It’s extraordinary how self-obsessed human beings are. The things that people always go on about is, ‘tell us about us’, ‘tell us about the first human being’. We are so self-obsessed with our own history....

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.

I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.

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...

We are a plague on the Earth.

It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for – the whole thing – rather than just one or two stars.

I’m especially involved, for example, in the Richmond Environmental Centre. That’s one of those things you can hardly say no to.

If my grandchildren were to look at me and say, ‘You were aware species were disappearing and you did nothing, you said nothing’, that I think is culpable. I don’t know how much more they...

All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder – and ultimately impossible to solve – with ever more people.

I believe the Abominable Snowman may be real. I think there may be something in that.

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!

If I can bicycle, I bicycle.

London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world… It’s got everything you want, really.

We are not overpopulated in an absolute sense; we’ve got the technology for 10 billion, probably 15 billion people, to live on this planet and live good lives. What we haven’t done is developed our...

I do an awful lot of appearances, and to have one person always grinding the same axe would not be a good idea.

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.

‎Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever increasing population. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it’s...

You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you’re talking about.

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...

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...

I can mention many moments that were unforgettable and revelatory. But the most single revelatory three minutes was the first time I put on scuba gear and dived on a coral reef. It’s just the...

You have to steer a course between not appalling people, but at the same time not misleading them.

I suffer much less than many of my colleagues. I am perfectly able to go to Australia and film within three hours of arrival.

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...

Since when has Finland been a rotten place to live in?

The climate suits me, and London has the greatest serious music that you can hear any day of the week in the world – you think it’s going to be Vienna or Paris or somewhere,...

Apart from anything else, I am designed by evolution, like we all are: if we see a little thing like that, big eyes, tiny nose, we go ‘aaah’. That’s what evolution does. We are programmed...

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...

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...

The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to...

The fundamental issue is the moral issue.

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?

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.

Dealing with global warming doesn’t mean we have all got to suddenly stop breathing. Dealing with global warming means that we have to stop waste, and if you travel for no reason whatsoever, that is...

I’m against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.

I don’t approve of sunbathing, and it’s bad for you.

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.

Well, I’m having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English.

What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.

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...

I’m coming towards the end of the shelf.

Things change… I don’t think we should regard change as a disaster.

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a...

I’m not a propagandist, I’m not a polemicist; my primary interest is just looking at and trying to understand how animals work.

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.

There are perfectly good independent small nations.

I would be absolutely astounded if population growth and industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn’t changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for...

I’m swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.

I’m not in politics.

Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel.