"NARRATOR:" "There have been few natural history films like it," "Planet Earth." "What a world we live in," "And what an experience it must have been to film it," "So why have the production team come away with mixed emotions?" "," "Filming Planet Earth has been a wonderful experience because we've been able to visit an extraordinary range of our planet, really, and it's been something of a bittersweet experience because, yes, we have seen some very threatened animals, you know," "and that's always sad to see, but at the same time we've met some wonderful impassioned individuals who are doing a great deal on the ground to improve the situation for those particular species." "And also, you realize that there is an enormous amount of wilderness still out there." "NARRATOR:" "But for how long?" "," "Will those impassioned individuals that Alastair met be enough to save what remains of the world's threatened wildernesses and their animals and plants?" "," "How much will it matter to us if they are lost?" "," "What can we really do to save them?" "," "And in this new millennium, are we still going about it the right way?" "," "In this series, we'll put such questions to the decision-makers and conservationists on the ground," "We'll demonstrate that the environmental debate today has never been more important," "We have to make hard judgments about what investments will yield the biggest returns for conservation." "And that means we make choices about what species to invest in, and about what strategies make the most difference." "NARRATOR:" "Is it right that those strategies are usually drawn up by Westerners with money?" "," "I don't think that the conservation organizations, the giants of conservation, know better than the people who, historically, have been staying with wildlife." "NARRATOR:" "We'll use footage from Planet Earth to look at some of the world's most important wild places and what's been happening to them," "The situation in the Asian region in particular is extremely serious." "Nearly all of the natural rainforest has gone from several countries now," "Thailand and the Philippines, and what remains in the big blocks, for example, in the Indonesian islands and New Guinea is now under serious threat, not least because of the huge consumption boom that's going on in China." "NARRATOR:" "We might know in our bones that that matters, but why?" "," "What, if anything, does wilderness actually do for us?" "," "We're getting a better understanding today of how there are some basic life-supporting services that the planet provides." "Fresh water is a classic example of that." "That if we don't put effort into conservation, we're not going to only make our lives worse, but it's also going to impact wildlife." "NARRATOR:" "Is this radically new understanding enough to make us all think again?" "," "And why are the world's religions suddenly getting involved?" "," "Wilderness always speaks to human beings of transcendence in the widest possible sense." "It says, "You as a human being are part of a system" ""which is not just about your needs and your concerns." ""Like it or not, you're part of something immense and very mysterious."" "NARRATOR:" "Immense, mysterious and disappearing," "Disappearing as human society expands, develops," "But surely an aware society can learn to live sustainably," "The term "sustainable development" is a contradiction in terms." "We can have no kind of development." "We've gone much too far." "What we need is a sustainable retreat from the mess that we're now in." "Who's really going to go out there and pretend there isn't going to be development in human societies?" "Development in our own evolution as a species." "Development in the way we help poor people to live better, more dignified lives." "What kind of world is it in which there's going to be no development?" "Everything stops right now." "If you want to use these mountainous forests, for example, for the plantations to produce paper, or to produce building materials, you can." "But you do that at the risk of not having rivers flow, and not having rainfall." "It seems to me that the issue of conservation of the natural world is something which can unite humanity if people know enough about it." "Persuade them to change the way in which they behave, to change the view that gross materialism and the search of material wealth is not the only thing in life." "This is an opportunity for greatness which has never been offered to any civilization, any generation in any civilization in human history before." "To act as a generation to do the right thing." "If we fail to receive that opportunity, to act on it, then my feeling is we will become the most vilified generation that's ever lived in human history." "NARRATOR:" "Saving wilderness, saving ecosystems, saving the planet, saving humanity, for that matter, all have to start somewhere," "And one of the first, and saddest things that struck the crews who filmed these particular animals was that so many of them were threatened," "Our series begins with those animals and with what's being done to try and save them," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "The Amur leopard, the rarest cat in the world," "NARRATOR:" "The Amur leopard is rare all right," "So rare, so highly endangered, that the Planet Earth crew filming in the Russian Far East may turn out to have been the last humans ever to see a wild one," "They were shocked by the rarity of many species that they filmed for the series, notjust Amur leopards," "I just felt amazingly excited, incredibly privileged." "You know, you're aware that very few people in the world have seen this cat and there's a risk that not many people will see one in the future." "Here in this wilderness you have this group of animals, these wild Bactrian camels, and I would say that 99% of the world's population don't know these animals exist." "And yet they're one of the most endangered large mammals on our planet." "We've been filming here for six weeks and we've got some remarkable footage, but anyone would have thought that this was a Shangri-la." "But sadly, that's not the case." "Several times during the trip, and the trip has been about six weeks, we've been woken in the middle of the night by gunshots." "I've lost count of the number of times I've visited a field station and worked with a scientist who says, "Oh!" "I don't understand it."" "You know, "This place always yields this amphibian, that amphibian." ""It's the first time ever we can't find them."" "And the overall sense is that amphibians are really, really collapsing." "I think we are faced probably with the extinction of at least half the world's frogs." "NARRATOR:" "Down beneath these clouds something drastic is happening," "This planet is unique in its solar system in supporting life, complicated life, animals," "But a lot of those animals are now in danger of dying out," "We have perhaps one in four mammals now on the threatened list, we have one third of all amphibians on the threatened list." "So we know that we are progressively pushing more and more species to the edge of extinction." "We have lost half of the world's forests, half of the world's wetlands, half of the world's grasslands," "We are systematically eradicating many of the habitats that make up the world's ecosystems." "If you just lose one species, it's probably not going to have a big impact." "At least nothing that you and I will recognize." "But if we continue to lose loads and loads and loads and loads of species, what we're actually saying is that the underlying fabric of nature is tearing." "And that tearing of that underlying fabric will have huge repercussions for the well-being of people who live within that environment." "Of course, scientists often spend a lot of their careers in one place, gaining immense detail." "As filmmakers we tend to travel the world, we just nip in for a week and nip out for a week." "But that does mean we get great overviews and one of the senses you definitely get as you travel the world is that amphibians are in collapse." "NARRATOR:" "Frogs were an importantpart ofPlanet Earth's Jungles program, and the crew traveled extensively to film them," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "I've just come back from Central America," "In one small area in Panama there were over 50 different species of frogs." "And they are very vulnerable because they are able to absorb substances through their skins, their moist skins, and thus are easily infected by fungi," "And there's a fungus moving up Panama which by next year will certainly have killed another two species." "NARRATOR:" "Frogs are becoming extinct throughout Central America, but what significance does that have?" "," "What do the inhabitants of Costa Rica think?" "," "The loss of a species should be a sad thing for everyone." "We already lost a very emblematic frog of Monteverde, the golden toad." "And that was the only place on Earth that it existed." "And it was a symbol of that forest, Cloud Forest." "It's lost and it's lost forever." "NARRATOR:" "The golden toad, like so many other species that have become extinct, were hit by the fungus," "So what is it?" ", Has it always been around?" "," "There's been a lot of forensic work, obviously, to say, "Well, where has the fungus come from? "" "And it's now been traced back to the African clawed toad." "And it looks as if toads from South Africa were exported in the 1930s in very large numbers to hospitals in the Western world because they're used as a biological indicator of human pregnancy," "And then presumably some have escaped, and once the fungus has got into the water systems, we're now still seeing the effects of its spread worldwide," "Whole frog communities are crashing, and on a global scale, out of something like 6,000 frog species altogether, now nearly one third are classified as endangered." "NARRATOR:" "In another forest, in a very remote part of Africa's Congo basin, the Planet Earth team filmed forest elephants," "Which are a little smaller than the better-known Savannah elephants, are less exposed and are presumably less likely to be killed for their tusks," "Cameraman Martyn Colbeck found that remoteness and vast, dense forest cover made almost no difference to the elephants' and other animals' vulnerability," "You go to these wonderful places on series like this, and it's always really sad and disappointing, you know, when you go to a place like this." "An extraordinary place, you see extraordinary animals, and you know that there are people out there shooting game for bush meat and if they came across elephants, they'd be poaching elephants as well for their ivory." "There's no doubt that if poaching becomes a serious problem," "I mean, it can quickly wipe out a population." "I mean, we've seen that happen in remarkably short time frames." "Countries that had great elephant populations decade or two decades ago, almost completely wiped out 20 years later." "So, you know, poaching is not necessarily something that happens on the fringe." "If poachers move in and they're organized and it's for an external market rather than an immediate consumptive market, it can wipe out a population." "Last year we got 70 guns." "Six years ago, for example, we confiscated about ten." "So, that's about a 700% increase." "The same with the snares here." "I mean, this is about 250 snares." "Last year, we confiscated 70,000." "And if you look at the devastation these snares cause in the forest..." "I mean, they don't just get to the little blue duikers, or the medium-sized red duikers that they're intended for, they get leopards, they get gorillas, and chimpanzees." "Often you see chimpanzees walking around without hands, and those are the lucky ones." "Because that means that the hand just developed gangrene and fell off, whereas the others developed septicemia from the infection and they die." "NARRATOR:" "It isn'tjust barely-accessible deep forest that poachers have managed to penetrate," "In other parts of Africa there are other kinds of inaccessibility," "Among the towering cliffs, peaks and ridges of Ethiopia's Simien Highlands, the so-called Roof of Africa, the filmmakers also found problems," "Walia ibex, Ethiopia's national symbol," "They can exist in these precarious places, and they do," "But that's mainly because they have to," "The cliffs are something like a kilometer high and they're almost sheer, and that's where the walla ibex live." "And to see them in this enormous distance, way, way off there on these sheer cliffs is truly spectacular," "I tried to film them years and years ago for another series and they proved just too difficult." "The walla ibex were much wider spread at one time throughout the mountains of Ethiopia and are related to the ibexes of Europe." "But as humans have spread through Ethiopia and the environment has dried out, the walla ibex has been pushed into the most marginal habitats it can find and some of the last remaining places that humans can't get to" "are these incredible sheer cliffs." "And it's only just been with a lot of warfare in the last century in Ethiopia, the Italian invasion and then a big civil war, that the walla ibex became favorite food for soldiers." "The Simien mountains saw a huge amount of fighting through the 1 970s and 1 980s and in that period the easiest food for a very cold soldier would have been to take a shot at one of the walla ibex." "And so we saw the numbers decimated." "The one thing the walla has going for it is the habitat that it lives in, which is these sheer, sheer cliffs." "There's very few animals in the world that could live on precipices like the walla." "And so it has a little niche that it can cling to, but it's such a fragile situation." "I mean, 600 animals for a large mammal is just nothing." "And when you have no other habitats to spread into, no other populations to interbreed with, no walla ibex in captivity, you'd better be sure that you can protect that one last piece of cliff that they have." "NARRATOR:" "When you're trying to save a species from extinction, one of the first things you have to know is how close to extinction the species is, how many animals are actually left," "In the case of the high-profile walla ibex, counting is easy, and its would-be conservers know exactly what the problem is," "But in other mountains on another continent, in the case of a species that's distinctly low-profile, it's not so easy," "Pakistan, The Himalayas," "This," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "The snow leopard, the rarest of Himalayan animals," "NARRATOR:" "The Planet Earth team spent months just trying to glimpse a snow leopard, and more months to film one," "How do you conserve a creature that you're lucky even to see?" "," "How do these scientists, or how do these conservationists, know where this animal is, how many they are and what their behavior is?" "Someone told me that there were 3,000 between China and Afghanistan." "Now, I mean, we've had a very tough time identifying three." "There is a threat to its existence simply because not enough is known about it," "We really don't know where it thrives," "Because it's isolated, you expect that a lot of wildlife is there." "How much of it and what are the elements affecting it are unknown." "I was up there for two years, never saw one." "Following snow leopard tracks into the snow, and you'd come back in the evening and the snow leopard tracks were on top of ours." "So they were following us." "For such an elusive creature, what could possibly threaten it?" "," "Mostly, it's poaching," "It's mostly snares and people who are trapping the snow leopards either to provide their furs to Lhasa or to other parts of the world that can still use snow leopard skins, or from shepherds who are trying to protect their flocks." "MALIK:" "There isn't enough research, It's brand-new almost," "It needs a lot more time and effort because the terrain that you're dealing with is anywhere between 1 0,000 feet to about 1 8,000 feet and access to those places is almost impossible, especially in winters." "NARRATOR:" "But even such a secretive animal in such a forbidding terrain can't entirely avoid poachers," "Everywhere the Planet Earth team filmed, poaching was going on," "In one case, a new threat appeared while they were filming," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "The Amazon is so large and rich in fish that it can support freshwater dolphins," "These botoes are huge, two and a half meters long," "We thought these animals were almost immortal." "They seemed to be going on forever and ever." "Every time we went out, we marked animals, and those animals were seen day after day, week after week, year after year." "And just in the last few years, we've suddenly noticed that animals which were being seen very regularly, have suddenly disappeared." "They're being killed because there's a new fishery for a type of catfish which hasn't been eaten in the Brazilian Amazon historically, but now that a market has opened up in Colombia..." "And this catfish eats dead meat." "We've actually found three of our marked animals which have definitely been killed for this bait fishery," "I think the population is almost certainly declining now." "I'm a biologist and I try to be as dispassionate as I can but the fact is you do get to know them very intimately," "Last week I saw one give birth, only for the second time in my life." "And, of course, that stirs real emotions inside you." "This is a new life being created and at the same time, a few kilometers away there are people taking those same lives." "The fact is that humans and river dolphins don't mix," "They're all after the same resource, water and fish really," "It's inevitable that the dolphins come off worst." "NARRATOR:" "New reasons for poaching are only part of an array of new threats, many arising only in the past few years," "In the high Arctic, the Planet Earth team saw polar bears behaving in ways they'd never seen before," "Get your eye behind the viewfinder, the adrenaline starts rushing, you know you're recording something so unusual, something so amazing that really very few people have ever seen before, but you have to focus." "It's very rare to see a bear go after walruses and to actually physically jump on them and attack them, stalk them, to hunt them." "NARRATOR:" "Ten years ago, at the same time ofyear and at the same latitude, this, as filmed in a BBC wildlife special, was what polar bears were doing," "The sea was frozen and the bears were hunting less intimidating prey," "Not enormous walruses in defensive herds on dry land, but manageably small ringed seals out on the ice," "We are rapidly losing ice cover." "It is happening as we speak." "The ice cap is getting thinner and its extent is greatly reduced, and it is that ice cap which is the home of the polar bear." "And so they are finding that the places they are accustomed to breeding and the places they are accustomed to hunting are disappearing," "There's no doubt that people in Svalbard can see the ice breaking up." "They can see the glaciers retreating." "And that's a real, real problem for polar bears." "Polar bears are in deep trouble and there is lots of research to show that," "And there are two possibilities." "One, they go extinct as they try desperately to find ice, or they may go further south and come onto firm land." "And, of course, their habits will have to change greatly," "Maybe they will evolve to do that," "But it's got a very short time in which to do this," "If the projections that the polar ice cap will have disappeared within 50 years, we are expecting an awful lot in the way of habitat change, annual movement change, feeding habits, hunting techniques of a bear," "and I think it's going to be very interesting to see if it can do that." "McNEELY:" "The estimates that we have is that we might lose 35% of them over the next 50 years," "And as that population starts to go down and their prey species move further out, it's going to be a real tough adaptation for the polar bear." "NARRATOR:" "So the planet's changing, But hasn't the planet changed before?" "," "And haven't species always had to change with it or die out?" "," "Species after species of animal have been going extinct, but the crisis that we face now is that the rate of extinction is accelerating, and that it will really reach biblical proportions within a few decades." "We now face an extinction episode on this planet comparable to that which marked the end of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago." "Largely driven by habitat change, driven by the release of pollution into the environment, by global warming." "All these things are combining in a series of forces that's likely to lead, if we don't take action very soon, to the extinction of a large proportion of this Earth's wildlife species," "SANJAYAN:" "When it comes to species extinction, we are able, through extraordinary means, to sometimes save the last of the last," "But they will never, never inhabit the range that they once inhabited." "So extinction itself is an issue that we might be able to, to some extent, deal with." "What we're not going to be able to deal with is the massive decline in populations of animals." "NARRATOR:" "The Planet Earth team experienced such a population crash," "Fifteen years ago, saiga antelope were filmed in their millions on the central Asian steppes for another BBC series," "Cameraman Martyn Colbeck remembers that occasion and the magnificence of the spectacle that he saw through the lens," "We came up to the top of this slight rise, and as we came over the top there was literally just a brown band from horizon to horizon." "They were a long way off and it was very heat hazy, but it was literally a band from horizon to horizon." "NARRATOR:" "The Planet Earth team wanted to film it again," "This was one of nature's mass migrations," "But to their horror, the spectacle had gone," "In the past 15 years, poachers in central Asia have reduced this huge population to nearly nothing," "No more spectacle," "In the 1 980s and the early 1 990s there were about a million saigas and then the break-up of Soviet Union happened and there was the collapse in the rural economy and people had no sort of food or income and they started to hunt the saigas." "And for the first time in 70 years, the border with China had opened and the saiga antelopes' horns that the males have are used in traditional Chinese medicine, and they're very valuable," "And obviously there was this massive market just waiting there," "And so there was also commercial hunting as well." "And within two or three years, at the end of the 1 990s, the saiga population had collapsed." "COLBECK:" "You just never imagine that it's possible for all those animals to suddenly disappear," "And they now realistically face the possibility of extinction." "NARRATOR:" "So for their spectacular migration shots, the team had to go east, into a complete wilderness area," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "In the distant reaches of outer Mongolia one of the planet's great migrations is underway," "Few people ever see this extraordinary annual event," "Mongolian gazelle, Two million are thought to live here," "NARRATOR:" "But what will happen to the gazelle in 15 years?" "," "And if they go the way of the saiga, will it matter?" "," "Should we concentrate only on the most important species?" "," "If so, which ones are the most important?" "," "WILSON:" "We need every species," "We need a great diversity of species," "We need every species because when you start decreasing the numbers of species, especially in an environment which is adapted to a high level of diversity, you start reducing the stability of the area." "I think that any extinction that is before its time matters." "But if one was to pick two groups, it's at the very top and the very bottom." "You know, the creatures that keep the planet going, and the big organisms that keep our souls and imaginations on fire." "The Tiger, probably the best-known poem in the English language," "Blake's "Tiger Tiger", which every child can recite and every child understands what it means." "Tiger!" "Tiger!" "Burning bright In the forests of the night." "And they know that it's notjust dark forest, It's to do with the pulse of life," "And if we lose these majestic creatures, with their sense of power and ancestry, and their possibility of power over us sometimes, then I think we are diminished by that, as well as the ecosystem." "If you go to a village in India and you start talking to them about saving the tiger, people will say to you," ""Look, how can you talk about saving the tiger when we've got starving people here? "" "And I think the way conservation was developed over the last 50 years, we have focused our energy into trying to convince people that things like tigers are inherently important." "Ultimately, if our movement is not relevant to the lives of real people dealing with real issues then we're just going to be preaching to the choir." "My concern is the great indifference that most people have toward the species of lesser creatures that they never notice or dismiss as bugs and weeds, and that's where the bulk of life on Earth exists." "And when you magnify one of these organisms to human size, and approach it as an independent, highly-complicated entity on Earth, then you see it as the equal of a large mammal," "MABEY:" "The organisms that matter perhaps most of all are the plants," "Many of them are very unglamorous, hardworking, fantastically common, of course, without which there would be no way in which the energy of the sun was translated into available energy for all other organisms." "Each of these creatures plays a role in its ecosystem." "Some of those roles are quite important." "But if you think in terms of a brick wall, we are systematically knocking out bricks, and sooner or later the wall collapses." "NARRATOR:" "This is biodiversity, the planet's full, wide range of life forms, and it benefits every single species, including the human one," "How?" "," "The whole planet Earth is a system and we, human species, are only part, a very small part, of the systems." "There are literally millions of species out there." "We may not know them, we may not know their value, but we want to conserve them." "There are a very wide range of practical reasons as to why we need to conserve this planet's biodiversity." "For a start, all of our food ultimately derives from biological systems." "So do a lot of our medicines." "A lot of our industrial products are based upon chemicals that we've taken from nature, for example." "Biodiversity is very much part, therefore, of the global economy, very much part of our well-being." "I don't think there's a single compelling reason of an economic kind that compels us to preserve biological diversity." "But in so far as there are reasons, one says we want to preserve all these..." "This gene pool because maybe we can use it." "very human-centered." "Maybe we can be clever enough to just understand the molecules ourselves." "The second says we depend on the services ecosystems give." "Pollinating, cleaning water, and as we reduce the number of species we can't be sure they will continue to deliver those services." "Maybe we could be clever enough to live in an impoverished world." "The third reason is a straight ethical reason that says we have a responsibility of stewardship." "And how strong that is depends on the luxuryyou have to enjoy it," "We are getting an immense amount of value from wild creatures left alive and the more of them there are, the better job is done." "One estimate made in 1 997 was that the services provided to humanity, scot-free incidentally, by all those bugs and weeds and, you know, seemingly disposable birds and the like, was about 30 trillion dollars." "But in holding water in the watersheds, filtering it, purifying it, pollination, and cleansing the atmosphere, in restoring soil and on and on through the other ecosystem services, we are getting an immense amount of value." "We should have a lot of respect for the system, for the natural system, for the biodiversity." "Don't worry if you don't know what good they are for." "You didn't create it, so you don't know what it is for." "Just let it be." "Because, who knows, someday down the road, our future generations might find that they can survive because of that aspect of biodiversity," "NARRATOR:" "But if all species matter, and many, many are endangered, how do conservationists decide which to conserve first?" "," "I think, in this business, with limited resources, and with, frankly, an overabundance of critically-endangered species, we, inescapably, have to make choices." "We have to make hard judgments about what investments will yield the biggest returns for conservation," "And that means we make choices about what species to invest in, and about what strategies make the most difference." "Generally speaking, what we spot are places where there are large numbers of endangered species together." "So to save one, typically means you save them all." "This is the basis of the "hot spot" concept of conservation," "NARRATOR:" "One of the hotter hot spots, a place with an intense concentration of species, is the Congo basin," "WWF's strategy here is to use anti-poaching patrols ostensibly to protect one species," "Elephants," "But because it's a hot spot, a lot of others get protection into the bargain," "This place is as special as any in all of central Africa." "It's really a jewel of the Congo basin." "You can't go anywhere and see animals like you can here." "We've got a team of 50 guards run by four unit chiefs," "And they are conducting patrols every day in the park and the reserve," "And we should really give thanks to nationals like those guards that are working every day here at Dzanga-Sangha to try and protect these animals." "They are doing an exceptional job under very harsh and unforgiving and thankless circumstances." "NARRATOR:" "Maybe they are," "But they're being paid by a large conservation organization to do it," "Is that really a viable long-term solution?" "," "Is this the best way forward?" ", Just maintaining this costly anti-poaching effort?" "," "If we don't keep these anti-poaching teams mobilized in the reserve on a daily basis, this amazing place, it's going to disappear in a matter of months, literally months." "NARRATOR:" "In Kenya, not everyone agrees that the large conservation organizations have all the best solutions," "Omar says, "If I am the director or the person in charge" ""of conservation of wildlife in this country," ""one, I will no longer depend on the rangers with bullets" ""to protect wildlife."" "But he is going to give the communities of this country who live with wildlife, he is going to make policies which allow the people themselves to be the protectors and the benefactors of wildlife." "NARRATOR:" "There is some evidence from another part of Africa, the Simien Highlands of Ethiopia, that solutions found from within are the only ones that will work in the long term," "When the walla ibex numbers got down to 1 50, it was when Ethiopians themselves started turning around saying," ""Hang on, this animal is so iconic to our culture, to our nation, we put it on flags," ""this is when we draw the line."" "It really was the beginning of conservation generated from within Ethiopia and so since then, even in the last, say, 1 0 or 1 5 years, we've seen the number of walla ibex come back from about 1 50 to 600," "and that's one of the best good-news stories that I've heard out of African conservation." "NARRATOR:" "The head count of the Amur leopard is much more disturbing," "Because of habitat loss and poaching, there are just 30 left in the wild," "With extinction so close, conservation becomes desperate," "Here in New Orleans, at the Audubon Zoo, we have a pair of the Amur leopards and our long-term strategy with them is to work with what we call the Species Survival Plan." "It is a plan that is part of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, which is our, kind of, parent organization here in the United States." "And the Amur leopard is one of the high-priority animals," "What's happened recently, and some of the work that we're doing involving cloning, has allowed us to now not necessarily take eggs and sperm, but we're able to take tissue samples from these animals," "put this tissue sample into culture and where it was once maybe 1 00 cells, we can now grow thousands of cells," "And each one of those cells contains the complete copy of DNA of this animal," "So we can freeze these cells and, let's say, 50 years from now, scientists go into those liquid nitrogen containers and they pull out the DNA from tigers, Amur leopards, rhinos," "That DNA is alive and it's able to be used to produce embryos that then could result in babies, in offspring." "So, what I'm hoping we leave in our lifetime is this living library for the future." "For, 50 years from now, the scientists can say, "Oh, my gosh, you know, we're about to lose" ""this little rusty spotted cat from Sri Lanka or this Amur leopard." ""But you know what?" "We have the DNA." "We have the science behind this" ""to be able to at least bring the numbers up of this species so they won't go extinct."" "I think we have to be very careful about producing something which is a facsimile of a wild animal, from something which is able to exist in the wild." "And one of the problems of keeping animals in conventional zoos, the selective pressures are very great, and you're actually moving that animal towards domestication," "It may look the same, but it may not have the skills or the behavioral attributes or the physiology to survive in the wild." "You know, it's funny when people say we may be playing God, we may be controlling, we may be taking charge of, kind of, these species' destinies." "But, you know, man played God a long time ago." "I think, and I believe, God gave us stewardship over these animals, and what we're doing is using the capabilities that we have as humans to not destroy animals any longer, but to try to protect them," "to preserve them, to bring them back." "Should we go to the extreme of thinking about captive-breeding programs and, you know, storing embryos or germ cells from a particular species?" "I think that is something that we probably should do." "But it is not going to be anything more than the smallest fraction of what conservation really ought to be." "I guess my thinking is, someday we may have to populate another planet." "You know, if you look back a hundred years ago, we were in horses and buggies, and if somebody had said, "Hey, we're going to be on the moon" ""in a number of years before this next century is over,"" "everybody would've laughed." "And in 1 963, where were we?" "We were on the moon." "So, if we try to look out 1 00 years from now, we are going to have technology that we can't even think about right now, but if we try to populate another planet, what better way than to take animals in some frozen form, perhaps," "to the moon, to Mars?" "That's pretty futuristic thinking, but something's going to have to be done." "And what we do in the laboratory, I believe at least, is a safety net." "And so if we can't release animals back to the wild today because of our shrinking habitats, even though we'd like to, maybe there'll be another option some day." "NARRATOR:" "Tigers on the moon, Well, well," "But the point is, it's tigers that are getting the attention," "Or leopards, Or elephants," "Of all the endangered species, why do we always concentrate on the big, beautiful, charismatic ones?" "," "The good thing about doing species conservation is that when you latch on to charismatic species, often people sit up and realize that's going on." "And they will give money and they will write letters and they will take direct action in order to save it." "There is something about a panda that touches people and I can't tell you exactly what it is." "But it is something which just..." "That reaches people at a different level than other species do." "And in that sense, it's a very important ambassador for the wild." "It is something that reminds people that they relate to the natural world, in some way that's beyond the clinical or statistical." "And I would say pandas, because of their charisma, also matter because they are such an effective symbol for conservation worldwide and because they draw so many people to that cause." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "I think you have to be very careful aboutjust making an appeal to the emotions," "The appeal should be to logic." "The appeal should be to rational thinking." "We might emotionally feel that small baby animals with big eyes and snub noses have a better case for survival than, say, fish," "That may or may not be the case, but it's not because we should feel emotionally attached to the one, and not emotionally attached to the other." "Our concentration on highly-endangered species, especially very glamorous, large endangered species, that's a morally tricky one, but probably politically sound." "If we were to let go of those creatures that figure so much in people's love of nature, figure so much in the historical imagination, as it were the people's favorites, then I think that the cause would be lost" "because I think it would be hard to make a case then for the defense of the stinging nettle which we need just as much." "Arguably, it's the little things, the invertebrates, the grotty things in the soil, that actually are more important to the functioning of ecosystems, but they attract less emotional resonance with us." "Given that we are going to lose species," "I and others would like us to take a more analytic view, that we try to evaluate what will preserve the greatest amount of independent evolutionary history of life on Earth." "NARRATOR:" "The grasslands of Assam, India," "What is the focus of conservation here?" "," "Elephants?" ", Rhinos?" ", Tigers?" "," "No," "It's a tiny pig, the pygmy hog," "We chose the pygmy hog because it appealed, particularly to Gerry Durrell, as one of the little brown jobs that no one else was looking after." "And, of course, it turns out to be taxonomically unique and is well worth, on any criteria, specific effort to keep it alive in the wild." "Now, the pygmy hog is probablypart of a large food chain of other predators," "Tigers undoubtedly eat them, pythons and things like that," "And I would argue that if you lose that pygmy hog, you lose that bite-sized pig, a lot of other things may suffer as well." "There is a very strong culture in all those range states of burning grasses every year," "Is it accidental?" ", Is it deliberate management?" ", And, of course, it's both," "In some ways we're having to play catch-up, I think, with some rather stereotyped old-fashioned views about burning grasslands," "If the stuff is tall and dead at the end of the dry season, ifyou burn it, then the green stuff comes up easier," "QED, it must be better." "Well, there's a huge cost to a lot of species of just burning the place." "Obviously, all your invertebrates, tortoises, pygmy hogs, all get roasted." "We've got to have a much more holistic view now about the management of those ecosystems." "NARRATOR:" "Butpeople, poor people, burn the grassland to improve the grass, the grazing," "That's their livelihood," "Do we in the West, with the so-called solutions for conservation of wildlife in third world countries, put the needs of the wildlife before the needs of the people?" "," "Do pigs matter more than people?" "," "Will our solutions for the wildlife ever work if they're not solutions to poverty?" "," "I really worry about the progress we'll make as conservationists unless we start to deal with the poverty in these countries." "You just can't go to somebody who's trying to feed their children and talk about the conservation of a wolf or a whale." "It just doesn't mean anything." "And so we can deal with some of the symptoms and try and stick some Band-Aids on these last few pockets of environment, but it really is not going to be addressing the core problem, and that is the poverty that surrounds a lot of these environments." "You're not talking about the Western world, you're not talking about even Eastern cities, you're talking about remote villages." "And without these people coming into an economic cycle of some sort, where they benefit directly, indirectly, in any other way, these people are never going to be in a position to look after that animal," "And if they don't, you can't enforce it," "We people sitting outside cannot enforce something on a local who has to live with life and death every day." "You can't ask him to look to the future." "Wildlife mean different things to different people," "To the large-scale landowners, wildlife is an asset because they can crop it, they can trade in it, they can manage it." "It can become a very good laboratory for them to research on wildlife." "And to the small-scale holder, who have got a small plot and is trying to have some of these annual crops, wildlife is such a menace." "There's a fear of, you know, wildlife coming and destroying the crop which is a year's hard labor." "NARRATOR:" "So maybe in the end, conservation is only a wealthy Western concern, a luxury," "A fantasy, even," "Can we really believe that by investing money in some other animal species, we're going to save the planet?" "," "Save ourselves?" "," "When there are hungry humans out there, can we justify spending money on wildlife conservation?" "," "You bet your life." "The expenditure of a few thousand, up to even a few million, if it can bring a species through, that has so much to give us, if we can keep it alive in every sphere of human consciousness," "aesthetic, scientific, relation to the environment, yeah, that's a very good investment." "It's sure better an investment than conducting wars." "If you look at the amount of money that we've been able to generate for all kinds of other things, like invading Iraq, for example, now, what has that cost?" "What tiny proportion of that would it take to ensure that those species do in fact survive?" "Miniscule." "We're not talking huge amounts of money here." "We're talking about targeted investments, ways of ensuring that the welfare of the people who live around these species is also improved, so also developing the human capacity to conserve." "NARRATOR:" "It wasn't by design that the Planet Earth series featured a lot of animals that were critically endangered," "They were chosen because they represented something," "Migrating grazers," "resourceful predators, each integral to a larger machine, an ecosystem," "The animals just turned out to be endangered, too," "So what does it mean for their ecosystems?" "," "In our next program, we'll be asking the experts about the health of the planet's working engines, the oceans, the forests, the tundra," "We'll look at what happens to them when their components die out, when the climate changes, when human societies grow out of control and elbow in," "We'll look at the future of ecosystems," "NARRATOR:" "Planet Earth, the most ambitious natural history series the BBC has ever made, was filmed in many parts of the world seldom seen by people," "These wilderness areas can be stunningly beautiful and are certainly vital sanctuaries for wildlife," "But are they even more than that?" "," "This program will explore the deeper importance of wilderness," "It will ask how it serves us now and why it isn'tjust virgin territory waiting for an ever-expanding humanity to take it over," "Planet Earth showed Africa's Okavango Delta as it's never been seen before," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "As the water sweeps into the Okavango a vast area of the Kalahari is transformed into a fertile paradise," "A lush water world," "NARRATOR:" "And no humans in sight," "Is that what wilderness means?" "," "Well, wilderness is a concept that really has been developed a lot in Western society, recognizing that there are certain places that have either very low human populations or are entirely devoid of people." "It's not a concept that necessarily has spread worldwide, yet it's something that I think is increasingly becoming important on an evermore overcrowded planet." "NARRATOR:" "Overcrowded?" "," "This program will ask ifpopulation is the greatest threat to wilderness," "It can't be coincidence that it shrinks as humanity grows," "Ignoring population strikes me as the biggest own goal that the environment movement has ever scored." "I would argue the bigger threat is effectively the growth in our economy and the way we use our wealth." "NARRATOR:" "And with growing economies, we ask if a wilderness will still be protected if it turns out to contain a valuable resource like oil," "Oil and natural gas production in the north slope of Alaska under modern technology will have a tiny environmental footprint." "We can do it in modern technology." "We should do it." "To open ANWR to exploration and drilling would not be criminal, but it's the closest thing I can imagine to being criminal." "NARRATOR:" "We'll discover that the environmental debate has never been more heated, and notjust at the political level," "Think about it this way, if you had to decide to keep a tree standing or feed one of your children, what would you do?" "NARRATOR:" "Despite everything, there are still vast wildernesses," "For instance, the Boreal forest," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "This vast forest circling the globe contains a third of all the trees on Earth and produces so much oxygen it changes the composition of the atmosphere," "NARRATOR:" "So how much of our planet is still covered with wilderness?" "," "In fact, there is a figure," "A couple ofyears ago, Russ Mittermeier conducted the study that produced it," "We came up with 39% of Earth's land surface with one person or less per square kilometer." "That's only about 43 million people, about 0.7% of the world's human population in an area of just about 40% of the land surface of the planet." "So there are a lot of places out there that have very few people." "You have to recognize that about a third of that is ice, I mean, Antarctica is huge," "Antarctica is about 14 million square kilometers, which is about one and a half times the size of the United States," "But the other two thirds, places like Amazonia and a number of other wilderness areas, also have very low human populations." "And they're rich in biodiversity, they're rich in life forms." "NARRATOR:" "That means that, Antarctica aside, only a quarter of the Earth's land surface is still wilderness," "We've changed most of the planet and certain types of forest have been the most damaged," "This is the kind of forest that used to characterize Europe," "Now there's just one tiny fragment left on the border of Poland and Belarus," "LINFIELD:" "We went to Bialowieza on Planet Earth because it's the original primeval forest in Europe," "And perhaps 6,000, 7,000 years ago, almost all of Europe would have looked like Bialowieza looks now." "Of course, today Bialowieza, it's a tiny little forest, but it gives us an idea of what most of Europe once looked like." "NARRATOR:" "And despite its obvious importance, even this final fragment of forest is under threat," "There is still activity which is destroying the forest." "This kind of activity is logging, for example." "If you check satellite pictures on the Polish side of the border, you'll see big damage caused by the logging in the forest." "To stop it, we need some action, like creating big national park on the both sides of the border." "Bialowieza forest doesn't belong just to Poland, just the Polish nation, it's world treasure with many rare species, wolf, European bison, rare species of birds." "And there should be international effort to protect Bialowieza forest because some wrong decisions can really destroy this treasure." "NARRATOR:" "It's notjust Europe that's losing what's left of its forest," "The demand for timber and pasture has an impact everywhere," "Over the last 300 years we've lost about half of the world's forest, but the pattern of loss has been very different so much of the earlier period of loss covered the temperate forests, in both the north and the south, especially in Europe and North America." "More recently, we are finding we're losing tropical forests at a much quicker rate than previously." "NARRATOR:" "The Amazon forest, for instance, is still coming down," "It's losing an area the size of Switzerland every year," "MITTERMEIER:" "Disappearance of wilderness varies tremendously from place to place," "Even within the Amazon region certain portions are still in very good condition and are likely to be maintained over at least the next few decades," "Whereas other portions are really under the gun and are rapidly, as we speak, being converted for other uses, like cattle pasture," "And they've now come up with varieties of soy that can be grown in the Amazon," "So you're seeing, in certain places in the southern and southeastern Amazon, parts of the central Amazon, you're seeing very rapid conversion." "On the other hand, in the northern extremes, magnificent wilderness areas with very, very few people living in them." "I believe that if any tropical rainforest areas remain intact 1 00 years from now, it's going to be in that very northern portion of Amazonia." "So, even within one wilderness area, there's a great deal of variability in terms of the degree of loss." "NARRATOR:" "So how much wilderness, right now, is actually legally protected?" "," "McNEELY:" "Well, right now we have about 12% of the land cover as protected areas, and you might say, "Well, okay, is 12% enough?" ", "" "And the answer to that is, it all depends." "It depends on how the areas around that 1 2% are going to be managed." "If we manage the rest of the landscape in a thoughtful way, then 1 2% may well be enough." "If we overuse and if we abuse the rest of the landscape, then 1 2% is nowhere near enough." "NARRATOR:" "Protected areas can'tjust be enclosures," "Often the same big, charismatic animals that inspired the creation of the areas need to venture outside them to find food and water," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "Driven on by thirst, they march hundreds of miles across the parched plains," "Relying on memory, the matriarchs lead their families to those special water holes that saved them in previous years," "You know, one of the great challenges of conservation in Africa..." "We're all attracted to these really huge species, elephants, lions, giraffe, and the problem with conservation for such very large animals is they need enormous amounts of space." "And at the best, where the animals can concentrate in the highest densities, you still need on the order of 1 5,000 square kilometers of habitat to be able to sustain one of those truly