Sir David Attenborough on life, death, climate change and the future of the planet — Triple J Hack

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Sir David, lovely to meet you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for making time for us. It's a real honour. Now, people of all ages and all generations love you and love your work, but young people seem to absolutely love you. Their eyes light up at the mention of your name. What's it like for you to connect so strongly with the younger generation? [00:00:22] Sir David Attenborough: Well, you know, in all honesty, it's not me. It's what I bring with me, that is to say, great shots of the natural world. I mean, that's what excite kids, in my experience, anyway. And if you see some of these fabulous sights, I mean, wonderful waterfalls or coral reefs or birds of paradise spraying or something, you know, that's something. That's real and that's our world, you know. And I've had the luck of introducing that sort of vision for 70 years. I mean, it's just unbelievable, really. [00:00:59] Speaker 1: OK, we'll speak more about young people in a moment. Particularly, I'd love to get your thoughts on the school climate strikes. But I'd love to go back into your decades in the field. I know from reading about you that your most feared animal is the intoxicated male homo sapien. But apart from that, what other animals have really put you on edge out in the field? [00:01:23] Sir David Attenborough: I don't think many things, but I do hate rats. I really do hate rats. I've had rats run over my face at night, you know, and that's not too good. [00:01:33] Speaker 1: Which Australian animals fascinate you? [00:01:35] Sir David Attenborough: All the corny ones, really. I mean, you'll laugh just because I'm a POM coming off here. But, I mean, there is nothing more extraordinary than the duckbill platypus. I mean, there really isn't. To my eyes. And sitting on a river back in New South Wales somewhere or down in Victoria and seeing one of these things quietly going about its business in a pool and then coming out, I mean, your eyes pop out. I mean, of course, the kangaroo, I mean, all those big macropods, all those big marsupials, they're amazing too. They are. I mean, they are mind-blowing. And the revelation, I mean, it's interesting, you know, I've been in this business long enough. When I first started, nobody had ever seen the vision of a little neonate, a tiny little creature like a worm, come out of a female and crawl up its fur and go into the pouch. I mean, these days we've all filmed it, we've all done it. And we've all seen it, I guess, if we wanted to. But it is, that is unbelievable. [00:02:45] Speaker 1: Absolutely. Let's go under the water, just off the coast of Australia. When did you first go diving at the Great Barrier Reef? What did it look like then? And how much has it changed? [00:02:56] Sir David Attenborough: I first went in the '50s, late '50s. And I'm a hopeless underwater swimmer. Mind you, most of us were. I mean, the kit you had in the 1950s was pretty primitive stuff. And I wasn't much good at it anyway. But that magical moment, which is the Australian's birthright. I mean, you do it more than anyone except people in Hawaii or somewhere. And when you do it in a place like a barrier reef, where you have this fantastic paradise of things, when you do it for the first time, here are 50 creatures that you've never seen before in your life. And all of them are fantastically beautiful. And you don't know the name of any of them. And they aren't afraid of you. I mean, what more do you want? And you can go up and go, I'm going to have another look. You can follow them around. I don't know. [00:03:45] Speaker 1: So that was your initial reaction to diving the Great Barrier Reef. I know that you went back just ten years ago. What did you see then? [00:03:51] Sir David Attenborough: I was looking for evidence of things going wrong. And we found plenty. I mean, a bleached reef is a tragic sight. I mean, a desperately tragic sight. Particularly if you've seen it before, you know. And you know what it could have been like. And you just see this acre after acre of white, pallid, deathly white coral. [00:04:18] Speaker 1: And for you, was that a real moment, I guess, in your journey of observing climate change? [00:04:25] Sir David Attenborough: Oh, certainly. Because it's one of the permanent things you can see. Particularly if you've dived there before. And suddenly you see that. I mean, that's serious. [00:04:39] Speaker 1: Yeah, what else have you seen that's really graphically illustrated the impact of climate change? [00:04:45] Sir David Attenborough: Well, that's one of the most graphic. Because it's one of the most extreme in the sense of full of life. I mean, there's nothing fuller of life than a coral reef. I've been to places in the Antarctic or in South Georgia. Where the first time I filmed there in, what, the 60s, 70s, I suppose. And I would see a glacier that was coming down within 100 yards of the sea. And then you'd go to the same place and it's way up in the valley. It's very difficult. It's dangerous to pick particular places. Because if someone is actually hell-bent on proving you wrong, they'll say, "Well, I can go to a place in the Antarctic where actually there's more ice." And that's quite right. I mean, you can. So you have to go on. I mean, that's what they call about being objective science, is where you have to go and get data from everywhere and see what the overall picture is. But whereas 10 years ago, 15 years ago, people would say, find it hard to believe, I mean, now I think hardly anybody can be in any doubt that the world is heating up. And what you've been going through in Australia, you've been having it, from all accounts, have a really bad time. We, in our own little way, we, in the last few weeks, had people going around saying, "Oh, it's intolerably hot." I mean, you would laugh at the temperatures that we were making us say that. But nonetheless, it was the case. [00:06:13] Speaker 1: I also found it very interesting that when you spoke to the UK Parliamentary Committee, you talked about a need to continually debate climate sceptics in public. Some people feel like it's too late for those people to have a voice in the public debate, that the science is settled and we should shut them out. What are your thoughts? [00:06:32] Sir David Attenborough: I think speech police are not things to be welcomed. Free speech is what you have to welcome. And as long as they represent a serious section of the community, they should be allowed to speak their piece. I mean, as a broadcaster, I mean, I was involved in the BBC for a long time, and you have a responsibility to see both sides of the debate. And I'm well aware that the moment comes when you can say, [00:06:58] Speaker 1: "Look, science is this." So you just did a documentary, "Climate Change: The Facts." You don't think that completely closes the door on the sceptics and it's time to move on from those debates? [00:07:08] Sir David Attenborough: No, no. I get, well, this morning I got a letter from Mum that said it isn't true. And then producing actually about a dozen pages of graphs and statistics and so on. And I have to say, when you get two or three of those a week, you say, "Look, I haven't got enough time. I am now personally convinced." The world is sick. We really have to do things about it. And there's enough time, no more time for argument. [00:07:40] Speaker 1: And you've been much more outspoken in recent times about the need to act on climate change. Was there a moment where you had a personal reflection and thought, "I need to have a stronger voice in this debate?" [00:07:51] Sir David Attenborough: No, not really, because in part of fact I've been saying it at the same sort of level as loudly as I can for a long time. I mean I made a program at the end of the last century, the year 2000, which said, "How many people on Earth can live on Earth?" You know, it's about population growth. Nobody took a blind bit of notice. I've been going on about global warming for at least 15 years. But there's something, as broadcasters we know, that you can't predict actually what is going to ring the bell, as you were. There's a moment when everything comes in the right sort of way together and suddenly you say something and bang, it makes an effect. And you can't predict what that's going to be and you probably don't understand why it's that way, but it is that way. And it has been that way, particularly over plastic. I did a program called Blue Planet 2, in which we showed plastic. Well, now I've been talking about plastic in the seas for certainly 20 years. But suddenly there was a shot of an albatross coughing up plastic. And everybody was motivated about plastic in the seas. Well, hooray! But I've been going on about it for a long time. [00:09:07] Speaker 1: And recently you singled out the Australian Government. And that was when you spoke to the UK Parliamentary Committee. You singled out our leaders for not doing enough on climate change, basically. Why did you feel Australia deserved a special mention there? [00:09:23] Sir David Attenborough: Because Australia, it seemed to me, was saying all the right things, previous governments were. And you are keepers of an extraordinary section of the Earth, of the surface of this planet, including the Barrier Reef. And what you say, what you do, really, really matters. And when you've been up and standing and talking what I see as the truth about what we're doing in the rest of the world. And then you suddenly say, no, no, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much coal we burn. Or indeed saying, well, this is the economic solution to some of our economic problems. But then go on to say, but we don't care. Damn what it does to the rest of the world. What do you say? [00:10:10] Speaker 1: Yeah, well, a lot of people drew attention to the fact that our Prime Minister in his former role as Treasurer brought a lump of coal into the Parliament. He said it was a joke, but a lot of people didn't see it as a very funny... [00:10:23] Sir David Attenborough: I didn't think it was a joke. And if you weren't opening a coal mine, okay, I would agree, that's a joke. But you are opening a coal mine. [00:10:32] Speaker 1: Well, that was a very big issue in our recent election, the Adani coal mine. Basically, you know, Labour and the Greens were offering stronger action on climate change than the coalition. And the voters in Queensland swung towards opening the coal mine rather than taking strong action on climate change. To me, that says the job of taking people with you on climate change is very hard as a politician. How do you think they can do that better? [00:11:01] Sir David Attenborough: I don't know. I mean, you just have to go on talking about it and so on. But fundamentally, in the end, you have to appeal to what people think are right. I mean, do you think it right that we go on destroying the natural world the way we are? [00:11:19] Speaker 1: How do we, you know, convince people who are worried about putting food on the table or getting a job that they should somehow make sacrifices for the long term and for the planet? [00:11:28] Sir David Attenborough: It's a problem, certainly. But the fact of the matter is that the world is going to be running short of food. Seriously short of food. And we are going to have to change our feeding habits, our eating habits. I mean, there's a real danger that there's going to be starvation and famine. I mean, it's happened before. It's not a kind of a new disaster. There have been famines in Africa before. But why? Because the land can't produce enough food to feed them. And that is now becoming a global problem. [00:12:04] Speaker 1: OK, let's talk about the younger generation. They're certainly a very loud voice now in the climate debate. We saw over a million school students strike for climate change action earlier this year. I'm sure those people walking out of their classrooms would love to know what you think of the stand they're taking. Do you have a message for them? [00:12:26] Sir David Attenborough: Yeah, I mean, young people see things very clearly. And they are speaking very clearly to the politicians. But if they actually do something in the way that they have been doing in this year, then politicians have to sit up and take notice. And you can say, well, it gets nowhere. Just stopping the traffic or disrupting the London life gets you nowhere. It gets you noticed. It gets people to listen to what you say and that you're important. And they are important. They're the people who are going to inherit the mess that we've made. [00:13:10] Speaker 1: So do you think they have made a difference already? [00:13:13] Sir David Attenborough: Yes. I think they are part of it. And precisely what has happened is actually rather strange. I occasionally say there was a time in the 19th century, the middle of the 19th century, when civilized human beings like you and me and all around the world thought it perfectly acceptable that you should own another human being as a slave. And in this period of about 15 years, not much more, suddenly it became intolerable. Suddenly no civilized human being could actually look you in the eye and say it's perfectly morally acceptable to accept a slave. Now, historians will produce various names, Wilberforce, this, that and the others, but somehow or other the whole world became absolutely clear to them that this was intolerable. And I think that's happening about reactions to the way we're dealing with the planet. I honestly think that people all around the world, rich and poor and from all continents, are all seeing the same thing. This is intolerable to go on treating the natural world that we've been doing so. [00:14:35] Speaker 1: OK, but America just voted for someone who promised to take them out of the Paris Agreement in Australia. They just voted for the coalition as we discussed earlier. Do you think the tide still has a way to turn? [00:14:46] Sir David Attenborough: Sure, sure, but I think it's turning. And I mean, I've been going on about Wales or whatever for a long time, and nobody took much of a notice, but they do now. And quite what that is. Why? I don't know. [00:15:02] Speaker 1: So we talked about the high school students and their activism. How radical do you think the climate change activism should be? We had the Extinction Rebellion in London this year, which shut down parts of the city for several days. Do you think that went too far? Or do you think we need that kind of radical action? I don't know. Oh, I don't know. [00:15:21] Sir David Attenborough: And the situation is changing all the time. The key, of course, is going to be when you actually demonstrate that the economic future lies in this pulling and touching in the belt. When in fact, we've got to convince every part of civilization, of our societies, that you have to go that way. And convince bankers and big business that actually, in the end, the long-term future lies in having a healthy planet. And that unless we do something about it, big business is going to suffer. You know, you're going to lose your money. [00:15:58] Speaker 1: What do you think the impact of Greta Thunberg has been the 16-year-old Swede? [00:16:03] Sir David Attenborough: Well, I think it's just that. I think the politicians have, I mean, let's not be too rude about politicians. There have been politicians, both in your country and my country, who have been going on about this for a long time. So it's not as though Greta Thunberg or me or anybody else has suddenly put it into existence. Maybe we've moved it up the headlines a bit, but that's about it. And so, yes, they had to make that statement, and I'm glad they did. But now it's up to the politicians. And young people will keep the pressure on, I'm sure. [00:16:39] Speaker 1: At the end of your documentary series, Blue Planet 2, there were some very strong words about needing to take personal responsibility for our everyday choices. And then those choices add up. So let's talk about those personal choices, starting with eating meat. What are your thoughts on meat eating? And has this reality affected your appetite for meat? [00:17:00] Sir David Attenborough: Well, yes, I mean, it's certainly affected my appetite. I've certainly changed my eating habits. How to disentangle that from my age, I don't know. Maybe everybody, when they get into their 70s, 80s or 90s, loses a taste for meat. But I've certainly lost mine. I mean, I haven't eaten a steak for, I can't remember. [00:17:22] Speaker 1: Okay, one of the other movements that seems to be starting is flight shaming, which is a translation from a Swedish word. And Greta Thunberg is travelling to the Americas for climate summits. And she's taking a sailing boat because she doesn't want to fly. Do you think we should stop flying? [00:17:40] Sir David Attenborough: I travel. I would hesitate to travel a long way for a purely trivial purpose. But if I'm travelling to do something, or to make a programme about climate change, I think that's justified. [00:17:57] Speaker 1: And you mentioned before you've done a programme on population growth. And you've spoken openly about the need to curb it. How do you suggest we do that? Is it feeding people to the lions or having less children? [00:18:09] Sir David Attenborough: Well, to start with, you have to be very, very careful about how you tell other people how they use the privileges that they have of being a human being. And having children is one of the great treasures and privileges and rewards of being alive. So you've got to be jolly careful when you say this. But all the evidence is that wherever women are educated and literate, and have the vote, and are able to determine what they do and when they have children, they have medical advice to help them, that the birth rate, which is not the same as population, the birth rate falls. One of the great boons that has come within medicine within the last, is the ability to be able to control the birth rate at which we breed. Well, just let us use it. [00:19:13] Speaker 1: Your programmes have helped draw attention to the plastic problem. How far do you think we have to go on plastics? [00:19:18] Sir David Attenborough: What we need to do is to find out a way in which we can use plastic and get rid of it in a way that is not harmful and preferably in a way that is actually useful. I can't help feeling we invented the stuff. Surely for heavens, we are clever enough to think of a way of disposing of it. [00:19:39] Speaker 1: Now, David, you've documented the life cycles of many species. What about your own? You're at a very interesting stage of your life and it doesn't seem like you're slowing down. You're still doing so much for someone in their 90s. How do you do it? [00:19:55] Sir David Attenborough: Luck is the answer. You've got to have luck. I mean, I'm unbelievably lucky. I've got dear friends who are my age or younger who can't walk about, you know. And it's not their fault. And they can't remember things. Well, I can't remember things, but seriously, you can't remember things. And why it happened to them, it happened to me, I don't know. And it's not because I eat anything peculiar or anything. I mean, I have just no idea. It's luck. [00:20:27] Speaker 1: Is it because you've had a really deep passion that's driven you through life? [00:20:30] Sir David Attenborough: Oh, lots of people have deep passions of driving them through life. Well, I think what would be a pity is that if you actually are able to walk around and put two words together, that you don't do it. I mean, and that society should condemn you to sitting in a chair knitting or something. I mean, you know, I'm just extremely lucky. [00:20:54] Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on what happens after this life? I know a lot of people have written to you in the past asking why you don't give God the credit for the natural wonders that you've seen. What do you believe in? I have no idea. [00:21:08] Sir David Attenborough: I'm what they call an agnostic. I don't know. I am quite sure that the mechanism by which this world has become populated with all these different species of animals and plants, we understand pretty well now. And Darwin and evolution and so on is long studied and there may be bits we don't know yet. I think that's almost certain. But by and large, you know how it works. Now, whether that says, whether you say that means God doesn't exist, is another question. I don't believe that the first man actually complained to God that he hadn't got a partner. And God said, all right, well, in that case, lie down and I'll take your rib and then I'll blow into it and you've got a partner. I don't believe that. I mean, it well may be that there is a creator, overall creator spirit that we don't know about. I have no idea. And whether it's a life after death, I've no idea. Are you scared of dying? No, I just hope it won't be painful. And I hope it won't be tiresome for others, you know. [00:22:24] Speaker 1: Have your views on how this world came to be and what happens to us after we pass away, have they changed much through the course of your life given what you've seen? [00:22:33] Sir David Attenborough: Not really. I never believed that Genesis was literally true. As a boy, I don't, I don't, come on. [00:22:44] Speaker 1: Sir David Attenborough, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. Thank you so much for your time. [00:22:50] Sir David Attenborough: Pleasure. [00:23:03] Speaker ?: Thank you.