It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.
David Attenborough
People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.
The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?
Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?
Many individuals are doing what they can. But real success can only come if there is a change in our societies and in our economics and in our politics.
It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole thing - rather than just one or two stars.
An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment.
There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it.
I don't run a car, have never run a car. I could say that this is because I have this extremely tender environmentalist conscience, but the fact is I hate driving.
I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.
If I can bicycle, I bicycle.
All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.
We are a plague on the Earth.
The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.
The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about.
I can mention many moments that were unforgettable and revelatory. But the most single revelatory three minutes was the first time I put on scuba gear and dived on a coral reef. It's just the unbelievable fact that you can move in three dimensions.
There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.
I've been to Nepal, but I'd like to go to Tibet. It must be a wonderful place to go. I don't think there's anything there, but it would be a nice place to visit.
I'm not an animal lover if that means you think things are nice if you can pat them, but I am intoxicated by animals.
People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile.
All we can hope for is that the thing is going to slowly and imperceptibly shift. All I can say is that 50 years ago there were no such thing as environmental policies.
We really need to kick the carbon habit and stop making our energy from burning things. Climate change is also really important. You can wreck one rainforest then move, drain one area of resources and move onto another, but climate change is global.
I'm against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.
You have to steer a course between not appalling people, but at the same time not misleading them.
Dealing with global warming doesn't mean we have all got to suddenly stop breathing. Dealing with global warming means that we have to stop waste, and if you travel for no reason whatsoever, that is a waste.
Being in touch with the natural world is crucial.
Steve Irwin did wonderful conservation work but I was uncomfortable about some of his stunts. Even if animals aren't aware that you are not treating them with respect, the viewers are.
We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that's what's happening. Too many people there. They can't support themselves - and it's not an inhuman thing to say. It's the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it's going to get worse and worse.
It's extraordinary how self-obsessed human beings are. The things that people always go on about is, 'tell us about us', 'tell us about the first human being'. We are so self-obsessed with our own history. There is so much more out there than what connects to us.
If you watch animals objectively for any length of time, you're driven to the conclusion that their main aim in life is to pass on their genes to the next generation.
We are not overpopulated in an absolute sense; we've got the technology for 10 billion, probably 15 billion people, to live on this planet and live good lives. What we haven't done is developed our technology.
It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.
I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.
As far as I'm concerned, if there is a supreme being then He chose organic evolution as a way of bringing into existence the natural world... which doesn't seem to me to be necessarily blasphemous at all.
If my grandchildren were to look at me and say, 'You were aware species were disappearing and you did nothing, you said nothing', that I think is culpable. I don't know how much more they expect me to be doing, I'd better ask them.
Crying wolf is a real danger.
To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see. The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn't believe that.
I think we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse.
I've been bitten by a python. Not a very big one. I was being silly, saying: 'Oh, it's not poisonous...' Then, wallop! But you have fear around animals.
People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can't sustain them.
If I can make programmes when I'm 95, that would be fine. But I would think I'll have had enough by then.
I don't like rats, but there's not much else I don't like. The problem with rats is they have no fear of human beings, they're loaded with foul diseases, they would run the place given half the chance, and I've had them leap out of a lavatory while I've been sitting on it.
The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.
The climate, the economic situation, rising birth rates; none of these things give me a lot of hope or reason to be optimistic.
Natural history is not about producing fables.
Birds are the most popular group in the animal kingdom. We feed them and tame them and think we know them. And yet they inhabit a world which is really rather mysterious.
What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.
Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.
Nature isn't positive in that way. It doesn't aim itself at you. It's not being unkind to you.
Cameramen are among the most extraordinarily able and competent people I know. They have to have an insight into natural history that gives them a sixth sense of what the creature is going to do, so they can be ready to follow.