viable populations of lions." "If you have your elephants in areas, they are even bigger than that, they still tend to wander way outside of those." "So you need enormous areas," "NARRATOR:" "But the larger the area set aside for wide-ranging animals, the harder the area is to patrol," "Less than 1,000 Bactrian camels remain in the vast expanse of the Gobi desert," "In such a wilderness, why so few?" "," "The Planet Earth team found them suspiciously elusive," "They're about three or four kilometers away." "They spotted us from that distance and that's going to be our real problem, getting close to these animals." "They're capable of spotting us from about five kilometers, and running for 70K's in the opposite direction so this is what's going to make this filming incredibly difficult." "When you work in wildlife, you know that when an animal runs from a human, you know there's a reason why, and it's because it's being threatened by humans." "Now, what's strange about the Gobi in Mongolia is that it's vast and nobody lives there." "But animals don't run from humans without good cause and I found out just talking to people when we were out there that humans do go in there." "They go in there in four-wheel drives with guns and they try to chase down the camels." "NARRATOR:" "Even in a huge wilderness, a small number ofpeople can cause big problems," "Wild dogs are in trouble even though they have enough space and they're not hunted by humans," "The wild dogs are one of the most endangered mammals in Africa and actually for a surprising reason." "They aren't directly hunted and they still have enough habitat, just about, but they have been in contact with humans and their pets." "And the main reason for their decline is that they have caught diseases from domestic dogs," "Things like canine distemper and this has caused a massive population collapse," "PACKER:" "Out here, there's almost no veterinary services whatsoever," "Dogs are companion animals and they have names, people look after them, but there's really not a family budget for vaccinating dogs against basic diseases like rabies, distemper." "And so the wild dogs, if one animal in the pack gets distemper, everybody else comes and sniffs and gets sneezed on and, you know, gets the disease, They all drop dead," "NARRATOR:" "Craig Packer and his colleagues came up with a solution," "Vaccinate domestic dogs to protect the wild ones," "We were able to design a vaccination program that effectively created a cordon sanitaire around the Serengeti, a vaccination zone, that separated the disease from the wildlife." "And it turned out to be a rare example of a win-win situation conservation because the local people were very pleased to have their dogs vaccinated," "Rabies is a serious threat to human life out here, and when we told them that it was good for the wildlife, they thought that was great, too, because they knew that tourists came out here to see the animals of the Serengeti," "So it wasn't like you're telling someone you're doing something wrong," "It's like, "Well, look, if this helps you, it helps the wildlife as well, "" "NARRATOR:" "Where there is plenty of space, animals and people often can live together," "But more and more people are moving into wilderness areas, pushing wildlife out of the way," "In Ethiopia, people and their farms are moving relentlessly up the Simien mountains," "In the Simien Highlands in particular, we're finding that agriculture is encroaching higher and higher up the mountains and barley is now being grown at about 3,500 meters." "That doesn't leave much space for the remaining habitat there and the remaining wildlife, much of which is very endemic in that part of the world." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "These summits, nearly three miles up, are home to some very remarkable mountaineers," "Gelada baboons, They are unique to the highlands of Ethiopia," "(BABOONS CHATTERING)" "NARRATOR:" "But gelada baboons are running out of space," "As farms encroach into the Ethiopian highlands, the areas of alpine grass are shrinking and the gelada numbers are still okay at the moment, but you will get a situation where gelada are getting squeezed because their natural grasslands are shrinking and the only thing left is barley crops." "And we're starting to see this now, a much greater increase in human-gelada conflict where the baboons are going into barley fields raiding barley because they've run out of their preferred alpine grasses." "NARRATOR:" "The Simien problem exists because Ethiopia's human population is expanding," "So is the ultimate problem for wilderness worldwide that there are simply too many people?" "," "One thing that's always worried me about the environment movement for the last 30 years, is their inability to get their heads around the importance of population." "I find it staggering that that is still downgraded as an issue." "There's a sense it's somehow politically incorrect to talk about population." "But the issue of population lies absolutely at the heart of the destruction of the natural world today." "If we had to find a way of creating a sustainable future for a billion people," "I can assure you it would be a great deal simpler and a lot better for the natural world than trying to find a solution for six billion people, let alone nine billion people, which will be the population of this planet by the middle of this century, by 2050." "So, ignoring population strikes me as the biggest own goal that the environment movement has ever scored." "I wouldn't like to, so to speak, to push the problem off onto overpopulation in the way that has sometimes been fashionable." "You know, people saying, "Well, the real problem about the environment" ""is that there are too many people in Africa and India," usually." "In other words, it's not about us." "So, overpopulation has to be seen as a global issue, not just something that we can tell other people to do something about." "Many people try to blame population as the major threat to our ecosystems." "I personally don't agree with that." "The population today is six billion people, roughly." "It's likely to go up to between eight and ten billion people by 2050, so about a 50% increase in the numbers of people." "Over that same time frame, the economic growth in the world is likely to be a factor of four." "So the threat to the environment is a combination of the number ofpeople and their consumer patterns," "And their consumer patterns are driven very largely by their economic wealth," "And so it's not simply an issue of numbers of people." "It's the numbers of people and to what degree can they buy biological resources, energy resources, use water, etcetera." "So I would argue the bigger threat is effectively the growth in our economy and the way we use our wealth." "It is how we live on the planet, not just our total numbers, that really makes the essential difference." "If we all live on this planet the way Americans currently live, we would need three planets to support the Earth's current population." "NARRATOR:" "The trouble is that much of the rest of the world wants to live and spend like Americans," "The conventional view is that the economy is there to produce goods and services and the more we produce and consume, the better off we'll be." "But there's a lot of evidence to show that that's not really the case." "Consumption of goods and services only improves people's sense of satisfaction up to a fairly low threshold, beyond which it becomes counterproductive in terms of their long-term wellbeing." "Our focus on consumption is a form ofpsychologicaljunk food," "It's something that makes us feel good temporarily but in the end it makes us unhealthy." "NARRATOR:" "Still, consumerism would have less impact on the planet if there weren't so many people," "There are six billion of us now, How many should there be?" "," "When one tries to get at a number, my guess is somewhere between 500 million people and one billion, no more than that." "I think that the Earth can safely support in a sustainable way, at a reasonable standard of living, about half of what it has today." "And I think that that would make people happier and it would certainly make the planet happier." "We'd have more diversity, we'd have plenty of productivity, we'd be able to maintain our cultural diversity and the world would be a much more sustainable place." "Now, choosing how to get from where we are to where we need to be is the crunch." "NARRATOR:" "So wejust halve the world's population," "Realistically, ethically, how?" "," "Actually, if you look at the world today, there is a fantastically good story to be told about population, which is when countries get on top of family planning," "learn how to provide that magic combination of literacy and better healthcare for women and for girls, and to provide access to a range of contraceptives, that's what it comes down to." "That's what good family planning is all about." "There need be no coercion involved, there need be no intrusions onto human rights, there need be none of the cruelty that has happened in some countries." "This can be done." "NARRATOR:" "That may seem simple but can birth rates come down evenly, everywhere?" "," "What about Africa?" "," "PACKER:" "Asia, Latin America, their population rates have slowed down to the point that's getting closer to what we're used to in Europe and North America." "But Africa, family size is still very large." "Economic security is still very low, so there's an incentive for people to have very large families, and these are families that require basic natural resources for their subsistence," "So the impact of people on the natural world is still growing quite strikingly here." "NARRATOR:" "If Africans were better off, they might have fewer children, but those children would be able to consume more," "So where's the environmental gain?" "," "Africans have thrived on this continent for very many years without aeroplanes, without trains, without skyscrapers, without all the modern development that we think when we look at the West, that's what development means." "To me, development means staying alive, having a quality of life." "Not so much a life that is surrounded by goods, things," "but a life where you can live in a clean and a healthy environment, where you can drink clean water." "Half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day." "This is totally and utterly unacceptable." "So we need economic growth, we need pro-poor economic growth." "But then what we need to couple with that is to make sure that as the demand for energy increases, that it's climate friendly, it's friendly to the local environment, it's friendly to water." "So the challenge for us, then, is how do we use our resources when they're used in the most sustainable manner possible," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "This river has cut the world's longest canyon system," "A 1,000 mile scar, clearly visible from space," "NARRATOR:" "As population grows, one of the first resources to come under pressure is fresh water," "For example, the mighty Colorado River that carved out the Grand Canyon isn't very mighty anymore," "WOMAN:" "Well, the Colorado actually is no longer reaching the sea in most years, and this is a very clear sign that the health of the river is in pretty bad shape," "And so there's a disconnection of ecological service here." "That river's job is to deliver fresh water and nutrients and sediment to deltas, and they're no longer doing that work and that has an implication for the species that live there." "And so, in the case of the Colorado, we see signs of diminishing productivity in the fisheries in the Upper Gulf of California," "We've gone about meeting these human needs in a very simple way, which is every time we need more water, we go out and find it." "We tap another river, we build another dam, we tap more groundwater and take more out of the natural world." "NARRATOR:" "Like almost every other big river in the world, the Colorado has been dammed," "You know, just 50 years ago, around 1 950, we had 5,000 large dams around the world." "Today we have 45,000 large dams around the world," "Which means we've been building two large dams every day for half a century," "So this is a very, very large change in the hydrologic environment," "NARRATOR:" "And dams don't always stop at generating electricity," "They also extract water for irrigation," "POSTEL:" "We have to take a lot of water out of the natural world in order to put it on cropland," "And this land is really important to us." "We do get 40% of our food from irrigated land, even though that land makes up less than 20% of the whole crop land base." "So it's really important land, but it requires that we intervene in a major way into the hydrologic cycle," "70% of all the water we take out of rivers, lakes, aquifers, goes to irrigation, so it consumes the lion's share of the water that we're taking out of the natural world," "NARRATOR:" "So is there really enough fresh water for six billion people and their crops?" "," "I think the good news on some of the water scarcity problems that we have, the shortages of water that we talk about, is that a lot of the shortage, a lot of the scarcity, is really all about waste and mismanagement." "And so it's not necessarily that there's not enough water, it's that we're not using it wisely enough." "NARRATOR:" "And water's not the only resource thatpeople would like to raid the wilderness for," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "Everyyear, three million caribou migrate across the Arctic tundra," "Some herds travel over 2,000 miles a year in search of fresh pastures," "This is the longest overland migration made by any animal," "NARRATOR:" "It's not the caribou people want to exploit," "In fact, caribou and their conservation rather get in the way," "No, it's what's under the animals' hooves, oil and gas," "The US Congress is under pressure to allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR," "Oil and natural gas production in the north slope of Alaska under modern technology will have a tiny environmental footprint, especially in comparison to the oil and gas development we see elsewhere in the world, sponsored by many countries hostile to the interests of democratic states." "In the US we have the most stringent safety laws." "We have the most stringent environmental protection requirements, and, once oil and gas production is done, the most stringent reclamation requirements." "So we basically, like hikers and campers, leave no trace when we're done." "We can do it in modern technology." "We should do it." "MITTERMEIER:" "Mypersonal opinion is that it's not going to resolve our oil issues," "We would be much better off just engaging in more serious conservation, better energy use, looking at a whole range of alternatives." "Simply drilling for oil in one of the last wilderness blocks in our country is..." "I think it's foolish, given the range of other options that are out there, and I would be very sad and actually embarrassed as an American were it to take place." "We should absolutely be drilling for oil in ANWR," "It's the most promising reserve in the United States that we have right now." "You're talking about an area that's 2,000 acres out of 1 9 million acres, over 1 9 million acres." "Potentially 10,4 billion barrels of oil there," "It's not going to have any detrimental impact on the caribou," "Again, it's all so much environmental scaremongering." "In reality, we can drill for oil in ANWR and not harm the environment." "To open ANWR to exploration and drilling would not be criminal, but it's the closest thing I can imagine to being criminal." "NARRATOR:" "In a way, it's encouraging that there's even a debate about drilling on the shores of the Arctic Ocean," "Very few people would see the operation or have their lives disturbed by it, which means there's an objection to the idea of violating such a pristine place," "It's obviously important to many people to know that there are still unspoiled wilderness areas" "like the Arctic and Antarctic as shown in Planet Earth." "One of the wonderful things about Antarctica is the silence, actually." "It's often very, very, very quiet." "You never hear a combustion engine, which is a hard thing to do on most of our planet." "You also feel terribly small, the scale of everything, the scale of the ice, and the ability for the weather to change so dramatically from one day." "It can be a beautiful sunlit day one day and then suddenly, often within a matter of hours, you're actually in real danger from the weather," "In a sense, it makes man very much back in their place." "Their role in nature is put right by being in Antarctica." "NARRATOR:" "All of nature puts humans in their place because their place is in nature," "I think for many people, maybe all people at some level, there is something about the wonder of nature, that nature in its infinite variety and its infinite mystery, and I think that's important." "It touches people in their souls." "WILLIAMS:" "I think that one of the things wilderness says to us is that nature is notjust there for us to be comfortable in," "There's an element of the world around us, a profound element, and an extensive element, that is just there." "It's there for its own sake." "It is what it is," "And, in that sense, I think wilderness always speaks to human beings of transcendence in the widest possible sense, It says, "You as a human being are part of a system" ""which is notjust about your needs and your concerns," ""Like it or not, you're part of something immense and very mysterious, "" "There is a very interesting relationship between wilderness and sacredness." "All the great monastic traditions, whether that's Christian, Buddhist or Daoist, all find their roots in an experience of their founders going into the desert, into the wilderness, onto the mountains and finding there something that civilization cannot give them." "A realization about themselves, about nature, about the divine," "In Daoism, for example, the symbol of someone who has achieved enlightenment is that of a human being alone on a mountain," "It's that sense that you are in front of something greater than yourself," "NARRATOR:" "Professor Wilson has coined a term for the innate human love of nature," "He calls it "biophilia"," "There's a lot of evidence that human beings need life, they are attracted to life forms, to diversity, that a lot of their culture is drawn from the emotional response they have to living forms in nature." "I think if you look at children, you will see, right from the very, very earliest age, an interest and an excitement about the natural world and their surroundings." "It's in our nature to be concerned about the nature of life around us and to be fascinated by it," "And sadly, I think, some people lose touch with that initial love of the natural world around them altogether." "But if they do, it's a major loss." "NARRATOR:" "We may love the natural world through our innate biophilia but why should we really care if it disappears?" "," "What do wildernesses actually do for us in practical terms?" "," "Well, really, in many ways one of the biggest values of wilderness is the fact that they provide enormous ecosystem services for the planet." "Just simple watershed protection, the hydrological cycles." "You look at the Amazon region." "About 20% of the world's water runs through Amazonia." "And you cut down that forest and the impacts, We're not exactly sure what the impacts are going to be, but you can be sure that it's going to be huge," "NARRATOR:" "Often, with people and forests, it's a case of "You don't know what you've got till it's gone"," "When their environment degrades, they are unable to meet some of their most basic needs, such as the need for firewood, the need for clean drinking water, the need for food, nutritious food." "And when people are able to understand that these basic needs" "can easily be met by the resources in the environment, then they are more willing to work with you." "NARRATOR:" "And once people realize what wilderness provides for them, they may be willing to pay for its services," "The country of Costa Rica, in Central America, has come up with this concept of forests as water factories, and they're actually paying farmers who are letting their pasture land go back into forest for the water services that are being provided by these forests." "NARRATOR:" "So is this scheme in Costa Rica effective?" "," "Is farmland really returning to forest?" "," "Si," "Yes." "(SPEAKING IN SPANISH)" "Ulises says that he once had pasture lands that were being used to raise cattle, obviously, and he now has had the land under forestry recovery for 20 years." "The trees that he has now on this land, that used to be pasture land, are 20 centimeters in girth." "So he has seen his forest grow." "NARRATOR:" "It's a win-win situation," "The forest is growing back and the farmers make money," "(SPEAKING IN SPANISH)" "LEON:" "We earn a living, We survive through the forests by way of the payments that we're getting to protect it," "So we know that it's a source of life for us, but it is also a source of life, he says, for many other organisms that live in this world." "NARRATOR:" "But if the payment scheme didn't exist, would Ulises be tempted to cut down the forest?" "," "(SPEAKING IN SPANISH)" "LEON:" "It would be a very sad decision, says Ulises, if I had to cut down the forest," "It would be a very sentimental decision for me," "But think about it this way, if you had to decide to keep a tree standing or feed one of your children, what would you do?" "NARRATOR:" "So while the scheme continues the payments are ensuring that forests survive outside national parks," "The amount of national parks, as such, are around 800,000 hectares" "and we have 500,000 hectares in forests for environmental services." "That means that about 60% of additional forest, beyond the national parks, are being kept under this scheme." "NARRATOR:" "That's all very well, but who pays for all this?" "," "Well, right now there are some companies that are charging an extra fee for the water bill you pay in order to compensate for the people that decide to maintain the forest." "If you depend on having clean water every day in your household for all the many uses we have, any small increase in the fare that you pay for water to make sure that the watersheds are kept in good shape" "is like paying insurance." "NARRATOR:" "So people in Costa Rica recognize the service that forests provide and are willing to pay for it," "And you could try to speculate on how much money all nature's goods and services are worth, things like fresh water, clean air, food," "One estimate made in 1 997 by economists and biologists was that the services provided humanity, scot-free incidentally, by all those bugs and weeds and, you know, possibly seemingly disposable birds and like... was about, at that time, it was about 30 trillion dollars." "I've been hugely impressed by some of those economists who do these incredible calculations about how much it would cost us to do something if nature didn't do it for us for free." "So you get these sort of multibillion or multitrillion dollar assessments of what would happen if bees and other insects stopped pollinating for us, for instance, which is the one I really like because nobody actually thinks very much about pollination" "as a gift from nature." "But if they all stopped doing it, okay, they just went on strike, and we had to do it by human intervention, by man-made means, well, you look at the price tag for that and it's x-hundred billion dollars," "or whatever it might be and you think, "Whoa!" "Well, that's nice."" "So our entire productive food enterprise is being subsidized by nature." "And it's only when you shove that price sign under some people's eyes that they think," ""Whoa, maybe this natural world is a bit more useful to us than we thought it was."" "People want to know, "What's in it for me?" "How much is it worth? "" "And so the conservation movement, which has tended to be an ethical movement, has also started to look much more at the economic values of conservation and of biodiversity." "And we're finding surprising things about how valuable the ecosystems of the world are for the services they deliver to people," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "Most tropical shallows are barren, but these coral havens contain one quarter of all the marine life on our planet," "NARRATOR:" "Calculating the value of a place may help conserve it," "So if one takes reefs for instance, the money value in terms of the productivity of that area, the biological diversity, the value to local communities of that place as a breeding center for fish, whatever it might be, for tourism and so on." "Stick a money value on it and then say to people," ""How smart do you think you're gonna be if you destroy that" ""for a fraction of the ongoing economic value of that asset," ""that resource, over years and years? "" "That may make a difference in the minds of some decision-makers who think that short-term liquidation of natural assets is the answer, when, really, long-term management of those assets gives a much better economic return." "NARRATOR:" "A price tag may help conserve a place, but can it really reflect the true value of a wilderness?" "," "I think to the extent that we begin to give it a monetary value we at least provide the signal that it is worth something and we should be careful about whether we decide to put it into another use." "The danger I see in putting a monetary value on particular ecosystems, or pieces of ecosystems, is that then you can compare that number to another one when it's almost impossible to come up with a number that really fully takes into account the total value." "NARRATOR:" "One trouble with putting a price tag on wildernesses is that people aren't always as practical as they think they are," "They can appreciate something's value and destroy it anyway," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "Krill, shrimp-like creatures," "By weight, they are the most abundant animals on the planet," "A single swarm can contain two million tons of them," "And that is a lot of fish food," "The shallow temperate seas support the greatest concentrations of fish on our planet," "Huge shoals migrate from their overwintering grounds in the depths to feed in these rich waters," "NARRATOR:" "All those fish, all that food," "The seas shown in Planet Earth are obviously valuable beyond comprehension," "They may seem infinite but these vast oceans can be damaged byjust a small amount of pollution, and that may harm us," "Everybody has always said, "The solution to pollution is dilution."" "So, if these things..." "Any of these bad substances get into the ocean, they're hugely diluted down and therefore are harmless." "And that's quite right, they are." "But then a totally insidious thing happens." "They get picked up in the oils of plankton, particularly of diatoms, these little single-celled plants of which the ocean is composed." "If you are eating an animal like a swordfish, for example, and that animal is at about the sixth level of the food pyramid, that means there is ten-to-the-sixth, a million times concentration of what was in the water around it." "So that means that when you take..." "If you ate a pound of swordfish, for example, you would be eating all of the pollutants which had been collected in a million pounds, five hundred tons, of diatoms." "That's a real problem," "NARRATOR:" "And in certain parts of the world, that's a particular problem," "So, for example, any woman of childbearing age, if she is nursing her infant in that tenderest of all mammalian acts, what she is actually doing is dumping her lifetime's accumulation of pollutants into that infant." "And if her milk was in containers other than her breasts, she would not be allowed to take it across a state line." "It's too polluted." "Now that exists." "That's something people have to concern themselves with." "We can dodge that bullet as a species by simply feeding formula to our children," "Not an option for a whale," "So the only conclusion you can draw is that these pollutants, as they build higher, are going to bring species to extinction, That's a problem," "NARRATOR:" "Another type of pollution is affecting the natural world, too," "Greenhouse gases are changing the climate and that transforms wildernesses," "FOTHERGILL:" "I'd originally been to Antarctica to make Life in the Freezer about 12 years ago," "And there's absolutely no doubt that you can really see a number of changes," "Undoubtedly, Antarctica looks warmer." "It's greener than it was 1 0 years ago," "NARRATOR:" "Wildernesses are also moving as the climate changes," "Over the last, say 1 0, 20 years, it's been very easy to see climate change in Ethiopia, in that as the country's been drying out, we've seen vegetation levels rising up the mountains." "In about the last 30 years, we have seen the vegetation levels of the Simien mountains climb about 50 meters." "So in 30 years you can look at photographs and see different tree lines moving up." "It also means that the animals that survive on the alpine grasses at the very top have nowhere else to go," "I mean, they've reached the top of the plateau," "This is the jumping-off point for these vegetation levels," "NARRATOR: "That's too bad, " some might say, "But why is humanity always to blame?" ", "" "Throughout Earth's history, animals and ecosystems have adapted as the climate has changed," "What's so different now?" "," "We're looking at climate change that's happening much more quickly than ever before, which will make it much harder for ecological systems and for humans to adapt." "Over the four billion sweep of the planet's history, climate has been wildly variable." "There have been times when maybe the whole planet's been a ball of snow and ice and times when exotic tropical animals have roamed the poles." "But during all our recorded history, the last 6,000 to 8,000 years, the climate has been unusually steady." "With the dawn of the industrial revolution, say around 1780, when we first started burning fossil fuels and at an accelerating rate, carbon dioxide levels have risen," "280 parts per million of carbon dioxide for thousands of years, up to 330 by 1 960," "360 by the '90s, 380 today." "The last time the planet came to equilibrium with greenhouse gas concentrations of the kind that we're looking toward," "500 parts per million by the middle of the century, was 20 to 40 million years ago and the oceans at that equilibrium point were about 300 feet higher." "What is still uncertain is what impact, if any, man is having on this warming." "There are so many variables that go into climate science that to make a blanket statement or try to just pinpoint one variable as being the be all end all is really short-sighted." "I mean, it was perfectly responsible for people 20 years ago to say, "Look, we don't have the evidence." "We don't have the continuity." ""We don't have the backward look and statistics and evidence" ""which can tell us enough about the rate at which we're changing" ""to predict whether or not human beings are responsible."" "Now, over that 20 years the evidence has accumulated until now, it seems to me, absolutely incontrovertible." "It's time to ignore the skeptics." "And I think the only explanation for the skeptics is that there will always be doubters of anything, any phenomenon like this, number one." "And number two, there are powerful economic forces at work." "Industries that are concerned that action on climate change may be to their disadvantage, and so, in the end, not that surprising that some voice doubts." "The President's made clear that the surface of the Earth is warming and there's great consensus on that, and that humans are contributing to the problem." "And so the issue that we face is what's the extent of potential change?" "What are the real downsides of that?" "What are the potential upsides of that?" "And how do we reduce our emissions?" "But people still want to get to their jobs, they still want to take their kids to school and we have to find the transitional strategies that gets us out of a petroleum-based economy, ultimately." "NARRATOR:" "It is getting harder to be a skeptic, not only because the science is more convincing but because people everywhere are watching their own landscapes change with the climate," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "The Mara River, snaking across the plains of East Africa," "As the land flattens out, rivers slow down and lose their destructive power," "Now they are carrying heavy loads of sediment that stains their waters brown," "NARRATOR:" "But East Africans have noticed something about the Mara," "Nowadays, it's often the only river for miles around that flows in the dry season," "Most of the others are empty," "I'm not sure that the majority of people in this country understand the global concept of climate change, but they do understand what they are observing locally." "The Green Belt Movement holds seminars, and in every class of about 1 00 people if I ask, "How many of you know of a river" ""that was flowing when you are young child, but is no longer flowing? "" "More than 60% of the people will raise their hands up." "So people understand what's happening at the very local level." "NARRATOR:" "People in Arizona have noticed changes, too," "SANJAYAN:" "I went to Southern Arizona some months ago, and I was in a room full of ranchers, I mean, these are guys wearing cowboy hats and they've got their cattle dog and they've got their cowhide jackets, right?" "," "I watched them listen to a talk on climate change." "And the guy up there was saying to them," ""Hey, do you know last year was the first year in Southern Arizona" ""that there was no frost on the ground? "" "And every cattleman in that room nodded his head." "And