Popularity: 1
Vote:   | 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. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Being in touch with the natural world is crucial. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Changing the way we measure things is vital. So is decompartmentalising society-making sure that economics and politics are not divorced from other crucial areas of life. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Children start off reading in books about lions and giraffes and so on, but they also-if they're lucky enough and have reasonable privileges of any human being-are able to go into a garden and turn over stone and see a worm and see a slug and see an ant. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Crying wolf is a real danger. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Getting to places like Bangkok or Singapore was a hell of a sweat. But when you got there it was the back of beyond. It was just a series of small tin sheds. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Here we are with even the most obvious things like a fishing policy or a transport policy-we know what the consequences are. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Homosapiens is a compulsive communicator. Look at the number of people you see walking around talking on mobile phones. We seem to have an infinite capacity for communicating and being communicated with. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I asked the airline staff what I was going to do with all the animals as I didn't have any food for them. They were very unhelpful. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I do an awful lot of appearances, and to have one person always grinding the same axe would not be a good idea. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I don't approve of sunbathing, and it's bad for you. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | I get Indian ring-necked parakeets in my garden every morning. There's a big colony living wild down the road. There might be some out there now. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I have never said that the reason we have got to preserve the tiger or the seahorse or whatever is because if we don't there will be some eco-disaster. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I haven't-touch wood-had a stomach upset for 15 or 20 years. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I joined the BBC as a trainee. At first, the television service had no money and it was regarded as a rather raffish arm of the BBC. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I mean, it is an extraordinary thing that a large proportion of your country and my country, of the citizens, never see a wild creature from dawn 'til dusk, unless it's a pigeon, which isn't really wild, which might come and settle near them. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | I mean, one is living an amazingly privileged life. It's only been the last 20 or so years that one could have possibly gone to all the places you and I go to. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I once had aspirations to be an anthropologist, and I know from anthropology that people will not accept difficult political instructions or governmental decisions from somebody who is totally divorced from them. If it doesn't speak the same language, it's no good. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I remember sleeping in places that were infested with rats and waking up with one trundling over my face. Actually, I hate rats! In my time, I've picked up all sorts of things in hotels-fleas, lice, tapeworm. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I suffer much less than many of my colleagues. I am perfectly able to go to Australia and film within three hours of arrival. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I think a major element of jetlag is psychological. Nobody ever tells me what time it is at home. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I think that anybody with any sense of perspective-geological or evolutionary-will recognise that the one thing the world has never ever been is static. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | I think that the justification for what I do is that in the end you will only get a real change, a real shift in people's behaviour, if it has political backing. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | I think there will be radical changes. But I don't actually think that within the next 100 years the natural world will be reduced to rats and cockroaches, nor do I think that the plant world will be reduced to some kind of desert. |
Popularity: 8
Vote: | I'm a very old BBC hand. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'm absolutely strict about it. When I land, I put my watch right, and I don't care what I feel like, I will go to bed at half past eleven. If that means going to bed early or late, that's what I live by. As soon as you get there, live by that time. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'm afraid I'm not a practising Christian, but it seems to me to be absolutely correct that the Archbishop of Canterbury should be a political force. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | I'm against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | I'm by and large against centralisation. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I'm coming towards the end of the shelf. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'm especially involved, for example, in the Richmond Environmental Centre. That's one of those things you can hardly say no to. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I'm not in politics. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | If I can bicycle, I bicycle. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If I do a series or tapes for the States and it's sponsored by somebody for the public broadcast system, I am committed to going on tour around various stations. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If you don't pay attention to it... one doesn't want to be too high-flown about this... but it can lead to a great spiritual deprivation. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | In the old days... it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes, I didn't use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual programmes. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | It is curiosity, quite right-a divine curiosity. A characteristic of the gods is curiosity. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole thing - rather than just one or two stars. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | It was regarded as a responsibility of the BBC to provide programs which have a broad spectrum of interest, and if there was a hole in that spectrum, then the BBC would fill it. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | It's about cherishing the woodland at the bottom of your garden or the stream that runs through it. It affects every aspect of life. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | It's lost on me. I can just about tell if it's got a jet engine or one of those funny things on the front! |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It's not just that we are dependent on the natural world for our food and for the very air we breathe-which is, of course, the case-and that the very richness of the natural world continues to provide us with all kinds of assistance. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It's very easy to say everything is outrageous. But if you have an oil company that's setting up its own environmental department, for example, what do you do? Do you spit in its eye, or do you make sure that what they do actually has some substance? |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Just recently we were coming out of Niger and it so happened that there was a great pilgrimage so all the hotels were full. We ended up sleeping on the floor in tin huts with bed bugs and fleas. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | My last trip was to the States, and on the way back I sat in the cockpit for take-off and landing. In a funny way, I think aircrew know that I've travelled a lot and therefore feel we are fellow professionals to some degree-which is nice, very complimentary. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Neither have I said we have got to do this because of some pharmaceutical advantage there may or may not be. The moral issue is that we should not impoverish this world. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Oh, my capacity for guilt is enormous. I'm all the time thinking I'm not doing the things I should be doing, not doing enough of it, or I said I'd be vice-president of something or other, and what I have I done? Nothing. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | People knew that animals were nocturnal but they didn't really know what they did because they couldn't see it. |
Popularity: -5
Vote: | People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | People say we have all got to join Europe for reasons which even the economists themselves aren't clear on-at the same time we're saying, well yes of course Scotland has got to be independent. And why don't we make Wales independent too? And the north of England. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Right, we'd better have a bloody revolution. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Since when has Finland been a rotten place to live in? |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Television of course actually started in Britain in 1936, and it was a monopoly, and there was only one broadcaster and it operated on a license which is not the same as a government grant. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The fundamental issue is the moral issue. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The nighttime is a very active time. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The only way Prescott is going to get through something to do with transport policy, is if the public think there are too many damn things on the road, and use the railways. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book? |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The reverse side of the coin in having this extraordinary ability to go anywhere, is that no one anywhere is remote any more. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | There are a multitude of things that the individual can do. There is the present debate going on about petrol, for instance. The fact is that we are poisoning the atmosphere and the less fumes we put in it, the better. And we are using up our fossil fuels. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | There are perfectly good independent small nations. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | There are things to be done at all levels: from using less power and being more modest about the demands that we put on the environment; to not using CFCs; voting for the right politician, who you think is supporting these ideals; and giving a few pence, every now and again, to appeals. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | There is a shift... whether there will be some 180 turn-I don't think there can possibly be. But I think that we might move away from some of the appalling materialist considerations which have governed politics for a long time. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Things change... I don't think we should regard change as a disaster. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Very few people in the history of biology could have seen as much of the actual things that I have, and the sad thing is that I do so little with it. I'm so busy gobbling it up that I don't sort of digest it. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | We have said some terrible things! When I say we, I mean I identify myself with environmentalists and ecologists. We have said terrible things, like, in 10 years there will be no rainforest left. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We were sent in an old two-engined Dakota, which held 20 or so people. It took three days to get there because we couldn't fly at night as there were no direction-finders. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | We've lived here for 38 years. This is where our kids were born, and this is my place. As far as I'm concerned, if I can't have this, I don't want anything. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Well, I'm having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | When I was right in the middle of Borneo, you thought you were in a different world. There was no radio, no ways of communicating. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | You don't meet many 5-year-olds who are not interested in a hedgehog or a stickleback. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you're talking about. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | You know, we could say yes, they were about to exterminate sea horses and now they aren't... But it isn't a solution to the world's problems. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | You were never quite sure which were pickpockets or loose ladies. |