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text stringlengths 1 192	audio audioduration (s) 1.02 12.3
my witness statement.
as i write this, i'm 94.
'i've had the most extraordinary life.'
it's only now i appreciate
how extraordinary.
i've been lucky enough to spend my life exploring the wild places of our planet and making films about the creatures that live there.
in doing so,
i've travelled widely around the globe.
i've experienced the living world first-hand in all its variety and wonder,
and witnessed some of its greatest spectacles
and most gripping dramas.
as a boy, i dreamed, like so many other boys,
of travelling to distant, wilder places
to look at the natural world in its pristine state and even find animals that were new to science.
now i find it hard to believe...
that i've managed to spend so much of my life doing everything.
exactly that.
1937
world population 2.3 billion.
carbon in the atmosphere,
280 parts per million.
remaining wilderness
66%.
when i was eleven years old, i lived in leicester in the middle of england.
at that time, it wasn't unusual for a boy of my age to get on a bicycle, ride off into the countryside,
and spend a whole day away from home.
and that is exactly what i did.'
every child explores, just turning over a stone and looking at the animals beneath is exploring.
it never occurred to me to be anything other than fascinated...
when watching what was going on in the natural world about me.
my older brother had another view.
leicester had an amateur dramatic society
that put on productions of near professional standards, and although he persuaded me every now and then to join him and speak a couple of lines in walk-on parts,
my heart was not in it.
instead, as soon as the weather was warm enough,
i would cycle off to the eastern part of the county where there were rocks full of beautiful and intriguing fossils.
they were not, it's true, the bones of dinosaurs.
the honey-coloured limestone had been deposited as mud at the bottom of an ancient sea, so no one could expect to find the remains of such land-living monsters in them.
instead...
i discovered the shells of sea-living creatures, ammonites, some six inches or so across,
'coiled like ram's horns.'
others the size of hazelnuts, inside which were tiny scaffolds of calcite
that had supported the gills with which the creatures...
within her breeze.'
and i knew of no greater thrill
then picking up a likely looking boulder,
giving it a smart blow with a hammer
and watching it fall apart to reveal one of these marvellous shells glinting in the sunlight.
and i revelled in the thought
that the first human eyes to gaze upon it
were mine.
i had believed from a very early age
that the most important knowledge was that which brought an understanding of how the natural world worked.
it was not laws invented by human beings that interested me.
but the principles that governed the lives of animals and plants.
not the history of kings and queens,
or even the different languages that had been developed
by different human societies, but the truths that had governed the world around me long before humanity had appeared in it.
why were there so many different kinds of ammonites?
why was this one different from that?
did it live in a different way?
did it live in a different area?
i soon discovered that plenty of other people had asked such questions
and had found a lot of the answers, and that these answers could be put together to form the most marvellous of all stories.
the history of life.
the story of the development of life on earth is for the most part one a slow, steady change.
every creature whose remains i found in the rocks
had spent its entire life being tested by its environment.
those that happen to be better at surviving and reproducing
passed on their characteristics.
'those that didn't?'
couldn't. over billions of years, life forms slowly changed,
and became more complex.
more efficient, often more specialised.
and their long story, detail by detail,
could be deduced from what could be found in the rocks.
the leicestershire limestones had recorded only a tiny moment of it.
but more chapters could be found in the specimens that the city museum had on display.
and to find out yet more, i decided that when the time came...
i will try to go to university.
there i learned another truth.
this long story of gradual change
had been violently interrupted at points
every hundred million years or so, after all those painstaking selections and improvements,
something catastrophic happened.
a mass extinction.
for different reasons at different times in the earth's history, there had been a profound, rapid global change to the environment
to which so many species had become so exquisitely adapted.
the earth's life-support machine...
had stuttered, and the miraculous assemblage of fragile interconnections which held it together
'had collapsed.'
'great numbers of species suddenly disappeared.'
leaving only a few.
all that evolution
was undone.
these monumental extinctions created boundaries in the rocks that you could see if you knew where to look and how to recognize them.
below the boundary there were many different life forms.
above, there is you.
such mass extinctions have happened five times in life's four billion year history.
each time nature has collapsed,