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This city in Ukraine was once home to almost 50,000 people.

It had everything a community would need

for a comfortable life.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

But On the 26th of April, 1986

it suddenly became uninhabitable.

The nearby nuclear power station of Chernobyl exploded...

and in less than 48 hours, the city was evacuated.

No one has lived here since.

The explosion was the result of bad planning and human error...

mistakes.

It triggered an environmental catastrophe

that had an impact across Europe.

Many people regarded it as the most costly

in the history of mankind.

But Chernobyl was a single event.

The true tragedy of our time

is still unfolding across the globe

barely noticeable from day to day.

I'm talking about the loss of our planet's wild places.

Its biodiversity.

The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel.

Billions of individuals

of millions of kinds of plants and animals...

dazzling in their variety and richness...

working together to benefit from the energy of the sun

and the minerals of the earth.

Leading lives that interlock in such a way

that they sustain each other.

We rely entirely

on this finely tuned life-support machine.

And it relies on its biodiversity

to run smoothly.

Yet the way we humans live on Earth now

is sending biodiversity into a decline.

TREE CREAKS AND CRASHES

This, too, is happening as a result of bad planning

and human error

and it, too, will lead to what we see here.

A place in which we cannot live.

The natural world is fading.

The evidence is all around.

It's happened in my lifetime.

I've seen it with my own eyes.

This film is my witness statement

and my vision for the future...

the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake

and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right.

I am David Attenborough

and I am 93.

I've had the most extraordinary life.

It's only now that I appreciate how extraordinary.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

I've been lucky enough to spend my life

exploring the wild places of our planet.

I've travelled to every part of the globe.

I've experienced the living world first-hand

in all its variety and wonder.

In truth, I couldn't imagine living my life in any other way.

BIRDS CLICK

I've always had a passion to explore, to have adventures

to learn about the wilds beyond.

HE EXCLAIMS

And I'm still learning...

Boo!

...as much now as I did when I was a boy.

BIRDSONG

It was a very different world back then.

We had very little understanding

of how the living world actually worked.

It was called "natural history"

because that's essentially what it was all about...

history.

It was a great place to come to as a boy

because this is ironstone workings

but it was disused.

All this was absolutely clear.

It was... Only just stopped being a working quarry.

When I was a boy, I spent all my spare time

searching through rocks in places like this...

for buried treasure.

Fossils.

It's a creature called an ammonite.

And, in life, the animal itself lived in a chamber here

and spread out its tentacles to catch its prey.

And it lived about 180 million years ago.

This particular one

has a scientific name of Tiltonicerus

because the first one ever was found near this quarry

here in Tilton, in the middle of England.

Over time, I began to learn something

about the Earth's evolutionary history.

By and large, it's a story of slow, steady change.

Over billions of years, Nature has crafted miraculous forms

each more complex and accomplished than the last.

It's an achingly intricate labour.

And then, every 100 million years or so

after all those painstaking processes

something catastrophic happens...

a mass extinction.

Great numbers of species disappear...

and are suddenly replaced by a few.

All that evolution undone.

You can see it.

A line in the rock layers.

A boundary that marks a profound, rapid global change.

Below the line are a multitude of lifeforms.

Above, very few.

A mass extinction has happened five times

in life's four-billion-year history.

The last time it happened was the event

that brought the end of the age of the dinosaurs.

A meteorite impact triggered a catastrophic change

in the Earth's conditions.

Seventy-five per cent of all species were wiped out.

Life had no option but to rebuild.

For 65 million years

it's been at work reconstructing the living world...

until we come to the world we know.

Our time.

Scientists call it the Holocene.

The Holocene has been one of the most stable periods

in our planet's great history.

BIRDS CHIRP

For 10,000 years, the average temperature

has not wavered up or down by more than one degree Celsius.

And the rich and thriving living world around us

has been key to this stability.

Phytoplankton at the ocean's surface

and immense forests straddling the north

have helped to balance the atmosphere

by locking away carbon.

Huge herds on the plains

have kept the grasslands rich and productive

by fertilising the soils.

Mangroves and coral reefs along thousands of miles of coast

have harboured nurseries of fish species

that, when mature, then range into open waters.

A thick belt of jungles around the Equator

has piled plant on plant

to capture as much of the sun's energy as possible

adding moisture and oxygen to the global air currents.

And the extent of the polar ice has been critical

reflecting sunlight back off its white surface

cooling the whole Earth.

The biodiversity of the Holocene helped to bring stability.

And the entire living world

settled into a gentle, reliable rhythm...

THUNDER RUMBLES

...the seasons.

THUNDER RUMBLES — HERD LOWS

On the tropical plains, the dry and rainy seasons

would switch every year, like clockwork.

THUNDER RUMBLES

In Asia, the winds would create the monsoon on cue.

THUNDER RUMBLES AND CRASHES

In the northern regions

the temperatures would lift in March, triggering spring...

and stay high until they dipped in October

and brought about autumn.

BIRDS CAW

The Holocene was our Garden of Eden.

Its rhythm of seasons was so reliable

that it gave our own species a unique opportunity.

CATTLE MOOS

We invented farming.

We learnt how to exploit the seasons

to produce food crops.

The history of all human civilisation followed...

each generation able to develop and progress

only because the living world could be relied upon

to deliver us the conditions we needed.

The pace of progress

was unlike anything to be found

in the fossil record.

Our intelligence changed the way in which we evolved.

In the past, animals had to develop some physical ability

to change their lives.

But for us, an idea could do that.

And the idea could be passed from one generation to the next.

We were transforming what a species could achieve.

A few millennia after this began

I grew up at exactly the right moment.

The start of my career in my 20s

coincided with the advent of global air travel.

So, I had the privilege of being amongst the first

to fully experience the bounty of life

that had come about as a result of

the Holocene's gentle climate.

NUMBERS CLICK

Wherever I went, there was wilderness.

Sparkling coastal seas.

Vast forests.

Immense grasslands.

You could fly for hours over the untouched wilderness.

And there I was, actually being asked to explore these places

and record the wonders of the natural world

for people back home.

And to begin with, it was quite easy.

People had never seen pangolins before on television.

They'd never seen sloths before.

They'd never seen the centre of New Guinea before.

It was the best time of my life.

The best time of our lives.

The Second World War was over...

technology was making our lives easier.

The pace of change was getting faster and faster.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

It felt that nothing would limit our progress.

The future was going to be exciting.

It was going to bring everything we'd ever dreamed of.

This was before any of us were aware

that there were problems.

NUMBERS CLICK

My first visit to East Africa was in 1960.

Back then, it seemed inconceivable

that we, a single species

might one day have the power

to threaten the very existence of the wilderness.

The Maasai word "Serengeti" means "endless plains".

To those who live here, it's an apt description.

You can be in one spot on the Serengeti

and the place is totally empty of animals

and then, the next morning...

WILDEBEEST GRUNT

...one million wildebeest...

WILDEBEEST GRUNT

...a quarter of a million zebra...

ANIMALS YIP

...half a million gazelle.

GAZELLE SNORT

A few days after that...

and they're gone

over the horizon.

You can be forgiven for thinking that these plains are endless

when they could swallow up such a herd.

It took a visionary scientist, Bernhard Grzimek

to explain that this wasn't true.

PLANE ROARS

He and his son used a plane

to follow the herds over the horizon.

WILDEBEEST GRUNT

ENGINE PURRS

They charted them as they moved across rivers

through woodlands, and over national borders.

They discovered that the Serengeti herds

required an enormous area of healthy grassland to function.

That without such an immense space

the herds would diminish

and the entire ecosystem would come crashing down.

The point for me was simple.

The wild is far from unlimited.

It's finite. It needs protecting.

And a few years later, that idea became obvious to everyone.

MAN, OVER RADIO: Engines are on.

Four, three, two, one, zero. — EMISSIONS ROAR

SIR DAVID: I was in a television studio

when the Apollo mission launched.

It was the first time

that any human had moved away far enough from the Earth

to see the whole planet.

And this is what they saw.

What we all saw.

Our planet...

vulnerable and isolated.

One of the extraordinary things about it was

that the world could actually watch it as it happened.

It was extraordinary

that you could see

what a man out in space could see

as he saw it at the same time.

And I remember very well that first shot.

You saw a blue marble, a blue sphere in the blackness

and you realised that that was the Earth.

And in that one shot

there was the whole of humanity with nothing else

except the person that was in the spacecraft

taking that picture.

And that completely changed the mindset of the population

the human population of the world.

Our home was not limitless.

There was an edge to our existence.

It was a rediscovery of a fundamental truth.

We are ultimately bound by and reliant upon

the finite natural world about us.

This truth defined the life we led in our pre-history

the time before farming and civilisation.

Even as some of us were setting foot on the moon

others were still leading such a life

in the most remote parts of the planet.

BIRDSONG

In 1971, I set out to find

an uncontacted tribe in New Guinea.

MEN SPEAK LOCAL LANGUAGE

These people were hunter-gatherers...

as all humankind had been before farming.

MAN SPEAKS LOCAL LANGUAGE

They lived in small numbers and didn't take too much.

MAN SPEAKS LOCAL LANGUAGE

They ate meat rarely.

The resources they used naturally renewed themselves.

Working with their traditional technology

they were living sustainably...

a lifestyle that could continue, effectively, forever.

MAN SPEAKS LOCAL LANGUAGE

It was a stark contrast to the world I knew...

a world that demanded more every day.

NUMBERS CLICK

I spent the latter half of the 1970s travelling the world

making a series I had long dreamed of

called Life on Earth...

the story of the evolution of life and its diversity.

It was shot in 39 countries.

We filmed 650 species

and we travelled 1.5 million miles.

That's the sort of commitment you need

if you want to even begin making a portrait of the living world.

But it was noticeable

that some of these animals were becoming harder to find.

When I filmed with the mountain gorillas

there were only 300 left

in a remote jungle in Central Africa.

Baby gorillas were at a premium

and poachers would kill a dozen adults to get one.

I got as close as I did

only because the gorillas were used to people.

GORILLAS GRUNT

The only way to keep them alive

was for rangers to be with them every day.

The process of extinction I'd seen as a boy...

in the rocks...

I now became aware was happening right there around me...

to animals with which I was familiar.

Our closest relatives.

And we were responsible.

It revealed a cold reality.

Once a species became our target...

there was now nowhere on Earth that it could hide.

HARPOON BLASTS

Whales were being slaughtered

by fleets of industrial whaling ships in the 1970s.

The largest whales, the blues

numbered only a few thousand by then.

BLOWHOLE WHOOSHES

They were virtually impossible to find.

We found humpbacks off Hawaii

only by listening out for their calls.

A moment ago, we made this recording

With an underwater microphone here in the Pacific near Hawaii.

Just listen to this.

WHALES SING ON TAPE

WHALES SING

SIR DAVID: Recordings like these

revealed that the songs of the humpbacks

are long and complex.

Humpbacks living in the same area

learn their songs from each other.

And the songs have distinct themes and variations

which evolve over time.

WHALES SING

Their mournful songs were the key

to transforming people's opinions about them.

MAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN

MAN, OVER MEGAPHONE: Hello, Boctok. We are Canadian.

Please stop killing the whales.

SIR DAVID: Animals that had been viewed

as little more than a source of oil and meat

became personalities.

MAN, OVER MEGAPHONE: We are men and women

and we speak for children.

And we 're all saying

"Please stop killing the whales. "

We have pursued animals to extinction

many times in our history.

But now that it was visible, it was no longer acceptable.

WHALE SINGS

The killing of whales turned from a harvest to a crime.

A powerful shared conscience had suddenly appeared.

Nobody wanted animals to become extinct.

People were coming to care for the natural world...

as they were made aware of the natural world.

And we now had the means

to make people across the world aware.

"LIFE ON EARTH" TV THEME PLAYS

SIR DAVID: By the time Life on Earth aired in 1979

I had entered my 50s.

There were twice the number of people on the planet

as there were when I was born.

You and I belong to the most widespread

and dominant species of animal on Earth.

We're certainly the most numerous large animal.

There are something like 4,000 million of us today

and we've reached this position with meteoric speed.

It's all happened within the last 2,000 years or so.

We seem to have broken loose from the restrictions

that have governed the activities

and numbers of other animals.

SIR DAVID: We had broken loose.

We were apart from the rest of life on Earth...

living a different kind of life.

Our predators had been eliminated.

Most of our diseases were under control.

We had worked out how to produce food to order.

There was nothing left to restrict us...

nothing to stop us...

unless we stopped ourselves.

We would keep consuming the Earth

until we had used it up.

Saving individual species or even groups of species

would not be enough.

Whole habitats would soon start to disappear.

I first witnessed the destruction

of an entire habitat

in Southeast Asia.

In the 1950s

Borneo was three-quarters covered with rainforest.

SIR DAVID, ON TV: We heard a crashing

in the branches ahead.

And there, only a few yards away

we spotted a great furry red form

swaying in the trees.

The orangutan.

SIR DAVID: By the end of the century

Borneo's rainforest had been reduced by half.

BIRDS TRILL

Rainforests are particularly precious habitats.

More than half of the species on land live here.

BIRD WHOOPS

They're places in which

evolution's talent for design soars.

BIRD TRILLS

BIRD CAWS

BIRD SQUAWKS

BIRD CLICKS

BIRD CLICKS

LEAVES RUSTLE

Many of the millions of species in the forest

exist in small numbers.

Every one has a critical role to play.

Orangutan mothers have to spend ten years with their young

teaching them which fruits are worth eating.

Without this training

they would not complete their role in dispersing seeds.

The future generations of many tree species would be at risk.

And tree diversity is the key to a rainforest.

BIRDS WHOOP AND TWITTER

In a single small patch of tropical rainforest

there could be 700 different species of tree

as many as there are in the whole of North America.

And yet...

this is what we've been turning this dizzying diversity into...

a monoculture of oil palm.

A habitat that is dead in comparison.

And you see this curtain of green

with occasionally birds in it

and you think it's perhaps OK.

But if you get in a helicopter

you see that that is a strip about half-a-mile wide.

And beyond that strip

out there is nothing but regimented rows of oil palms.

CHAINSAWS BUZZ

There is a double incentive to cut down forests.

CHAINSAW BUZZES

People benefit from the timber

and then benefit again

from farming the land that's left behind.

CHAINSAW BUZZES

TIMBER CREAKS

TIMBER CRASHES

TIMBER CREAKS

Which is why we've cut down

three trillion trees across the world.

Half of the world's rainforests have already been cleared.

What we see happening today is just the latest chapter

in a global process spanning millennia.

The deforestation of Borneo

has reduced the population of orangutan

by two-thirds since I first saw one just over 60 years ago.

We can't cut down rainforests forever

and anything that we can't do forever

is, by definition, unsustainable.

If we do things that are unsustainable

the damage accumulates...

ultimately, to a point where the whole system collapses.

No ecosystem, no matter how big, is secure.

Even one as vast as the ocean.

This habitat was the subject of the series The Blue Planet

which we were filming in the late '90s.

NUMBERS CLICK

It was an astonishing vision of a completely unknown world

a world that had existed since the beginning of time.

All sorts of things that you'd no idea had ever existed

all in a multitude of colours, all unbelievably beautiful.

And all of them completely undisturbed by your presence.

For much of its expanse, the ocean is largely empty.

But in certain places, there are hotspots

where currents bring nutrients to the surface

and trigger an explosion of life.

In such places, huge shoals of fish gather.

The problem is that our fishing fleets

are just as good at finding those hotspots

as are the fish.

When they do, they're able to gather

the concentrated shoals with ease.

It was only in the '50s that large fleets

first ventured out into international waters...

to reap the open-ocean harvest across the globe.

Yet they've removed 90 per cent of the large fish in the sea.

At first, they caught plenty of fish in their nets.

But within only a few years

the nets across the globe were coming in empty.

The fishing quickly became so poor...

that countries began to subsidise the fleets

to maintain the industry.

Without large fish and other marine predators

the oceanic nutrient cycle stutters.

The predators help to keep nutrients

in the ocean's sunlit waters

recycling them

so they can be used again and again by plankton.

Without predators

nutrients are lost for centuries to the depths

and the hotspots start to diminish.

The ocean starts to die.

Ocean life was also unravelling in the shallows.

In 1998, a Blue Planet film crew

stumbled on an event little known at the time.

Coral reefs were turning white.

The white colour is caused by corals expelling algae

that lives symbiotically within their body.

When you first see it

you think perhaps that it's beautiful

and suddenly you realise it's tragic.

Because what you're looking at is skeletons.

Skeletons of dead creatures.

The white corals are ultimately smothered by seaweed.

And the reef turns from wonderland...

to wasteland.

At first, the cause of the bleaching was a mystery.

But scientists started to discover

that in many cases where bleaching occurred

the ocean was warming.

For some time, climate scientists had warned

that the planet would get warmer as we burned fossil fuels

and released carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases

into the atmosphere.

LAVA ROARS

A marked change in atmospheric carbon

has always been incompatible with a stable Earth.

It was a feature of all five mass extinctions.

LAVA ROARS

In previous events

it had taken volcanic activity up to one million years

to dredge up enough carbon from within the earth

to trigger a catastrophe.

By burning millions of years' worth

of living organisms all at once

as coal and oil...

we have managed to do so in less than 200.

The global air temperature

had been relatively stable till the '90s

but it now appeared this was only because the ocean

was absorbing much of the excess heat

masking our impact.

It was the first indication to me

that the Earth was beginning to lose its balance.

WIND WHOOSHES — ICE CREAKS

The most remote habitat of all

exists at the extreme north and south of the planet.

I've visited the polar regions over many decades.

They've always been a place beyond imagination...

with scenery unlike anything else on Earth...

and unique species adapted to a life in the extreme.

But that distant world is changing.

In my time, I've experienced the warming of Arctic summers.

We have arrived at locations

expecting to find expanses of sea ice

and found none.

We've managed to travel by boat

to islands that were impossible to get to historically

because they were permanently locked in the ice.

By the time Frozen Planet aired in 2011

the reasons for these changes was well established.

The ocean has long since become unable to absorb

all the excess heat caused by our activities.

As a result, the average global temperature today

is one degree Celsius warmer than it was when I was born.

ICE RUMBLES AND CRASHES

A speed of change that exceeds any in the last 10,000 years.

ICE CRASHES AND RUMBLES

Summer sea ice in the Arctic

has reduced by 40 per cent in 40 years.

Our planet is losing its ice.

ICE CRASHES

This most pristine and distant of ecosystems

is headed for disaster.

Our imprint is now truly global...

our impact now truly profound.

Our blind assault on the planet has finally come

to alter the very fundamentals of the living world.

We have overfished 30 per cent of fish stocks

to critical levels.

We cut down over 15 billion trees each year.

BIRDS TRILL

By damming, polluting

and over-extracting rivers and lakes

we've reduced the size of freshwater populations

by over 80 per cent.

We're replacing the wild with the tame.

Half of the fertile land on Earth is now farmland.

Seventy per cent of the mass of birds on this planet

are domestic birds.

The vast majority, chickens.

We account for over one third of the weight of mammals on Earth.

A further 60 per cent are the animals we raise to eat.

The rest, from mice to whales, make up just four per cent.

This is now our planet

run by humankind for humankind.

There is little left for the rest of the living world.

Since I started filming in the 1950s

on average, wild animal populations

have more than halved.

I look at these images now, and I realise that

although as a young man

I felt I was out there in the wild

experiencing the untouched natural world...

it was an illusion.

Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying.

Um, so, the world is not as wild as it was.

Well, we've destroyed it...

not just ruined it.

I mean, we have completely...

well, destroyed that world.

That non-human world is... is gone.

Uh... HE STAMMERS

Human beings have overrun the world.

That is my witness statement.

A story of global decline during a single lifetime.

But it doesn't end there.

If we continue on our current course

the damage that has been the defining feature

of my lifetime

will be eclipsed by the damage coming in the next.

NUMBERS CLICK

Science predicts that were I born today

I would be witness to the following.

FIRE CRACKLES

The Amazon Rainforest...

cut down until it can no longer produce enough moisture...

degrades into a dry savannah

bringing catastrophic species loss...

and altering the global water cycle.

At the same time, the Arctic becomes ice-free in the summer.

Without the white icecap

less of the sun's energy is reflected back out to Space.

And the speed of global warming increases.

MUD CRASHES

Throughout the north, frozen soils thaw

releasing methane

a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide

accelerating the rate of climate change, dramatically.

As the ocean continues to heat and becomes more acidic

coral reefs around the world die.

Fish populations crash.

Global food production enters a crisis

as soils become exhausted by overuse.

Pollinating insects disappear.

THUNDER CRACKS

And the weather is more and more unpredictable.

Our planet becomes four degrees Celsius warmer.

Large parts of the Earth are uninhabitable.

HIPPOS SNUFFLE

Millions of people, rendered homeless.

A sixth mass extinction event...

is well underway.

WIND WHIPS

This is a series of one—way doors...

bringing irreversible change.

Within the span of the next lifetime...

the security and stability of the Holocene...

our Garden of Eden...

will be lost.

WIND WHIPS

APPLAUSE

Right now, we're facing a manmade disaster...

of global scale.

Our greatest threat in thousands of years.

If we don't take action

the collapse of our civilisations

and the extinction of much of the natural world

is on the horizon.

But the longer we leave it

the more difficult it'll be to do something about it.

And you could happily retire.

But you now want to explain to us what peril...

we are in.

Um...

And, in a way, I-I wish I wasn't involved in this struggle.

HE CHUCKLES

Because I wish the struggle wasn't there or necessary.

But I've had unbelievable luck and good fortune...

um, and I certainly would feel very guilty...

if I saw what the problems are and decided to ignore them.

APPLAUSE

SIR DAVID, ON VIDEO: Climbing over the tightly-packed bodies

is the only way across the crowd.

WALRUSES GROWL

Those beneath can get crushed to death.

WALRUSES GROWL

VIDEO CONTINUES PLAYING

SIR DAVID: We are facing nothing less

than the collapse of the living world.

The very thing that gave birth to our civilisation.

The thing we rely upon for every element of the lives we lead.

No one wants this to happen.

None of us can afford for it to happen.

So, what do we do?

It's quite straightforward.

It's been staring us in the face all along.

To restore stability to our planet...

we must restore its biodiversity...

the very thing that we've removed.

It's the only way out of this crisis we have created.

We must rewild the world.

REINDEER GRUNT

BIRDS WHOOP

BIRDS CAW

BUFFALO GRUNT

BIRDS CAW

ELEPHANT TRUMPETS

Rewilding the world is simpler than you might think.

And the changes we have to make

will only benefit ourselves and the generations that follow.

A century from now, our planet could be a wild place again.

And I'm going to tell you how.

BIRDS TWITTER AND SQUAWK

Every other species on Earth

reaches a maximum population after a time.

The number that can be sustained

on the natural resources available.

With nothing to restrict us

our population has been growing dramatically

throughout my lifetime.

CROWD CHANTS

On current projections

there will be 11 billion people on Earth by 2100.

But it's possible to slow, even to stop, population growth

well before it reaches that point.

Japan's standard of living climbed rapidly

in the latter half of the 20th century.

As healthcare and education improved

people's expectations and opportunities grew

and the birthrate fell.

In 1950, a Japanese family was likely to have

three or more children.

By 1975, the average was two.

The result is that the population has now stabilised

and has hardly changed since the millennium.

There are signs that this has started to happen

across the globe.

As nations develop everywhere

people choose to have fewer children.

The number of children being born worldwide every year

is about to level off.

A key reason the population is still growing

is because many of us are living longer.

At some point in the future

the human population will peak for the very first time.

LOW HUBBUB

The sooner it happens

the easier it makes everything else we have to do.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

By working hard to raise people out of poverty...

giving all access to healthcare...

and enabling girls, in particular

to stay in school as long as possible

we can make it peak sooner and at a lower level.

Why wouldn't we want to do these things?

Giving people a greater opportunity of life

is what we would want to do anyway.

The trick is to raise the standard of living

around the world

without increasing our impact on that world.

That may sound impossible

but there are ways in which we can do this.

The living world is, essentially, solar-powered.

The Earth's plants capture

three trillion kilowatt-hours of solar energy each day.

That's almost 20 times the energy we need...

just from sunlight.

Imagine if we phased out fossil fuels

and ran our world

on the eternal energies of Nature, too.

Sunlight, wind, water and geothermal.

At the turn of the century

Morocco relied on imported oil and gas

for almost all of its energy.

Today, it generates 40 per cent of its needs at home

from a network of renewable power plants...

including the world's largest solar farm.

Sitting on the edge of the Sahara...

and cabled directly into southern Europe...

Morocco could be an exporter of solar energy by 2050.

Within 20 years, renewables are predicted

to be the world's main source of power.

But we can make them the only source.

It's crazy that our banks and our pensions

are investing in fossil fuel...

when these are the very things

that are jeopardising the future that we are saving for.

SIRENS WAIL

A renewable future will be full of benefits.

Energy everywhere will be more affordable.

Our cities will be cleaner and quieter.

And renewable energy will never run out.

TWINKLING NOISE

The living world can't operate without a healthy ocean.

And neither can we.

The ocean is a critical ally

in our battle to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

The more diverse it is, the better it does that job.

WHALES SING

And, of course, the ocean is important to all of us

as a source of food.

Fishing is the world's greatest wild harvest.

And if we do it right, it can continue...

because there's a win-win at play.

The healthier the marine habitat

the more fish there will be

and the more there will be to eat.

Palau is a Pacific Island nation

reliant on its coral reefs for fish and tourism.

When fish stocks began to reduce

the Palauans responded by restricting fishing practices

and banning fishing entirely from many areas.

Protected fish populations soon became so healthy

they spilt over into the areas open to fishing.

As a result, the "no fish" zones

have increased the catch of the local fishermen

while at the same time allowing the reefs to recover.

Imagine if we committed to a similar approach

across the world.

Estimates suggest that "no fish" zones

over a third of our coastal seas

would be sufficient to provide us

with all the fish we will ever need.

In international waters, the UN is attempting to create

the biggest "no fish" zone of all.

In one act, this would transform the open ocean

from a place exhausted by subsidised fishing fleets

to a wilderness that will help us all in our efforts

to combat climate change.

The world's greatest wildlife reserve.

When it comes to the land...

we must radically reduce the area we use to farm

so that we can make space for returning wilderness.

And the quickest and most effective way to do that

is for us to change our diet.

Large carnivores are rare in Nature

because it takes a lot of prey to support each of them.

For every single predator on the Serengeti

there are more than 100 prey animals.

WILDEBEEST GRUNT

Whenever we choose a piece of meat

we, too, are unwittingly demanding

a huge expanse of space.

HERD LOWS IN DISTANCE

The planet can't support billions of large meat-eaters.

There just isn't the space.

BELL DINGS

ASPARAGUS SIZZLES

If we all had a largely plant-based diet...

we would need only half the land we use at the moment.

And because we would be then dedicated to raising plants

we could increase the yield of this land substantially.

The Netherlands is one of the world's

most densely populated countries.

It's covered with small family-run farms

with no room for expansion.

So, Dutch farmers have become expert

at getting the most out of every hectare.

Increasingly, they're doing so, sustainably...

raising yields tenfold in two generations

while at the same time using less water

fewer pesticides, less fertiliser

and emitting less carbon.

Despite its size, the Netherlands is now

the world's second largest exporter of food.

It's entirely possible for us to apply

both low-tech and hi-tech solutions

to produce much more food from much less land.

We can start to produce food in new spaces...

indoors, within cities.

Even in places where there's no land at all.

As we improve our approach to farming

we'll start to reverse the land-grab

that we've been pursuing ever since we began to farm

which is essential

because we have an urgent need for all that free land.

Forests are a fundamental component

of our planet's recovery.

They are the best technology Nature has

for locking away carbon.

And they are centres of biodiversity.

Again, the two features work together.

The wilder and more diverse forests are

the more effective they are

at absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.

We must immediately halt deforestation everywhere...

and grow crops like oil palm and soya

only on land that was deforested long ago.

After all, there's plenty of it.

But we can do better than that.

A century ago, more than three quarters of Costa Rica

was covered with forest.

By the 1980s, uncontrolled logging had reduced this

to just one quarter.

The government decided to act

offering grants to land owners to replant native trees.

In just 25 years

the forest has returned to cover half of Costa Rica once again.

BIRDS CHIRP

Just imagine if we achieve this on a global scale.

The return of the trees would absorb

as much as two thirds of the carbon emissions

that have been pumped into the atmosphere

by our activities to date.

With all these things

there is one overriding principle.

Nature is our biggest ally and our greatest inspiration.

We just have to do what Nature has always done.

It worked out the secret of life long ago.

In this world, a species can only thrive...

when everything else around it thrives too.

We can solve the problems we now face

by embracing this reality.

If we take care of Nature...

Nature will take care of us.

It's now time for our species to stop simply growing...

to establish a life on our planet

in balance with Nature...

to start to thrive.

When you think about it

we're completing a journey.

Ten thousand years ago, as hunter-gatherers...

we lived a sustainable life

because that was the only option.

All these years later

it's once again the only option.

We need to rediscover...

how to be sustainable.

To move from being apart from Nature

to becoming a part of Nature once again.

FILM PROJECTOR WHIRRS

SINGLE BEEP

Tonight, we've got rather a different programme for you.

SIR DAVID: If we can change the way we live on Earth...

an alternative future comes into view.

In this future...

we discover ways to benefit from our land

that help, rather than hinder, wilderness...

ways to fish our seas

that enable them to come quickly back to life.

WHALES SPOUT AND SPLASH

FOREST ANIMALS CALL

And ways to harvest our forests sustainably.

We will finally learn how to work with Nature

rather than against it.

In the end

after a lifetime's exploration of the living world

I'm certain of one thing.

This is not about saving our planet...

it's about saving ourselves.

The truth is, with or without us

the natural world will rebuild.

In the 30 years since the evacuation of Chernobyl...

...the wild has reclaimed the space.

BIRDS CHIRP

Today, the forest has taken over the city.

It's a sanctuary for wild animals

that are very rare elsewhere.

HORSES SNORT

And powerful evidence

that however grave our mistakes

Nature will, ultimately, overcome them.

The living world will endure.

We humans cannot presume the same.

We've come this far

because we are the smartest creatures

that have ever lived.

But to continue

we require more than intelligence...

we require... wisdom.

There are many differences between humans

and the rest of the species on Earth

but one that has been expressed

is that we alone are able to imagine the future.

For a long time, I, and perhaps you, have dreaded that future.

But it's now becoming apparent

that it's not all doom and gloom.

There's a chance for us to make amends...

to complete our journey of development

manage our impact

and once again become a species in balance with Nature.

All we need is the will to do so.

We now have the opportunity to create

the perfect home for ourselves...

and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world

that we inherited.

Just imagine that.