All language subtitles for The Living Planet 12of12 New Worlds 720p x265_Subtitles01.ENG

The planet on which we live
is in a state of perpetual change.

From cracks in its surface,
molten rock is continually erupting.

The forces that drive this lava to the surface also
cause the continents to move round the globe,

millimetre by millimetre, over thousands of years.

When they collide, the buckling, contorted rocks
are pushed up into great mountain ranges.

But just as they rise, so are they cut down by
the erosion of ice and snow and rushing water.

At the poles, where the sun's rays strike the glob
only obliquely, it's bitterly cold.

Here glaciers grind their way across the land,
gouge out deep valleys and flow into the sea.

At the equator, where the sun strikes
the earth four-square, the land is baked.

Over centuries,
the amount of rain falling on it has varied.

As it diminishes, so the forests have dwindled
and been replaced by grassland.

And grassland, if it dries still further,
turns to desert.

Throughout all these changes,
living creatures have evolved

with a speed that has matched
that of the changing landscape.

In the hot deserts, animals have evolved
ways of living in oven-like temperatures

without drinking any liquid whatsoever.

In the cold deserts around the poles, other
creatures, who generate their own internal heat,

have grown insulating coats of fur and fat
so that they are not frozen to death.

Human beings, one of the last species
of large animal to appear on the planet,

have spread with extraordinary speed
to all corners of the globe.

They've done so not so much because
their bodies have changed to match extremes

but because they've used skills and intelligence
to exploit the adaptations of other living creatures.

The Eskimos survive in the Arctic
by keeping themselves warm

with the skins of polar bears and seals.

In the jungles of the Amazon, the Indians
have learned where to find and how to collect

everything they need to sustain themselves.

Even though today they may cook in metal pots
traded from the outside world,

they still know how to make pottery from the clay.

In the hot deserts of southern Africa, the Bushmen
survive droughts by tapping the stores of liquid

held in the bodies of animals
and the roots and the stems of plants.

Immediately after the rains, however,
they can collect water from natural hollows,

but even that takes knowledge and skill.

Human beings, for nearly all the half-million year
of their existence as a species,

have lived by gathering wild plants
and hunting wild animals.

10,000 years ago, people were doing so here in
the Middle East, as they were everywhere else.

In these forests, there's quite a lot to eat:

Pistachio nuts and wild almonds
and acorns and juniper berries.

10,000 years ago
there were quite a lot of wild animals:

Wild goat, wild pig, wild horses,
giant wild cattle and gazelle.

Even so, there are hardships to be endured.
There could be torrential rains.

At night it can get crushingly cold
and there could be snow.

During the day it gets bakingly hot.

But about 9,000 years ago,
man took a crucial step.

Until then, the environment
through evolution had shaped his body,

as it had shaped the bodies of all animals.

But now, uniquely, man turned that around.

He began to change the environment
to suit himself,

and one of the places where he first did so
is in that valley down there.

This is Beidha in Jordan, and here were found
the remains of one of mankind's earliest villages.

This was no temporary encampment,
but a permanent settlement

with alleys and houses of stone
built adjoining one another.

They were half-dug into the ground, the floor
and walls covered with a plaster of mud and lime,

and in the walls were posts
which supported a roof of thatch

which probably just cleared the top of the wall
so light could get in.

So the people had created a snug home,
protected from the rain and the sun,

a place where mothers
could bear their children in safety.

There are lots of grinding stones, querns, here,
in which the people ground the seeds of grass,

a kind of wild barley
that grows abundantly hereabouts.

They'd long since discovered that you could
scatter grass seeds and produce a crop.

They'd been doing that with the seeds
of another wild grass, wheat, for many centuries.

Now they were settled,
it was inconvenient to scour the countryside

to look for places
where the grass happened to grow.

Much better to throw it onto the ground near
the village, where they could watch the crop,

make sure animals didn't plunder it,
and it was convenient to gather.

So these people became farmers.

The people were also meat-eaters,
and in this one small chamber

have been found great quantities
of the bones of wild goat, like this.

Domesticating animals must have been
much more difficult than domesticating plants.

But the first steps towards doing so
were probably taken centuries earlier

when the people were still nomads.

A way in which that might have happened
can be seen going on today

amongst the Lapp peoples in Scandinavia.

This is the most northerly living of all deer. It'
found round the Arctic wherever there is land.

In America, it's called the caribou,
in Europe, reindeer.

In North America the caribou are completely wild,

but here in northern Scandinavia
they are, to some degree at least, domesticated.

