362: David Attenborough at 100

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Christiana Figueres: He changed that later.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: He did. It's a slight undercurrent to the interview where we sort of, you know, he's the David, we're not going to, you know, be too direct about it. But we sort of asked him the questions. And he really addressed it, I think, how things had changed. But he was really prepared to embody how he felt about this situation, how sad he felt. And I think us sitting there with him and feeling that sadness in him, it was, I mean, I found it a life-changing experience. Yeah.

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Christiana Figueres: Let's listen to it.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Let's listen. Here we go. Sir David Attenborough on his 100th birthday. We'll see you all next week. Thanks.

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Christiana Figueres: Bye. Bye.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So, David, thank you so much for joining us and for participating in this podcast. I don't know about Christiana, but the reason that I work on environment and climate change was your films, which I watched as a boy. So it's amazing to be sitting here.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Millions of people will say the same thing.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Millions of people will say the same thing. We, the process of creating the Paris Agreement gave us a sense of the power of optimism to bring countries together to do something most people thought wasn't possible. But we also see, of course, the fraying at the fabric of the web of life and the sense of outrage that precipitates in us and others. And we believe both of these impulses, which taken to their extremes are forms of denialism, but properly applied are both necessary. So we want to have a conversation with you about that balance and how we utilize that to change the world. So Christiana, over to you.

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Christiana Figueres: So, Sir David, one of the very exciting chapters of activism that has burst out in just the past few weeks or months is these young people that are taking to the streets, to be very specific, Fridays at noon. And we have met with Greta and had a very interesting conversation with her. But you know, the last movement, the last Friday on March 15, had 1.5 million young people in the streets all over the world. So I would be interested in knowing from you, they have definitely understood the seriousness of climate change and the seriousness of non-action or delayed action on climate change. Do you think that their outrage is justified? And should they have any sense of optimism in addition to their outrage?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): I think the outrage was certainly justified. There's no doubt about that. And there will be cynics who try and dismiss them and say, they don't understand about the world and the way it works. But young people, it's true, may lack experience, but they also have clear sight. And they can see perhaps more clearly than the rest of us who have been around for some time and are concerned about all conditional clauses and on the other hand, and that sort of stuff. But people of their age see it very clearly. And we older ones should take notice of what they say. I find it enormously encouraging that that is so. And that they understand the simple dependencies, the simple discoveries of science about our dependence upon the natural world and our place within it. And that is the one big reason I have anyway of feeling that we are making progress. If we weren't making progress with young people, we are done.

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Christiana Figueres: Absolutely. But you know, I had almost a one hour or more conversation with Greta Thunberg in Davos. And you know, I had a very hard time bringing her over to the space of hope, bringing her over to the space of optimism. She is, she and all of these other young people are, as you say, justifiably furious. They're angry with us. They have, you know, they say we have been at this for 30 years and we still haven't solved this. How do we balance that? Do we have to balance that? Do they balance it within their message? How do we reach a productive tension between those two forces so that we can move forward? Because if anger leads to paralysis, we're not going to get anywhere. And if optimism leads into naivety, we're not going to get anywhere. How do we actually bring those two so that we move forward?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Well, just one word, understanding. Understanding is what they have to have, perhaps in more detail, but we have to have too. I mean, my generation is no great example for understanding. I mean, we've done terrible things in my generation. And is it what we didn't understand or we didn't know? I don't know, you know, whether it's just ignorance or pigheadedness. I tend to think that it's a bit...

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Christiana Figueres: Is that pig with a B or with a P?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): That's a good question. Perhaps big-headed pigs is what I'm talking about. But I believe that the facts are now clear, you know. And it wasn't the case that when we were 16 or 18, I certainly didn't... If someone said to me, you depend upon the natural world for every mouthful of food you eat and every lungful of air you breathe, I'd say...

