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  • 7/6/2025

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00:00Transcribed by —
00:30Planet Earth, the most ambitious natural history series the BBC has ever made,
00:37was filmed in many parts of the world, seldom seen by people.
00:42These wilderness areas can be stunningly beautiful
00:46and are certainly vital sanctuaries for wildlife.
00:50But are they even more than that?
00:53This programme will explore the deeper importance of wilderness.
01:00It will ask how it serves us now
01:03and why it isn't just virgin territory waiting for an ever-expanding humanity to take it over.
01:21Planet Earth showed Africa's Okavango Delta as it's never been seen before.
01:30As the water sweeps into the Okavango, a vast area of the Kalahari is transformed into a fertile paradise.
01:49A lush water world.
01:52And no humans in sight.
01:57Is that what wilderness means?
01:59Well, wilderness is a concept that really has been developed a lot in Western society,
02:05recognising that there are certain places that have either very low human populations
02:10or are entirely devoid of people.
02:13It's not a concept that necessarily has spread worldwide,
02:16but yet it's something that I think is increasingly becoming important
02:19on an ever more overcrowded planet.
02:23Overcrowded?
02:24This programme will ask if population is the greatest threat to wilderness.
02:29It can't be coincidence that it shrinks as humanity grows.
02:33Ignoring population strikes me as the biggest own goal that the environment movement has ever scored.
02:40I would argue the bigger threat is effectively the growth in our economy
02:44and the way we use our wealth.
02:46And with growing economies, we ask if a wilderness will still be protected
02:54if it turns out to contain a valuable resource like oil.
02:59Oil and natural gas production in the north slope of Alaska under modern technology
03:03will have a tiny environmental footprint.
03:06We can do it in modern technology, we should do it.
03:09To open Anwar to exploration and drilling would not be criminal,
03:16but it's the closest thing I can imagine to being criminal.
03:22We'll discover that the environmental debate has never been more heated,
03:27and not just at the political level.
03:30Think about it this way, if you had to decide to keep a tree standing
03:36or feed one of your children, what would you do?
03:44Despite everything, there are still vast wildernesses.
03:48For instance, the boreal forest.
03:55This vast forest circling the globe contains a third of all the trees on earth
04:01and produces so much oxygen, it changes the composition of the atmosphere.
04:10So how much of our planet is still covered with wilderness?
04:14In fact, there is a figure.
04:17A couple of years ago, Russ Mittermeier conducted the study that produced it.
04:23We came up with 39% of Earth's land surface with one person or less per square kilometer.
04:29That's only about 43 million people.
04:32It's about 0.7% of the world's human population in an area of just about 40% of the land surface of the planet.
04:41So there's a lot of places out there that have very few people.
04:45You have to recognize that about a third of that is ice.
04:48I mean, Antarctica is huge.
04:49Antarctica is about 14 million square kilometers,
04:52which is about one and a half times, again, the size of the United States.
04:57But the other two-thirds, places like Amazonia and a number of other wilderness areas,
05:02also have very low human populations.
05:05And they're rich in biodiversity, they're rich in life forms.
05:09That means that Antarctica aside,
05:12only a quarter of the Earth's land surface is still wilderness.
05:14We've changed most of the planet, and certain types of forest have been the most damaged.
05:21This is the kind of forest that used to characterize Europe.
05:25Now there's just one tiny fragment left on the border of Poland and Belarus.
05:30We went to Bieluasia on planet Earth because it's the original primeval forest in Europe.
05:37And perhaps 6,000, 7,000 years ago,
05:41almost all of Europe would have looked like Bieluasia looks now.
05:45Of course, today, Bieluasia is a tiny little forest,
05:49but it gives us an idea of what most of Europe once looked like.
05:53And despite its obvious importance,
05:56even this final fragment of forest is under threat.
05:58There's still activity which is destroying the forest.
06:02This kind of activity is logging, for example.
06:05If you check satellite pictures on the Polish side of the border,
06:10you'll see big damage caused by logging in the forest.
06:14To stop it, we need some action,
06:17like creating big national park on both sides of the border.
06:21Bieluasia forest doesn't belong just to Poland, just the Polish nation.
06:28It's worth treasure with many rare species.
06:32Wolf, European bison, rare species of birds.
06:36And there should be international effort to protect Bieluasia forests
06:41because some wrong decisions can really destroy this treasure.
06:45It's not just Europe that's losing what's left of its forest.
06:51The demand for timber and pasture has an impact everywhere.
06:55Over the last 300 years, we've lost about half of the world's forest.
06:59But the pattern of loss has been very different.
07:00So much of the earlier period of loss covered the temperate forests in both the north and the south,
07:07especially in Europe and North America.
07:10More recently, we're finding we're losing tropical forests at a much quicker rate than previously.
07:14The Amazon forest, for instance, is still coming down.
07:25It's losing an area the size of Switzerland every year.
07:28The disappearance of wilderness varies tremendously from place to place, even within the Amazon region.
07:37Certain portions are still in very good condition and are likely to be maintained over at least the next few decades,
07:45whereas other portions are really under the gun and are rapidly, as we speak, being converted for other uses like cattle pasture.
07:52And they've now come up with varieties of soy that can be grown in the Amazon.
07:57So you're seeing in certain places, in the southern and southeastern Amazon, parts of the central Amazon,
08:02you're seeing very rapid conversion.
08:04On the other hand, in the northern extreme, magnificent wilderness areas with very, very few people living in them.
08:12I believe that if any tropical rainforest areas remain intact 100 years from now,
08:17it's going to be in that very northern portion of Amazonia.
08:20So even within one wilderness area, there's a great deal of variability in terms of the degree of loss.
08:31So how much wilderness right now is actually legally protected?
08:36Well, right now we have about 12% of the land cover as protected areas.
08:42And you might say, well, okay, is 12% enough?
08:45And the answer to that is, it all depends.
08:48It depends on how the areas around that 12% are going to be managed.
08:54If we manage the rest of the landscape in a thoughtful way, then 12% may well be enough.
09:01If we overuse and if we abuse the rest of the landscape, then 12% is nowhere near enough.
09:06Protected areas can't just be enclosures.
09:13Often the same big, charismatic animals that inspired the creation of the areas need to venture outside them to find food and water.
09:23Driven on by thirst, they march hundreds of miles across the parched plains.
09:32Relying on memory, the matriarchs lead their families to those special water holes that saved them in previous years.
09:50You know, one of the great challenges of conservation in Africa, we're all attracted to these really huge species, elephants, lions, giraffe.
10:07And the problem with conservation for such very large animals is they need enormous amounts of space.
10:15And at the best, where the animals can concentrate in the highest densities, you still need on the order of, oh, 15,000 square kilometers of habitat to be able to sustain one of those truly viable populations of lions.
10:28If you have your elephants in areas that are even bigger than that, they still tend to wander way outside of those.
10:36So you need enormous areas.
10:49But the larger the area set aside for wide-ranging animals, the harder the area is to patrol.
10:54Less than a thousand Bactrian camels remain in the vast expanse of the Gobi Desert.
11:01In such a wilderness, why so few?
11:05The Planet Earth team found them suspiciously elusive.
11:09They're about three or four kilometers away.
11:11They spotted us from that distance.
11:13And that's going to be our real problem, getting close to these animals.
11:16They're capable of spotting us from about five kilometers.
11:19I'm running for 70 k's in the opposite direction.
11:22So this is what's going to make this filming incredibly difficult.
11:27When you work in wildlife, you know that when an animal runs from a human, you know there's a reason why.
11:34And it's because it's being threatened by humans.
11:36Now, what's strange about the Gobi in Mongolia is that it's vast and nobody lives there.
11:41But animals don't run from humans without a good cause.
11:46And I found out, just talking to people when we're out there, that humans do go in there.
11:51They go in there in four-wheel drives with guns and they try to chase down the camels.
11:56Even in a huge wilderness, a small number of people can cause big problems.
12:14Wild dogs are in trouble, even though they have enough space and they're not hunted by humans.
12:20Wild dogs are one of the most endangered mammals in Africa.
12:24And actually for a surprising reason, they aren't directly hunted and they still have enough habitat, just about.
12:33But they have been in contact with humans and their pets.
12:38And the main reason for their decline is that they've caught diseases from domestic dogs, things like canine distemper.
12:46And this has caused a massive population collapse.
12:50Out here, there's almost no veterinary services whatsoever.
12:55Dogs are companion animals and they have names, people look after them.
12:59But there's really not a family budget for vaccinating dogs against basic diseases like rabies, distemper.
13:07And so the wild dogs, if one animal in the pack gets distemper, everybody else comes and sniffs and gets sneezed on and, you know, gets the disease.
13:17They all drop dead.
13:20Craig Packer and his colleagues came up with a solution.
13:24Vaccinate domestic dogs to protect the wild ones.
13:28We were able to design a vaccination program that effectively created a cordon sanitaire around the Serengeti, a vaccination zone that separated the disease from the wildlife.
13:41And it turned out to be a rare example of a win-win situation in conservation.
13:46Because the local people were very pleased to have their dogs vaccinated.
13:50Rabies is a serious threat to human life out here.
13:54And when we told them that it was good for the wildlife, they thought that was great too, because they knew that tourists came out here to see the animals of the Serengeti.
14:01So it wasn't like you're telling somebody you're doing something wrong.