Man has managed to achieve that
by becoming a nomad himself.

The reindeer during the winter have to keep
on the move in search for something to eat,

and the Lapps, to keep an eye on their herd and
maintain possession, have to move with them.

Traditionally, they do so on skis.
Indeed, skis originated in this part of the world.

But today the herdsmen are fully up to date
with modern technology.

The reindeer's winter food is a kind of lichen
which they find growing beneath the snow.

When the reindeer were completely wild,

young stags would wander away from their group,
taking a few young females with them.

But the Lapps regarded
the offspring of their herd as their property.

To prevent them being lost,
they castrated the young males.

The few they left unmutilated in order to breed

were those they thought most likely to remain
unaggressive and disinclined to wander.

So, consciously or unconsciously, the Lapps
over centuries have changed the reindeer

from a nervous creature living in family groups

to one that is so docile
it can be kept in herds thousands strong

and can be moved from one slope to another
by leading the way with a stag on a halter.

It may well be that in some such way as this,
the people who lived 9,000 years ago in Beidha

gradually turned the wild goats of the surrounding
mountains into tamed domesticated ones.

The techniques of domestication
and maybe the domesticated animals themselves

slowly spread westwards across Europe.

7,000 years ago,
the people living in France had their own herds.

And around 6,000 years ago, the techniques
and even perhaps herdsmen with some stock

crossed the channel into Britain.

They must have landed somewhere in southern
England, but the land didn't look like this.

Like nearly all the rest of Britain,
it was covered in trees.

People were already living in the forests,
gathering fruit and nuts

and hunting the wild animals, deer and wild oxen.

But they hadn't changed the woodlands of Britain

any more than the Amazonian Indians
have changed the jungle.

But these new arrivals did. They began
to clear the forests to make way for their farms.

So this landscape of the South Downs
is not natural. It's their creation.

The people cut down the forests with stone axes.

And then the teeth of their flocks
kept the land open.

Sheep still prevent the seedlings
of trees from growing

and keep the pastures clear for cowslips,
clover, orchids, buttercups, pipits and skylarks.

This was the beginning of a process
that was to transform Britain.

Much of our apparently wild landscape
is in fact man-made.

The Norfolk Broads, that wilderness of shallow
lakes, reed beds and winding waterways,

are not natural basins but vast pits,
dug by men collecting peat some 600 years ago,

that have subsequently flooded.

Many upland moors of northern England
and southern Scotland

were cleared of forests thousands of years ago,

but in the 19th century
men encouraged heather to grow there

by setting light to the moors regularly,

for heather is the food of grouse,

and men want flocks of grouse for their guns.

Almost the only part of Britain
that remains free of human influence

is the land over 2,500 feet high
that is of little practical use to people.

It was scraped clean of soil by glaciers
during the Ice Age 10,000 years ago

and still remains stony and barren.

As we transformed the landscape, so we also
altered the community of animals that lived here.

Those that didn't suit us, we got rid of.

Brown bears were once common,
but they were regarded as dangerous

and they could give good sport if baited with dogs

The last British bear
was killed in the 10th century.

Wolves preyed on domesticated flocks and herds
and even threatened people.

The last English wolf
had been killed by the year 1500

and the last Scottish one
by the middle of the 18th century.

Beavers were hunted
not so much because of the damage they did

but because their fur was highly valued.

They had all gone by the 13th century.

Wild boar were once common in British woods,

grubbing up roots and bulbs,
munching acorns and beech nuts.

But boars could be aggressive and dangerous,
and the sows made good eating.

By the 17th century,
there were none of these left either.

The elk, known in America as the moose,
once lived here too,

but it had been hunted into extinction
even before the Romans arrived.

Men also introduced animals to Britain.

The Normans brought fallow deer from Europe.
And rabbits.

At first they were guarded in enclosures,
for they were valued for their fur and meat.

They only became really common
in the countryside during the 19th century.

Pheasants are Asian birds, and were brought here
soon after the Norman Conquest.

Other introductions, however,
were unintentional and much less welcome.

The house mouse may have been the first animal
of all to be brought to Britain by man,

for the Romans found it living in British villages

Other, bigger, animals were living around
the settlements of those early British tribes.

Aurochs, the giant cattle whose images
were painted in French caves during prehistory,

also roamed in British forests.

By Roman times,
some had already been domesticated,

and one of the early strains derived from them
still survives in the Cheviot Hills.

This herd at Chillingham was penned
in a great park during the 13th century,

and has lived here ever since,
with scarcely any interference from human beings.

