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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is vital that there is a narrator figure whom people believe. That’s why I never do commercials. If I started saying that margarine was the same as motherhood, people would think I was a liar.
I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature.
Its about cherishing the woodland at the bottom of your garden or the stream that runs through it. It affects every aspect of life.
Since when has Finland been a rotten place to live in?
Children start off reading in books about lions and giraffes and so on, but they also-if theyre 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.
There are perfectly good independent small nations.
The reverse side of the coin in having this extraordinary ability to go anywhere, is that no one anywhere is remote any more.
It never really occurred to me to believe in God.
Nothing in the natural world makes sense – except when seen in the light of evolution.
The climate, the economic situation, rising birth rates; none of these things give me a lot of hope or reason to be optimistic.
How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I knew what was happening to the world and did nothing?
Can a growing human population still leave space for wildlife?
You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you’re talking about.
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.
You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else’s. But it’s inevitable, so you’d better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean.
Nature isn’t positive in that way. It doesn’t aim itself at you. It’s not being unkind to you.