I thought to myself, "You know what?" "These guys get climate change." ""They get climate change better than any politician out here."" "Because if there's no frost on the ground, it means they're going to have a hell of a fire season." "And it's going to have a major impact on how they're going to be able to graze their cattle that year." "NARRATOR:" "So how will wildernesses around the world change with global warming?" "," "And how will that affect people?" "," "McNEELY:" "One of the things that is most likely to happen is changes in the distribution of rainfall," "Why that's important is that rainfall drives the productivity of ecosystems." "So if you have greater rainfall, you're going to be able to expand agricultural land, for example." "In areas where you have less rainfall agriculture land is going to be less productive and may in fact be used only for pastoralism, for grazing." "Where you see the change in land use is where you see conflict." "And if we look historically at times of rapid climate change, these are times of conflict between human cultures." "NARRATOR:" "If climate change does alter the places that people rely on for food and water, there could be more conflict in the future," "Recent studies by military entities, like the Pentagon for example, which is, you know, well-known studies, you know, have demonstrated that tomorrow wars, the wars of tomorrow, will be triggered by environment." "They have referred to climate change, for example, as being one of the most important threats to the US security," "And the scarcity of water in the future will be one of the main reason to trigger war and international conflict." "NARRATOR:" "Is the beautiful planet Earth we were shown in the series doomed by its dominant animal species, or will that species start to make better use of its collective big brain?" "," "We are now the most powerful species the world has ever seen, and we now have it in our hands to destroy pretty well anything." "And we should therefore take on the moral responsibility of being a steward of the planet on which we happen to have developed." "We can forecast population growth, we can forecast climate change, we can forecast extinction, immigration of species, all kinds of things like that." "That really does give us a unique ability today to take a problem that is a 1 00-year, 500-year problem and break it into manageable bite-sized chunks." "Now if that sounds like a paradox, you know, it can't be done, well, of course it can be done." "We've been talking about it everywhere and intensively now for many years, on how to reduce energy consumption with alternative sources, how to grow more food better in the areas that are already under cultivation." "We can handle this and end up with a better quality of life and carrying through as much of the natural world that we inherited as we can." "There are other countries who are beginning to take on board more of these ideas of balancing the natural and the social including..." "The country of Bhutan has recently declared that their national policy goal is gross national happiness rather than gross national product." "I think that's the bottom line." "We can consume less and be better off than we are." "We live with a terrible paradox." "We love nature, we are totally dependent on nature and we destroy nature." "I think what we need now to realize is that we can, in fact, undo a lot of what we're doing." "It turns out that most of the major problems that we face are actually solvable, that the solutions are simple, and that these solutions can take place using basic scientific information that we already have." "We can start the process." "We need to do that." "It's really important." "LEAPE:" "This is a time when our planet is under assault like never before, and we are only beginning to realize how severe the consequences may be for the quality of our own lives and for the quality of our children's lives," "And, for me, the only good news in this picture is that we also see glimmers of the solution, that we can begin to see strategies that work, that it is possible to shift our economies so that it works for conservation instead of against it." "I've always felt a kind of very deep gut-wrenching sense of pain when I think about the speed with which we're laying waste the planet." "But I've always taken that kind of emotional pain and turned it into," "I hope, more constructive approaches to trying to deal with these things," "Because if all you can do is get stuck on your personal pain, you'll never turn that into campaigning passion to put the thing right that is going wrong at the moment," "We've got to turn people's minds towards more positive images of the good that we can still do to help protect the natural world." "NARRATOR:" "How much longer can a growing, consuming, developing humanity coexist with wild animals, with raw nature?" "," "And what will happen to the animals, to nature, and to us, if we can't?" "," "Planet Earth has shown us some of the world's most spectacular inhabitants in their spectacular settings," "And few fit this description better than humpback whales," "BROWNLOW:" "One of the greatest privileges I've ever had is to swim with humpback whales," "These are 1 2-meter giants that could swat you with their flukes but, instead, they accept you and enable you to just gently snorkel close up to them, to get a very close and personal experience with them." "(WHALE CALLING)" "NARRATOR:" "You could almost say that the modern conservation movement was started by humpback whales," "It was recordings of their songs in the 1960s that spearheaded the Save the Whale campaign," "And that, combined with other new awareness, the dangers of pesticides, the threat to rainforests, soon grew into "Save the Earth"," "The man who produced those humpback recordings is Roger Payne," "Humpback whales are the whales that sing." "I mean, imagine!" "And these songs, they change and they use rhyme in the most complicated ones." "It's thrilling to hear," "And this is why we were able to get whales into the culture of humanity," "So important," "NARRATOR:" "Humpbacks not only sing, they also provide us with an annual spectacle, an event captured byPlanet Earth." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "The humpbacks have finally arrived," "The polar seas in summer are the most productive on the planet and the whales gorge themselves round the clock," "But it may not always be this way," "Fish and krill stocks are declining so rapidly that spectacles like this may soon be part of history," "NARRATOR:" "So the animals that inspired 40 years of conservation are, themselves, still not saved," "Alas, humpbacks and other whales are not safe." "We are not, at this moment, where we think we are." "Everybody seems to think, "Oh, we've the saved whales."" ""We have a moratorium." And the answer is, "Wrong."" "It is being violated steadily by the whaling nations, by various loopholes which they are playing." "And the result is that whaling is about to escape all meaningful international control." "So, I'm watching my life's work undone in front of my eyes, and it's a horrible thing to watch." "(BIRDS CHIRPING)" "NARRATOR:" "Whales are not the only ones in the firing line," "Many of the world's wilderness areas are under constant threat," "We are now to the point that we have lost half of the world's forests, half of the world's wetlands, half of the world's grasslands." "We are systematically eradicating many of the habitats that make up the world's ecosystems." "NARRATOR:" "Despite all the energy and the money that are being poured into conservation, the battles keep going on and on, Why?" "," "Has the conservation movement been getting its message wrong?" "," "The challenges have, in some ways, got bigger." "Our consumption of natural resources, the pressure on land, the changes now taking place to the climate, pose far bigger challenges than those that have been solved." "And I think we do have to look at ways in which we can start gearing up the environmental message to be something more than simply an add-on to the way we do development and run our countries." "To make it something that's at the center of the way in which governments and societies work, and we're still far from doing that." "I'm not sure the conservation movement's got it wrong in terms of where their focus has been." "It's just that their focus has been in one end of the spectrum." "When we do campaigns that say "Save the Tiger" or "Save the Whale"and focus on a species, then it's clearly important," "What happened is, I think, the conservation movementjust stopped evolving after that," "NARRATOR:" "Early conservation was very stern, invariably casting humans as every wild animal's enemy," "Conservation areas were fenced in and people were kept out," "National parks, which were being set up all over the world, were typically seen as havens of protection and, in some cases, were fiercely guarded," "The strategy appeared to work, too," "It's credited with saving the elephants," "Richard Leakey was head of the Kenya Wildlife Service in the early 1 990s," "Elephants and rhinos were being heavily poached for their tusks and their horns, and numbers were falling dramatically," "Leakey's solution was to create a wildlife army," "ALL:" "Left, right, left." "About turn!" "Left, right, left..." "The rangers became the most effective fighting force in the country," "But he also moved local tribes outside the fences, leaving the parks just for animals and tourists," "They became guarded fortresses," "But was he right to take such a hardline approach?" "," "Leakey was right." "If you look at the '90s, when the issue of poaching, especially for ivory and for the rhino horn, he was really right in the sense that "Who are poachers? "" "The poachers were the communities and they were selling this to the middlemen." "And the situation was so bad that the population of wildlife, especially the rhino and the elephant, depleted so fast, that if drastic measures were not taken, we were going to lose them." "But that was 1990s," "NARRATOR:" "The elephants thrived and the tourists got their money's worth," "But what was the effect on the local tribes people, cut off from their ancestral lands?" "," "The Masais were chased out of the park and never allowed in again." "But, to us, the Masai people, we look at it as very bad laws put in place, oppressing one side and giving one side a new way to oppress the other because wildlife are not restricted inside the park alone." "Always the wildlife come out of the park and they came to mingle together with our livestock here, causing a lot of diseases and a lot of conditions," "And, on the other side, we are not allowed to get into the park," "NDEDE:" "That's why I insist we need to re-engineer the whole thing," "And when we develop or design a program to protect wildlife in this country, it should be people-sensitive," "And if there are specific promises that are made from the government's side, it should be one of the key areas that should be looked at is to make sure that these promises are fulfilled, so people don't get disillusioned." "Otherwise you're going to lose it." "Omar says," ""If I am the director or the person in charge of conservation of wildlife in this country," ""one, I will no longer depend on the rangers with bullets to protect wildlife."" "But he's going to give the communities of this country who live with wildlife, he's going to make policies which allow the people themself to be the protectors and the benefactors of wildlife," "NARRATOR:" "The World Bank was the main financial backer of Leakey's strategy," "We must empower local communities to be totally involved in both the design and the management of our protected areas." "Obviously, one of the key challenges in a protected area is indeed to keep out poachers etc, but whether or not the Bank would nowadays endorse the use of sort of a military-style empowerment, I think is a real question." "NARRATOR:" "Nowadays the trend is to involve people, local people, more and more," "But is conservation going too far in that direction?" "," "Should there still be some fortresses?" "," "One of the biggest problems we have with protecting these last pockets of pristine environment now is, "Who has the right to go in there? "" "We have indigenous people who might have used that land and those animals as a resource for generations." "And we'll have a situation where we have well-protected environmental areas so locked up that only an elite few can go in and visit these animals." "I think there are some parts of the world where we probably have to do that for a moment in history." "But it's not a long moment in history, it's at a time when there is particular stress." "Because I think that after a few years, yeah, maybe a decade at the most, then you start to have softer boundaries." "Because if it's just a fortress, it will never be able to be defended long enough to be a sustainable fortress," "There are always going to be shifts of pressure around the boundaries that will make it more and more difficult to defend, both politically and practically." "And it also turns out that, you know, 80% of the world's biodiversity doesn't actually exist in national parks, it actually exists outside of national parks." "And so you're going to have to deal with the human element if you want to think about where conservation is gonna go in the future." "NARRATOR:" "This is Raja Ampat, a coral reef in a remote corner of Indonesia," "It was recently brought to the world's attention as the most diverse, the richest coral reef on Earth, and the Planet Earth crew were among the first to film there, discovering behavior that had never been seen before," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "And there are snakes here, too, Lots of them," "These are banded sea kraits," "They lay their eggs on land but they hunt here in the water," "NARRATOR:" "Now that the world knows about Raja Ampat, divers and snorkelers are bound to flock here, putting pressure on the reef system," "Is this a case for fortress conservation, banning tourists and keeping the reef pristine?" "," "McNEELY:" "It's a wonderful reef and, you know, we went snorkeling there and visiting," "A tremendous wealth of diversity of species and a great place," "Now, how was it able to maintain that status for so long?" "It was there, it was being protected without making it a fortress because nobody was putting pressure on it." "The reason that it would need to be protected now is because people are beginning to put pressure onto that habitat." "It may well be that there are places where we should keep people out," "You know, if the people have been out for a long time, sure, why should they go in?" "," "Because ifyou look at the production of fisheries, the establishment of marine protected areas where people are not allowed to fish," "leads to greater production outside the protected area," "Many of the fish that people eat, a good part of their life cycle takes place in coral reefs and in mangroves." "So, they absolutely should be conserved for the benefit of the fisheries outside." "But why not to have some limited amount of tourism so that they provide also that economic benefit?" "And why not allow me to go snorkeling there?" ", I greatly enjoyed that," "And why shouldn't people have the pleasure of experiencing that?" "," "Why shouldn't the Indonesian people have the pleasure of experiencing that?" "As long as they don't spoil it." "NARRATOR:" "But tourism means development along the coast, and up to now, coastal development anywhere around the world usually means environmental degradation," "In the past 40 years, a lot of the development has been funded by a well-meaning World Bank, backing projects designed to help countries make the most of their natural resources," "The early assumptions about development were" ""Let's have lots of projects, lots of roads, lots of dams."" ""Infrastructure means development, it means civilization."" "People were moved." "All sorts of habitats were destroyed." "People's livelihoods were destroyed." "I think lots of that was enormously crass and destructive." "And countries ended up with the capacity to produce electricity they weren't using and enormous debt out of the projects." "There's been terrible errors." "I think in the past, one tried, from a World Bank perspective, to focus on big infrastructure projects, roads, dams, power plants." "And I think the evidence now suggests that many of those projects were not as successful as we would have liked." "Too many of our big infrastructure projects did lead to the loss of biodiversity without even helping the local rural poor," "I think we're now starting to design our projects in a much more holistic manner," "NARRATOR:" "That idea, developing while doing virtually no damage to the environment, is known as sustainable development and is controversial," "JUNIPER:" "For me, sustainable development is the most powerful idea ever invented," "It's about protecting the Earth's natural capacities at the same time as meeting human needs." "And that sounds quite a simple and straightforward idea, but it's incredible how difficult that is to get across into the mainstream policy-making process where, pretty much all the time, it's not a question of bringing these things together" "and doing them as a single idea, they're traded off against each other." "It's either the environment or people." "And if we're going to solve these big problems, like the mass extinction that's taking place, and the climatic change that poses so many dangers to people, we have to do away with that false choice." "It's not a question of the environment or people, it has to be both, and that's what sustainable development is all about." "When talking about sustainable development," "I think it's a very clever term that's been created by the environmentalists, particularly..." "Well, internationally." "It's sustainable, it's development." "How could anybody be against it?" "But in reality, environmentalists or the folks who promote sustainable development, what they're really promoting is no development." "And that's the key." "It's very thinly veiled." "They don't want any development that's of any worth to the developing nations of the world," "They want to dictate the solar panels on top of huts, you know, the wind turbines in the fields," "The inefficient things that aren't truly going to bring these people out of the energy dark ages and help them progress as a people." "Sustainable development must mean that we develop in a way that we can thrive on this continent." "And Africans have thrived on this continent for very many years without aeroplanes, without trains, without skyscrapers, without all the modern development that we think when we look at the West, that that's what development means." "To me, development means staying alive, having a quality of life, not so much a life that is" "surrounded by goods, things." "But a life where you can live in a clean and healthy environment." "As it is now, the term sustainable development is a contradiction in terms." "We can have no kind of development, we've gone much too far." "What we need is a sustainable retreat from the mess that we're now in." "Solutions, like renewable energy and so on, are not really solutions at all," "Perhaps 1 00 years ago, all would have been fine." "It's much, much too late now." "What kind of world is it in which there'll be no development?" "Everything stops right now." "It's a really stupid idea to talk about a world in which there's no development." "But that development has got to be delivered in ways that are compatible with life support systems, ecosystems, with natural services and all the rest of it." "That's what we mean by sustainability." "What I know is what is unsustainable." "When we effectively lose biodiversity, perturb the climate system, pollute our waters, degrade our land, that is clearly unsustainable in the long term." "We need to integrate our national economic planning, sectoral planning, energy systems, transportation systems, agricultural systems, by taking into account what are we doing to the Earth's environment, both the biodiversity, and the climate system, and local air quality." "So we must match our need for economic development with our need to protect ecological systems because they, in the long run, underpin a more sustainable way of life." "NARRATOR:" "Sustainable development, the idea that people can live alongside and protect the natural world, yet still grow economically, has only been around for a few years," "But in reality, what does it mean in countries where the wildlife is not that easy to live next to?" "," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "Lions don't usually hunt elephants but desperate times require desperate measures," "This herd contains calves, easier targets," "A few exhausted stragglers are still arriving," "One of them is alone," "A solitary lion stands no chance, but the whole pride is here," "There are 30 of them and they are specialist elephant hunters," "The existence of man-eaters has always captured the imagination of people but in southern Tanzania, we, in the year 2006, expect 1 00 people to be attacked by lions, in this year alone." "These are people that are being attacked and eaten as food by the lions, and it's shocking to think that that kind of conflict could still exist in the 21 st century." "But what we find is that people in southern Tanzania are so incredibly poor, that they live in grass houses." "They spend hours and hours each day in their fields where they're vulnerable to lions that have learned to eat people as food," "This is the kind of situation that is obviously intolerable," "It's unacceptable on any level that there should be that much cost in human life from direct animal conflict," "It may prove impossible to find ways for people to live in such close proximity to an animal as dangerous as a lion," "It may simply be the case that we're in the last stages of seeing animals, such as the lion, living outside any sort of protected area," "NARRATOR:" "To people in the West, that may seem like a shocking statement," "How can there be an Africa without lions?" "," "I think that there's an incredible disconnect now between the forces in the developed nations and the realities on the ground." "That people who claim to love animals so much are the ones that see beautiful pictures in beautiful light of a female lion playing with her cubs in the safety of their homes." "And they have no idea what that lion can do to people that have to live next to it," "They have no idea that these animals actually cause serious damage to people," "(GUN FIRING)" "NARRATOR:" "Even hunting, trophy hunting, can be called sustainable development," "In Tanzania, it's big business, bringing thousands of tourist dollars to poor areas," "How do conservationists rationalize that?" "," "Hunting species in a sustainable way will continue to be part of conservation, and should be." "That's in terrestrial systems, hunting has been a part of human management of those systems for millennia." "And as long as that hunting is consistent with protecting the essential integrity of those systems, it ought to be allowed." "(GUN FIRING)" "I enjoy hunting because it's a challenge for me," "I like the risk involved." "It's just like any other sport," "People do dangerous sports 'cause they get an adrenaline rush," "That's what keeps me going, gives me a kick." "Hunters, in my opinion, are very much conservationists." "We're not trying to reduce numbers, 'cause it's our future," "But I do believe that the population of lions would increase if there was a value to them." "The people would then look after them, turn around and say," ""That animal is worth 30, 40, whatever thousand dollars to us."" "You got to look at it like that animal you've taken is now gonna go back into the system to save the rest of them," "There'll be probably no change at the end of the day out of $50,000-$60,000 to get a big lion," "PACKER:" "By all of the legislation in this country, a proportion of the benefits of trophy hunting has to go into the local communities," "Then the revenue that is sustained by that really is meaningful enough to have a big impact on people's lives so that they really do care about the wildlife as a resource rather than a nuisance." "NARRATOR:" "Manypeople would see this as good business, and if it helps save lions while bringing in money, it also has to be sustainable development," "But as conservation, isn't there something missing?" "," "The conservation ethic maybe?" "," "SANJAYAN:" "Let's take a charismatic species like lions," "There are people who are out there who say," ""Look, I should be able to go out there and if I'm putting some money back into conservation" ""to save the habitat, I should be able to shoot that lion," ""cut its head off and mount it on my office wall."" "And there are other people who say, "No."" "You know, these things, just the notion of going out and trophy hunting for a magnificent, top predator like this is the, you know, antithesis of what conservation is all about." "I don't have a clear answer to that dilemma but it's the kind of argument I think that needs to happen." "Because I think the ethics of conservation is being lost sometimes," "We don't have that conversation enough," "I think the people that worry about the ethics of any kind of consumptive or even non-consumptive tourism as a mechanism for preserving wildlife," "I think they're going to have a hard time convincing local people that they can eat ethics." "And when you're up against it like this, there's no point." "It'sjust silly to talk about that," "People who have these high ethics are gonna have to speak with money," "It's the cheap, easy option to be pointing their fingers at anybody trying to engage people economically, because I don't think they want to contribute any money," "Here's my challenge to the people who've got this high ethical standards," "What are you doing?" ", Where's your investment?" "," "I don't see any of those organizations working here in Tanzania." "I don't see them doing anything positive in Botswana, South Africa, Kenya, that's really making a difference, that's really gonna help people to live with these kinds of species." "Put your money where your mouth is." "Get out here, this is where the action is, otherwise you're just wasting everybody's time." "NARRATOR:" "Trophy hunting happens outside of Africa, too," "These are the mountains of Pakistan where Western hunters pour huge amounts of money into local communities for the privilege of becoming another predator of an animal with an already precarious life," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "Markhor gather for their annual rut," "Males must fight for the right to breed," "But on these sheer cliffs, any slip by either animal could be fatal," "On these treacherous slopes, no hunter other than a snow leopard would have a chance of catching such agile prey," "MALIK:" "Trophy hunting of markhor started about four, five years ago, in earnest," "Right now you get a trophy of a markhor for $50,000," "The snow leopard, you can't hunt anymore," "Drawing the locals into the conservation element by giving them some benefits, whether it's trophy hunting, whether it's tourism, whether it's basic services when people go into the parks, made sense." "It still does." "The only issue with that is that if you're not going to look after the whole picture and you're just picking up on trophies with markhor on it, you're inevitably causing the locals to protect one animal at the cost of another." "Trophy hunting is one of the links," "It isn't the answer to economic growth or creating that infrastructure through trophy hunting alone," "That's just one element," "You have education, you have relocation of villages, you have trophy hunting, you have villages, shops, schools, health units, ecotourism." "They all have to come together before you find the economic solution." "NARRATOR:" "So it's possible to forget any qualms about trophy hunting and see it as just one end of the burgeoning industry of ecotourism," "Many countries poor in money are rich in natural spectacle, which attracts tourists and vast amounts of their dollars," "I think you'd be a very pessimistic person today not to welcome the growing focus on ecotourism of one kind or another because, whichever way you cut it, it's got to be a damn sight better than the Earth-trashing tourism that has dominated the global market up until now." "Tourism is now one of the world's largest industries, it's one of the fastest growing industries worldwide, therefore, the economic momentum behind it is absolutely huge." "If we can find ways of turning tourism into a positive force for conservation, then I think that's all to the good." "But it does embrace a very wide range of different activities from, for example, taking the bus and walking along the coast of England, right through to flying on a jumbo jet to the other side of the world," "going in a four-by-four vehicle, disturbing wild creatures, impinging on local communities." "So there is an awful big spectrum in there in this idea of ecotourism," "PORRITT:" "I don't think we should be too upset about that," "This is a market place that is still forming itself," "Definitions are being made, standards are being set, experience is being learned." "I feel we will arrive at a point where genuinely sustainable tourism becomes a reality for a large number of people." "NARRATOR:" "In Kenya, the Masai people may not be allowed to live in the parks, but some do profit from tourism," "They run this new, luxurious eco-lodge," "In the morning you would see lions and other game walking around." "And especially the view from the loo is brilliant." "We are very lucky to have lions because that will attract more guests." "And the more we get the guests, the more revenue we get from the tourism." "NARRATOR:" "Tourists pay a few hundred dollars a night to stay at the lodge, but 40% of this goes to the Masai, who see it as worthwhile to protect wildlife," "There is absolutely no question that people work in their own self-interest and that self-interest is often short term and it's economic gain." "So if we can demonstrate that a local park, a protected area, has value to local people as well as to the national government, it really is a major way forward." "So what one wants to do is effectively embody the value of the national park, which has aesthetic, moral, ethical value, but to recognize that national park can be a source of income, ecotourism." "But it can also have many other values and if the local community can capture those values, they then actually help to protect that area." "And the people should see how to conserve wildlife to benefit from it as a resource, like any other resource." "Like oil in Iraq, like oil in the Arabian countries." "It's going to make sure that Kenyans will see as an oil of Kenya." "NARRATOR:" "Tourism is reaching some of the more remote places now," "Deep rainforest," "ATTENBOROUGH:" "This forest covers only 3% of the planet's surface, but it contains more than 50% of all its plants and animals," "(ANIMALS CALLING)" "The canopy is particularly rich," "There are monkeys, birds and millions of species of insects," "Exactly how many, we have no idea," "The character of the forest changes as you descend, becoming ever darker and damper, favoring different kinds of animals and plants," "NARRATOR:" "Rainforest tourism is well and good, but it's usually more immediately profitable just to cut the forest down," "(CHAINSAW WHIRRING)" "The truth is that no matter what the conservation movement does, there are some huge forces that sometimes tend to line up against what conservation is trying to do." "Massive agriculture, like the palm oil industry for example in Asia, where you can have a monoculture dominating a landscape, reducing the rainforest to essentially small chunks, is a huge challenge." "I've seen a lot of those studies that talk about how fast the rainforest is disappearing and they all differ from one another." "It's always a different rate every year, and if you consider the time when these arguments first started coming out and do the math, we should have no rainforests by now." "So I raise an eyebrow and view with a great deal of skepticism some of the reports about how fast the rainforest is decreasing." "Well, one of the most depressing things about going back to places after you haven't been there for several years is to see how some places change." "And going back to Borneo was particularly difficult because we were driving through countless miles of oil palm plantation." "As far as you could see in every direction, there was oil palm." "Just to see so much of it, and for so long, is very depressing and actually, sort of, almost brings tears to your eyes to know what it once was and what you're looking at now." "An oil palm plantation is the absolute antithesis of a rainforest," "In a rainforest, particularly in Borneo, you've got about 250 species of tree per hectare." "That's more than the whole of the British Isles." "And so you're replacing this wonderfully diverse environment with a monoculture." "All the same tree species." "So when you take just one tree and mass produce it across three quarters of an island the size of Borneo, you're obviously reducing your diversity enormously." "LOvELOCK:" "The tropical rainforests are quite remarkable entities," "There is a mix of species in them, a great biodiversity that has evolved to regulate the water flow of the whole system." "And there are complex and detailed interactions between the plants and animals of that great ecosystem that cannot be replaced by a simple single plantation of trees." "It just wouldn't work." "Oil palm is a plantation crop that's being grown across many tropical countries right now, and it produces large quantities of very cheap vegetable oil." "This is then traded in global commodity markets and finishes up in a wide range of products, bread, soup, crisps, lipstick." "A wide range of everyday goods thatyou'll buy contain palm oil," "Now the problem is it's a very destructive trade and yet, there appears to be as yet, very little being done to control it," "I think your best bet in trying to move forward in terms of conservation in that kind of environment is to engage with that industry in such a way that the expansion of that activity is limited at least to the lands" "that are least important for conservation." "You know, you are not going to hold back the tide, but you might be able to direct it." "NARRATOR:" "In the past 10 years, the palm oil industry has grown by 50% and shows no sign of slowing down," "So in 2004, the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil was set up," "It's a voluntary organization that encourages the industry to be as environmentally friendly as, under the circumstances, such an industry can be," "Unilever, which uses palm oil in many of its products, is a founder member," "KEES vis:" "The mission of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil is to promote the use of sustainable palm oil," "In order to do that, we needed to define what we mean with sustainable palm oil." "And in order to do that, we need to balance the interests of those who are interested in nature conservation, and the interests of those whose livelihoods depends on the production of palm oil, and the interests of those who use palm oil, put it in their products and sell it to consumers." "Palm oil creates employment for millions ofpeople in Malaysia and Indonesia," "It's a big part of the local economy over there," "And so there are clearly very large economic interests for the producers to make sure that palm oil is an accepted product in consumer markets." "Agriculture and biodiversity cannot live side by side by definition." "Wherever there is agriculture now, there was biodiversity in the past." "Wherever there is a wheat field in northern France, there was an oak forest once," "Wherever there is a potato field in the UK, there was an oak forest once," "That's how it is, that is the footprint mankind has on nature," "The point is, we have six billion people on this planet, the number will grow to nine billion people on this planet, those people need to be fed," "In order to feed those people, we need to convert some nature to agriculture, we have no choice." "Where we do have a choice is to decide where we do that." "Not all regions are suitable for all crops." "So within the regions that are suitable for a certain crop, you need to look for those areas where you destroy the least biodiversity, if you need to convert it to agriculture." "But as a species, if we want to survive, if we want to feed the people on this planet, we need to grow crops." "It's what we have to do." "NARRATOR:" "As the human population grows, countries grow and expand their industrial base and more and more of the natural world inevitably disappears," "Frustrated by the refusal of the world's governments to do much about this, some people are taking matters into their own hands," "Johan Eliasch is one of the richest men in Britain," "Rich enough to buy a piece of the Amazon the size of greater London," "I acquired a piece of the rainforest last year." "I was fed up with politicians talking and I saw an opportunity to actually take action and that's why I bought this piece of rainforest." "Having followed the debate about the environment," "I have become increasingly concerned because if we look at the changing weather patterns, if we look at how much of the rainforest that has been deforested over the last 50 years, it's horrendous." "The rainforest that I bought had, basically, a forestry operation," "So I shut down the sawmill and stopped anything to do with cutting trees," "The motive to save rainforests can be a good thing as long as one does the proper cost-benefit analysis." "Now if you're talking about rich elites, you know, we in the United States sometimes refer to them as armchair environmentalists, going down, buying land, putting it off limits." "In reality, these programs have the detrimental effect of hindering economic and industrial growth in developing countries." "ELIASCH:" "Well, I think you have to look at the alternatives," "The alternative is that somebody else owns the land who wants to log and yes, that would create jobs," "But then you have to weigh up..." "It's jobs which is, in this case, very short term in thinking or preserving the environment and making sure that we don't get further climate change." "SANJAYAN:" "It all depends on what the ultimate goal of what they're trying to do is," "When you have an individual going to a foreign country and buying some land and saying, "Look, I'm buying this because I think it's important for the heritage of the country, "" "And there is some plan down the road to transition that ownership of the land into some local entity that can manage it in perpetuity," "I think that's a noble thing to do." "What I would argue is, if indeed an entity in the north wanted to buy land in a developing country, one would not only want to look at the importance for biodiversity, conservation and protection, but also, what are the implications for the people that live on that land?" "One would want to look at the social issues as well as the environmental issues before one would move ahead with such a project," "NARRATOR:" "The conservation vision is always struggling against another, more seductive vision," "That of a world based on Western lifestyles," "I go to other countries and start telling them about conservation," "I'm always cognizant in the back of my mind that they're thinking, "Well, that's great for you to say that," ""but, you know, you guys have all these things in the US" ""and you're well developed and all that," ""and now you're trying to prevent us from doing the same thing."" "I mean, these are real human aspirations that there's no wayyou're gonna stop, or stem the tide," "I just don't believe that you need to make the exact same mistakes we made, in getting people who are at a very poor standard of living to the next step." "It is impossible and unacceptable and just won't work, to say to the poor of China and India, "You can't have what we've got."" "So the only way that we can get a deal with the people of the world to preserve human civilization is to say," ""It's not any longer going to be economic growth for economic growth's sake," ""It's a more equitable world where everyone has the basic things that human beings need,"" "and then we cease to find the meaning of life out of more and more economic growth and more and more consumption." "Because in our kind of society, where that's what's happening, it's not only plundering the world and unsustainable, it's making people miserable." "I think we need a change of heart." "I think we need to see ourselves in another kind of context." "Instead of seeing ourselves as fundamentally, to use the old phrase, brains on stalks, living in this artificial world, in this bubble, we need to see ourselves as part of a system, answerable to other parts of that system" "and I would say also, of course, answerable to God." "Now, that's something which doesn't come easily in the Western world." "I think it's absolutely imperative for anyone in a position of religious responsibility in the Western world to hammer on that theme as loudly and consistently as they possibly can." "Two forces that have guided human social development through the ages has been, you know, economic growth and how do you make yourself richer, and religion." "I mean, these are the two big engines that have developed and forced us into where we are today, or shaped us into where we are today." "You know, religion is starting to play a bigger and more vocal role in talking about protecting God's creation, and I wholeheartedly welcome that engagement." "Well, the way that religion can contribute to environment is that it owns a lot of the planet to start with." "We estimate that the 1 1 major religions we work with own about 7 to 8% of the habitable surface of the planet." "Forests, farms, urban sites, you name it." "So, when we talk about religion, yes, at one level we can think about them preaching and teaching, because all the faiths have immensely profound statements and teachings about how we should treat nature," "But they also are in the business of the environment," "They actually buy, they sell, they own, they control and they influence," "And not only that, they carry authority," "If they say, "Do this,"" "they're gonna be listened to in a way that no government, and certainly no NGO is going to be listened to." "NARRATOR:" "All it took was a plea by the Dalai Lama to make a dramatic change in the attitude of Tibetan Buddhists," "What happened is that tens of thousands of people in response to the Dalai Lama's message across Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, India have ripped their furs off their robes." "Burned their fox hats, burned their fur blankets, Burned it, And these are extremely poor people," "They have very little money," "So it's a bit like us setting fire to our car because we think it's wrong to drive cars in terms of financial value," "And they're doing it with a huge smile on their face," "It is really seeing people at their very best." "They embraced the responsibility and I think their behavior really sets the standard for everybody else in the world," "I have never seen anything like this happen before." "It is absolutely staggering." "I can't say what the Dalai Lama's influence in his area is." "I don't think there is any influence in our areas." "Religion doesn't play any part in any sort of superstition or otherwise, with these animals." "I think the religion of stomach is the essence here," "I don't think religion has anything to do with conserving animals, at least in our part of the world," "I'm intrigued to see the way now in which some of the world's major faiths and religions are beginning to understand that they have a serious leadership role." "To use their teaching, their holy texts, if you like, their authority, their inherent wisdom, to draw out better messages about the responsibility of human kind, in terms of acting as stewards and all the rest of it." "Is it going to come in time?" ", I don't know," "I'm pretty critical, looking back at how pathetically disengaged the world's major religions have been, They've just stood by and watched as our industrialjuggernaut has laid waste to this astonishingly beautiful created world," "And I'm glad they're gonna be out there now raising their voice in defense of that, of our planet, our home, of God's Earth, if you like, in a Christian sense," "But I think they've left it a bit late in the day, I must admit." "25 years ago, as I remember very well, the World Wildlife Fund organized a big conference of multi faiths, of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism." "They all got together and determined that all those religions carried within them the moral precept that they ought to care for the environment and for the creatures with which we share the world." "I suppose in a way, the problem is that the world by and large has turned away from religions and they are having less effect than they did." "I'd hope that, in relation to the whole question about the environment and ecology," "I could help to keep open some of the really big questions, the questions about what is human nature in this." "It's not just a practical problem about how do we avoid disaster, but how do we imagine our humanity freshly, and I think religion has a unique perspective to offer there." "PAYNE:" "Up until now, science has ruled the roost in terms of what takes place in conservation around the world, We need to expand that," "We need to bring in the humanities, poetry, art, music, dance, everything." "Anything that will make a difference on how people view this problem because this problem matters." "It matters to their lives, it matters to their hearts, it matters in every way." "What we need is more responsible media," "And then I think this makes it possible for people to become interested in something, to become passionately concerned and then to do something," "If they get interested and passionately concerned and don't do anything, then they are falling back and down." "And my feeling is they have to move, we have to move." "I think the media has a really important role in conserving wildlife in the future." "I mean, if you look back at the history of wildlife filmmaking from the very beginning, undoubtedly the awareness that has risen over the years, and introducing animals to people, is phenomenal." "And every generation, there is a new generation, and every time we are showing people new animals." "ATTENBOROUGH:" "This series will take you to the last wildernesses and showyou the planet and its wildlife as you have never seen them before," "I don't have any doubt at all in my own mind that all the programs, radio, Tv programs, that have been made about the natural world over the last 30 years, have had an incredible impact on people." "They really have." "And they've helped people to understand our part in the natural world, to get a feel for its beauty, its diversity and so on." "So, a big tick in that box, a very positive impact, if you like." "But there's also a downside to that." "I think people have been turned into passive voyeurs of nature rather than engaged participants in cohabiting with nature." "I sometimes think that the natural history programming has left people with a sense that it's all okay out there and, "Look, if it's on the box, it must be fine and it'll be fine tomorrow."" "When, in fact, even as the program makers have been out there capturing this stuff on film, they know that it's disappearing under their very eyes." "But luckily, we're not just making programs like Planet Earth, there are a range of different programs dealing with the problems as well." "And the combination, I think, is vital." "vital in conservation, globally." "Fifty years ago, nobody cared tuppence about whaling, for example." "And it was only the underwater pioneers, people like Cousteau and so on who started the movement, that suddenly people, having seen those things..." "They could only have seen it on television, there was nowhere else," "They don't see it in the cinema, Where else are they going to see it?" "," "Suddenly there's a worldwide movement that says "Save the Whale"," "Had it not been for people like Cousteau, I don't think there would be such a movement." "So, that's the justification of doing those sort of films." "NARRATOR:" "Throughout the world, awareness of environmental issues has grown immensely," "A lot of people now know what the problems are, and what's more, most of them know about the solutions," "So can we, after all, be optimistic?" "," "I have to be optimistic about the future." "I have to believe that my daughter, and if she has children, her daughters or sons, will actually live in a world at least as good as the world we have today." "But I have to be equally honest, business as usual will not realize that world." "If we continue with the energy policies and energy practices of today, if we continue with our deforestation policies that we have today, if we carry on in the way we are today, the world tomorrow will be a worse place for our children and our grandchildren." "I have two sons, who are 1 7 and 1 9, and I worry about their future." "I worry about the planet that we are leaving to them." "And I am a conservationist, so I am by nature an optimist." "Because you have to believe it's possible to turn around the trends that you see on this planet." "And I think we can, but we need to get going." "I would definitely say I'm optimistic about what I can do and what I can stimulate other people to do on this issue." "I don't think anyone has ever created a revolution or a movement, who's a pessimist." "You just don't get very far." "And I truly believe that we can live in a world that is better than it is today, and that our individual contributions can add up to something better." "We're constantly told that our planet is a very small one, but it isn't." "And I think you learn that when you work on a series like Planet Earth," "Sure, when we went to a lot of the places we did see destroyed areas, we did see fragmentation, environmental damage." "But we also saw incredible wildernesses, species that, while they may be threatened, are still there." "I mean, when you've got wild Bactrian camels still surviving in a place like the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, there is still hope," "And everywhere where you go, there are people that care about these places, and care about the species," "And while they still exist, I think we should all feel hopeful that they can continue to live and survive in these incredible places,"