They may well be very similar to those that
wandered around the farms in Roman times.

They're formidable animals,
very different from the gentle Friesian of today.

One great bull rules the herd.
He mates with all the cows

and fights every young male who challenges him.

Eventually, after two or three years,

he will lose and surrender his place
to a younger, more vigorous animal.

Having changed a wild animal
into a docile one by selective breeding,

farmers now used the same techniques
to modify the animal's body.

They wanted meat, and soon they produced
a very different-looking beast.

These portraits,
commissioned by breeders 100 years ago,

show that the characteristics they valued in their
cattle then are the same as those we prize today.

Today's bulls have such stunted legs
that they can't run fast to chase away a rival.

Many don't even have horns
with which to fight a courtship battle.

These won't be permitted to mate with a cow.

Their semen will be taken
and injected into cows by syringe,

so each one, without moving from his stall,

may father thousands of offspring
on the other side of the world.

Under intensive feeding,
such cattle can put on two pounds a day

and grow so fast that they can be
profitably slaughtered within a year.

The new breeds of pig, descendants
of the wild boars of the European forests,

now grow five times faster than their wild cousins
and are ready for slaughter within six months.

Turkeys are descended
from wild birds in Central America.

They are produced by artificial insemination
and have become creatures

that will live not in small family groups
but immense congregations.

Chickens, birds of the Asian jungles, have
been converted into egg-producing machines

that can lay over 300 eggs a year.

The same techniques produced our food plants,
using species from all over the world.

The potato came from the Andes,
where it was grown by the Incas.

The pea is a European plant first cultivated
by the Italians in the 16th century.

Beans came from Mexico, rhubarb from China,
beetroot from Germany.

This plant was first cultivated
in the seventh century in Afghanistan,

taken from there to North Africa,
then brought by the Moors into Europe,

where it was cultivated by the Dutch
to produce... this, a carrot.

But wild plants from the family
that is the most important to man for food

don't grow in this allotment because
they would be regarded as weeds: The grasses.

The grass we call rice was domesticated in Asia
some 7,000 years ago,

at about the same time that people were learning
to cultivate wheat around the Mediterranean.

The people of Asia have perfected the techniques
of growing one kind of rice in flooded terraces.

They do so with such skill
that the rice will flower and ripen

and produce heads of swollen seeds
several times a year.

As mankind's population grew, so more and more
of the land had to be taken into cultivation.

Today, 11% of all the arable land on earth is
devoted to growing just this one species of grass.

Now more than 2,000 million people depend on it,
half the population of the world.

In the western world, people still prefer the kind
of grass they learned to eat during prehistory,

but that too they have transformed.

Today's wheat grows tall, uniform and dense,
so it can be easily harvested by machines.

Selective breeding has greatly increased its yield

Even since the 1940s,
its productivity has been doubled.

Today it bears ten times
the weight of seeds on each stem

than does its wild ancestor that still grows
in the parched lands of the Middle East.

This change has a price. Wheat like this can't
even reproduce itself now without man's aid.

It's true that it is largely immune
to pests like moulds and rusts,

but moulds and rusts also evolve quickly,

naturally, into forms
which can attack the new strains.

So farmers have to change the strain that
they grow on average about every ten years.

Today, in North America, over half the wheat
comes from just four strains.

Were plant breeders to fail to produce
new varieties from wild species,

then fields like this could be devastated
and the western world would starve.

To grow the vast quantity of grain needed
by mankind's increasing population,

huge areas of the most fertile lands on earth
have been turned over to its cultivation.

Gone are the rich communities of grasses
and other small plants,

together with hundreds
of kinds of insects and small creatures.

Now over thousands of square miles, all other
plants and large animals, except human beings,

are rigorously excluded.

Intruders are poisoned or shot.

So mankind has introduced to the earth
a completely new type of environment,

a monoculture, one which contains,
to all intents and purposes, just one species.

And this is another
of mankind's virtual monocultures.

The species that proliferates here
and congregates of its own accord

into dense swarms numbering millions
is Homo sapiens himself.

The tallest building he's constructed so far
is in Chicago, the Sears Tower.

It stands 1,454 feet high.

12,000 people daily come to work in it,
and they live in an artificial microclimate

in which the temperature and humidity
are controlled by computers.

The whole structure
is built of artificial man-made materials,

a framework of steel,
with black-skinned aluminium

and bronze-faced glare-reducing glass
forming a shell around it.

In such an environment, you might suppose
that animals and plants could have no place.

But not so.

Many human beings, it seems, don't wish to live
totally out of contact with other living species.

Once again, people have moulded their animals
to match their particular whim and fancy,

altering their size, their proportions, their fur.
Even their smells.

Dogs first associated with man
when he was a nomadic hunter,

accepting him as a leader,
helping him to track and pull down his quarry,

and taking a share in the spoils,

but now that man no longer hunts,
his dogs must play a very different role.

Cats are not, in the wild, social animals like dog

but solitary hunters
with strong territorial instincts.

They probably decided of their own accord
to move into houses and hunt rats and mice,

and people accepted them because of this
useful service, and because they're endearing,

but to this day they have remained
independent operators, aloof and haughty,

even when people have bred them to exaggerate
the most cuddlesome of their characteristics.

A few other living organisms
have discovered that the city suits them.

The well-drained sterility of a lava flow
is not unlike that of a city street,

and in the 18th century a botanist found a yellow
ragwort growing on the slopes of Mount Etna.

He took it back to Oxford,
where it was cultivated in the botanic gardens.

60 years later, the ragwort was noticed
growing on the stones of college walls,

but for quite a time it spread no further.

Then, in the 19th century,
railways were built across Britain.

The stone rubble on which the tracks were laid
was exactly what the ragwort liked.

It spread along the railways
to appear in all the cities along the main lines,

where it still flourishes today.

A few wild animals have found what they need
in man's apparently hostile wildernesses.

The sea otter swims happily
in the waters of California's harbours.

Prairie dogs, driven off the prairies by ranchers,
find new homes in urban playgrounds.

English foxes have discovered
a rich source of food in city litter bins

and doze on suburban roofs.

And in the south-west of the United States,
acorn woodpeckers store their acorns

in the trunks of fir trees, even when
they've been turned into telegraph poles.

Ospreys habitually build their nests
in the very tops of trees,

and telegraph poles also give them
the kind of isolation they need.

Church towers, to kestrels,
are just as good nesting sites as rocky crags.

Kittiwakes apparently regard modern buildings
as little more than particularly regular sea cliff

Swallows learned to tolerate man
for the sake of the nest sites beneath his eaves,

and now few nest anywhere else.

But not all people's urban companions
are so welcome.

There are still plenty of creatures, mammals
and insects, that claim a share of mankind's food.

Many insects eat cellulose,
and find it in abundance in wood

and in the paper
with which people surround themselves.

Grubs chew the sheep hair
with which clothes are made.

This whole community of insects is in turn preyed
upon by other unwelcome creatures: Spiders.

So we wage war on the animals
that have come to live with us.

Brown rats originated somewhere in Asia
and spread to Europe some 300 years ago.

Today, rats are found
in every large city in the world.

They will eat almost anything, tackling meat
with as much relish as grain and vegetables.

They gnaw electric cables, causing short circuits
and even, in consequence, fires.

They not only consume huge quantities of food,
but contaminate much of what they leave,

and they spread disease.

So if we're not to be overrun,
we have to pursue them wherever they go.

We created the city, and if it's to function properly
and be neither oppressively sterile

nor infested with pests, we have to manage
the living organisms that live in it,

encouraging some, exterminating others.

But our influence spreads far wider
than we often choose to recognise.

We're changing the whole of the globe, and we
must accept our responsibilities of managing that,

but so far we are making a very poor job of it.

We have to rid our cities
of the vast quantity of rubbish we create.

New York City produces
22,000 tons of refuse every single day.

Half of that is taken by barge down
the Hudson River and dumped on Staten Island.

The rubbish is laid down in a layer
several feet thick and 200 feet wide.

Every day it advances 100 feet. When the land
is covered, another layer is dumped on top.

This is a very expensive way
of getting rid of our rubbish.

If there are cheaper ways of doing so,
we take them,

telling ourselves if it's out of sight,
it doesn't matter what happens to it,

assuming that somehow the world is so large

that our poisons
will simply be lost in its immensities.

So we pour our waste chemicals
and detergents into our rivers.

Suds may or may not
have been valuable in a sink.

In a river they can be lethal,
killing the plants and the fish.

We spill oil into the sea, in spite
of all the precautions, and set the waves aflame,

and now there are patches of oil polluting
even the remotest parts of the widest oceans.

And we poison the very air we breathe.

Fumes belched from our engines
fill the atmosphere of the city.

Steam rising from the cooling towers
of power stations is relatively harmless,

but the gases produced by burning coal and oil
are certainly not.

Our solution has been quite simple:

To build chimneys even taller, so that the gases
are blown farther away from our cities,

but they don't disappear.

They're carried by the prevailing winds
to countries hundreds of miles away.

The lakes of Scandinavia have, over the past
few decades, become more and more acid

until now fish and plants
can no longer survive in many.

In Norway alone, there are now 1,800 lakes
without fish, and hundreds more that are dying,

shameful monuments
to our carelessness and lack of concern.

In Germany,
10% of the forests are seriously damaged,

almost certainly due to
industrial pollution of the atmosphere

and the collection of the poisons from it by rain.

But we don't only despoil the natural world
by accident. We do so quite deliberately.

These islands, off the coast of Peru,

may seem, on the face of it, to be the very
picture of fertility and ecological success.

They're the home of a great variety of seabirds:
Cormorants and pelicans,

boobies, terns and gulls.

But 30 years ago,
another bird was also living here:

These, a kind of cormorant called the guanay.

When these pictures were taken in the 1950s,

five and a half million of them
were nesting on just one of these islands.

The guanay lives exclusively
on anchovies and, oddly,

excretes an unusually high proportion
of the fish it eats as droppings or guano.

No rain falls here, so the guano wasn't
washed away but accumulated on the rocks.

100 years ago the world realised
that this was a fertiliser of unparalleled richness.

It was collected and sold for such high prices
that the guanay cormorant

became known
as the most valuable bird in the world.

But then, in the 1950s,
chemical fertilisers were developed in Europe,

the price of guano began to drop and the people
started to harvest not the guanay's droppings,

but its food: Anchovies.

In one year, 14 million tons of anchovies
were taken out of these waters.

They were sold not to feed people
but cattle, chickens and pets.

The fishing was so intense
that the anchovies were almost wiped out.

That in turn brought about the collapse
of the guanay cormorants' population.

And now for every 50 cormorants
that used to live here,

you're lucky if you find one.

And these walls that would be
filled with guano to the top inside two years,

now seldom accumulate more than an inch or so.

But the cormorants shed their guano
not only on the land but in the sea.

Indeed, for every drop they put on land,
they shed 20 into the sea.

There it fertilises water
just as it fertilises the land,

promoting the growth of floating plants,
plankton, the food of the anchovy.

So if you get less anchovies,
you get less cormorants,

and if you get less cormorants,
you get less anchovies.

Anchovies are food not just for cormorants
but for sea fish like tuna and sea bass.

So, with that one rash act
of overfishing 30 years ago,

Peru has lost anchovies,

cormorants, guano and sea fish.

It's a major blow to the nation's economy.

Nor do we seem to learn from our mistakes.

We're making similar catastrophic misjudgements,

and on an even greater scale,
in the world's tropical rainforests.

This, the richest of all living communities,
has been of enormous value to us.

It's provided industry with rubber,
craftsmen with hardwoods,

and our larders with bananas, nuts,
chewing gum and chocolate.

Many of our drugs are based
on animals and plants that live here.

And still we have only investigated in detail
the biochemistry of less than 1% of the plants.

And here, too, live some of the most beautiful
and bizarre creatures to be found anywhere.

These animals are the product
of millions of years of evolution in these forests

They can't live anywhere else. The numbers
of each species in a given area remains stable,

but over the past few centuries
one species of animal outside the forest

has suddenly started to increase in numbers
in a way that is without parallel.

In South-East Asia, as in South America
and Africa, thousands of extra people every year

are seeking land
on which to grow food for themselves.

They take it from the forest. The labour is huge.

After the trees have been felled and burnt,
the people sow their crops, in this case, hill rice.

After a month, it's as tall as this, and in only
five months it will be ready to be harvested,

and it will have been sustained by this,
the ash from the burnt forest.

But there are only enough nutrients in this
to sustain one crop.

So next year the people plant not rice but this,
cassava or tapioca, as it's called here.

This is a different crop, a root crop,
which gets nutrients from deeper in the soil,

but even this can only produce for one year.

After that, the seeds from the wild forest
will come in and new plants will grow,

producing a landscape like that.

But they will have to grow for eight to ten years
before they are big enough

to be felled and produce enough ash
and nutrients to refertilise the soil

and allow the people to take a second crop.

And the true forest, with all its original richness
of animals and plants, will never be restored.

It's not only the local people
who cut down the forest.

So, indirectly,
do the people of the developed world.

The huge trees are in perpetual demand

to provide timber for furniture,
for constructing buildings and crates

and above all for the paper for which
the world has an unquenchable appetite.

So a tree that took 200 years to grow
is now cut down by a chainsaw in five minutes.

The gigantic trunks,
which once could only be shifted by elephants

and only be extracted from forests
growing on flat country,

are now handled with terrifying ease
by modern machinery.

Sometimes only the biggest trees are taken,
leaving smaller ones standing,

but the damage is such
that the forest is largely beyond recovery.

As the international price of timber increases,
so more of the tropical forest is destroyed.

In South-East Asia, it's been reduced
to about a third of its original size,

and, in the world at large, an area the size
of Switzerland is being destroyed every year.

But this may be a ray of hope.

This is the fastest-growing tree in the world. It'
called Albizia and comes from eastern Indonesia,

and can be planted
immediately after the felling of the jungle.

In just one year it can grow
to 10 or 11 metres tall, 35 feet.

This one is some two years old and in only
another six years it will be ready for logging.

Albizia will grow well on the poor land
that once supported rainforest,

and many sawmills actually prefer small,
easily handled logs of uniform size.

So if it were possible to produce
this kind of timber on a really large scale,

it might no longer be necessary to continue

the extremely expensive and appallingly
destructive business of felling the wild trees.

And were that to happen,
then, in some parts of the world,

away from the coasts and the rivers,
in remote and mountainous country,

the tropical rainforest might still survive.

The great rivers of the world can also yield riches
to mankind, not simply food but power.

We've known for almost a century
how to turn the force of water into electric power

We've made mistakes. The dams have filled up
with silt and become useless within decades,

and fields downriver, robbed of their annual supply
of fertilising mud, have turned to desert.

But we're getting better at it,
and we're doing it on a greater scale.

This dam,
at Itaipu between Paraguay and Brazil,

will harness the power of one of South America's
greatest rivers, the Parana.

I am walking across
what was once the bed of that river.

And above me rises
the biggest dam ever built by man.

It contains enough concrete to construct
a whole city to house four million people.

It will make a lake
which will stretch upstream for 140 kilometres.

And the power it will produce
will be enough to supply the whole of Paraguay

and the great cities of southern Brazil:
Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro.

And the astonishing thing is
that it will have taken only seven years to build.

There will, of course, be a heavy price to pay.

44,000 people will have to be moved
and their villages and fields submerged,

fields that produce 200,000 tons of food a year,

and that will create further demands
on the rainforest.

Even so, this major reshaping
of the surface of the earth

is likely to be one of the less damaging
of those that mankind has inflicted on the planet.

A million trees of 50 species
will be planted around the lake

to prevent silt from washing into it.

The water will slowly clear
and develop a population of fish.

And the turbines will produce power
without poisoning the atmosphere

or leaving behind radioactive waste.

They will not deplete
the earth's irreplaceable reserves of fossil fuel,

and the dam will continue to produce electricity,
it's estimated, for the next 300 years.

The scale of this immense construction

is awe-inspiring evidence
of the power we now have in our hands

with which to transform the face of the earth.

When, in prehistoric times,
these stones were first put up to build this temple

in the west of England at Avebury, they too
must have been an astonishment to people,

an amazing demonstration of how clever,
how powerful, human beings had become.

And yet that was less than 5,000 years ago,
a mere moment in the history of life.

And in the brief period since then, men have
gone on to learn how to build dams like Itaipu,

how to mould animals and plants
to suit their needs or their fancies,

how to transform whole landscapes.

Immensely powerful though we are today,

it's equally clear that we're going to be
even more powerful tomorrow.

And there will be greater compulsion
to use our power

as the number of human beings on earth
increases still further.

Clearly, we could devastate the world.

If we're not to do so, we must have a plan.

A plan has been formulated
by environmental scientists.

They called it the World Conservation Strategy
and it rests on three simple propositions.

One: That we shouldn't so exploit
natural resources that we destroy them.

Common sense, you might think. Yet look
what we've done to the European herring,

the South American anchovy,
and are still doing to the whales.

Two: We shouldn't interfere with the basic
processes of the earth on which life depends,

in the sky, on the green surface of the earth
and in the sea.

And yet we go on pouring poisons into the sky,
cutting down the tropical rainforest,

dumping our rubbish into the oceans.

And third, that we should preserve
the diversity of life.

That's not just because we depend upon it
for our food, though we do,

nor because we still know so little about it
that we won't know what we are losing,

though that is the case as well,
but it is surely that we have no moral right

to destroy other living organisms
with which we share the earth.

As far as we know, the earth is the only place
in the universe where there is life.

Its continued survival now rests in our hands.