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Christiana Figueres: That would have been difficult to understand.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Yes. I honestly think we wouldn't. And I was supposed to be, you know, as a 16-year-old, I'm studying biology at school. I was supposed to understand these things. Well, that's what I knew about with dogfish and how to cut it up, you know. And the classical zoology didn't account for ecology. Ecology is really quite a recent subject.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Just one question about understanding, because, you know, you've been involved in this for so many decades. But my understanding is that you came to your sense of kind of outrage about what was happening to climate quite late.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Well, yes and no. I mean, it was apparent to me in the mid-50s that we were, that humanity was actually having a damaging effect upon the natural world in a significant way. In that, well, we had exterminated things. We were beginning to realize that there were a number of species which were on the hovering on the brink of extinction. We understood about that. But that was a very limited understanding. And in a way, I don't want to denigrate it too much, but in a way it was like stamp collectors who were saying, oh, these stamps are rare and therefore they were valuable. They weren't valuable because they're rarity. They were valuable because they were key to a whole lot of connections. That's the point. And we were slow in bringing that to a realisation. From my own point of view, I worked for the BBC. And the BBC at the time was essentially a monopoly in that nobody else, no other broadcaster dealt with natural history in a serious way. Now if you're in a monopoly situation, you have to be very careful about what you say, because it's better jolly well be right, and you avoided controversy. And even in the 50s, I'm not sure that I would have gone out onto a limb and said that the world was going to be damaged by the fact that we might lose the Hawaiian goose. You know, I wouldn't have said that. And I was aware of the extinction problem, and I hope I was aware that it was not just a question of, as it were, stamp collecting and losing rarities, that it was more significant than that. But if you're in a monopoly situation, you have to be absolutely sure of what you're doing. You don't want to be shot down in flames by someone. And there were plenty of people gaming for you, you know. Plenty of people would say, no, no, rubbish. And I, so I, I, I issued warnings, various, and there wasn't a single big series I did that I didn't at the end say, you know, there's a problem. So that you are showing the natural history of the world because it's wonderful, it's beautiful, it's exciting, and it's important.

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Christiana Figueres: But inviting everyone else to fall in love with it as well.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Yeah, maybe, yes. But then that last point had to be said, and we were saying it, and we were able to say it louder and louder and louder as the world came behind us. And we could say to our critics, and there were critics, you know, who said, oh, a lot of nonsense still are, as we well know, in various parts of the world, of people saying it's rubbish.

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Christiana Figueres: Is your increased sense of urgency in your call and in your message, is it because of that that you feel that there's more public opinion, or more sources of information? Or is it because, frankly, we are running out of time? There is truly an urgency here now. Or is it both?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Well, I think it's both. But I think that what wasn't there was the absolutely totally 100% convincing evidence, which there is now, about what's going on in the stratosphere and the upper parts of the atmosphere, and indeed what's happening to the world. I mean, you don't have to argue about it. You can see that we're killing coral reefs.

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Christiana Figueres: Yes. And many other species, 60% of species, gone.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Sure.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: And how, I mean, I think now there is the certainty there. And now we understand the extent of what's happening. But we have a very, we live in a very interesting time where so much of humanity is divorced from a daily experience of the natural world, they live in urban environments. So how, in a way, and your programs have done so much to precipitate this, we need to make the natural world more of a lived experience for those people, so that they feel more of a sense of guardianship and custody. Do you think that's right?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Well, it would be an ideal situation if we could do that. But the fact is that over 50% of the population of human beings on this earth are urbanites. They are means that over half the people in the live today are out of touch to some degree with the natural world.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yes.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): And some of them peripherally, but quite a lot of them totally out of touch. And the paradox is that because of the mass media like television and so on, they are in a position to know more and probably do in a sort of book learning sense or an electronic image sense. They know more about the natural world than anybody before in history. I mean, nobody knew the giant lemur until we filmed it and put it on television in the 60s. Nobody knew about the giant lemurs. How would they? But that's important. But it's only one part of the thing. Why is it important that they should know about? Why is it really important that primates like that should continue to survive? And the answer, of course, is the complexity of the ecological web and so on. But that's highly theoretical. And I wonder and worry that we haven't really got that message over yet by any manner of means.

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Christiana Figueres: But it is a matter of urgency because you're saying 50% of us are already urbanites, but over the next few decades, there's going to be 75% of the population living in cities, many of them in mega cities. And if our care for mother nature actually depends on a personal, almost emotional connection rather than just an intellectual understanding, how are we going to bring those two things together?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Very difficult things to know. One would like to think that we could solve the question to some degree by the way in which you integrate the natural world and the urban world. And we're learning quite a lot about that. And you do find Londoners who are delighted to know that there are peregrine falcons in the middle of the city, or a common of that in the middle of New York. They are there and people rejoice in that. So the two are coming together to some degree, I think.

