toilet area." "Such middens may be used continuously for over 100 years before being abandoned." "Over time, the nitrogen in their droppings crystallises and the midden solidifies, and so can survive for thousands of years in this hot, dry climate." "Fossil middens are like time capsules." "They carry an accurate record of the plant life during the time that the midden was created." "Scientists have analysed the contents of 52 such middens, which between them cover a period of 10,000 years." "What they found was a revelation." "By dissolving the crystallised nitrogen and studying the plant remains, the history of a civilisation was unravelled." "It was discovered that when the Anasazi first arrived in Chaco Canyon, the area was wooded with pinyon and ponderosa pines." "These trees were cut down for firewood and for building materials." "When the canyon had been cleared of all its trees, the Anasazi built roads to bring timber back from up to 70 miles away in the mountains." "But by then, the damage had been done." "This is one of the few trees still standing." "It seems that the destruction of the trees, combined with an ill-timed period of drought, caused the water table to drop below the level of the irrigation systems in the fields, until they could no longer produce crops." "The land became the desert that we know today and the Anasazi were forced to leave." "The collapse of this civilisation is in itself an alarming story." "But Chaco Canyon was by no means unique." "There are dozens of examples." "There were collapses in the Fertile Crescent, on Easter Island, at Angkor Wat, in the Indus Valley, at Great Zimbabwe, in Mycenaean Greece, in the Mississippi Valley, it goes on and on and on." "The destruction of habitats is doing more damage to biodiversity around the world than any other human activity." "As our population increases and as we cover more of the earth's surface with our buildings and our cultivated fields, we will inevitably lose more wild habitat." "(ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)" "The damage we have inflicted on the world's environments has led many to question whether the human species is deliberately destructive." "Edward Wilson is a biologist who's made a special study of the effect of human behaviour on the rest of life." "(WILSON) I think it would be a grave injustice to speak of the human species as in some sense evil even though we are destroying the environment so efficiently at the present time." "Basically, that's not our intent, it never was." "It was very natural - in fact, it was necessary for survival for the ancestral human beings - to throw everything they had against the wilderness in an attempt to conquer it, to utilise it... that is the nature of humankind." "To expand the population, to gain security, to control, to alter, and for millions of years, that paid off without undue damage." "But then what happened was, as we developed a modern, industrial capacity, then the techno-scientific capacity to eliminate entire habitats quickly and efficiently..." "We succeeded too well and at long last we broke nature." "And now, almost too late, we're waking up to the fact that we've overdone it and we're destroying the very foundation in the environment on which humanity was built." "(ATTENBOROUGH) Habitat destruction is the third way in which human activities are damaging life's diversity." "A process called islandisation is the fourth." "(LAWTON) When we destroy habitats, we tend to leave undisturbed pockets." "Whenever you fly over any bit of the globe now, you can see what we're doing to it." "Basically the process can be thought of as one of islandisation." "Islands of undisturbed habitat in a sea of totally modified habitat." "What happens to habitats that have been cut up and reduced to islands?" "To answer that a huge and ingenious experiment was set up in the rainforests of Brazil by conservation biologist Tom Lovejoy." "Basically, it's like you have this carpet of rainforest, and you took a cookie cutter and put it down in a few places and cut all the forests away around the cookie cutter and then you were left with these green patches of forest." "Although the cleared areas have now begun to grow back, the regrowth consists of just a few weedy species." "So the islands of rainforest, like this dark green rectangular patch, still remain isolated." "It was found that these islands of forests changed from the centre to the edge." "Nearer the margins, the more species will have gone." "Species are continuing to disappear even 20 years later, due to changed conditions or because the islands were simply not big enough to sustain their populations." "The results were usually the same, whether in an experimental island or in an area of forest bisected by nothing more than a road." "One clear example of the effects of islandisation that has been studied here involves a group of birds that habitually follow the swarms of army ants." "Studies have been made to discover whether these ant birds will fly from one patch of forest to another." "Ant birds rely for their food on the army ants which range over the forest floor hunting insects." "The ant birds follow them, picking off whatever insects they can." "A colony of ants needs a large area of forest to provide it with enough insects." "If an island of forest is not big enough, then the ants will leave and cross