Our Fragile Planet Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild

For me, as for countless others,

the natural world is the greatest of all treasures,

and yet in my lifetime we have damaged it more severely

than in the whole of the rest of human history.

Indeed, significant parts of it now are in danger of total destruction.

When I first came to Borneo in 1956, the rainforest stretched unbroken

on either side of the river for hundreds of miles.

Today, it's very different.

Just beyond the trees lining the river bank,

there is nothing but oil palm plantations,

and the forest and all the rich variety

of animals and plants that it had once contained has been destroyed.

And yet, as we have transformed the natural world,

so our attitudes towards it have changed fundamentally.

Again and again, I have seen the impoverishment

and desolation caused by the way we have ruthlessly taken

what we want from the land, no matter what the cost.

But I have also seen how the natural world,

given just the slightest chance, can manage to survive.

HE LAUGHS

And I have met the far-sighted and dedicated conservationists

who've laboured to protect it, people who, by their own example,

have shown that there is something that can be done about it.

I was born in 1926,

at the end of the age of the great naturalist collectors.

It was a time when it was perfectly acceptable to go out

and collect creatures from the wild.

If the London Zoo wanted a new animal or a replacement,

they simply commissioned a collector to go out and get it.

And in the 1950s,

as a young television producer obsessed with the natural world,

I was delighted when we got permission to go along

with an expedition from the London Zoo.

It was going to go to West Africa and be headed by one of the zoo's

animal-collecting experts, Jack Lester.

I thought it would be a good idea if we called the series

Quest for something or other.

So I asked Jack Lester whether in fact there was an animal there

that we could have a quest for, that no-one had seen before.

And he said, "Oh, yes. And it's called Picathartes gymnocephalus."

So, I said, "Well, that's not really very catchy,

"Quest for Picathartes gymnocephalus. Is there another name?"

And Jack said, "Yes. It's also called the bald-headed rock fowl."

I said, "Well, even Quest for a Bald-Headed Rock Fowl

"isn't likely to grab people."

So in the end, we just called it Zoo Quest.

TRIBAL SINGING

We spent weeks travelling around the country

collecting all kinds of mammals, reptiles and birds.

Everywhere we went, we showed people a picture of Picathartes

and finally found a village chief who said the birds nested nearby.

And so they did.

In the finished programmes, of course,

we didn't reveal this immediately. Instead, we ended each by saying,

"So we went on to look for Picathartes."

Nonetheless, we were a bit concerned

as to whether anybody would really care about Picathartes.

But I was reassured when I was travelling down Oxford Street

in an open car and a bus driver leant out of his cab and he said,

"Hello, Dave. Well, are we or are we not going to find

"Pica-bloody-fartees?"

So I knew that actually we had made an impact with somebody.

And the bus driver got his answer in the last episode.

-ARCHIVE RECORDING:

-'We took our places behind the hide

'and now came the most tense moment of the expedition,

'the moment for which we'd all waited so long.

'Would we see the adult birds?

'And then suddenly, we saw one,

'a few yards away in the twilight of the bush preening itself.

'This was enormous excitement.

'Then up it fluttered onto the nest. And as it did so, the other parent

'flew across and drove the first one away.

'This was a great thrill for us, for as this happened,

'we became the first Europeans ever to see the white-necked Picathartes on its nest.'

Having filmed Picathartes, we managed to collect a young nestling

and brought it back, together with sun birds

and emerald starlings, to live here in the bird house in the London Zoo.

It had been my first opportunity to film animals in the wild

and this happy collaboration with the London Zoo

resulted in a whole succession of Zoo Quest series.

Sadly, after the first, Jack became seriously ill, so I took over

and tried to give the impression that I knew what I was doing.

'It's important to grab his tail as soon as you grab his head,

'otherwise he'll wrap his great coils round you

'and give you a very nasty squeeze.

'I was more than happy that we'd been able to take it away

'without IT harming us.

'First, I grabbed the tail with my left hand

'and then tickled his tummy with my right, so that he doubled up,

'lost his grip and out he came.'

Of course, I wouldn't behave like that today.

Things have changed.

