David Attenborough
David Attenborough
Sir David Frederick Attenborough OM CH CVO CBE FRS FLS FZS FSA is an English broadcaster and naturalist...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionTV Show Host
Date of Birth8 May 1926
CityIsleworth, England
decision environment natural
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.
eight environmental extinction
One in eight plant species face extinction.
people environmental population
All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.
years environmental policy
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.
choices environment cherish
We can now destroy or we can cherish-the choice is ours.
environmental example hardly richmond
I'm especially involved, for example, in the Richmond Environmental Centre. That's one of those things you can hardly say no to.
company easy environmental oil setting spit sure
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?
atmosphere debate fact fossil individual less multitude present using
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.
curiosity divine characteristics
It is curiosity, quite right-a divine curiosity. A characteristic of the gods is curiosity.
mean people three
You've got to be fairly solemn [about the environment]. I mean the mere notion that there are three times as many people on Earth as there were when I started making television. How can the Earth accommodate them? When people, including politicians, set their faces against looking at the consequences-it's just unbelievable that anyone could ignore it.
heart thinking worry
I don't think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? [...] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they're going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it.
moving important needs
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.
years doing-nothing size
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.
children believe worms
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.