to another one." "This presents a problem for the ant birds." "(LOVEJOY) They're psychologically adapted to staying in dark, shadowy forest." "They simply will not go out in the open." "So they are unable to follow an army ant colony if it leaves a fragment." "If they are then left in the fragment, they will starve and die." "One species after another will be lost wherever you create an island, in any kind of habitat." "You're going through a simplification of the ecosystem, an impoverishment of the number of species, so you end up with something which is quite less than what you started out with." "Islandisation is happening more and more around the world." "Even nature reserves are islands." "The smaller an island, the more vulnerable its inhabitants." "A large species may need very big islands indeed." "There's a small but clear example on the chalk grasslands which once extended right along the whole length of the downs of southern England." "Changes in agricultural practices here have had a dramatic effect... on this little insect." "Like many animals and plants, the silver-spotted skipper butterfly is very particular about where it lives." "In England, it can only survive where the grass is very well grazed, as here at Boxhill in Surrey." "That grazing keeps the grass very short and allows a full range of downland flowers to bloom." "But more importantly for the butterfly, it also creates areas of bare earth where there's no grass and no flowers." "These bare patches of earth are crucial to it because they warm up very quickly in the sun." "The butterflies bask on them and so raise their body temperature." "Only when they've done that can they fly away and lay their eggs on the surrounding grass." "The silver-spotted skipper's home has now been reduced to a number of small grassland islands." "They won't fly more than a short distance over unsuitable ground, and so don't move from one island to another." "So each butterfly population is now isolated from the others, a typical consequence of islandisation." "If a bad season or a disease eliminates one colony, that area cannot be naturally restocked from elsewhere." "The danger for species living in isolated populations is that one after the other those populations may die out." "If nothing is done to save them, then before long the species has disappeared over quite a wide area." "If its range was not large to start with, quite soon it becomes totally extinct." "The piecemeal destruction of populations caused by islandisation of habitat is the fourth way in which humans are affecting the environment." "The fifth way is pollution." "There is pollution in many parts of the world." "Its damage to habitat may be great but often it's only local." "There is one kind of pollution, however, which could have worldwide consequences." "That is the global warming that results from human activities that pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere." "Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas;" "that is to say, it traps the sun's heat." "The more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the warmer it becomes." "Stephen Schneider is a scientist who has studied both climate change and its effects on the natural world." "It's absolutely certain that humans, when they use the atmosphere as a free sewer and we dump tail pipes and smoke stacks in it and chop down trees and have cement plants, are adding to that envelope of greenhouse gases." "It's virtually certain that that traps enough heat to make a significant difference." "There are probably damages already." "Sea levels are now of the order of 10 to 20 centimetres higher than they were, mountain glaciers are melting, there's probably a little added intensity to hurricanes, so it's already possible to argue plausibly that we've started to crank up the stress" "in terms of added droughts and floods and so forth." "(ATTENBOROUGH) Global warming has occurred naturally many times before." "You can see the effect on animals and plants of just one such happening if you go a few miles out to sea and back in time by 10,000 years." "I'm on a fishing boat on the North Sea, just off the Dutch coast." "We're trawling at a depth of about 30 metres, 90 feet, for mussels." "Sometimes the nets bring up something more than mussels;" "they bring up vivid evidence of an ancient global warming." "Starfish, razor shells, starfish..." "That's more like it..." "That's a bit of bone, and a huge bone, too." "That would have been an articulating surface, like that." "That looks like... a tooth." "That's a tooth of a small horse." "This is nothing compared with what has been got out of this particular sea." "Over here, all these have come out from just here..." "A tusk, a mammoth tusk." "This... this is the joint... from the top of the shoulder, there, like that." "Also of a mammoth." "This, perhaps most convincing of all - nobody doubted that this is something very strange." "This is a mammoth's tooth." "These are its roots, this is its substantial body of the tooth that was in the jaw, and this is the grinding surface." "Spectacular demonstration... that nine, ten, eleven thousand years ago, this patch of the sea was dry land, with mammoths wandering over it." "That global warming led to a great rise in sea levels which drowned much low-lying land and changed the character of many areas by altering weather