Thanks to their breeding programmes, zoos can get most of what they want

without going to catch them in the wild. But that was then.

Caring for the creatures we collected took so much time

it eventually became part of the programme's story.

Once the animals we had collected had settled in at the zoo,

we got permission to take some of the more interesting ones

to the studios to show them off on live television.

And here he is, twice as large, I should say,

but still just as hungry

and still making this extraordinary little noise

which he used to make out there in Borneo.

And here he is in the studio.

He can bite. He's got quite powerful fangs.

I have been bitten by a python. It doesn't hurt much.

Well, helping me... Help...

Helping me control this python is Mr Lanwarn from the reptile house

in the London Zoo who, in fact, has it in his care now,

but he's quite a handful now, isn't he?

-These... You could quite imagine how these powerful coils...

-Oh, yes.

..could really give you quite a crush.

Our attitudes to wildlife were so very different in the '50s.

But then they were about to undergo a transformation.

Ducks and geese are decreasing in the world rather rapidly.

It would be a great pity, I think, if they were allowed

to disappear altogether or even to become extremely rare.

In these marshy fields, we built special paddocks

and in them, we've established this collection of ducks

and geese and swans.

As a student, there was one person perhaps more than anyone else

who fuelled my excitement about the natural world.

He was the most celebrated broadcaster of his time.

On radio, of course. There was no television.

Little did I think that, within a few years,

he and I were to become friends.

That man was Peter Scott, who founded The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust

and created its first reserve around his home here at Slimbridge.

Peter Scott made me realise for the first time

that there were species of animal around the world

that were in danger of becoming extinct.

It was a radical idea at the time.

Well, if we decide that we have got a responsibility to prevent animals

from becoming extinct, what can we do about it?

Well, in extreme cases, we can, and I think we should,

take into captivity a proportion of the population into some zoo

or park or reserve and try and breed them there and build up the stock.

Now, here at the Wildfowl Trust, we have done that with the nene, or Hawaiian goose.

The nene evolved on the island of Hawaii.

But in the 19th century, colonial settlers brought dogs, pigs,

rats and mongooses, all of which preyed heavily on the nene.

By the late 1940s, there were only 30 individual birds left.

Peter Scott, as a young man,

had been a passionate hunter of wildfowl.

Now, he became their saviour.

In 1950, he arranged for a few of them

to be brought halfway around the world to Slimbridge

so that he could try to breed them in captivity.

And he succeeded, because these are some of their descendents.

Wonderfully tame.

And now they have been introduced,

not only to other wildlife sanctuaries, but back to Hawaii.

Until I'd met Peter here at Slimbridge and seen these nene,

it had never occurred to me that a species could become

totally extinct in my lifetime.

But Peter and the nene changed all that

and I began to wonder seriously about what I myself could do

to become involved in the protection of wildlife.

Come on.

In those days, I was rather more interested in mammals than I was in birds.

But nonetheless, Peter and I regularly compared notes.

One day, I ran into him in the Natural History Museum.

"Where are you off to next?" he said.

I said, "We're going to Madagascar." "Madagascar!" he said.

"The Madagascar pochard is one of the rarest ducks in the world,

"the only one that we haven't got in the collection at Slimbridge."

And I said, "Peter, if you want Madagascar pochard, leave it to me.

"I'll bring you back a pair."

And off we went to Madagascar.

Well, of course, actually, I was in Madagascar looking for lemurs

and we got the first film ever of the indri,

the biggest of the living lemurs, and other things, too.

The series was going down quite well when I happened to meet Peter again

and as I met him, I suddenly thought...

I forgot all about the Madagascar pochard.

So I went over and I said, "Peter, I'm terribly sorry.

"We did look very hard, but we never found your Madagascar pochard."

"Didn't you?" he said. "Oh, I was looking at the show last night

"and there were about 1,000 of them behind you as you were talking to camera."

Clearly, both my memory and my ornithology

needed a bit of improvement.

By now, Peter had his own natural history series on television.

It was called Look.

At the same time, he and others were devising

a strategy for protecting wildlife worldwide.

A world wildlife charter to meet what amounts to

a state of emergency for wildlife.

And now we've got a World Wildlife Fund,

which is being launched to give it teeth.

In 1961, Peter became one of the founder members

of the World Wildlife Fund, as it then was.

One of the most charismatic and endangered animals of the time

was a Chinese creature, the giant panda.

Its simple black and white form made it an excellent subject

for a logo and Peter designed it.

This is his original and, to my mind, much the best version.

The Fund was the first international body to spend money

on conservation projects around the world.

And one of its first projects was to help the endangered

and rare animals on the Galapagos Islands.

And those extraordinary islands still remain wonderlands today.

This is the giant Galapagos tortoise.

They live longer than any other animal on Earth,

well over 150 years.

They weigh up to a quarter of a tonne

and have shells over a metre across. They really are giants.

Some 15 subspecies of these reptiles evolved on the Galapagos.

But in the 17th century, human beings discovered the islands.

The tortoises were a valuable source of fresh meat

and visiting sailors took them away by the thousand.

By the middle of the 20th century,

one third of the original subspecies had been totally exterminated

and only 3,000 of the remainder still survived.

In the early 1960s, the World Wildlife Fund got involved

with trying to halt the decline.

They put money into the Charles Darwin Research Centre

on the Galapagos, which collected tortoise eggs from the wild

and carefully raised them away from predators.

By the 1970s, when I first visited the Galapagos,

the first captive-bred tortoises were ready to be released.

And a dramatic discovery had been made on Pinta Island.

The subspecies that evolved there had long been thought extinct,

but in 1971, a single male tortoise was discovered there.

He was brought back to the Charles Darwin Research Station

where he quickly became a celebrity in his own right.

This is the rarest living animal in all the world.

There is none rarer.

This is Lonesome George.

It was hoped that a female Pinta tortoise might be found

with which he could breed, but it was not to be.

Lonesome George, it seems, is doomed to be the last of his kind.

Sadly, he died in June, 2012.

But other surviving Galapagos tortoises have had to deal with a different threat.

Goats.

They were brought to the island long ago by both sailors

and settlers and have now gone wild.

They crop the vegetation so severely

that there's little or nothing left for the tortoises.

So the islands' conservation authorities decided to eradicate

feral goats on several of the islands,

so that the vegetation could recover

and the tortoises get their natural food back.

Now, on Isabella Island, as I saw for myself in 2008,

the plants have returned to their former lushness

and the tortoises' future has been secured.

Saving large, dramatic species was one of conservationists' first aims.

But soon, we realised that true conservation

means protecting the entire habitat,

of which this spectacular species is just one element.

And one way of doing that is to establish nature reserves

or national parks.

The first national park in Africa was created in 1925

around the volcanoes that lie in the heart of the continent.

Its aim was to protect the rare mountain gorillas,

which were being killed by trophy hunters and poachers.

But what has happened there since has made it quite clear

that effective conservation isn't just a question

of governments drawing lines on a map.

Very often, it requires the passion and determination

of one highly-motivated individual, as I saw myself in Rwanda.

An American woman, Dian Fossey, had been studying the mountain gorillas

in the Virunga Volcanoes National Park since 1967.

By patiently sitting near to them year after year,

she had eventually won their complete trust

to a quite astonishing degree.

In 1978, she agreed that we might come with cameras to film them.

She introduced us to the gorillas

in the sense that they saw that we were with Dian, so I suspect

that that may well have been that they therefore thought we were OK.

But without Dian, that sequence could never have happened.

There is more meaning and mutual understanding

in exchanging a glance with a gorilla...

..than any other animal I know.

We're so similar.

Their sight, their hearing, their sense of smell

are so similar to ours that...

we see the world in the same way as they do.

They live in the same sort of social groups,

making permanent family relationships.

They walk around on the ground as we do, though they're

immensely more powerful than we are and so if ever there was

a possibility of escaping the human condition

and living imaginatively...

..in another creature's world, it must be with a gorilla.

And this is how they spend most of their time,

lounging on the ground grooming one another.

Sometimes they even allow others to join in.

What that sequence didn't show,

but which the still pictures I took at the time did,

was the way the gorillas were fascinated by our equipment.

One of them was very interested in

the long sort of sausage-shaped housing that holds the microphone

and you can see this young male just feeling it,

seeing what it is, and also they were fascinated by the camera

and they came to Martin Saunders, who was the cameraman, and were peering

inside the camera to see if they could see another animal inside it.

And finally, the adult male, the big silverback, appeared.

Dian's name for him was Beethoven, and Beethoven was a huge, powerful

animal and really quite alarming, because if he'd lost his temper

with you, he could simply smash your skull with one blow of his fist.

The thing you don't do is to pick up your camera

and look directly at him. That's a challenging thing to do.

So I have quite a lot of pictures of Beethoven gazing to

the right or to the left or even looking away from me.

Yeah. So he is.

But behind this extraordinary encounter lay a tragic

and shocking reality.

We had arrived in Dian Fossey's camp in January 1978,

just days after Dian's favourite gorilla, a young male, whose

name was Digit, had been savagely and brutally killed by poachers.

Dian was grief stricken, it was though she had lost a child, and

on top of that she was in extremely poor health, spitting blood.

We became witness to a slow-motion tragedy.

Gorillas had been illegally killed

in the Virunga Volcanoes National Park throughout the '60s and '70s.

When Dian had arrived, there were about 500 left.

But there were only about half that number at the time of our visit

and Dian had taken it upon herself to organise anti-poaching patrols.

Never before had it been so clear to me

that a species was heading for disaster.

It was just Dian Fossey who was standing between

the mountain gorillas and extinction.

On our last evening at her camp, Dian called me to her sickbed

and made me promise to do something to help save the gorillas.

And when I got back to Britain, I kept that promise

and got together with other conservationists

and jointly we created the Mountain Gorilla Fund.

The sequence with the gorillas caused something of a sensation

and helped people realise that these relatives of ours

were not only endangered but had to be helped.

Once Dian's health had improved,

she resumed her efforts to protect the gorillas and their habitat.

She fought as hard as she could to prevent great

areas of the forest from being cut down and turned into farmland.

And she continued her battles with the poachers, destroying their

snares and arresting them when her patrols captured them red-handed.

Although there is no doubt that Dian Fossey's anti-poaching methods

were controversial and certainly antagonised many of the local people,

nonetheless, it succeeded in saving much of the forest.

And today, in spite of the dreadful civil wars that have

since devastated Rwanda,

there are twice as many gorillas as there were when we were there.

But they are still threatened because of the great

speed at which the human population of the region is increasing.

And that danger is, in fact, a global one.

You and I belong to the most widespread

and dominant species of animal on Earth.

We live on the icecaps at the Pole and in the tropical jungles

at the equator. We have climbed the highest mountain and dived

deep into the seas. We've even left the Earth and set foot on the Moon.

And we're certainly the most numerous, large animal.

There are something like 4,000 million of us today

and we've reached this position with meteoric speed.

It's all happened within the last 2,000 years or so.

We seem to have broken loose from the restrictions that have

governed the activities and numbers of other animals.

That was St Peter's Square in Rome in 1978.

I said then that there were 4,000 million - that is

four billion of us on this planet, twice as many as when I was born.

Today, that has nearly doubled yet again.

There are now over seven billion of us

and by some estimates, there may be nine billion in 2050.

That growth is largely attributable to medical advances

and to the highly efficient ways we have found to grow our food.

In just a few thousand years, the revolution of agriculture has

spread to virtually all human societies.

Today, over a third of the surface of the land is devoted to

producing food for human beings.

And that has changed some landscapes in the most dramatic way.

Our scientific and technological ingenuity has enormously

increased agricultural productivity in the last 60 years.

World grain production has more than tripled.

But even that has not been able to

keep pace with the needs of the world's growing human population.

In some parts of the world,

the natural forest was cleared for agriculture many centuries ago.

But elsewhere, that transformation has happened in my lifetime.

When I first came to Borneo in 1956, all this was rainforest.

Now, all those trees have gone.

The logging industry took out the wood.

The palm oil industry cleared what remained of the forest

and replaced it with its own uniform plantations.

All those extra human mouths have to be fed,

and the country needs the cash.

But the effect on the natural world has been catastrophic.

Few have suffered more than the orangutans.

Many adults were killed as the forest was cleared.

If their babies didn't die with them,

then they were usually taken and sold as pets.

A few fortunate ones ended up in sanctuaries,

like this one at Sepilok.

These baby orangs are orphans, mostly rescued from the pet trade.

It's easy to see why they make such engaging pets when they're young.

Indeed, when I was here 50 years ago,

I had one as a pet, which I became very fond of.

'His mother had been killed by a villager as she raided

'his banana plantation.

'London Zoo, I knew, wanted to establish an orang breeding colony,

'so he joined our floating menagerie.'

'But it wasn't long before Charlie, as we had christened him,

'began to calm down.

'Slowly, we managed to win his confidence.'

And then, for the first time, four days after we'd had him,

we encouraged him to come right outside his cage.

And here is Charlie, safe and sound back in London.

Hey, Charlie? Charlie?

Whoa-dear, that's it.

And with him is Mr Smith, the head keeper of the Monkey House.

And how is he, Mr Smith?

Very much recovered from his long and arduous journey here, David,

and he's going to settle down

-and I think he's going to be with us for a very long time.

-Good.

And that he was.

And a few years after his arrival at the zoo,

he took a shine to a young female who was already there.

Back in 1961, I went into the Ape House in London Zoo

to see Charlie, as I often did,

and the head keeper came over and he said,

"I've got good news," he said, "You are about to become a grandfather."

"Really?" I said.

"Yes," he said, "Your young Charlie has fathered a baby,

"and it should be born in a few months' time.

"And as grandfather," he said,

"You have the privilege of christening it."

So, eventually, I decided it should be called Bulu,

which in Malay means little hairy one.

Bulu. Can we have Bulu?

Now, this is Charlie's daughter.

All right, dear, all right, all right.

'Bulu was the first orangutan born in Britain

'and she was just as endearing as Charlie had been.'

I look back on those days when I had Charlie the baby orang with

mixed feelings, because the fact of the matter is that these

are not pets, these are wild animals and they should be in the wild.

The problem is that although many people in Borneo support the

rehabilitation of orangutan, their rainforest home continues to be

destroyed as the rest of the world increases its demand for palm oil.

So, the question that hangs over these orangs' future is,

whether there will be enough forest left for them to return to

when they've grown up?

Strong measures will have to be taken if that is to be so.

There is one place where our destructive

impact on the planet is less immediately obvious.

The oceans.

I can see its tail, just under my boat here,

and it's coming up, coming up, there!

The blue whale is 100 feet long.

30 metres. Nothing like that can

grow on land because no bone is strong enough to support such bulk.

Only in the sea can you get such a huge size

as that magnificent creature.

I had to wait until I was 76 years old to see my first blue whale.

Part of what made the encounter

so special was that for much of my lifetime, blue whales were

being killed at such a rate that it seemed quite

possible that they would become extinct before I ever saw one.

The fact that they have survived is a conservation triumph,

and that only happened because there was a fundamental change

worldwide in people's attitudes to whales.

Men had hunted whales for centuries,

primarily for the sake of the oil in their blubber.

And the skeletons of just a few of them

ended up here in the Natural History Museum.

When I was growing up, whale products were used mostly in food.

I must have unconsciously eaten a fair amount of blubber

because it was an ingredient of margarine,

and during the War, when meat was really scarce, I certainly ate

what was euphemistically called Arctic steak, whale meat.

But it never occurred to me that whales could actually be endangered.

But improved methods of tracking

and killing whales was reducing their numbers alarmingly.

600 yards of rope are drawn out in the wounded giant's death struggle.

By the 1960s, there were fewer than 2,000 blue whales surviving,

just 1% of their probable original population.

The species seemed headed towards extinction,

until whaling nations finally banned the hunting of blue whales.

What changed the fortunes of the other great whales were

anti-whaling campaigners who turned whole nations against the industry.

