Sir David Attenborough Reflects on Earth Day

I just wonder what you think of kind of being inside, unable to go outside and celebrate Earth Day, and all the changes that our planet's seen, certainly since you were born. Yes, indeed. I mean, the world has been transformed, and I've been extraordinarily lucky in that I've been filming the natural world since the 1950s, and so I've got video documentation of how it looked to me when I was in my early 30s. And it was a different world altogether. I could see things that nobody else had filmed before, certainly. I could travel into places where hardly anybody had ever been before. It was a marvellous, pristine world, and it was rich, and yet, of course, it was still being depleted. Had I been there 50 years before that, I would have seen even greater things, but now what I realise, of course, looking back now, is how the world has become poisoned and depleted, and is wrecked, really, from many points of view, and that there are dangers on the horizon. Let me ask you, before I go back, because you're right, you know, in your lifespan, I mean, you're 93 years old. That's a well-known fact. I'm not being indiscreet. And as you say, you've seen these massive transformations. But I led into this, and surely you obviously have been on top of it as well, by talking about the incredible blue skies, the lack of carbon and pollution in our air, the cleaner waters right now. We've seen animals roaming around as if it was still a natural world in highways and streets of urban centres. Do you think, wow, look at what could happen if we put our minds to it? Yes, very much so. And particularly in this glorious weather. Of course, I'm locked in, as we say, so I don't get out, even though I'm close to one of the loveliest parks in Greater London, in the Richmond Park. I can't go there, I'm supposed to stay at home, which is what I'm doing. But the skies are so blue, the birdsong is so loud, and I can hear it over because there's no aeroplanes. I mean, I live quite close to London Airport, and normally I wouldn't be able to talk for longer than 90 seconds or so before a drone of an aeroplane came by. Now it's an event to see an aeroplane in the sky, and I can hear the birdsong. But also the air is purer, and when you hear reports of fish coming back into the Venice canals and so on, you realise the world is actually changing, and that change is being forced upon us. The question is, are we going to be strong enough to keep these changes, to do what's needed to retain these improvements in the years to come when we've got over this particular hump?