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Christiana Figueres: So do you see the future with green cities? Do you see us with growing cities rather than constructing and building cities?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): I think there is that element. I can't believe that it's actually going to be a major transformation of urban living. But what it can do is that if you preserve little bits of it in the urban situation, it makes you more conscious of the richness and splendour and wonder and importance of it in the big scale, so that people living outside cities could see perhaps the reason why they shouldn't spread too far into what has been the wild circumstances and why they should be careful about what they do and not try at all to turn the whole of the countryside into an extension of an asphalt playground.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: And one area where, I mean, just talking about how this sense of connection can be precipitated that leads to action, I mean, plastic has been remarkable, right, over the last few years, and you've said how sort of astonished you were, the degree of change that people were prepared to make and the number of people that were prepared to do that. I suppose the question comes, climate is in a way a more multi-faceted and difficult issue to communicate, because it's sort of everywhere and nowhere, it's affecting everything. How do we precipitate that type of moment that you were able to precipitate on plastics more broadly for climate?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Well, there's always been people so far who've gainsayed it, I mean, people said, oh no, no, no, the climate's not changing. But there are fewer and fewer, and as the dreadful catastrophes that are overtaking all parts of the world are because of extreme weather, it's becoming more and more acceptable and understandable and believable by ordinary people. That yes, there weren't that number of tornadoes in the past. Yes, the dreadful famines that we've placed, there weren't those in the past. And so I think the evidence is mounting up. I don't find a lot of people arguing when I say, I'm not surprised to hear about the way in which Australia is heating up, or indeed California. And people will say, yeah, yeah, I believe that. And of course, linking it to precisely what they do with their own energy sources is another question. I still remember, I've forgotten how long ago it was now, but travelling in New Mexico and so on in very high temperatures and seeing every single house with refrigerators, air conditioners, thumping out all the time and not a single weather blade, an aerial wind vane collecting energy. Not one.

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Christiana Figueres: And maybe no one at home.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): No, maybe that's right too. I mean, the profligacy of how you're in the Western United States have dealt with energy is extraordinary. And actually, there's one which I'm not well informed about, but the scarcity of water is going to be a real, real problem, is it not?

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Christiana Figueres: Indeed. Indeed, we all know that Barcelona has already had to bring water in through barges. We had in South Africa, we had a water crisis. It has already been hitting large cities.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): And you still sprinkle the lawn in summer.

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Christiana Figueres: Or golf courses.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Yes, golf courses indeed.

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Christiana Figueres: So you have said, thinking of these, you know, very, very acute issues, you have actually gone out on a limb, sort of, and you've said the future of civilization really depends on how we deal with climate change now. And of course, we see examples of totally irresponsible behavior. Do we also see some examples of responsible behavior? I.e., do you have any reason to have any degree of confidence that we actually will be able to address at least the worst impacts of climate change in a timely fashion?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Well, the big jump has yet to be made. I suppose, I mean, what I used to say and I still feel is that actually the actual nature of homo sapiens is to actually be aggressive with one culture with another. History that we learn all about is a history about wars, about people winning wars and losing wars. That has to change. The history of the future has to be about agreements. And so human beings are not accustomed for one culture to agree with another culture. That's not in their nature, one would think, except, of course, there is one, well, perhaps two prime examples. The one is when we actually were aware of what was happening in the upper atmosphere, the destruction of the ozone there. But then, if I may say so, it was scientists who argued the case, it was scientists who diagnosed it, and it was scientists who were actually able to produce the evidence. And almost quietly, the governments actually saw the validity of the arguments and did something about it. That was one thing. And that was something that caused for optimism. The other thing, of course, was when, in fact, the maritime nations of the world got together and suddenly realized that they were bringing whales to extermination. And that if they went on whaling in the way they had, with these modern devices where they could explode in a whale's body and destroy them, if we went on doing that, there were going to be no whales. And the perfect and simple prospect faced them that they had to agree to do something about it. And they did, fair do's. And so there are now whales more abundant than there have been for 200 years. Which is wonderful. OK, well, if we can do that, we've got a lot more agreements that we've got to sort out.

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Christiana Figueres: We also have the Antarctic Treaty. They all got together and they decided that they would keep that for scientific research and peace, the entire continent. That's a pretty impressive agreement. We also have the Paris Agreement.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Well, the Paris Agreement, yes, I was talking about the predecessors, that the Paris Agreement was the great source of hope. I know you were organizing it, but I was sitting around listening to you talking, and I was there with David King that I remember walking behind him. He was the chief scientist of Britain at the time, and he was walking on air. It was a joy to behold him. He would say, we've done it, we've done it, and you were there doing it. And he had insights into all the arguments and the debates and one thing or another that had taken place. He was there watching the whole grizzly business. But he...

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Christiana Figueres: He was grizzly, you're right.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Well, you were there, very much so. And it was, I was infected by him. I left thinking, yes, we have done something, of course, or not we, they have done something.

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Christiana Figueres: We as humanity.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Yeah, we as humanity, indeed. And then when the leader of the United States decided he wasn't a part of that humanity.

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Christiana Figueres: What did that do to you?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): I thought, well, it's only for four years and maybe eight years. And if it has to be endured, we can clench our teeth and hope that whoever succeeds him will see the same evidence and then some, because there will be then some.

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Christiana Figueres: Yes, indeed. Sadly. Sadly. So you're doing a new piece on climate change. Is that true? Are you launching a piece on climate change?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): I'm doing a new series of seven-part series on Netflix, which looks at ecosystems and sees what, first of all, what they are, and then what needs to be done in order to sort them out. And fairly simple solutions, but solutions which require government action.

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Christiana Figueres: Yes. Only government?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): No, of course, because in democratic societies, I hope, governments reflect popular reflection of democratic passions and democratic demands. And that you won't get anywhere. I suppose that's not true to say you might well get anywhere by almost fascist totalitarian methods, but they don't sustain. You know, you have to carry the piece with you. And that's why the debate that is going on now around the world about the conservation and so on is of crucial importance. I mean, it's all very well to say that, yes, you can deal with the upper atmosphere, or indeed you can deal with the pole without the man in the streets giving it necessarily his full advice, and that it can be left to statesmen and wise people to do those things. But with the sort of reforms that we need now, which are reforms about how you eat and about how you package your food and about how you run your motor cars and how you get your energy, those are all things which the man in the street and the woman in the street have got to deal with.

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Christiana Figueres: Which means there's also a role for corporations here.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Yes.

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Christiana Figueres: In addition to governments.

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Absolutely so, because the corporations are reflecting their shareholders or their customers. Yes.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So David, we've taken a lot of your time. Thank you very much. We have one final question, if that's all right. So it can be very hard to sort of internalize the reality of what some of the changes that are possibly in our future might look like. The loss of biodiversity and other issues can be very painful in all sorts of ways. And I just wondered, what sorts of stories do you tell yourself about the life that your great-grandchildren will lead? Do you see that as inhabiting a world that is increasingly poorer, or do you see signs of hope that they can live in a way that is regenerative and that's a brighter future?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): Do you know, I don't spend time thinking about that because I can't bear it. You know, I'm just coming up to 93. And so I don't have many more years around here. And I find it difficult to think about what's beyond that because the signs are good. And I hope I would be doing what I'm doing and saying what I'm saying, whether I spent time speculating about how awful the catastrophe might be or whether I don't. It seems to me unnecessarily specific. There is a profound moral reason why we're doing what we're doing. And it's not restricted to morality about co-human, other human beings. It's morality about the world. It's a morality that concerns all of the animals and plants that exist in this world, which are a result of three and a half billion years of evolution. And that one generation should come along and think it has the right to maltreat it to the extent that it obliterates great sections of it is to me insupportable. It's not a question of argument or of calculating how bad or unbad it is. It's just a moral issue. We have an obligation on our shoulders and it would be to our deep eternal shame if we fail to acknowledge that.

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Christiana Figueres: Do we have an option?

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David Attenborough (archival interview clip): We have no option. No option if we want to survive. But the reason is because it's right.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: So David, thank you so much.

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Christiana Figueres: Thank you very much. Thank you.