And once again, Peter Scott helped show the way.

It was Peter Scott who first made me

and many, many others aware of the plight of the great whales.

By the 1970s, he and other activists, like Greenpeace, were

at the forefront of the campaigns to prevent their slaughter.

'It was an issue that I could not avoid.'

This beautiful, intelligent, astounding creature

is a killer whale.

There are about 80 different kinds of whales in the world.

Whales, of course, are warm blooded, like ourselves

and, as we are belatedly beginning to discover, extremely intelligent.

Surely they are among the most fascinating creatures in the world.

The film that follows is made by a group of people who

passionately believe that the whales should be protected.

They call themselves Greenpeace.

HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN

Hello, Vostok, we are Canadian.

We are asking you, from your position of strength and power,

to grant us the following request.

Please, stop killing the whales.

We are men and women and we speak for children

and we're all saying, "Please, stop killing the whales."

It would take nearly another decade of activism by Greenpeace,

and patient negotiation by Peter Scott and others,

before a total ban on commercial whaling came into force.

Since 1986, whales have only been legally killed by indigenous

communities or for scientific purposes.

I remember very vividly Peter saying to me once,

"I will die a happy man

"if I can think that we have saved the great whales."

Well, as far as the blue whale is concerned,

we have gone a long way to achieving that ambition.

Today, the world's blue whale population appears to be

recovering slowly.

It has doubled in the last 50 years to perhaps as many as 4,500.

Of course, it's not just the big, charismatic species

that we are exterminating.

Life on earth is a complex web

and we ignore the millions of tiny creatures in it at our peril.

One kind of animal is right now in the grip of the greatest

extinction event since the disappearance of the dinosaurs -

animals like this, amphibians.

Globally the numbers of amphibians are declining at an alarming rate.

One third of all species are now critically endangered.

In the rainforest of Costa Rica in the late '70s,

we filmed the Monteverde Toad.

Ten years later, inexplicably, it had become extinct.

It was only in the last few years that the mystery of what

killed the toad was finally solved and that was not before many

other species of amphibians had also died out.

In fact, while we were filming Life In Cold Blood in 2007,

I actually witnessed the extinction in the wild

of the Panamanian golden frog,

which fell victim to the same insidious killer.

Individual males set up their territories beside the river and

then wait for the females

to turn up, and since good positions for the

territory are not common they may have to hold them against intruders.

And here one comes.

Just in case his call is inaudible he makes his message clear

with a wave.

And his rival waves back.

He repeats his message so there's no misunderstanding.

Sadly, there are no longer any Panamanian golden frogs waving

in the wild and the disease that killed them is now sweeping round

the world, exterminating hundreds of different species of amphibians.

The killer is a fungus.

It's highly infectious

and believed to have originated in South Africa, from where it

was transported by the international trade in captive animals.

It was spreading across Panama while we were filming

and when we had finished, scientists collected the last few

survivors and took them into a specially quarantined

building where other endangered amphibians were being kept.

Here they may breed and then

if a cure for the fungus is found or it runs its course in the wild,

the frogs may be returned to their former home.

In the last 60 years I've come face to face with many species

that we've put at risk.

Sea otters.

Chimpanzee.

Manatee.

Sadly this magnificent animal is getting rarer and rarer.

'How many of these wonderful things will still

'be around in another 60 years?'

What an extraordinary creature.

Although the threat to the natural world from humanity has never

been greater than it is today there are nonetheless

causes for hope here and there.

In recent decades,

when people have become involved with the local population of animals

they have started to take part in the conservation process and

that's certainly the case here in Borneo in the caves at Gomantong.

The only visitors here

when we first came in 1972 were the local people and the people

came to the cave for one particular and extraordinary purpose.

They collect what is surely one of the strangest commodities to

be found in any cuisine.

It's so valuable that they risk their lives to get it.

They are harvesting the nests that swiftlets construct

using their own glutinous spittle.

And this is the end product of all this labour and sweat

and danger and sheer courage.

One can't help wondering who it was who first looked at these

extraordinary objects and said,

"That'd be great for making soup out of,"

but whoever he was he lived over 1,000 years ago because

there are Chinese records in the 9th and 10th centuries which speak

of the wonderful delicacy of birds' nests that you can get from Borneo.

I wanted to see what all the fuss was about

so I went into a local restaurant in Sandakan

to see what birds' nest soup actually tastes like.

The consistency perhaps is a little odd,

it's a little sort of gelatinous but for the rest of it,

well I'm afraid there is one great secret about birds' nests,

the fact of the matter is that pure birds' nests taste of nothing

whatsoever, provided that is, it's been well cleaned.

Even in the '70s the birds' nests were

so valuable that there was an obvious risk that the

cave would be overexploited.

But today that risk is even greater.

A nest like this is worth as much as £100.

If you take too many of them then the birds will have nowhere

to raise their young and the colony is doomed, but a total ban

would deprive the local people of a very important part of their income.

So a plan was agreed.

Some caves should be regularly harvested,

others should be protected from any human interference,

and one should be open for the public to visit and wonder.

It's an almost ideal situation - the local economy benefits,

the wildlife benefits and an ancient tradition, with luck,

is kept alive for many years to come.

Other creatures in Borneo are now also being protected by people

who once put them in danger.

This is Selingan Island off the northern coast of Borneo

and turtles come up here onto beaches like this at night

in order to lay their eggs.

And back in the 1950s, local people

would come to such places in order to dig up those eggs and eat them.

And I have to admit they weren't the only people to do that.

If turtles use this beach it occurred to me that there

might be a chance that we could find a turtles nest with eggs,

which would be a very welcome addition to the rice, bananas and

bully beef on which we'd been living almost entirely for the past week.

And here, buried three feet deep, were the eggs.

There were 88 eggs in that nest, enough to provide us with breakfast

for many days to come, and they were all produced by one female turtle.

'Looking back it all seems rather shocking,

'and I hadn't got a clue how to cook them.'

'We had cheerfully added as much salt as

'if we were dealing with chickens' eggs.'

'The result, though no doubt very nourishing,

'wasn't, I'm afraid, particularly delicious.'

Turtle eggs may not have been to my taste

but the local people loved them,

and they were an important source not only of nutriment but income.

The trouble was that the human population was growing

so fast that the turtle eggs were being collected in huge numbers

and turtles worldwide were in decline.

In the decades that followed, the Malaysian government

stepped in to save their turtles.

Harvesting the eggs was banned

and a hatchery established on Selingan Island, which people

visit to see what's going on.

During the breeding season, the eggs are collected from the beach

and reburied in the hatchery,

each clutch being kept together inside its own little fence.

But it's only after dark that the adult turtles reveal themselves,

crawling out of the sea

and laying their eggs to the delight of the on-lookers.

Maybe another location. Anybody else? No take picture.

The visitors pay good money for the privilege of watching the

turtles at close quarters and that gives an income to the local people.

That's about the age...

Once the eggs hatch, the youngsters are collected

and taken down to the shore.

Off you go. Off you go.

Millions of baby turtles have now been released under this

conservation programme and as a consequence

the population of adult green turtles here is now increasing.

But the survival of green turtles needs more

than their protection by local people at their nesting beaches.

Turtles migrate.

They swim across national borders into unprotected foreign waters

and that can be a problem.

It's now clear that many conservation projects will only

succeed in the long term if they transcend national boundaries and

allow wildlife to cross frontiers without hindrance, and that's

exactly what's happening here in the rainforest in the island of Borneo.

Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei signed the Heart of Borneo agreement

in 2007, declaring that the rainforest will be

protected while allowing sustainable use and access by local people.

This sort of international cross-border cooperation is

vital if we are to safeguard an area of wildlife

and ultimately the health of the planet.

And thinking about the health of the planet as a whole was not something

many people did until one truly extraordinary and historic event.

The engines are armed.

Four, three, two, one, zero.

We have commit. We have...we have lift off.

Lift off at 7:51 AM Eastern Standard Time.

Pictures of the launch of Apollo 8 arrived in Britain

back in 1968 by way of the BBC's central control room here in the

Television Centre in London where I had a job as a network controller.