14:04It's like, well, if this helps you, it helps the wildlife as well.
14:11Where there is plenty of space, animals and people often can live together.
14:20But more and more people are moving into wilderness areas, pushing wildlife out of the way.
14:27In Ethiopia, people and their farms are moving relentlessly up the Simian Mountains.
14:34So in the Simian Highlands in particular, we're finding that agriculture is encroaching higher and higher up the mountains,
14:40and barley has now been grown at about three and a half thousand metres.
14:44That doesn't leave much space for the remaining habitat there and the remaining wildlife,
14:47much of which is very endemic in that part of the world.
14:55These summits, nearly three miles up, are home to some very remarkable mountaineers.
15:02Gelada baboons. They are unique to the highlands of Ethiopia.
15:09But gelada baboons are running out of space.
15:26As farms encroach into the Ethiopian highlands, the areas of alpine grass are shrinking.
15:32And the gelada numbers are still okay at the moment, but you will get a situation where gelada are getting squeezed
15:39because their natural grasslands are shrinking, and the only thing left is barley crops.
15:44And we're starting to see this now, a much greater increase in human gelada conflict,
15:49where the baboons are going into barley fields raiding barley because they've run out of their preferred alpine grasses.
15:56The simian problem exists because Ethiopia's human population is expanding.
16:03So is the ultimate problem for wilderness worldwide that there are simply too many people?
16:10One thing that's always worried me about the environment movement for the last 30 years is their inability to get their heads around the importance of population.
16:21I find it staggering that that is still downgraded as an issue.
16:25There's a sense it's somehow politically incorrect to talk about population.
16:30But the issue of population lies absolutely at the heart of the destruction of the natural world today.
16:35If we had to find a way of creating a sustainable future for a billion people, I can assure you it would be a great deal simpler
16:42and a lot better for the natural world than trying to find a solution for 6 billion people, let alone 9 billion people,
16:49which will be the population of this planet by the middle of this century, by 2050.
16:54So ignoring population strikes me as the biggest own goal that the environment movement has ever scored.
17:02I wouldn't like to, so to speak, to push the problem off onto overpopulation in the way that has sometimes been fashionable.
17:11You know, people saying, well, the real problem about the environment is that there are too many people in Africa and India usually.
17:16In other words, it's not about us.
17:19So overpopulation has to be seen as a global issue, not just something that we can tell other people to do something about.
17:26Many people try to blame population as a major threat to our ecosystems.
17:31I personally don't agree with that.
17:34The population today is 6 billion people, roughly.
17:37It's likely to go up to between 8 and 10 billion people by 2050, so about a 50% increase in the numbers of people.
17:44Over that same timeframe, the economic growth in the world is likely to be a factor of 4.
17:50So the threat to the environment is a combination of the number of people and their consumer patterns.
17:57And their consumer patterns are driven very largely by their economic wealth.
18:01And so it's not simply an issue of numbers of people.
18:04It's the numbers of people and to what degree can they buy biological resources, energy resources, use water, etc.
18:12So I would argue the bigger threat is effectively the growth in our economy and the way we use our wealth.
18:18It is how we live on the planet, not just our total numbers, that really makes the essential difference.
18:24If we all live on this planet the way Americans currently live, we would need three planets to support the Earth's current population.
18:33The trouble is that much of the rest of the world wants to live and spend like Americans.
18:40The conventional view is that the economy is there to produce goods and services, and the more we produce and consume, the better off we'll be.
18:51But there's a lot of evidence to show that that's not really the case.
18:56Consumption of goods and services only improves people's sense of satisfaction up to a fairly low threshold,
19:02beyond which it becomes counterproductive in terms of their long-term well-being.
19:07Our focus on consumption is a form of psychological junk food.
19:12It's something that makes us feel good temporarily, but in the end it makes us unhealthy.
19:18Still, consumerism would have less impact on the planet if there weren't so many people.
19:25There are six billion of us now. How many should there be?
19:30When one tries to get at a number, my guess is somewhere between 500 million people and one billion, no more than that.
19:41I think that the Earth can safely support in a sustainable way, at a reasonable standard of living, about half of what it has today.
19:49And I think that that would make the people happier, and it would certainly make the planet happier.
19:56We'd have more diversity, we'd have plenty of productivity, we'd be able to maintain our cultural diversity,
20:02and the world would be a much more sustainable place.
20:06Now, choosing how to get from where we are to where we need to be is the crunch.
20:12So we just halve the world's population. Realistically, ethically, how?
20:20Actually, if you look at the world today, there is a fantastically good story to be told about population,
20:25which is when countries get on top of family planning, learn how to provide that magic combination of literacy and better healthcare for women and for girls,
20:36and to provide access to a range of contraceptives. That's what it comes down to.
20:42That's what good family planning is all about. There need be no coercion involved. There need be no intrusions onto human rights.
20:49There need be none of the cruelty that has happened in some countries. This can be done.
20:54That may seem simple, but can birth rates come down evenly everywhere? What about Africa?
21:01Asia, Latin America, their population rates have slowed down to the point that's getting closer to what we're used to in Europe and North America.
21:09But Africa, family size is still very large. Economic security is still very low.
21:15So there's an incentive for people to have very large families. And these are families that require basic natural resources for their subsistence.
21:24So the impact of people on the natural world is still growing quite strikingly here.
21:30If Africans were better off, they might have fewer children, but those children would be able to consume more. So where's the environmental gain?
21:43Africans have thrived on this continent for very many years without airplanes, without trains, without sky creepers, without all the modern development that we think when we look at the West,
21:59that that's what development means. To me, development means staying alive, having a quality of life. Not so much alive that is surrounded by goods, things, but alive where you can live in a clean and healthy environment, where you can drink clean water.
22:26Half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. This is totally and utterly unacceptable. So we need economic growth. We need pro-poor economic growth.
22:38But then what we need to couple with that is to make sure that as the demand for energy increases, that it's climate friendly. It's friendly to the local environment. It's friendly to water.
22:49So the challenge for us then is how do we use our resources when they're used in the most sustainable manner possible.
22:56This river has cut the world's longest canyon system, a 1,000 miles car clearly visible from space.
23:14As population grows, one of the first resources to come under pressure is fresh water. For example, the mighty Colorado River that carved out the Grand Canyon isn't very mighty anymore.
23:30Well, the Colorado actually is no longer reaching the sea in most years. And this is a very clear sign that the health of the river is in pretty bad shape.
23:43And so there's a disconnection of ecological service here. That river's job is to deliver fresh water and nutrients and sediment to deltas.
23:50And they're no longer doing that work. And that has an implication for the species that live there.
23:56And so in the case of the Colorado, we see signs of diminishing productivity in the fisheries in the upper Gulf of California.
24:05We've gone about meeting these human needs in a very simple way, which is every time we need more water, we go out and find it.
24:11We tap another river, we build another dam, we tap more groundwater, and take more out of the natural world.
24:19Like almost every other big river in the world, the Colorado has been dammed.
24:26You know, just 50 years ago, around 1950, we had 5,000 large dams around the world.
24:34Today we have 45,000 large dams around the world, which means we've been building two large dams every day for half a century.
24:44So this is a very, very large change in the hydrologic environment.
24:51And dams don't always stop at generating electricity. They also extract water for irrigation.
25:00We have to take a lot of water out of the natural world in order to put it on cropland.
25:05And this land is really important to us. We do get 40% of our food from irrigated land, even though that land makes up less than 20% of the whole cropland base.
25:17So it's really important land. But it requires that we intervene in a major way into the hydrologic cycle.
25:2470% of all the water we take out of rivers, lakes, aquifers, goes to irrigation.
25:32So it consumes the lion's share of the water that we're taking out of the natural world.
25:37So is there really enough fresh water for 6 billion people and their crops?
25:44I think the good news on some of the water scarcity problems that we have, the shortages of water that we talk about,
25:54is that a lot of the shortage, a lot of the scarcity is really all about waste and mismanagement.
26:01And so it's not necessarily that there's not enough water, it's that we're not using it wisely enough.
26:16And water's not the only resource that people would like to raid the wilderness for.
26:21Every year, 3 million caribou migrate across the Arctic tundra.
26:28Some herds travel over 2,000 miles a year in search of fresh pastures.
26:35This is the longest overland migration made by any animal.
26:43It's not the caribou people want to exploit.
26:46In fact, caribou and their conservation rather get in the way.
26:49No, it's what's under the animal's hooves, oil and gas.
26:53The US Congress is under pressure to allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR.
27:02Oil and natural gas production in the north slope of Alaska under modern technology will have a tiny environmental footprint,
27:09especially in comparison to the oil and gas development we see elsewhere in the world, sponsored by many countries hostile to the interest of democratic states.
27:19In the US, we have the most stringent safety laws, we have the most stringent environmental protection requirements,
27:25and once oil and gas production is done, the most stringent reclamation requirements,
27:29so we basically, like hikers and campers, leave no trace when we're done.
27:34We can do it in modern technology. We should do it.
27:37My personal opinion is that it's not going to resolve our oil issues.
27:45We would be much better off just engaging in more serious conservation, better energy use,
27:52looking at a whole range of alternatives, simply drilling for oil in one of the last wilderness blocks in our country is,
28:00I think it's foolish, given the range of other options that are out there,
28:05and I would be very sad and actually embarrassed is an American word to take place.
28:12We should absolutely be drilling for oil in ANWR.
28:15It's the most promising reserve in the United States that we have right now.
28:19You're talking about an area that's 2,000 acres out of 19 million acres, over 19 million acres.
28:29Potentially 10.4 billion barrels of oil there.
28:35It's not going to have any detrimental impact on the caribou.
28:40Again, it's all so much environmental scaremongering.
28:45In reality, we can drill for oil in ANWR and not harm the environment.
28:52To open ANWR to exploration and drilling would not be criminal, but it's the closest thing I can imagine to being criminal.
29:09In a way, it's encouraging that there's even a debate about drilling on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
29:18Very few people would see the operation or have their lives disturbed by it.
29:23Which means there's an objection to the idea of violating such a pristine place.
29:28It's obviously important to many people to know that there are still unspoiled wilderness areas like the Arctic and Antarctic as shown in planet Earth.
29:43One of the wonderful things about Antarctica is the silence, actually.
29:48It's often very, very, very quiet.
29:50You never hear a combustion engine, which is a hard thing to do on most of our planet.
29:56You also feel terribly small, the scale of everything, the scale of the ice.
30:02And the ability for the weather to change so dramatically from one day.
30:06It can be a beautiful sunlit day one day.
30:08And then suddenly, often within a matter of hours, you're actually in real danger from the weather.
30:15In a sense, it makes man very much back in their place.
30:19Their role in nature is put right by being in Antarctica.
30:26All of nature puts humans in their place because their place is in nature.
30:50I think for many people, maybe all people at some level, there is something about the wonder of nature.
30:55Nature in its infinite variety and its infinite mystery.
31:01And I think that's important.
31:02It touches people in their souls.
31:04I think that one of the things wilderness says to us is that nature is not just there for us to be comfortable in.
31:15There's an element of the world around us, a profound element, and an extensive element that is just there.
31:24It's there for its own sake.
31:25It is what it is.
31:26And in that sense, I think wilderness always speaks to human beings of transcendence in the widest possible sense.
31:32It says, you as a human being are part of a system which is not just about your needs and your concerns.
31:39Like it or not, you're part of something immense and very mysterious.
31:44There is a very interesting relationship between wilderness and sacredness.
32:00All the great monastic traditions, whether that's Christian, Buddhist or Taoist, all find their roots in an experience of their founders going into the desert, into the wilderness, onto the mountains and finding there something that civilization cannot give them.
32:18A realization about themselves, about nature, about the divine.
32:23In Taoism, for example, the symbol of someone who has achieved enlightenment is that of a human being alone on a mountain.
32:31It's that sense that you are in front of something greater than yourself.
32:39Professor Wilson has coined a term for the innate human love of nature.
32:44He calls it biophilia.
32:47There's a lot of evidence that human beings need life.
32:52They are attracted to life forms, to diversity.
32:55That a lot of their culture is drawn from the emotional response they have to living forms in nature.
33:07I think if you look at children, you will see, right from the very, very early stage, an interest and an excitement about the natural world.
33:16And their surroundings.
33:17It's in our nature to be concerned about the nature of life around us and to be fascinated by it.
33:25And sadly, I think, some people lose touch with that initial love of the natural world around them altogether.
33:35But if they do, it's a major loss.
33:47We may love the natural world through our innate biophilia, but why should we really care if it disappears?
33:53What do wildernesses actually do for us in practical terms?
33:58Well, really, in many ways, one of the biggest values of wilderness is the fact that they provide enormous ecosystem services for the planet.
34:07And just simple watershed protection, the hydrological cycles.
34:11You look at the Amazon region, about 20% of the world's water runs through Amazonia.
34:16You cut down the forest and the impacts. We're not exactly sure what the impacts are going to be, but you can be sure that it's going to be huge.
34:28Often, with people and forests, it's a case of, you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
34:35When their environment degrades, they are unable to meet some of their most basic needs, such as the need for firewood, the need for clean drinking water, the need for food, nutritious food.
34:52And when people are able to understand that these basic needs can easily be met by the resources in the environment, then they are more willing to work with you.
35:13And once people realize what wilderness provides for them, they may be willing to pay for its services.
35:19The country of Costa Rica in Central America has come up with this concept of forests as water factories.
35:25And they're actually paying farmers who are letting their pasture land go back into forest for the water services that are being provided by these forests.
35:35So is this scheme in Costa Rica effective? Is farmland really returning to forest?
35:42Yes.
35:45Yes.
35:46Hace 15 Años
35:47Se dejaron unos portrelos a que se hiciera bosque, y ahora son bosques secundarios ya con diámetros hasta de 20 centímetros.
35:54Ulysses says that he once had pasture lands
35:58that were being used to raise cattle, obviously,
36:02and he now has had the land under forestry recovery for 20 years.
36:09The trees that he has now on this land that used to be pasture land
36:13are 20 centimeters in girth.
36:16So he has seen his forest grow.
36:22It's a win-win situation.
36:25The forest is growing back and the farmers make money.
36:34We earn our living, we make, we survive through the forest
36:39by way of the payments that we're getting to protect it.
36:43So we know that it's a source of life for us,
36:47but it is also a source of life, he says,
36:50for many other organisms that live in this world.
36:56But if the payment scheme didn't exist,
36:58would Ulysses be tempted to cut down the forest?
37:02It would be a very sad decision, says Ulysses, if I had to cut down the forest.
37:12It would be a very sentimental decision for me.
37:16But think about it this way, if you had to decide to keep a tree standing
37:23or feed one of your children, what would you do?
37:29So while the scheme continues, the payments are ensuring that forests survive outside national parks.
37:36The amount of national parks as such are around 800,000 hectares.
37:44And we have 500,000 hectares in forest for environmental services.
37:51That means that about 60% of additional forest beyond the national parks are being kept under this scheme.
38:02That's all very well. But who pays for all this?
38:06Well, right now there are some companies that are charging an extra fee for the water bill you pay
38:20in order to compensate for the people that decide to maintain the forest.
38:28If you depend on having clean water every day in your household,
38:34for all the many uses we have, any small increase in the fare that you pay for water,
38:42to make sure that the watersheds are kept in good shape is like paying insurance.
38:51So people in Costa Rica recognize the service that forests provide
38:57and are willing to pay for it.
39:00And you could try to speculate on how much money all nature's goods and services are worth.
39:06Things like fresh water, clean air, food.
39:10One estimate made in 1997 was, by economists and biologists,
39:16was that the services provided humanity, scot-free incidentally,
39:21by all those bugs and weeds and possibly seemingly disposable birds and the like,
39:29was about, at that time, about 30 trillion dollars.
39:34I've been hugely impressed by some of those economists who do these incredible calculations
39:39about how much it would cost us to do something if nature didn't do it for us for free.
39:44So you get these sort of multi-billion or multi-trillion dollar assessments
39:50of what would happen if bees and other insects stopped pollinating for us, for instance,
39:55which is the one I really like because nobody actually thinks very much about pollination as a gift from nature.
40:01But if they all stopped doing it, okay, they just went on strike,
40:04and we had to do it by human intervention, by man-made means,
40:09well, you look at the price tag for that and it's $100 billion or whatever it might be,
40:13and you think, whoa, well, that's nice.
40:15So our entire productive food enterprise is being subsidized by nature.
40:19And it's only when you shove that price sign under some people's eyes they think,
40:24whoa, maybe this natural world is a bit more useful to us than we thought it was.
40:28People want to know what's in it for me. How much is it worth?
40:33And so the conservation movement, which has tended to be an ethical movement,
40:38has also started to look much more at the economic values of conservation and of biodiversity.
40:45And we're finding surprising things about how valuable the ecosystems of the world are
40:51for the services they deliver to people.
40:58Most tropical shallows are barren, but these coral havens contain one quarter of all the marine life on our planet.
41:23Calculating the value of a place may help conserve it.
41:27So if one takes reefs, for instance, the money value in terms of the productivity of that area,
41:35the biological diversity, the value to local communities of that place as a breeding centre for fish,
41:41whatever it might be, for tourism's on, stick a money value on it and then say to people,
41:45how smart do you think you're going to be if you destroy that for a fraction of the ongoing economic value of that asset,
41:54that resource, over years and years, that may make a difference in the minds of some decision makers
41:59who think that short-term liquidation of natural assets is the answer when really long-term management of those assets gives a much better economic return.
42:13A price tag may help conserve a place, but can it really reflect the true value of a wilderness?
42:21I think to the extent that we begin to give it a monetary value, we at least provide the signal that it is worth something,
42:30and we should be careful about whether we decide to put it into another use.
42:35The danger I see in putting a monetary value on particular ecosystems or pieces of ecosystems is that then you can compare that number to another one,
42:47when it's almost impossible to come up with a number that really fully takes into account the total value.
42:54One trouble with putting a price tag on wildernesses is that people aren't always as practical as they think they are.
43:01They can appreciate something's value and destroy it anyway.
43:09Krill, shrimp-like creatures. By weight, they're the most abundant animals on the planet.
43:15A single swarm can contain two million tons of them.
43:21And that is a lot of fish food.
43:24The shallow, temperate seas support the greatest concentrations of fish on our planet.
43:35Huge shoals migrate from their overwintering grounds in the depths to feed in these rich waters.
43:42All those fish, all that food.
44:07The seas shown in planet Earth are obviously valuable beyond comprehension.
44:14They may seem infinite, but these vast oceans can be damaged by just a small amount of pollution.
44:21And that may harm us.
44:24Everybody's always said the solution to pollution is dilution.
44:27So if these things, any of these bad substances get into the ocean, they're hugely diluted down and therefore are harmless.
44:34And that's quite right, they are.
44:36But then a totally insidious thing happens.
44:40They get picked up in the oils of plankton, particularly of diatoms, these little single-celled plants of which the ocean is composed.
44:48If you are eating an animal like a swordfish, for example, and that animal is at about the sixth level of the food pyramid, that means there is ten to the sixth, a million times concentration of what was in the water around it.
45:03So that means that when you take, if you ate a pound of swordfish, for example, you would be eating all of the pollutants which had been collected in a million pounds, 500 tons of diatoms.
45:18That's a real problem.
45:20And in certain parts of the world, that's a particular problem.
45:28So for example, any woman of childbearing age, if she is nursing her infant in that tenderest of all mammalian acts, what she is actually doing is dumping her lifetime's accumulation of pollutants into that infant.
45:43And if her milk was in containers other than her breasts, she would not be allowed to take it across a state line.
45:49It's too polluted.
45:50Now that exists.
45:52That's something people have to concern themselves with.
45:59We can dodge that bullet as a species by simply feeding formula to our children.
46:05Not an option for a whale.
46:07So the only conclusion you can draw is that these pollutants, as they build higher, are going to bring species to extinction.
46:14That's a problem.
46:19Another type of pollution is affecting the natural world too.
46:47Greenhouse gases are changing the climate, and that transforms wildernesses.
46:54I'd originally been to Antarctica to make life in the freezer about 12 years ago.
46:59And there's absolutely no doubt that you can really see a number of changes.
47:04Undoubtedly, Antarctica looks warmer.
47:07It's greener than it was 10 years ago.
47:17Wildernesses are also moving as the climate changes.
47:22Over the last, say, 10, 20 years, it's been very easy to see climate change in Ethiopia, in that as the country's been drying out, we've seen vegetation levels rising up the mountains.
47:37In about the last 30 years, we've seen the vegetation levels of the Simeon Mountains climb about 50 meters.
47:46So in 30 years, you can look at photographs and see different tree lines moving up.
47:51It also means that the animals that survive on the alpine grasses at the very top have nowhere else to go.
47:58I mean, they've reached the top of the plateau.
48:00This is the jumping off point for these vegetation levels.
48:05That's too bad, some might say.
48:08But why is humanity always to blame?
48:11Throughout Earth's history, animals and ecosystems have adapted as the climate has changed.
48:17What's so different now?
48:19We're looking at climate change that's happening much more quickly than ever before, which will make it much harder for ecological systems and for humans to adapt.
48:29Over the four billion sweep of the planet's history, climate has been wildly variable.
48:36There have been times when maybe the whole planet's been a ball of snow and ice, and times when exotic tropical animals have roamed the poles.
48:44But during all our recorded history, the last six to eight thousand years, the climate has been unusually steady.
48:54With the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, say around 1780, when we first started burning fossil fuels,
49:01and at an accelerating rate, carbon dioxide levels have risen.
49:07280 parts per million of carbon dioxide for thousands of years.
49:12up to 330 by 1960, 360 by the 90s, 380 today.
49:22The last time the planet came to equilibrium with greenhouse gas concentrations of the kind that we're looking toward,
49:31500 parts per million by the middle of the century, was 20 to 40 million years ago.
49:37And the oceans at that equilibrium point were about 300 feet higher.
49:42What is still uncertain is what impact, if any, man is having on this warming.
49:49There are so many variables that go into climate science that to make a blanket statement or try to just pinpoint one variable as being the be-all end-all is really short-sighted.
50:03I mean, it was perfectly responsible for people 20 years ago to say, look, we don't have the evidence.
50:12We don't have the continuity.
50:13We don't have the backward look and statistics and evidence which can tell us enough about the rate at which we are changing to predict whether or not human beings are responsible.
50:28Now, over that 20 years, the evidence has accumulated until now, it seems to me, absolutely incontrovertible.
50:35It's time to ignore the skeptics.
50:38And I think the only explanation for the skeptics is that there will always be doubters of anything, any phenomenon like this, number one.
50:46And number two, there are powerful economic forces at work, industries that are concerned that action on climate change may be to their disadvantage.
50:55And so, in the end, not that surprising that some voice doubts.
50:58Well, the president's made clear that the surface of the earth is warming and there's great consensus on that and that humans are contributing to the problem.
51:05And so, the issue that we face is what's the extent of potential change, what are the real downsides of that, what are the potential upsides of that, and how do we reduce our emissions.
51:15But people still want to get to their jobs, they still want to take their kids to school, and we have to find the transitional strategies that gets us out of a petroleum-based economy, ultimately.
51:24It is getting harder to be a skeptic, not only because the science is more convincing, but because people everywhere are watching their own landscapes change with the climate.
51:43The Mara River, snaking across the plains of East Africa.
51:50As the land flattens out, rivers slow down and lose their destructive power.
51:55Now, they are carrying heavy loads of sediment that stains their waters brown.
52:06But East Africans have noticed something about the Mara.
52:10Nowadays, it's often the only river for miles around that flows in the dry season.
52:17Most of the others are empty.
52:20I'm not sure that the majority of people in this country understand the global concept of climate change, but they do understand what they are observing locally.
52:33The Greenbelt Movement holds seminars, and in every class of about 100 people, if I ask how many of you know of a river that was flowing when you were a young child, but it's no longer flowing, more than 60% of the people will raise their hands up.
52:54So people understand what's happening at the very local level.
53:04People in Arizona have noticed changes too.
53:08I went to southern Arizona some months ago, and I was in a room full of ranchers.
53:14I mean, these are guys wearing cowboy hats, and they've got their cattle dog, and they've got their car hot jackets, right?
53:20I watched them listen to a talk on climate change.
53:23And the guy up there was saying to them, hey, do you know last year was the first year in southern Arizona that there was no frost on the ground?
53:31And every cattleman in that room nodded his head.
53:34And I thought to myself, you know what, these guys get climate change.
53:38They get climate change better than any politician out here.
53:41Because if there's no frost on the ground, it means they're going to have a hell of a fire season.
53:47And it's going to have a major impact on how they're going to be able to graze their cattle that year.
53:54So how will wildernesses around the world change with global warming?
53:59And how will that affect people?
54:03One of the things that is most likely to happen is changes in the distribution of rainfall.
54:09Why that's important is that rainfall drives the productivity of ecosystems.
54:14And so if you have greater rainfall, you're going to be able to expand agricultural land, for example.
54:21In areas where you have less rainfall, agriculture land is going to be less productive and may in fact be used only for pastoralism, for grazing.
54:31Where you see the change in land use is where you see conflict.
54:36And if we look historically at times of rapid climate change, these are times of conflict between human cultures.
54:45If climate change does alter the places that people rely on for food and water, there could be more conflict in the future.
54:54Recent studies by military entities like the Pentagon, for example, which is, you know, well-known studies, you know, have demonstrated that tomorrow wars, the wars of tomorrow, will be triggered by environment.
55:09They have referred to climate change, for example, as being one of the most important threats to the U.S. security.
55:16And the scarcity of water in the future will be one of the main reasons to trigger war and international conflict.
55:24Is the beautiful planet Earth we were shown in the series doomed by its dominant animal species?
55:39Or will that species start to make better use of its collective big brain?
55:44We are now the most powerful species the world has ever seen.
55:50And we now have it in our hands to destroy pretty well anything.
55:55And we should therefore take on the moral responsibility of being a steward of the planet on which we happen to have developed.
56:06We can forecast population growth.
56:08We can forecast climate change.
56:10We can forecast extinction, immigration of species, all kinds of things like that.
56:15That really does give us a unique ability today to take a problem that has a 100-year, 500-year problem and break it into manageable bite-sized chunks.
56:28Now, if that's not like a paradox, you know, it can't be done.
56:31Well, of course it can be done.
56:32We've been talking about it everywhere and intensively now for many years on how to reduce energy consumption with alternative sources,
56:42how to grow more food better in the areas that are already under cultivation.
56:49We can handle this and end up with a better quality of life and carrying through as much of the natural world that we inherited as we can.
56:59There are other countries who are beginning to take on board more of these ideas of balancing the natural and the social,
57:12including the country of Bhutan has recently declared that their national policy goal is gross national happiness rather than gross national product.
57:23I think that's the bottom line.
57:26We can consume less and be better off than we are.
57:29We live with a terrible paradox.
57:32We love nature.
57:33We are totally dependent on nature.
57:35And we destroy nature.
57:37I think what we need now to realize is that we can, in fact, undo a lot of what we're doing.
57:45It turns out that most of the major problems that we face are actually solvable, that the solutions are simple,
57:53and that these solutions can take place using basic scientific information that we already have.
57:59We can start the process.
58:01We need to do that.
58:02It's really important.
58:04We need to do that.
58:05You can still trust physicians and demonstrate agency to us in order to the freedom of faith.
58:18We have found great things in which we need to make a difference between the body of faith and supporting faith and the glory of faith in our heart.