patterns." "Finding the bones of a great land animal like a mammoth under the sea makes it perfectly clear that global warming can bring about great, profound changes in the distributions of animals and plants." "Equally obviously, any future global warming is likely to do the same." "When it happens, temperatures change all over the planet, as we can see on this thermal image." "This is a problem for many animals and plants, because most can only live within a very limited temperature range." "If climate changes, they must move to keep pace with it." "For example, when the climate warmed after the last Ice Age, oak forests moved north or south, to keep up with their shifting temperature zone." "How does an oak forest move?" "The answer is, very slowly, by having its seeds transported by animals." "In the autumn, squirrels and jays bury acorns as food stores for the winter months." "But they forget where many of them are and those acorns will germinate." "When global warming happens, acorns buried in the north of the forest will grow, while those of the south, where it is too warm, will die." "So a forest slowly creeps north." "This process took thousands of years." "But today it seems that global warming is happening faster than ever before." "It's not like it was when the Ice Age ended, 15 to 12,000 thousand years ago, and the trees marched north, marched in the sense that the seeds spread and animals literally flew and walked." "Now we're saying, go ahead and redo that, not in 1,000 years or in 5,000 years like in history, but go ahead and redo that in a century and do it when you have to cross factories, farms, freeways and settlements," "and all the human disturbance." "It's that combination of factors, the disturbance combined with the climate change that makes most of us in environmental science very concerned about the ability of the earth to support anywhere near the current level of biodiversity in the next century." "These are the five ways we are damaging the planet." "Over-harvesting, introducing alien species, destroying the places where species live, creating small islands of habitat and finally by polluting the atmosphere." "Change in itself is not necessarily destructive when it happens slowly." "However, these five factors are all happening at unprecedented speed." "It seems that the reasons behind the loss of species today make the impending change unique among the great waves of mass extinctions that have happened so far." "Scientist Sir Robert May is a leading authority on the current biological crisis." "The dinosaurs were probably done in through an asteroid impact, an external environmental impact." "What we're seeing at the moment is something unique in the history of life, a single species, us, sequestering to our use, for example, a quarter to a half of all the plant material that grows on earth in any one year." "Our activities are creating the conditions that are driving this sixth great wave of extinction, the wave on whose breaking tip we stand." "It's both literally the best of times and the worst of times." "There has never been a more exciting time to be alive, when we're beginning to actually read the book of life itself." "We have the potential to apply that understanding... for good stewardship and husbandry of this marvellous world that we're heir to, or we can just thoughtlessly bend it, to creating more... bits of garbage to amuse ourselves." "I don't think there's going to be some major environmental catastrophe, some major Armageddon, the world isn't going to stop tomorrow." "The world will simply become a progressively grottier, less interesting place." "If you like... rats and... cats and... house finches and a few things like this and you would like to see them everywhere you go, then biotic impoverishment is for you." "But if you or your descendants would like to live... in an interesting world in which there is richness of life, a variety of life, and wild environments full of surprises and aesthetic delight, then... conservation of biodiversity is for you." "My belief is... that given enough education, enough awareness, enough sensitivity... to problems presented to them, people have the capacity to do amazing things and change their attitude." "We began our investigation in Hawaii, the very image of a tropical paradise." "The vulnerability of its native animals and plants had much to do with the fact that they evolve on islands, but nonetheless their fate should be taken as a warning." "We now understand which of humanity's activities inflicts the greatest damage on the diversity of animals and plants on this planet." "That knowledge is going to be crucial if we are to meet the great challenge of the next century:" "How to provide a good living standard for an ever-growing number of human beings, without inflicting a grave impoverishment on the planet." "In the next programme, we will discover how changes in our behaviour could prevent a great loss of species over the next century." "Our journey will take us to the mountains of New Guinea, home to the largest butterflies on earth." "We will visit the grasslands of Africa, with their famous big mammals." "In the forests of the American north west, we will see the beautiful spotted owl." "Finally, on the single most remote island on the planet, we will discover how our own past can offer us important lessons for the future."