What you see at the top is the North Pole,

in the centre, just forward to the centre is South America,

all the way down to Cape Horn.

Those images were instrumental in changing the way that

many of us viewed the planet.

We began to think globally.

Looking at the earth from outer space made us

realise just how small our world is and how finite its resources.

It also helped us understand that we have to cherish not just

individual species, nor even individual patches of wilderness

but the whole planet as a single integrated ecosystem.

But back in 1968, few people could imagine that the

activities of just one species, our own,

could interfere with the way that the planet worked.

That we could actually change the climate of the earth.

It was in the oceans that this threat first became apparent.

I'll never forget the first time I put my head

beneath the surface of the sea and saw all around me a coral reef

'in all its complexity and richness, and almost unbelievable beauty.'

'I have been enthralled by coral reefs ever since.'

If the jungle is the place on land where there are the greatest

number and the greatest variety of life then this,

the coral reef, is surely the jungle of the sea.

Although coral reefs occupy just 1% of the oceans

they support a quarter of all their fish.

The fragility of these complex ecosystems suddenly became

alarmingly clear in 1998.

Almost overnight, in oceans all round the globe, coral turned white.

The temperature of the sea had risen

and it had devastated 16% of the world's coral reefs.

Even the rise of a single degree centigrade can be enough to

kill the organisms that build the coral,

leaving their limestone skeletons a naked white.

If the rise is brief then the coral can recover,

but if it is sustained then the coral may die completely

and this coral bleaching hints at an even bigger problem.

The average temperature of our planet has

increased by 0.7 degrees centigrade over the last century

and it seems likely to rise still further

and that could lead to changes in sea level.

Even a very small rise in sea temperature

could have a devastating effect.

Small islands like the one behind me could be totally submerged.

Major cities could be at risk.

And the reason for that lies far away from here where the

change is already beginning to be seen, at the Poles.

I am at the very centre of the great white continent, Antarctica.

The South Pole is about half a mile away.

For 1,000 miles in all directions there is nothing but ice.

This white wilderness, this emptiness is the North Pole.

I'm standing in the middle of a frozen ocean.

I have been lucky enough to travel in the polar regions several

times in the last 30 years, making films about their rich wildlife.

His sole object in life at the moment is to make quite

sure that he and he alone mates with every single one of them

and for that he must fight.

It's heavier even than...heavier than the adult.

These parent birds reunite once they come back here onto their own

patch of...patch of shingle.

And although the Antarctic is virtually lifeless over vast areas,

there are one or two small oases that teem with life.

'Slowly I began to realise that things were changing in ways

'that will affect the wildlife and eventually ourselves no

'matter how far away from the Poles we might be.'

This is the ice that covered the Arctic Ocean in September 1980.

Since then there has been a 30% reduction

in the area covered by ice.

And not only that, what ice remains is only half as thick as it was.

If the sea ice continues to melt at this rate, there will be

open ocean in the summer at the North Pole within decades.

The very whiteness of the snow and ice

contributes to the pace of change.

Light bouncing off it takes 90% of the sun's energy back into space,

and this has helped to keep the planet cool.

But when the sea ice melts, it exposes the dark sea water.

That doesn't reflect the sun's heat, it absorbs it,

so the temperature of the sea rises.

Here in the Arctic the climate is warming

twice as fast as the rest of the earth and that could have

global consequences including rises in sea level around the world.

Climate change is already affecting the lives of not only wild animals

but ourselves, all over the globe.

I have spent my life filming the natural world and I've

travelled to some pretty remote and exciting places in order to do so.

I've enjoyed every minute of it.

But every journey seems to have got quicker and shorter,

it's as though the world has shrunk.

But then, sadly, so have the wild places.

The increasing size of the human population is having

a devastating effect on the natural world.

But, fortunately, people are becoming aware of that

and doing something about it and I'd like to think that

natural history films have helped in that process.

And there are some signs of hope - animals that I thought might become

extinct in my lifetime are still with us and growing in numbers.

We now have a better understanding of the natural world than ever.

We know how best to protect it for future generations.

I can only hope that we will.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd