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This city in Ukraine was once home to almost 50,000 people.
It had everything a community would need
for a comfortable life.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
But On the 26th of April, 1986
it suddenly became uninhabitable.
The nearby nuclear power station of Chernobyl exploded...
and in less than 48 hours, the city was evacuated.
No one has lived here since.
The explosion was the result of bad planning and human error...
mistakes.
It triggered an environmental catastrophe
that had an impact across Europe.
Many people regarded it as the most costly
in the history of mankind.
But Chernobyl was a single event.
The true tragedy of our time
is still unfolding across the globe
barely noticeable from day to day.
I'm talking about the loss of our planet's wild places.
Its biodiversity.
The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel.
Billions of individuals
of millions of kinds of plants and animals...
dazzling in their variety and richness...
working together to benefit from the energy of the sun
and the minerals of the earth.
Leading lives that interlock in such a way
that they sustain each other.
We rely entirely
on this finely tuned life-support machine.
And it relies on its biodiversity
to run smoothly.
Yet the way we humans live on Earth now
is sending biodiversity into a decline.
TREE CREAKS AND CRASHES
This, too, is happening as a result of bad planning
and human error
and it, too, will lead to what we see here.
A place in which we cannot live.
The natural world is fading.
The evidence is all around.
It's happened in my lifetime.
I've seen it with my own eyes.
This film is my witness statement
and my vision for the future...
the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake
and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right.
I am David Attenborough
and I am 93.
I've had the most extraordinary life.
It's only now that I appreciate how extraordinary.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
I've been lucky enough to spend my life
exploring the wild places of our planet.
I've travelled to every part of the globe.
I've experienced the living world first-hand
in all its variety and wonder.
In truth, I couldn't imagine living my life in any other way.
BIRDS CLICK
I've always had a passion to explore, to have adventures
to learn about the wilds beyond.
HE EXCLAIMS
And I'm still learning...
Boo!
...as much now as I did when I was a boy.
BIRDSONG
It was a very different world back then.
We had very little understanding
of how the living world actually worked.
It was called "natural history"
because that's essentially what it was all about...
history.
It was a great place to come to as a boy
because this is ironstone workings
but it was disused.
All this was absolutely clear.
It was... Only just stopped being a working quarry.
When I was a boy, I spent all my spare time
searching through rocks in places like this...
for buried treasure.
Fossils.
It's a creature called an ammonite.
And, in life, the animal itself lived in a chamber here
and spread out its tentacles to catch its prey.
And it lived about 180 million years ago.
This particular one
has a scientific name of Tiltonicerus
because the first one ever was found near this quarry
here in Tilton, in the middle of England.
Over time, I began to learn something
about the Earth's evolutionary history.
By and large, it's a story of slow, steady change.
Over billions of years, Nature has crafted miraculous forms
each more complex and accomplished than the last.
It's an achingly intricate labour.
And then, every 100 million years or so
after all those painstaking processes
something catastrophic happens...
a mass extinction.
Great numbers of species disappear...
and are suddenly replaced by a few.
All that evolution undone.
You can see it.
A line in the rock layers.
A boundary that marks a profound, rapid global change.
Below the line are a multitude of lifeforms.
Above, very few.
A mass extinction has happened five times
in life's four-billion-year history.
The last time it happened was the event
that brought the end of the age of the dinosaurs.
A meteorite impact triggered a catastrophic change
in the Earth's conditions.
Seventy-five per cent of all species were wiped out.
Life had no option but to rebuild.
For 65 million years
it's been at work reconstructing the living world...
until we come to the world we know.
Our time.
Scientists call it the Holocene.
The Holocene has been one of the most stable periods
in our planet's great history.
BIRDS CHIRP
For 10,000 years, the average temperature
has not wavered up or down by more than one degree Celsius.
And the rich and thriving living world around us
has been key to this stability.
Phytoplankton at the ocean's surface
and immense forests straddling the north
have helped to balance the atmosphere
by locking away carbon.
Huge herds on the plains
have kept the grasslands rich and productive
by fertilising the soils.
Mangroves and coral reefs along thousands of miles of coast
have harboured nurseries of fish species
that, when mature, then range into open waters.
A thick belt of jungles around the Equator
has piled plant on plant
to capture as much of the sun's energy as possible
adding moisture and oxygen to the global air currents.
And the extent of the polar ice has been critical
reflecting sunlight back off its white surface
cooling the whole Earth.
The biodiversity of the Holocene helped to bring stability.
And the entire living world
settled into a gentle, reliable rhythm...
THUNDER RUMBLES
...the seasons.
THUNDER RUMBLES — HERD LOWS
On the tropical plains, the dry and rainy seasons
would switch every year, like clockwork.
THUNDER RUMBLES
In Asia, the winds would create the monsoon on cue.
THUNDER RUMBLES AND CRASHES
In the northern regions
the temperatures would lift in March, triggering spring...
and stay high until they dipped in October
and brought about autumn.
BIRDS CAW
The Holocene was our Garden of Eden.
Its rhythm of seasons was so reliable
that it gave our own species a unique opportunity.
CATTLE MOOS
We invented farming.
We learnt how to exploit the seasons
to produce food crops.
The history of all human civilisation followed...
each generation able to develop and progress
only because the living world could be relied upon
to deliver us the conditions we needed.
The pace of progress
was unlike anything to be found
in the fossil record.
Our intelligence changed the way in which we evolved.
In the past, animals had to develop some physical ability
to change their lives.
But for us, an idea could do that.
And the idea could be passed from one generation to the next.
We were transforming what a species could achieve.
A few millennia after this began
I grew up at exactly the right moment.
The start of my career in my 20s
coincided with the advent of global air travel.
So, I had the privilege of being amongst the first
to fully experience the bounty of life
that had come about as a result of
the Holocene's gentle climate.
NUMBERS CLICK
Wherever I went, there was wilderness.
Sparkling coastal seas.
Vast forests.
Immense grasslands.
You could fly for hours over the untouched wilderness.
And there I was, actually being asked to explore these places
and record the wonders of the natural world
for people back home.
And to begin with, it was quite easy.
People had never seen pangolins before on television.
They'd never seen sloths before.
They'd never seen the centre of New Guinea before.
It was the best time of my life.
The best time of our lives.
The Second World War was over...
technology was making our lives easier.
The pace of change was getting faster and faster.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
It felt that nothing would limit our progress.
The future was going to be exciting.
It was going to bring everything we'd ever dreamed of.
This was before any of us were aware
that there were problems.
NUMBERS CLICK
My first visit to East Africa was in 1960.
Back then, it seemed inconceivable
that we, a single species
might one day have the power
to threaten the very existence of the wilderness.
The Maasai word "Serengeti" means "endless plains".
To those who live here, it's an apt description.
You can be in one spot on the Serengeti
and the place is totally empty of animals
and then, the next morning...
WILDEBEEST GRUNT
...one million wildebeest...
WILDEBEEST GRUNT
...a quarter of a million zebra...
ANIMALS YIP
...half a million gazelle.
GAZELLE SNORT
A few days after that...
and they're gone
over the horizon.
You can be forgiven for thinking that these plains are endless
when they could swallow up such a herd.
It took a visionary scientist, Bernhard Grzimek
to explain that this wasn't true.
PLANE ROARS
He and his son used a plane
to follow the herds over the horizon.
WILDEBEEST GRUNT
ENGINE PURRS
They charted them as they moved across rivers
through woodlands, and over national borders.
They discovered that the Serengeti herds
required an enormous area of healthy grassland to function.
That without such an immense space
the herds would diminish
and the entire ecosystem would come crashing down.
The point for me was simple.
The wild is far from unlimited.
It's finite. It needs protecting.
And a few years later, that idea became obvious to everyone.
MAN, OVER RADIO: Engines are on.
Four, three, two, one, zero. — EMISSIONS ROAR
SIR DAVID: I was in a television studio
when the Apollo mission launched.
It was the first time
that any human had moved away far enough from the Earth
to see the whole planet.
And this is what they saw.
What we all saw.
Our planet...
vulnerable and isolated.
One of the extraordinary things about it was
that the world could actually watch it as it happened.
It was extraordinary
that you could see
what a man out in space could see
as he saw it at the same time.
And I remember very well that first shot.
You saw a blue marble, a blue sphere in the blackness
and you realised that that was the Earth.
And in that one shot
there was the whole of humanity with nothing else
except the person that was in the spacecraft
taking that picture.
And that completely changed the mindset of the population
the human population of the world.
Our home was not limitless.
There was an edge to our existence.
It was a rediscovery of a fundamental truth.
We are ultimately bound by and reliant upon
the finite natural world about us.
This truth defined the life we led in our pre-history
the time before farming and civilisation.
Even as some of us were setting foot on the moon
others were still leading such a life
in the most remote parts of the planet.
BIRDSONG
In 1971, I set out to find
an uncontacted tribe in New Guinea.
MEN SPEAK LOCAL LANGUAGE
These people were hunter-gatherers...
as all humankind had been before farming.
MAN SPEAKS LOCAL LANGUAGE
They lived in small numbers and didn't take too much.
MAN SPEAKS LOCAL LANGUAGE
They ate meat rarely.
The resources they used naturally renewed themselves.
Working with their traditional technology
they were living sustainably...
a lifestyle that could continue, effectively, forever.
MAN SPEAKS LOCAL LANGUAGE
It was a stark contrast to the world I knew...
a world that demanded more every day.
NUMBERS CLICK
I spent the latter half of the 1970s travelling the world
making a series I had long dreamed of
called Life on Earth...
the story of the evolution of life and its diversity.
It was shot in 39 countries.
We filmed 650 species
and we travelled 1.5 million miles.
That's the sort of commitment you need
if you want to even begin making a portrait of the living world.
But it was noticeable
that some of these animals were becoming harder to find.
When I filmed with the mountain gorillas
there were only 300 left
in a remote jungle in Central Africa.
Baby gorillas were at a premium
and poachers would kill a dozen adults to get one.
I got as close as I did
only because the gorillas were used to people.
GORILLAS GRUNT
The only way to keep them alive
was for rangers to be with them every day.
The process of extinction I'd seen as a boy...
in the rocks...
I now became aware was happening right there around me...
to animals with which I was familiar.
Our closest relatives.
And we were responsible.
It revealed a cold reality.
Once a species became our target...
there was now nowhere on Earth that it could hide.
HARPOON BLASTS
Whales were being slaughtered
by fleets of industrial whaling ships in the 1970s.
The largest whales, the blues
numbered only a few thousand by then.
BLOWHOLE WHOOSHES
They were virtually impossible to find.
We found humpbacks off Hawaii
only by listening out for their calls.
A moment ago, we made this recording
With an underwater microphone here in the Pacific near Hawaii.
Just listen to this.
WHALES SING ON TAPE
WHALES SING
SIR DAVID: Recordings like these
revealed that the songs of the humpbacks
are long and complex.
Humpbacks living in the same area
learn their songs from each other.
And the songs have distinct themes and variations
which evolve over time.
WHALES SING
Their mournful songs were the key
to transforming people's opinions about them.
MAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN
MAN, OVER MEGAPHONE: Hello, Boctok. We are Canadian.
Please stop killing the whales.
SIR DAVID: Animals that had been viewed
as little more than a source of oil and meat
became personalities.
MAN, OVER MEGAPHONE: We are men and women
and we speak for children.
And we 're all saying
"Please stop killing the whales. "
We have pursued animals to extinction
many times in our history.
But now that it was visible, it was no longer acceptable.
WHALE SINGS
The killing of whales turned from a harvest to a crime.
A powerful shared conscience had suddenly appeared.
Nobody wanted animals to become extinct.
People were coming to care for the natural world...
as they were made aware of the natural world.
And we now had the means
to make people across the world aware.
"LIFE ON EARTH" TV THEME PLAYS
SIR DAVID: By the time Life on Earth aired in 1979
I had entered my 50s.
There were twice the number of people on the planet
as there were when I was born.
You and I belong to the most widespread
and dominant species of animal on Earth.
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.
SIR DAVID: We had broken loose.
We were apart from the rest of life on Earth...
living a different kind of life.
Our predators had been eliminated.
Most of our diseases were under control.
We had worked out how to produce food to order.
There was nothing left to restrict us...
nothing to stop us...
unless we stopped ourselves.
We would keep consuming the Earth
until we had used it up.
Saving individual species or even groups of species
would not be enough.
Whole habitats would soon start to disappear.
I first witnessed the destruction
of an entire habitat
in Southeast Asia.
In the 1950s
Borneo was three-quarters covered with rainforest.
SIR DAVID, ON TV: We heard a crashing
in the branches ahead.
And there, only a few yards away
we spotted a great furry red form
swaying in the trees.
The orangutan.
SIR DAVID: By the end of the century
Borneo's rainforest had been reduced by half.
BIRDS TRILL
Rainforests are particularly precious habitats.
More than half of the species on land live here.
BIRD WHOOPS
They're places in which
evolution's talent for design soars.
BIRD TRILLS
BIRD CAWS
BIRD SQUAWKS
BIRD CLICKS
LEAVES RUSTLE
Many of the millions of species in the forest
exist in small numbers.
Every one has a critical role to play.
Orangutan mothers have to spend ten years with their young
teaching them which fruits are worth eating.
Without this training
they would not complete their role in dispersing seeds.
The future generations of many tree species would be at risk.
And tree diversity is the key to a rainforest.
BIRDS WHOOP AND TWITTER
In a single small patch of tropical rainforest
there could be 700 different species of tree
as many as there are in the whole of North America.
And yet...
this is what we've been turning this dizzying diversity into...
a monoculture of oil palm.
A habitat that is dead in comparison.
And you see this curtain of green
with occasionally birds in it
and you think it's perhaps OK.
But if you get in a helicopter
you see that that is a strip about half-a-mile wide.
And beyond that strip
out there is nothing but regimented rows of oil palms.
CHAINSAWS BUZZ
There is a double incentive to cut down forests.
CHAINSAW BUZZES
People benefit from the timber
and then benefit again
from farming the land that's left behind.
CHAINSAW BUZZES
TIMBER CREAKS
TIMBER CRASHES
TIMBER CREAKS
Which is why we've cut down
three trillion trees across the world.
Half of the world's rainforests have already been cleared.
What we see happening today is just the latest chapter
in a global process spanning millennia.
The deforestation of Borneo
has reduced the population of orangutan
by two-thirds since I first saw one just over 60 years ago.
We can't cut down rainforests forever
and anything that we can't do forever
is, by definition, unsustainable.
If we do things that are unsustainable
the damage accumulates...
ultimately, to a point where the whole system collapses.
No ecosystem, no matter how big, is secure.
Even one as vast as the ocean.
This habitat was the subject of the series The Blue Planet
which we were filming in the late '90s.
NUMBERS CLICK
It was an astonishing vision of a completely unknown world
a world that had existed since the beginning of time.
All sorts of things that you'd no idea had ever existed
all in a multitude of colours, all unbelievably beautiful.
And all of them completely undisturbed by your presence.
For much of its expanse, the ocean is largely empty.
But in certain places, there are hotspots
where currents bring nutrients to the surface
and trigger an explosion of life.
In such places, huge shoals of fish gather.
The problem is that our fishing fleets
are just as good at finding those hotspots
as are the fish.
When they do, they're able to gather
the concentrated shoals with ease.
It was only in the '50s that large fleets
first ventured out into international waters...
to reap the open-ocean harvest across the globe.
Yet they've removed 90 per cent of the large fish in the sea.
At first, they caught plenty of fish in their nets.
But within only a few years
the nets across the globe were coming in empty.
The fishing quickly became so poor...
that countries began to subsidise the fleets
to maintain the industry.
Without large fish and other marine predators
the oceanic nutrient cycle stutters.
The predators help to keep nutrients
in the ocean's sunlit waters
recycling them
so they can be used again and again by plankton.
Without predators
nutrients are lost for centuries to the depths
and the hotspots start to diminish.
The ocean starts to die.
Ocean life was also unravelling in the shallows.
In 1998, a Blue Planet film crew
stumbled on an event little known at the time.
Coral reefs were turning white.
The white colour is caused by corals expelling algae
that lives symbiotically within their body.
When you first see it
you think perhaps that it's beautiful
and suddenly you realise it's tragic.
Because what you're looking at is skeletons.
Skeletons of dead creatures.
The white corals are ultimately smothered by seaweed.
And the reef turns from wonderland...
to wasteland.
At first, the cause of the bleaching was a mystery.
But scientists started to discover
that in many cases where bleaching occurred
the ocean was warming.
For some time, climate scientists had warned
that the planet would get warmer as we burned fossil fuels
and released carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere.
LAVA ROARS
A marked change in atmospheric carbon
has always been incompatible with a stable Earth.
It was a feature of all five mass extinctions.
LAVA ROARS
In previous events
it had taken volcanic activity up to one million years
to dredge up enough carbon from within the earth
to trigger a catastrophe.
By burning millions of years' worth
of living organisms all at once
as coal and oil...
we have managed to do so in less than 200.
The global air temperature
had been relatively stable till the '90s
but it now appeared this was only because the ocean
was absorbing much of the excess heat
masking our impact.
It was the first indication to me
that the Earth was beginning to lose its balance.
WIND WHOOSHES — ICE CREAKS
The most remote habitat of all
exists at the extreme north and south of the planet.
I've visited the polar regions over many decades.
They've always been a place beyond imagination...
with scenery unlike anything else on Earth...
and unique species adapted to a life in the extreme.
But that distant world is changing.
In my time, I've experienced the warming of Arctic summers.
We have arrived at locations
expecting to find expanses of sea ice
and found none.
We've managed to travel by boat
to islands that were impossible to get to historically
because they were permanently locked in the ice.
By the time Frozen Planet aired in 2011
the reasons for these changes was well established.
The ocean has long since become unable to absorb
all the excess heat caused by our activities.
As a result, the average global temperature today
is one degree Celsius warmer than it was when I was born.
ICE RUMBLES AND CRASHES
A speed of change that exceeds any in the last 10,000 years.
ICE CRASHES AND RUMBLES
Summer sea ice in the Arctic
has reduced by 40 per cent in 40 years.
Our planet is losing its ice.
ICE CRASHES
This most pristine and distant of ecosystems
is headed for disaster.
Our imprint is now truly global...
our impact now truly profound.
Our blind assault on the planet has finally come
to alter the very fundamentals of the living world.
We have overfished 30 per cent of fish stocks
to critical levels.
We cut down over 15 billion trees each year.
BIRDS TRILL
By damming, polluting
and over-extracting rivers and lakes
we've reduced the size of freshwater populations
by over 80 per cent.
We're replacing the wild with the tame.
Half of the fertile land on Earth is now farmland.
Seventy per cent of the mass of birds on this planet
are domestic birds.
The vast majority, chickens.
We account for over one third of the weight of mammals on Earth.
A further 60 per cent are the animals we raise to eat.
The rest, from mice to whales, make up just four per cent.
This is now our planet
run by humankind for humankind.
There is little left for the rest of the living world.
Since I started filming in the 1950s
on average, wild animal populations
have more than halved.
I look at these images now, and I realise that
although as a young man
I felt I was out there in the wild
experiencing the untouched natural world...
it was an illusion.
Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying.
Um, so, the world is not as wild as it was.
Well, we've destroyed it...
not just ruined it.
I mean, we have completely...
well, destroyed that world.
That non-human world is... is gone.
Uh... HE STAMMERS
Human beings have overrun the world.
That is my witness statement.
A story of global decline during a single lifetime.
But it doesn't end there.
If we continue on our current course
the damage that has been the defining feature
of my lifetime
will be eclipsed by the damage coming in the next.
NUMBERS CLICK
Science predicts that were I born today
I would be witness to the following.
FIRE CRACKLES
The Amazon Rainforest...
cut down until it can no longer produce enough moisture...
degrades into a dry savannah
bringing catastrophic species loss...
and altering the global water cycle.
At the same time, the Arctic becomes ice-free in the summer.
Without the white icecap
less of the sun's energy is reflected back out to Space.
And the speed of global warming increases.
MUD CRASHES
Throughout the north, frozen soils thaw
releasing methane
a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide
accelerating the rate of climate change, dramatically.
As the ocean continues to heat and becomes more acidic
coral reefs around the world die.
Fish populations crash.
Global food production enters a crisis
as soils become exhausted by overuse.
Pollinating insects disappear.
THUNDER CRACKS
And the weather is more and more unpredictable.
Our planet becomes four degrees Celsius warmer.
Large parts of the Earth are uninhabitable.
HIPPOS SNUFFLE
Millions of people, rendered homeless.
A sixth mass extinction event...
is well underway.
WIND WHIPS
This is a series of one—way doors...
bringing irreversible change.
Within the span of the next lifetime...
the security and stability of the Holocene...
our Garden of Eden...
will be lost.
WIND WHIPS
APPLAUSE
Right now, we're facing a manmade disaster...
of global scale.
Our greatest threat in thousands of years.
If we don't take action
the collapse of our civilisations
and the extinction of much of the natural world
is on the horizon.
But the longer we leave it
the more difficult it'll be to do something about it.
And you could happily retire.
But you now want to explain to us what peril...
we are in.
Um...
And, in a way, I-I wish I wasn't involved in this struggle.
HE CHUCKLES
Because I wish the struggle wasn't there or necessary.
But I've had unbelievable luck and good fortune...
um, and I certainly would feel very guilty...
if I saw what the problems are and decided to ignore them.
APPLAUSE
SIR DAVID, ON VIDEO: Climbing over the tightly-packed bodies
is the only way across the crowd.
WALRUSES GROWL
Those beneath can get crushed to death.
WALRUSES GROWL
VIDEO CONTINUES PLAYING
SIR DAVID: We are facing nothing less
than the collapse of the living world.
The very thing that gave birth to our civilisation.
The thing we rely upon for every element of the lives we lead.
No one wants this to happen.
None of us can afford for it to happen.
So, what do we do?
It's quite straightforward.
It's been staring us in the face all along.
To restore stability to our planet...
we must restore its biodiversity...
the very thing that we've removed.
It's the only way out of this crisis we have created.
We must rewild the world.
REINDEER GRUNT
BIRDS WHOOP
BIRDS CAW
BUFFALO GRUNT
BIRDS CAW
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
Rewilding the world is simpler than you might think.
And the changes we have to make
will only benefit ourselves and the generations that follow.
A century from now, our planet could be a wild place again.
And I'm going to tell you how.
BIRDS TWITTER AND SQUAWK
Every other species on Earth
reaches a maximum population after a time.
The number that can be sustained
on the natural resources available.
With nothing to restrict us
our population has been growing dramatically
throughout my lifetime.
CROWD CHANTS
On current projections
there will be 11 billion people on Earth by 2100.
But it's possible to slow, even to stop, population growth
well before it reaches that point.
Japan's standard of living climbed rapidly
in the latter half of the 20th century.
As healthcare and education improved
people's expectations and opportunities grew
and the birthrate fell.
In 1950, a Japanese family was likely to have
three or more children.
By 1975, the average was two.
The result is that the population has now stabilised
and has hardly changed since the millennium.
There are signs that this has started to happen
across the globe.
As nations develop everywhere
people choose to have fewer children.
The number of children being born worldwide every year
is about to level off.
A key reason the population is still growing
is because many of us are living longer.
At some point in the future
the human population will peak for the very first time.
LOW HUBBUB
The sooner it happens
the easier it makes everything else we have to do.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
By working hard to raise people out of poverty...
giving all access to healthcare...
and enabling girls, in particular
to stay in school as long as possible
we can make it peak sooner and at a lower level.
Why wouldn't we want to do these things?
Giving people a greater opportunity of life
is what we would want to do anyway.
The trick is to raise the standard of living
around the world
without increasing our impact on that world.
That may sound impossible
but there are ways in which we can do this.
The living world is, essentially, solar-powered.
The Earth's plants capture
three trillion kilowatt-hours of solar energy each day.
That's almost 20 times the energy we need...
just from sunlight.
Imagine if we phased out fossil fuels
and ran our world
on the eternal energies of Nature, too.
Sunlight, wind, water and geothermal.
At the turn of the century
Morocco relied on imported oil and gas
for almost all of its energy.
Today, it generates 40 per cent of its needs at home
from a network of renewable power plants...
including the world's largest solar farm.
Sitting on the edge of the Sahara...
and cabled directly into southern Europe...
Morocco could be an exporter of solar energy by 2050.
Within 20 years, renewables are predicted
to be the world's main source of power.
But we can make them the only source.
It's crazy that our banks and our pensions
are investing in fossil fuel...
when these are the very things
that are jeopardising the future that we are saving for.
SIRENS WAIL
A renewable future will be full of benefits.
Energy everywhere will be more affordable.
Our cities will be cleaner and quieter.
And renewable energy will never run out.
TWINKLING NOISE
The living world can't operate without a healthy ocean.
And neither can we.
The ocean is a critical ally
in our battle to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
The more diverse it is, the better it does that job.
WHALES SING
And, of course, the ocean is important to all of us
as a source of food.
Fishing is the world's greatest wild harvest.
And if we do it right, it can continue...
because there's a win-win at play.
The healthier the marine habitat
the more fish there will be
and the more there will be to eat.
Palau is a Pacific Island nation
reliant on its coral reefs for fish and tourism.
When fish stocks began to reduce
the Palauans responded by restricting fishing practices
and banning fishing entirely from many areas.
Protected fish populations soon became so healthy
they spilt over into the areas open to fishing.
As a result, the "no fish" zones
have increased the catch of the local fishermen
while at the same time allowing the reefs to recover.
Imagine if we committed to a similar approach
across the world.
Estimates suggest that "no fish" zones
over a third of our coastal seas
would be sufficient to provide us
with all the fish we will ever need.
In international waters, the UN is attempting to create
the biggest "no fish" zone of all.
In one act, this would transform the open ocean
from a place exhausted by subsidised fishing fleets
to a wilderness that will help us all in our efforts
to combat climate change.
The world's greatest wildlife reserve.
When it comes to the land...
we must radically reduce the area we use to farm
so that we can make space for returning wilderness.
And the quickest and most effective way to do that
is for us to change our diet.
Large carnivores are rare in Nature
because it takes a lot of prey to support each of them.
For every single predator on the Serengeti
there are more than 100 prey animals.
WILDEBEEST GRUNT
Whenever we choose a piece of meat
we, too, are unwittingly demanding
a huge expanse of space.
HERD LOWS IN DISTANCE
The planet can't support billions of large meat-eaters.
There just isn't the space.
BELL DINGS
ASPARAGUS SIZZLES
If we all had a largely plant-based diet...
we would need only half the land we use at the moment.
And because we would be then dedicated to raising plants
we could increase the yield of this land substantially.
The Netherlands is one of the world's
most densely populated countries.
It's covered with small family-run farms
with no room for expansion.
So, Dutch farmers have become expert
at getting the most out of every hectare.
Increasingly, they're doing so, sustainably...
raising yields tenfold in two generations
while at the same time using less water
fewer pesticides, less fertiliser
and emitting less carbon.
Despite its size, the Netherlands is now
the world's second largest exporter of food.
It's entirely possible for us to apply
both low-tech and hi-tech solutions
to produce much more food from much less land.
We can start to produce food in new spaces...
indoors, within cities.
Even in places where there's no land at all.
As we improve our approach to farming
we'll start to reverse the land-grab
that we've been pursuing ever since we began to farm
which is essential
because we have an urgent need for all that free land.
Forests are a fundamental component
of our planet's recovery.
They are the best technology Nature has
for locking away carbon.
And they are centres of biodiversity.
Again, the two features work together.
The wilder and more diverse forests are
the more effective they are
at absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.
We must immediately halt deforestation everywhere...
and grow crops like oil palm and soya
only on land that was deforested long ago.
After all, there's plenty of it.
But we can do better than that.
A century ago, more than three quarters of Costa Rica
was covered with forest.
By the 1980s, uncontrolled logging had reduced this
to just one quarter.
The government decided to act
offering grants to land owners to replant native trees.
In just 25 years
the forest has returned to cover half of Costa Rica once again.
BIRDS CHIRP
Just imagine if we achieve this on a global scale.
The return of the trees would absorb
as much as two thirds of the carbon emissions
that have been pumped into the atmosphere
by our activities to date.
With all these things
there is one overriding principle.
Nature is our biggest ally and our greatest inspiration.
We just have to do what Nature has always done.
It worked out the secret of life long ago.
In this world, a species can only thrive...
when everything else around it thrives too.
We can solve the problems we now face
by embracing this reality.
If we take care of Nature...
Nature will take care of us.
It's now time for our species to stop simply growing...
to establish a life on our planet
in balance with Nature...
to start to thrive.
When you think about it
we're completing a journey.
Ten thousand years ago, as hunter-gatherers...
we lived a sustainable life
because that was the only option.
All these years later
it's once again the only option.
We need to rediscover...
how to be sustainable.
To move from being apart from Nature
to becoming a part of Nature once again.
FILM PROJECTOR WHIRRS
SINGLE BEEP
Tonight, we've got rather a different programme for you.
SIR DAVID: If we can change the way we live on Earth...
an alternative future comes into view.
In this future...
we discover ways to benefit from our land
that help, rather than hinder, wilderness...
ways to fish our seas
that enable them to come quickly back to life.
WHALES SPOUT AND SPLASH
FOREST ANIMALS CALL
And ways to harvest our forests sustainably.
We will finally learn how to work with Nature
rather than against it.
In the end
after a lifetime's exploration of the living world
I'm certain of one thing.
This is not about saving our planet...
it's about saving ourselves.
The truth is, with or without us
the natural world will rebuild.
In the 30 years since the evacuation of Chernobyl...
...the wild has reclaimed the space.
BIRDS CHIRP
Today, the forest has taken over the city.
It's a sanctuary for wild animals
that are very rare elsewhere.
HORSES SNORT
And powerful evidence
that however grave our mistakes
Nature will, ultimately, overcome them.
The living world will endure.
We humans cannot presume the same.
We've come this far
because we are the smartest creatures
that have ever lived.
But to continue
we require more than intelligence...
we require... wisdom.
There are many differences between humans
and the rest of the species on Earth
but one that has been expressed
is that we alone are able to imagine the future.
For a long time, I, and perhaps you, have dreaded that future.
But it's now becoming apparent
that it's not all doom and gloom.
There's a chance for us to make amends...
to complete our journey of development
manage our impact
and once again become a species in balance with Nature.
All we need is the will to do so.
We now have the opportunity to create
the perfect home for ourselves...
and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world
that we inherited.
Just imagine that.