BBC Planet Earth The Future s01e01 Episode Script
Saving Species
NARRATOR: There have been few natural history films like it.
Planet Earth.
What a world we live in.
And what an experience it must have been to film it.
So why have the production team come away with mixed emotions? Filming Planet Earth has been a wonderful experience because we've been able to visit an extraordinary range of our planet, really, and it's been something of a bittersweet experience because, yes, we have seen some very threatened animals, you know, and that's always sad to see, but at the same time we've met some wonderful impassioned individuals who are doing a great deal on the ground to improve the situation for those particular species.
And also, you realise that there is an enormous amount of wilderness still out there.
NARRATOR: But for how long? Will those impassioned individuals that Alastair met be enough to save what remains of the world's threatened wildernesses and their animals and plants? How much will it matter to us if they are lost? What can we really do to save them? And in this new millennium, are we still going about it the right way? In this series, we'll put such questions to the decision-makers and conservationists on the ground.
We'll demonstrate that the environmental debate today has never been more important.
We have to make hard judgements about what investments will yield the biggest returns for conservation.
And that means we make choices about what species to invest in, and about what strategies make the most difference.
NARRATOR: Is it right that those strategies are usually drawn up by Westerners with money? I don't think that the conservation organisations, the giants of conservation, know better than the people who, historically, have been staying with wildlife.
NARRATOR: We'll use footage from Planet Earth to look at some of the world's most important wild places and what's been happening to them.
The situation in the Asian region in particular is extremely serious.
Nearly all of the natural rainforest has gone from several countries now, Thailand and the Philippines, and what remains in the big blocks, for example, in the Indonesian islands and New Guinea is now under serious threat, not least because of the huge consumption boom that's going on in China.
NARRATOR: We might know in our bones that that matters, but why? What, if anything, does wilderness actually do for us? We're getting a better understanding today of how there are some basic life-supporting services that the planet provides.
Fresh water is a classic example of that.
That if we don't put effort into conservation, we're not going to only make our lives worse, but it's also going to impact wildlife.
NARRATOR: Is this radically new understanding enough to make us all think again? And why are the world's religions suddenly getting involved? Wilderness always speaks to human beings of transcendence in the widest possible sense.
It says, ''You as a human being are part of a system ''which is not just about your needs and your concerns.
''Like it or not, you're part of something immense and very mysterious.
'' NARRATOR: Immense, mysterious and disappearing.
Disappearing as human society expands, develops.
But surely an aware society can learn to live sustainably.
The term ''sustainable development'' is a contradiction in terms.
We can have no kind of development.
We've gone much too far.
What we need is a sustainable retreat from the mess that we're now in.
Who's really going to go out there and pretend there isn't going to be development in human societies? Development in our own evolution as a species.
Development in the way we help poor people to live better, more dignified lives.
What kind of world is it in which there's going to be no development? Everything stops right now.
If you want to use these mountainous forests, for example, for the plantations to produce paper, or to produce building materials, you can.
But you do that at the risk of not having rivers flow, and not having rainfall.
It seems to me that the issue of conservation of the natural world is something which can unite humanity if people know enough about it.
Persuade them to change the way in which they behave, to change the view that gross materialism and the search of material wealth is not the only thing in life.
This is an opportunity for greatness which has never been offered to any civilisation, any generation in any civilisation in human history before.
To act as a generation to do the right thing.
If we fail to receive that opportunity, to act on it, then my feeling is we will become the most vilified generation that's ever lived in human history.
NARRATOR: Saving wilderness, saving ecosystems, saving the planet, saving humanity, for that matter, all have to start somewhere.
And one of the first, and saddest things that struck the crews who filmed these particular animals was that so many of them were threatened.
Our series begins with those animals and with what's being done to try and save them.
ATTENBOROUGH: The Amur leopard, the rarest cat in the world.
NARRATOR: The Amur leopard is rare all right.
So rare, so highly endangered, that the Planet Earth crew filming in the Russian Far East may turn out to have been the last humans ever to see a wild one.
They were shocked by the rarity of many species that they filmed for the series, not Just Amur leopards.
I just felt amazingly excited, incredibly privileged.
You know, you're aware that very few people in the world have seen this cat and there's a risk that not many people will see one in the future.
Here in this wilderness you have this group of animals, these wild Bactrian camels, don't know these animals exist.
And yet they're one of the most endangered large mammals on our planet.
We've been filming here for six weeks and we've got some remarkable footage, but anyone would have thought that this was a Shangri-la.
But sadly, that's not the case.
Several times during the trip, and the trip has been about six weeks, we've been woken in the middle of the night by gunshots.
I've lost count of the number of times I've visited a field station and worked with a scientist who says, ''Oh! I don't understand it.
'' You know, ''This place always yields this amphibian, that amphibian.
''It's the first time ever we can't find them.
'' And the overall sense is that amphibians are really, really collapsing.
I think we are faced probably with the extinction of at least half the world's frogs.
NARRATOR: Down beneath these clouds something drastic is happening.
This planet is unique in its solar system in supporting life, complicated life, animals.
But a lot of those animals are now in danger of dying out.
We have perhaps one in four mammals now on the threatened list, we have one third of all amphibians on the threatened list.
So we know that we are progressively pushing more and more species to the edge of extinction.
We have lost half of the world's forests, half of the world's wetlands, half of the world's grasslands.
We are systematically eradicating many of the habitats that make up the world's ecosystems.
If you just lose one species, it's probably not going to have a big impact.
At least nothing that you and I will recognise.
But if we continue to lose loads and loads and loads and loads of species, what we're actually saying is that the underlying fabric of nature is tearing.
And that tearing of that underlying fabric will have huge repercussions for the well-being of people who live within that environment.
Of course, scientists often spend a lot of their careers in one place, gaining immense detail.
As filmmakers we tend to travel the world, we just nip in for a week and nip out for a week.
But that does mean we get great overviews and one of the senses you definitely get as you travel the world is that amphibians are in collapse.
NARRATOR: Frogs were an important part of Planet Earth's Jungles programme, and the crew travelled extensively to film them.
ATTENBOROUGH: I've Just come back from Central America.
In one small area in Panama there were over 50 different species of frogs.
And they are very vulnerable because they are able to absorb substances through their skins, their moist skins, and thus are easily infected by fungi.
And there's a fungus moving up Panama which by next year will certainly have killed another two species.
NARRATOR: Frogs are becoming extinct throughout Central America, but what significance does that have? What do the inhabitants of Costa Rica think? The loss of a species should be a sad thing for everyone.
We already lost a very emblematic frog of Monteverde, the golden toad.
And that was the only place on Earth that it existed.
And it was a symbol of that forest, Cloud Forest.
It's lost and it's lost forever.
NARRATOR: The golden toad, like so many other species that have become extinct, were hit by the fungus.
So what is it? Has it always been around? There's been a lot of forensic work, obviously, to say, ''Well, where has the fungus come from?'' And it's now been traced back to the African clawed toad.
And it looks as if toads from South Africa were exported in the 1 930s in very large numbers to hospitals in the Western world because they're used as a biological indicator of human pregnancy.
And then presumably some have escaped, and once the fungus has got into the water systems, we're now still seeing the effects of its spread worldwide.
Whole frog communities are crashing, and on a global scale, out of something like 6,000 frog species altogether, now nearly one third are classified as endangered.
NARRATOR: In another forest, in a very remote part of Africa's Congo basin, the Planet Earth team filmed forest elephants.
Which are a little smaller than the better-known Savannah elephants, are less exposed and are presumably less likely to be killed for their tusks.
Cameraman Martyn Colbeck found that remoteness and vast, dense forest cover made almost no difference to the elephants' and other animals' vulnerability.
You go to these wonderful places on series like this, and it's always really sad and disappointing, you know, when you go to a place like this.
An extraordinary place, you see extraordinary animals, and you know that there are people out there shooting game for bush meat and if they came across elephants, they'd be poaching elephants as well for their ivory.
There's no doubt that if poaching becomes a serious problem, I mean, it can quickly wipe out a population.
I mean, we've seen that happen in remarkably short time frames.
Countries that had great elephant populations decade or two decades ago, almost completely wiped out 20 years later.
So, you know, poaching is not necessarily something that happens on the fringe.
If poachers move in and they're organised and it's for an external market rather than an immediate consumptive market, it can wipe out a population.
Last year we got 70 guns.
Six years ago, for example, we confiscated about ten.
The same with the snares here.
I mean, this is about 250 snares.
Last year, we confiscated 70,000.
And if you look at the devastation these snares cause in the forest I mean, they don't just get to the little blue duikers, or the medium-sized red duikers that they're intended for, they get leopards, they get gorillas, and chimpanzees.
Often you see chimpanzees walking around without hands, and those are the lucky ones.
Because that means that the hand just developed gangrene and fell off, whereas the others developed septicaemia from the infection and they die.
NARRATOR: It isn't Just barely-accessible deep forest that poachers have managed to penetrate.
In other parts of Africa there are other kinds of inaccessibility.
Among the towering cliffs, peaks and ridges of Ethiopia's Simien Highlands, the so-called Roof of Africa, the filmmakers also found problems.
Walia ibex, Ethiopia's national symbol.
They can exist in these precarious places, and they do.
But that's mainly because they have to.
The cliffs are something like a kilometre high and they're almost sheer, and that's where the walia ibex live.
And to see them in this enormous distance, way, way off there on these sheer cliffs is truly spectacular.
I tried to film them years and years ago for another series and they proved just too difficult.
The walia ibex were much wider spread at one time throughout the mountains of Ethiopia and are related to the ibexes of Europe.
But as humans have spread through Ethiopia and the environment has dried out, the walia ibex has been pushed into the most marginal habitats it can find and some of the last remaining places that humans can't get to are these incredible sheer cliffs.
And it's only just been with a lot of warfare in the last century in Ethiopia, the Italian invasion and then a big civil war, that the walia ibex became favourite food for soldiers.
The Simien mountains saw a huge amount of fighting through the 1 970s and 1 980s and in that period the easiest food for a very cold soldier would have been to take a shot at one of the walia ibex.
And so we saw the numbers decimated.
The one thing the walia has going for it is the habitat that it lives in, which is these sheer, sheer cliffs.
There's very few animals in the world that could live on precipices like the walia.
And so it has a little niche that it can cling to, but it's such a fragile situation.
I mean, 600 animals for a large mammal is just nothing.
And when you have no other habitats to spread into, no other populations to interbreed with, no walia ibex in captivity, you'd better be sure that you can protect that one last piece of cliff that they have.
NARRATOR: When you're trying to save a species from extinction, one of the first things you have to know is how close to extinction the species is, how many animals are actually left.
In the case of the high-profile walia ibex, counting is easy, and its would-be conservers know exactly what the problem is.
But in other mountains on another continent, in the case of a species that's distinctly low-profile, it's not so easy.
Pakistan.
The Himalayas.
This.
ATTENBOROUGH: The snow leopard, the rarest of Himalayan animals.
NARRATOR: The Planet Earth team spent months just trying to glimpse a snow leopard, and more months to film one.
How do you conserve a creature that you're lucky even to see? How do these scientists, or how do these conservationists, know where this animal is, how many they are and what their behaviour is? Someone told me that there were 3,000 between China and Afghanistan.
Now, I mean, we've had a very tough time identifying three.
There is a threat to its existence simply because not enough is known about it.
We really don't know where it thrives.
Because it's isolated, you expect that a lot of wildlife is there.
How much of it and what are the elements affecting it are unknown.
I was up there for two years, never saw one.
Following snow leopard tracks into the snow, and you'd come back in the evening and the snow leopard tracks were on top of ours.
So they were following us.
For such an elusive creature, what could possibly threaten it? Mostly, it's poaching.
It's mostly snares and people who are trapping the snow leopards either to provide their furs to Lhasa or to other parts of the world that can still use snow leopard skins, or from shepherds who are trying to protect their flocks.
MALIk: There isn't enough research.
It's brand-new almost.
It needs a lot more time and effort because the terrain that you're dealing with is anywhere between 1 0,000 feet to about 1 8,000 feet and access to those places is almost impossible, especially in winters.
NARRATOR: But even such a secretive animal in such a forbidding terrain can't entirely avoid poachers.
Everywhere the Planet Earth team filmed, poaching was going on.
In one case, a new threat appeared while they were filming.
ATTENBOROUGH: The Amazon is so large and rich in fish that it can support freshwater dolphins.
These botoes are huge, two and a half metres long.
We thought these animals were almost immortal.
They seemed to be going on forever and ever.
Every time we went out, we marked animals, and those animals were seen day after day, week after week, year after year.
And just in the last few years, we've suddenly noticed that animals which were being seen very regularly, have suddenly disappeared.
They're being killed because there's a new fishery for a type of catfish which hasn't been eaten in the Brazilian Amazon historically, but now that a market has opened up in Colombia And this catfish eats dead meat.
We've actually found three of our marked animals which have definitely been killed for this bait fishery.
I think the population is almost certainly declining now.
I'm a biologist and I try to be as dispassionate as I can but the fact is you do get to know them very intimately.
Last week I saw one give birth, only for the second time in my life.
And, of course, that stirs real emotions inside you.
This is a new life being created and at the same time, a few kilometres away there are people taking those same lives.
The fact is that humans and river dolphins don't mix.
They're all after the same resource, water and fish really.
It's inevitable that the dolphins come off worst.
NARRATOR: New reasons for poaching are only part of an array of new threats, many arising only in the past few years.
In the high Arctic, the Planet Earth team saw polar bears behaving in ways they'd never seen before.
Get your eye behind the viewfinder, the adrenaline starts rushing, you know you're recording something so unusual, something so amazing that really very few people have ever seen before, but you have to focus.
It's very rare to see a bear go after walruses and to actually physically jump on them and attack them, stalk them, to hunt them.
NARRATOR: Ten years ago, at the same time of year and at the same latitude, this, as filmed in a BBC wildlife special, was what polar bears were doing.
The sea was frozen and the bears were hunting less intimidating prey.
Not enormous walruses in defensive herds on dry land, but manageably small ringed seals out on the ice.
We are rapidly losing ice cover.
It is happening as we speak.
The ice cap is getting thinner and its extent is greatly reduced, and it is that ice cap which is the home of the polar bear.
And so they are finding that the places they are accustomed to breeding and the places they are accustomed to hunting are disappearing.
There's no doubt that people in Svalbard can see the ice breaking up.
They can see the glaciers retreating.
And that's a real, real problem for polar bears.
Polar bears are in deep trouble and there is lots of research to show that.
And there are two possibilities.
One, they go extinct as they try desperately to find ice, or they may go further south and come onto firm land.
And, of course, their habits will have to change greatly.
Maybe they will evolve to do that.
But it's got a very short time in which to do this.
If the projections that the polar ice cap will have disappeared within 50 years, we are expecting an awful lot in the way of habitat change, annual movement change, feeding habits, hunting techniques of a bear, and I think it's going to be very interesting to see if it can do that.
McNEELY: The estimates that we have is that we might lose 35% of them over the next 50 years.
And as that population starts to go down and their prey species move further out, it's going to be a real tough adaptation for the polar bear.
NARRATOR: So the planet's changing.
But hasn't the planet changed before? And haven't species always had to change with it or die out? Species after species of animal have been going extinct, but the crisis that we face now is that the rate of extinction is accelerating, and that it will really reach biblical proportions within a few decades.
We now face an extinction episode on this planet comparable to that which marked the end of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.
Largely driven by habitat change, driven by the release of pollution into the environment, by global warming.
All these things are combining in a series of forces that's likely to lead, if we don't take action very soon, to the extinction of a large proportion of this Earth's wildlife species.
SANJAYAN: When it comes to species extinction, we are able, through extraordinary means, to sometimes save the last of the last.
But they will never, never inhabit the range that they once inhabited.
So extinction itself is an issue that we might be able to, to some extent, deal with.
What we're not going to be able to deal with is the massive decline in populations of animals.
NARRATOR: The Planet Earth team experienced such a population crash.
Fifteen years ago, saiga antelope were filmed in their millions on the central Asian steppes for another BBC series.
Cameraman Martyn Colbeck remembers that occasion and the magnificence of the spectacle that he saw through the lens.
We came up to the top of this slight rise, and as we came over the top there was literally just a brown band from horizon to horizon.
They were a long way off and it was very heat hazy, but it was literally a band from horizon to horizon.
NARRATOR: The Planet Earth team wanted to film it again.
This was one of nature's mass migrations.
But to their horror, the spectacle had gone.
In the past 1 5 years, poachers in central Asia have reduced this huge population to nearly nothing.
No more spectacle.
In the 1 980s and the early 1 990s there were about a million saigas and then the break-up of Soviet Union happened and there was the collapse in the rural economy and people had no sort of food or income and they started to hunt the saigas.
And for the first time in 70 years, the border with China had opened and the saiga antelopes' horns that the males have are used in traditional Chinese medicine, and they're very valuable.
And obviously there was this massive market just waiting there.
And so there was also commercial hunting as well.
And within two or three years, at the end of the 1 990s, the saiga population had collapsed.
COLBECk: You Just never imagine that it's possible for all those animals to suddenly disappear.
And they now realistically face the possibility of extinction.
NARRATOR: So for their spectacular migration shots, the team had to go east, into a complete wilderness area.
ATTENBOROUGH: In the distant reaches of outer Mongolia one of the planet's great migrations is underway.
Few people ever see this extraordinary annual event.
Mongolian gazelle.
Two million are thought to live here.
NARRATOR: But what will happen to the gazelle in 1 5 years? And if they go the way of the saiga, will it matter? Should we concentrate only on the most important species? If so, which ones are the most important? WILSON: We need every species.
We need a great diversity of species.
We need every species because when you start decreasing the numbers of species, especially in an environment which is adapted to a high level of diversity, you start reducing the stability of the area.
I think that any extinction that is before its time matters.
But if one was to pick two groups, it's at the very top and the very bottom.
You know, the creatures that keep the planet going, and the big organisms that keep our souls and imaginations on fire.
The Tiger, probably the best-known poem in the English language, Blake's ''Tiger Tiger'', which every child can recite and every child understands what it means.
Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright In the forests of the night.
And they know that it's not Just dark forest.
It's to do with the pulse of life.
And if we lose these majestic creatures, with their sense of power and ancestry, and their possibility of power over us sometimes, then I think we are diminished by that, as well as the ecosystem.
If you go to a village in India and you start talking to them about saving the tiger, people will say to you, ''Look, how can you talk about saving the tiger when we've got starving people here?'' And I think the way conservation was developed over the last 50 years, we have focused our energy into trying to convince people that things like tigers are inherently important.
Ultimately, if our movement is not relevant to the lives of real people dealing with real issues then we're just going to be preaching to the choir.
My concern is the great indifference that most people have toward the species of lesser creatures that they never notice or dismiss as bugs and weeds, and that's where the bulk of life on Earth exists.
And when you magnify one of these organisms to human size, and approach it as an independent, highly-complicated entity on Earth, then you see it as the equal of a large mammal.
MABEY: The organisms that matter perhaps most of all are the plants.
Many of them are very unglamorous, hardworking, fantastically common, of course, without which there would be no way in which the energy of the sun was translated into available energy for all other organisms.
Each of these creatures plays a role in its ecosystem.
Some of those roles are quite important.
But if you think in terms of a brick wall, we are systematically knocking out bricks, and sooner or later the wall collapses.
NARRATOR: This is biodiversity, the planet's full, wide range of life forms, and it benefits every single species, including the human one.
How? The whole planet Earth is a system and we, human species, are only part, a very small part, of the systems.
There are literally millions of species out there.
We may not know them, we may not know their value, but we want to conserve them.
There are a very wide range of practical reasons as to why we need to conserve this planet's biodiversity.
For a start, all of our food ultimately derives from biological systems.
So do a lot of our medicines.
A lot of our industrial products are based upon chemicals that we've taken from nature, for example.
Biodiversity is very much part, therefore, of the global economy, very much part of our well-being.
I don't think there's a single compelling reason of an economic kind that compels us to preserve biological diversity.
But in so far as there are reasons, one says we want to preserve all these This gene pool because maybe we can use it.
Very human-centred.
Maybe we can be clever enough to just understand the molecules ourselves.
The second says we depend on the services ecosystems give.
Pollinating, cleaning water, and as we reduce the number of species we can't be sure they will continue to deliver those services.
Maybe we could be clever enough to live in an impoverished world.
The third reason is a straight ethical reason that says we have a responsibility of stewardship.
And how strong that is depends on the luxury you have to enJoy it.
We are getting an immense amount of value from wild creatures left alive and the more of them there are, the better job is done.
One estimate made in 1 997 was that the services provided to humanity, scot-free incidentally, by all those bugs and weeds and, you know, seemingly disposable birds and the like, was about 30 trillion dollars.
But in holding water in the watersheds, filtering it, purifying it, pollination, and cleansing the atmosphere, in restoring soil and on and on through the other ecosystem services, we are getting an immense amount of value.
We should have a lot of respect for the system, for the natural system, for the biodiversity.
Don't worry if you don't know what good they are for.
You didn't create it, so you don't know what it is for.
Just let it be.
Because, who knows, someday down the road, our future generations might find that they can survive because of that aspect of biodiversity.
NARRATOR: But if all species matter, and many, many are endangered, how do conservationists decide which to conserve first? I think, in this business, with limited resources, and with, frankly, an overabundance of critically-endangered species, we, inescapably, have to make choices.
We have to make hard Judgements about what investments will yield the biggest returns for conservation.
And that means we make choices about what species to invest in, and about what strategies make the most difference.
Generally speaking, what we spot are places where there are large numbers of endangered species together.
So to save one, typically means you save them all.
This is the basis of the ''hot spot'' concept of conservation.
NARRATOR: One of the hotter hot spots, a place with an intense concentration of species, is the Congo basin.
WWF's strategy here is to use anti-poaching patrols ostensibly to protect one species.
Elephants.
But because it's a hot spot, a lot of others get protection into the bargain.
This place is as special as any in all of central Africa.
It's really a jewel of the Congo basin.
You can't go anywhere and see animals like you can here.
We've got a team of 50 guards run by four unit chiefs.
And they are conducting patrols every day in the park and the reserve.
And we should really give thanks to nationals like those guards that are working every day here at Dzanga-Sangha to try and protect these animals.
They are doing an exceptional job under very harsh and unforgiving and thankless circumstances.
NARRATOR: Maybe they are.
But they're being paid by a large conservation organisation to do it.
Is that really a viable long-term solution? Is this the best way forward? Just maintaining this costly anti-poaching effort? If we don't keep these anti-poaching teams mobilised in the reserve on a daily basis, this amazing place, it's going to disappear in a matter of months, literally months.
NARRATOR: In Kenya, not everyone agrees that the large conservation organisations have all the best solutions.
Omar says, ''If I am the director or the person in charge ''of conservation of wildlife in this country, ''one, I will no longer depend on the rangers with bullets ''to protect wildlife.
'' But he is going to give the communities of this country who live with wildlife, he is going to make policies which allow the people themselves to be the protectors and the benefactors of wildlife.
NARRATOR: There is some evidence from another part of Africa, the Simien Highlands of Ethiopia, that solutions found from within are the only ones that will work in the long term.
When the walia ibex numbers got down to 1 50, it was when Ethiopians themselves started turning around saying, ''Hang on, this animal is so iconic to our culture, to our nation, we put it on flags, ''this is when we draw the line.
'' It really was the beginning of conservation generated from within Ethiopia and so since then, even in the last, say, 1 0 or 1 5 years, we've seen the number of walia ibex come back from about 1 50 to 600, and that's one of the best good-news stories that I've heard out of African conservation.
NARRATOR: The head count of the Amur leopard is much more disturbing.
Because of habitat loss and poaching, there are Just 30 left in the wild.
With extinction so close, conservation becomes desperate.
Here in New Orleans, at the Audubon Zoo, we have a pair of the Amur leopards and our long-term strategy with them is to work with what we call the Species Survival Plan.
It is a plan that is part of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, which is our, kind of, parent organisation here in the United States.
And the Amur leopard is one of the high-priority animals.
What's happened recently, and some of the work that we're doing involving cloning, has allowed us to now not necessarily take eggs and sperm, but we're able to take tissue samples from these animals, put this tissue sample into culture and where it was once maybe 1 00 cells, we can now grow thousands of cells.
And each one of those cells contains the complete copy of DNA of this animal.
So we can freeze these cells and, let's say, 50 years from now, scientists go into those liquid nitrogen containers and they pull out the DNA from tigers, Amur leopards, rhinos.
That DNA is alive and it's able to be used to produce embryos that then could result in babies, in offspring.
So, what I'm hoping we leave in our lifetime is this living library for the future.
For, 50 years from now, the scientists can say, ''Oh, my gosh, you know, we're about to lose ''this little rusty spotted cat from Sri Lanka or this Amur leopard.
''But you know what? We have the DNA.
We have the science behind this ''to be able to at least bring the numbers up of this species so they won't go extinct.
'' I think we have to be very careful about producing something which is a facsimile of a wild animal, from something which is able to exist in the wild.
And one of the problems of keeping animals in conventional zoos, the selective pressures are very great, and you're actually moving that animal towards domestication.
It may look the same, but it may not have the skills or the behavioural attributes or the physiology to survive in the wild.
You know, it's funny when people say we may be playing God, we may be controlling, we may be taking charge of, kind of, these species' destinies.
But, you know, man played God a long time ago.
I think, and I believe, God gave us stewardship over these animals, and what we're doing is using the capabilities that we have as humans to not destroy animals any longer, but to try to protect them, to preserve them, to bring them back.
Should we go to the extreme of thinking about captive-breeding programmes and, you know, storing embryos or germ cells from a particular species? I think that is something that we probably should do.
But it is not going to be anything more than the smallest fraction of what conservation really ought to be.
I guess my thinking is, someday we may have to populate another planet.
You know, if you look back a hundred years ago, we were in horses and buggies, and if somebody had said, ''Hey, we're going to be on the moon ''in a number of years before this next century is over,'' everybody would've laughed.
And in 1 96 3, where were we? We were on the moon.
So, if we try to look out 1 00 years from now, we are going to have technology that we can't even think about right now, but if we try to populate another planet, what better way than to take animals in some frozen form, perhaps, to the moon, to Mars? That's pretty futuristic thinking, but something's going to have to be done.
And what we do in the laboratory, I believe at least, is a safety net.
And so if we can't release animals back to the wild today because of our shrinking habitats, even though we'd like to, maybe there'll be another option some day.
NARRATOR: Tigers on the moon.
Well, well.
But the point is, it's tigers that are getting the attention.
Or leopards.
Or elephants.
Of all the endangered species, why do we always concentrate on the big, beautiful, charismatic ones? The good thing about doing species conservation is that when you latch on to charismatic species, often people sit up and realise that's going on.
And they will give money and they will write letters and they will take direct action in order to save it.
There is something about a panda that touches people and I can't tell you exactly what it is.
But it is something which just That reaches people at a different level than other species do.
And in that sense, it's a very important ambassador for the wild.
It is something that reminds people that they relate to the natural world, in some way that's beyond the clinical or statistical.
And I would say pandas, because of their charisma, also matter because they are such an effective symbol for conservation worldwide and because they draw so many people to that cause.
ATTENBOROUGH: I think you have to be very careful about Just making an appeal to the emotions.
The appeal should be to logic.
The appeal should be to rational thinking.
We might emotionally feel that small baby animals with big eyes and snub noses have a better case for survival than, say, fish.
That may or may not be the case, but it's not because we should feel emotionally attached to the one, and not emotionally attached to the other.
Our concentration on highly-endangered species, especially very glamorous, large endangered species, that's a morally tricky one, but probably politically sound.
If we were to let go of those creatures that figure so much in people's love of nature, figure so much in the historical imagination, as it were the people's favourites, then I think that the cause would be lost because I think it would be hard to make a case then for the defence of the stinging nettle which we need just as much.
Arguably, it's the little things, the invertebrates, the grotty things in the soil, that actually are more important to the functioning of ecosystems, but they attract less emotional resonance with us.
Given that we are going to lose species, I and others would like us to take a more analytic view, that we try to evaluate what will preserve the greatest amount of independent evolutionary history of life on Earth.
NARRATOR: The grasslands of Assam, India.
What is the focus of conservation here? Elephants? Rhinos? Tigers? No.
It's a tiny pig, the pygmy hog.
We chose the pygmy hog because it appealed, particularly to Gerry Durrell, as one of the little brown jobs that no one else was looking after.
And, of course, it turns out to be taxonomically unique and is well worth, on any criteria, specific effort to keep it alive in the wild.
Now, the pygmy hog is probably part of a large food chain of other predators.
Tigers undoubtedly eat them, pythons and things like that.
And I would argue that if you lose that pygmy hog, you lose that bite-sized pig, a lot of other things may suffer as well.
There is a very strong culture in all those range states of burning grasses every year.
Is it accidental? Is it deliberate management? And, of course, it's both.
In some ways we're having to play catch-up, I think, with some rather stereotyped old-fashioned views about burning grasslands.
If the stuff is tall and dead at the end of the dry season, if you burn it, then the green stuff comes up easier.
QED, it must be better.
Well, there's a huge cost to a lot of species of just burning the place.
Obviously, all your invertebrates, tortoises, pygmy hogs, all get roasted.
We've got to have a much more holistic view now about the management of those ecosystems.
NARRATOR: But people, poor people, burn the grassland to improve the grass, the grazing.
That's their livelihood.
Do we in the West, with the so-called solutions for conservation of wildlife in third world countries, put the needs of the wildlife before the needs of the people? Do pigs matter more than people? Will our solutions for the wildlife ever work if they're not solutions to poverty? I really worry about the progress we'll make as conservationists unless we start to deal with the poverty in these countries.
You just can't go to somebody who's trying to feed their children and talk about the conservation of a wolf or a whale.
It just doesn't mean anything.
And so we can deal with some of the symptoms and try and stick some Band-Aids on these last few pockets of environment, but it really is not going to be addressing the core problem, and that is the poverty that surrounds a lot of these environments.
You're not talking about the Western world, you're not talking about even Eastern cities, you're talking about remote villages.
And without these people coming into an economic cycle of some sort, where they benefit directly, indirectly, in any other way, these people are never going to be in a position to look after that animal.
And if they don't, you can't enforce it.
We people sitting outside cannot enforce something on a local who has to live with life and death every day.
You can't ask him to look to the future.
Wildlife mean different things to different people.
To the large-scale landowners, wildlife is an asset because they can crop it, they can trade in it, they can manage it.
It can become a very good laboratory for them to research on wildlife.
And to the small-scale holder, who have got a small plot and is trying to have some of these annual crops, wildlife is such a menace.
There's a fear of, you know, wildlife coming and destroying the crop which is a year's hard labour.
NARRATOR: So maybe in the end, conservation is only a wealthy Western concern, a luxury.
A fantasy, even.
Can we really believe that by investing money in some other animal species, we're going to save the planet? Save ourselves? When there are hungry humans out there, can we Justify spending money on wildlife conservation? You bet your life.
The expenditure of a few thousand, up to even a few million, if it can bring a species through, that has so much to give us, if we can keep it alive in every sphere of human consciousness, aesthetic, scientific, relation to the environment, yeah, that's a very good investment.
It's sure better an investment than conducting wars.
If you look at the amount of money that we've been able to generate for all kinds of other things, like invading Iraq, for example, now, what has that cost? What tiny proportion of that would it take to ensure that those species do in fact survive? Miniscule.
We're not talking huge amounts of money here.
We're talking about targeted investments, ways of ensuring that the welfare of the people who live around these species is also improved, so also developing the human capacity to conserve.
NARRATOR: It wasn't by design that the Planet Earth series featured a lot of animals that were critically endangered.
They were chosen because they represented something.
Migrating grazers, resourceful predators, each integral to a larger machine, an ecosystem.
The animals Just turned out to be endangered, too.
So what does it mean for their ecosystems? In our next programme, we'll be asking the experts about the health of the planet's working engines, the oceans, the forests, the tundra.
We'll look at what happens to them when their components die out, when the climate changes, when human societies grow out of control and elbow in.
We'll look at the future of ecosystems.
Planet Earth.
What a world we live in.
And what an experience it must have been to film it.
So why have the production team come away with mixed emotions? Filming Planet Earth has been a wonderful experience because we've been able to visit an extraordinary range of our planet, really, and it's been something of a bittersweet experience because, yes, we have seen some very threatened animals, you know, and that's always sad to see, but at the same time we've met some wonderful impassioned individuals who are doing a great deal on the ground to improve the situation for those particular species.
And also, you realise that there is an enormous amount of wilderness still out there.
NARRATOR: But for how long? Will those impassioned individuals that Alastair met be enough to save what remains of the world's threatened wildernesses and their animals and plants? How much will it matter to us if they are lost? What can we really do to save them? And in this new millennium, are we still going about it the right way? In this series, we'll put such questions to the decision-makers and conservationists on the ground.
We'll demonstrate that the environmental debate today has never been more important.
We have to make hard judgements about what investments will yield the biggest returns for conservation.
And that means we make choices about what species to invest in, and about what strategies make the most difference.
NARRATOR: Is it right that those strategies are usually drawn up by Westerners with money? I don't think that the conservation organisations, the giants of conservation, know better than the people who, historically, have been staying with wildlife.
NARRATOR: We'll use footage from Planet Earth to look at some of the world's most important wild places and what's been happening to them.
The situation in the Asian region in particular is extremely serious.
Nearly all of the natural rainforest has gone from several countries now, Thailand and the Philippines, and what remains in the big blocks, for example, in the Indonesian islands and New Guinea is now under serious threat, not least because of the huge consumption boom that's going on in China.
NARRATOR: We might know in our bones that that matters, but why? What, if anything, does wilderness actually do for us? We're getting a better understanding today of how there are some basic life-supporting services that the planet provides.
Fresh water is a classic example of that.
That if we don't put effort into conservation, we're not going to only make our lives worse, but it's also going to impact wildlife.
NARRATOR: Is this radically new understanding enough to make us all think again? And why are the world's religions suddenly getting involved? Wilderness always speaks to human beings of transcendence in the widest possible sense.
It says, ''You as a human being are part of a system ''which is not just about your needs and your concerns.
''Like it or not, you're part of something immense and very mysterious.
'' NARRATOR: Immense, mysterious and disappearing.
Disappearing as human society expands, develops.
But surely an aware society can learn to live sustainably.
The term ''sustainable development'' is a contradiction in terms.
We can have no kind of development.
We've gone much too far.
What we need is a sustainable retreat from the mess that we're now in.
Who's really going to go out there and pretend there isn't going to be development in human societies? Development in our own evolution as a species.
Development in the way we help poor people to live better, more dignified lives.
What kind of world is it in which there's going to be no development? Everything stops right now.
If you want to use these mountainous forests, for example, for the plantations to produce paper, or to produce building materials, you can.
But you do that at the risk of not having rivers flow, and not having rainfall.
It seems to me that the issue of conservation of the natural world is something which can unite humanity if people know enough about it.
Persuade them to change the way in which they behave, to change the view that gross materialism and the search of material wealth is not the only thing in life.
This is an opportunity for greatness which has never been offered to any civilisation, any generation in any civilisation in human history before.
To act as a generation to do the right thing.
If we fail to receive that opportunity, to act on it, then my feeling is we will become the most vilified generation that's ever lived in human history.
NARRATOR: Saving wilderness, saving ecosystems, saving the planet, saving humanity, for that matter, all have to start somewhere.
And one of the first, and saddest things that struck the crews who filmed these particular animals was that so many of them were threatened.
Our series begins with those animals and with what's being done to try and save them.
ATTENBOROUGH: The Amur leopard, the rarest cat in the world.
NARRATOR: The Amur leopard is rare all right.
So rare, so highly endangered, that the Planet Earth crew filming in the Russian Far East may turn out to have been the last humans ever to see a wild one.
They were shocked by the rarity of many species that they filmed for the series, not Just Amur leopards.
I just felt amazingly excited, incredibly privileged.
You know, you're aware that very few people in the world have seen this cat and there's a risk that not many people will see one in the future.
Here in this wilderness you have this group of animals, these wild Bactrian camels, don't know these animals exist.
And yet they're one of the most endangered large mammals on our planet.
We've been filming here for six weeks and we've got some remarkable footage, but anyone would have thought that this was a Shangri-la.
But sadly, that's not the case.
Several times during the trip, and the trip has been about six weeks, we've been woken in the middle of the night by gunshots.
I've lost count of the number of times I've visited a field station and worked with a scientist who says, ''Oh! I don't understand it.
'' You know, ''This place always yields this amphibian, that amphibian.
''It's the first time ever we can't find them.
'' And the overall sense is that amphibians are really, really collapsing.
I think we are faced probably with the extinction of at least half the world's frogs.
NARRATOR: Down beneath these clouds something drastic is happening.
This planet is unique in its solar system in supporting life, complicated life, animals.
But a lot of those animals are now in danger of dying out.
We have perhaps one in four mammals now on the threatened list, we have one third of all amphibians on the threatened list.
So we know that we are progressively pushing more and more species to the edge of extinction.
We have lost half of the world's forests, half of the world's wetlands, half of the world's grasslands.
We are systematically eradicating many of the habitats that make up the world's ecosystems.
If you just lose one species, it's probably not going to have a big impact.
At least nothing that you and I will recognise.
But if we continue to lose loads and loads and loads and loads of species, what we're actually saying is that the underlying fabric of nature is tearing.
And that tearing of that underlying fabric will have huge repercussions for the well-being of people who live within that environment.
Of course, scientists often spend a lot of their careers in one place, gaining immense detail.
As filmmakers we tend to travel the world, we just nip in for a week and nip out for a week.
But that does mean we get great overviews and one of the senses you definitely get as you travel the world is that amphibians are in collapse.
NARRATOR: Frogs were an important part of Planet Earth's Jungles programme, and the crew travelled extensively to film them.
ATTENBOROUGH: I've Just come back from Central America.
In one small area in Panama there were over 50 different species of frogs.
And they are very vulnerable because they are able to absorb substances through their skins, their moist skins, and thus are easily infected by fungi.
And there's a fungus moving up Panama which by next year will certainly have killed another two species.
NARRATOR: Frogs are becoming extinct throughout Central America, but what significance does that have? What do the inhabitants of Costa Rica think? The loss of a species should be a sad thing for everyone.
We already lost a very emblematic frog of Monteverde, the golden toad.
And that was the only place on Earth that it existed.
And it was a symbol of that forest, Cloud Forest.
It's lost and it's lost forever.
NARRATOR: The golden toad, like so many other species that have become extinct, were hit by the fungus.
So what is it? Has it always been around? There's been a lot of forensic work, obviously, to say, ''Well, where has the fungus come from?'' And it's now been traced back to the African clawed toad.
And it looks as if toads from South Africa were exported in the 1 930s in very large numbers to hospitals in the Western world because they're used as a biological indicator of human pregnancy.
And then presumably some have escaped, and once the fungus has got into the water systems, we're now still seeing the effects of its spread worldwide.
Whole frog communities are crashing, and on a global scale, out of something like 6,000 frog species altogether, now nearly one third are classified as endangered.
NARRATOR: In another forest, in a very remote part of Africa's Congo basin, the Planet Earth team filmed forest elephants.
Which are a little smaller than the better-known Savannah elephants, are less exposed and are presumably less likely to be killed for their tusks.
Cameraman Martyn Colbeck found that remoteness and vast, dense forest cover made almost no difference to the elephants' and other animals' vulnerability.
You go to these wonderful places on series like this, and it's always really sad and disappointing, you know, when you go to a place like this.
An extraordinary place, you see extraordinary animals, and you know that there are people out there shooting game for bush meat and if they came across elephants, they'd be poaching elephants as well for their ivory.
There's no doubt that if poaching becomes a serious problem, I mean, it can quickly wipe out a population.
I mean, we've seen that happen in remarkably short time frames.
Countries that had great elephant populations decade or two decades ago, almost completely wiped out 20 years later.
So, you know, poaching is not necessarily something that happens on the fringe.
If poachers move in and they're organised and it's for an external market rather than an immediate consumptive market, it can wipe out a population.
Last year we got 70 guns.
Six years ago, for example, we confiscated about ten.
The same with the snares here.
I mean, this is about 250 snares.
Last year, we confiscated 70,000.
And if you look at the devastation these snares cause in the forest I mean, they don't just get to the little blue duikers, or the medium-sized red duikers that they're intended for, they get leopards, they get gorillas, and chimpanzees.
Often you see chimpanzees walking around without hands, and those are the lucky ones.
Because that means that the hand just developed gangrene and fell off, whereas the others developed septicaemia from the infection and they die.
NARRATOR: It isn't Just barely-accessible deep forest that poachers have managed to penetrate.
In other parts of Africa there are other kinds of inaccessibility.
Among the towering cliffs, peaks and ridges of Ethiopia's Simien Highlands, the so-called Roof of Africa, the filmmakers also found problems.
Walia ibex, Ethiopia's national symbol.
They can exist in these precarious places, and they do.
But that's mainly because they have to.
The cliffs are something like a kilometre high and they're almost sheer, and that's where the walia ibex live.
And to see them in this enormous distance, way, way off there on these sheer cliffs is truly spectacular.
I tried to film them years and years ago for another series and they proved just too difficult.
The walia ibex were much wider spread at one time throughout the mountains of Ethiopia and are related to the ibexes of Europe.
But as humans have spread through Ethiopia and the environment has dried out, the walia ibex has been pushed into the most marginal habitats it can find and some of the last remaining places that humans can't get to are these incredible sheer cliffs.
And it's only just been with a lot of warfare in the last century in Ethiopia, the Italian invasion and then a big civil war, that the walia ibex became favourite food for soldiers.
The Simien mountains saw a huge amount of fighting through the 1 970s and 1 980s and in that period the easiest food for a very cold soldier would have been to take a shot at one of the walia ibex.
And so we saw the numbers decimated.
The one thing the walia has going for it is the habitat that it lives in, which is these sheer, sheer cliffs.
There's very few animals in the world that could live on precipices like the walia.
And so it has a little niche that it can cling to, but it's such a fragile situation.
I mean, 600 animals for a large mammal is just nothing.
And when you have no other habitats to spread into, no other populations to interbreed with, no walia ibex in captivity, you'd better be sure that you can protect that one last piece of cliff that they have.
NARRATOR: When you're trying to save a species from extinction, one of the first things you have to know is how close to extinction the species is, how many animals are actually left.
In the case of the high-profile walia ibex, counting is easy, and its would-be conservers know exactly what the problem is.
But in other mountains on another continent, in the case of a species that's distinctly low-profile, it's not so easy.
Pakistan.
The Himalayas.
This.
ATTENBOROUGH: The snow leopard, the rarest of Himalayan animals.
NARRATOR: The Planet Earth team spent months just trying to glimpse a snow leopard, and more months to film one.
How do you conserve a creature that you're lucky even to see? How do these scientists, or how do these conservationists, know where this animal is, how many they are and what their behaviour is? Someone told me that there were 3,000 between China and Afghanistan.
Now, I mean, we've had a very tough time identifying three.
There is a threat to its existence simply because not enough is known about it.
We really don't know where it thrives.
Because it's isolated, you expect that a lot of wildlife is there.
How much of it and what are the elements affecting it are unknown.
I was up there for two years, never saw one.
Following snow leopard tracks into the snow, and you'd come back in the evening and the snow leopard tracks were on top of ours.
So they were following us.
For such an elusive creature, what could possibly threaten it? Mostly, it's poaching.
It's mostly snares and people who are trapping the snow leopards either to provide their furs to Lhasa or to other parts of the world that can still use snow leopard skins, or from shepherds who are trying to protect their flocks.
MALIk: There isn't enough research.
It's brand-new almost.
It needs a lot more time and effort because the terrain that you're dealing with is anywhere between 1 0,000 feet to about 1 8,000 feet and access to those places is almost impossible, especially in winters.
NARRATOR: But even such a secretive animal in such a forbidding terrain can't entirely avoid poachers.
Everywhere the Planet Earth team filmed, poaching was going on.
In one case, a new threat appeared while they were filming.
ATTENBOROUGH: The Amazon is so large and rich in fish that it can support freshwater dolphins.
These botoes are huge, two and a half metres long.
We thought these animals were almost immortal.
They seemed to be going on forever and ever.
Every time we went out, we marked animals, and those animals were seen day after day, week after week, year after year.
And just in the last few years, we've suddenly noticed that animals which were being seen very regularly, have suddenly disappeared.
They're being killed because there's a new fishery for a type of catfish which hasn't been eaten in the Brazilian Amazon historically, but now that a market has opened up in Colombia And this catfish eats dead meat.
We've actually found three of our marked animals which have definitely been killed for this bait fishery.
I think the population is almost certainly declining now.
I'm a biologist and I try to be as dispassionate as I can but the fact is you do get to know them very intimately.
Last week I saw one give birth, only for the second time in my life.
And, of course, that stirs real emotions inside you.
This is a new life being created and at the same time, a few kilometres away there are people taking those same lives.
The fact is that humans and river dolphins don't mix.
They're all after the same resource, water and fish really.
It's inevitable that the dolphins come off worst.
NARRATOR: New reasons for poaching are only part of an array of new threats, many arising only in the past few years.
In the high Arctic, the Planet Earth team saw polar bears behaving in ways they'd never seen before.
Get your eye behind the viewfinder, the adrenaline starts rushing, you know you're recording something so unusual, something so amazing that really very few people have ever seen before, but you have to focus.
It's very rare to see a bear go after walruses and to actually physically jump on them and attack them, stalk them, to hunt them.
NARRATOR: Ten years ago, at the same time of year and at the same latitude, this, as filmed in a BBC wildlife special, was what polar bears were doing.
The sea was frozen and the bears were hunting less intimidating prey.
Not enormous walruses in defensive herds on dry land, but manageably small ringed seals out on the ice.
We are rapidly losing ice cover.
It is happening as we speak.
The ice cap is getting thinner and its extent is greatly reduced, and it is that ice cap which is the home of the polar bear.
And so they are finding that the places they are accustomed to breeding and the places they are accustomed to hunting are disappearing.
There's no doubt that people in Svalbard can see the ice breaking up.
They can see the glaciers retreating.
And that's a real, real problem for polar bears.
Polar bears are in deep trouble and there is lots of research to show that.
And there are two possibilities.
One, they go extinct as they try desperately to find ice, or they may go further south and come onto firm land.
And, of course, their habits will have to change greatly.
Maybe they will evolve to do that.
But it's got a very short time in which to do this.
If the projections that the polar ice cap will have disappeared within 50 years, we are expecting an awful lot in the way of habitat change, annual movement change, feeding habits, hunting techniques of a bear, and I think it's going to be very interesting to see if it can do that.
McNEELY: The estimates that we have is that we might lose 35% of them over the next 50 years.
And as that population starts to go down and their prey species move further out, it's going to be a real tough adaptation for the polar bear.
NARRATOR: So the planet's changing.
But hasn't the planet changed before? And haven't species always had to change with it or die out? Species after species of animal have been going extinct, but the crisis that we face now is that the rate of extinction is accelerating, and that it will really reach biblical proportions within a few decades.
We now face an extinction episode on this planet comparable to that which marked the end of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.
Largely driven by habitat change, driven by the release of pollution into the environment, by global warming.
All these things are combining in a series of forces that's likely to lead, if we don't take action very soon, to the extinction of a large proportion of this Earth's wildlife species.
SANJAYAN: When it comes to species extinction, we are able, through extraordinary means, to sometimes save the last of the last.
But they will never, never inhabit the range that they once inhabited.
So extinction itself is an issue that we might be able to, to some extent, deal with.
What we're not going to be able to deal with is the massive decline in populations of animals.
NARRATOR: The Planet Earth team experienced such a population crash.
Fifteen years ago, saiga antelope were filmed in their millions on the central Asian steppes for another BBC series.
Cameraman Martyn Colbeck remembers that occasion and the magnificence of the spectacle that he saw through the lens.
We came up to the top of this slight rise, and as we came over the top there was literally just a brown band from horizon to horizon.
They were a long way off and it was very heat hazy, but it was literally a band from horizon to horizon.
NARRATOR: The Planet Earth team wanted to film it again.
This was one of nature's mass migrations.
But to their horror, the spectacle had gone.
In the past 1 5 years, poachers in central Asia have reduced this huge population to nearly nothing.
No more spectacle.
In the 1 980s and the early 1 990s there were about a million saigas and then the break-up of Soviet Union happened and there was the collapse in the rural economy and people had no sort of food or income and they started to hunt the saigas.
And for the first time in 70 years, the border with China had opened and the saiga antelopes' horns that the males have are used in traditional Chinese medicine, and they're very valuable.
And obviously there was this massive market just waiting there.
And so there was also commercial hunting as well.
And within two or three years, at the end of the 1 990s, the saiga population had collapsed.
COLBECk: You Just never imagine that it's possible for all those animals to suddenly disappear.
And they now realistically face the possibility of extinction.
NARRATOR: So for their spectacular migration shots, the team had to go east, into a complete wilderness area.
ATTENBOROUGH: In the distant reaches of outer Mongolia one of the planet's great migrations is underway.
Few people ever see this extraordinary annual event.
Mongolian gazelle.
Two million are thought to live here.
NARRATOR: But what will happen to the gazelle in 1 5 years? And if they go the way of the saiga, will it matter? Should we concentrate only on the most important species? If so, which ones are the most important? WILSON: We need every species.
We need a great diversity of species.
We need every species because when you start decreasing the numbers of species, especially in an environment which is adapted to a high level of diversity, you start reducing the stability of the area.
I think that any extinction that is before its time matters.
But if one was to pick two groups, it's at the very top and the very bottom.
You know, the creatures that keep the planet going, and the big organisms that keep our souls and imaginations on fire.
The Tiger, probably the best-known poem in the English language, Blake's ''Tiger Tiger'', which every child can recite and every child understands what it means.
Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright In the forests of the night.
And they know that it's not Just dark forest.
It's to do with the pulse of life.
And if we lose these majestic creatures, with their sense of power and ancestry, and their possibility of power over us sometimes, then I think we are diminished by that, as well as the ecosystem.
If you go to a village in India and you start talking to them about saving the tiger, people will say to you, ''Look, how can you talk about saving the tiger when we've got starving people here?'' And I think the way conservation was developed over the last 50 years, we have focused our energy into trying to convince people that things like tigers are inherently important.
Ultimately, if our movement is not relevant to the lives of real people dealing with real issues then we're just going to be preaching to the choir.
My concern is the great indifference that most people have toward the species of lesser creatures that they never notice or dismiss as bugs and weeds, and that's where the bulk of life on Earth exists.
And when you magnify one of these organisms to human size, and approach it as an independent, highly-complicated entity on Earth, then you see it as the equal of a large mammal.
MABEY: The organisms that matter perhaps most of all are the plants.
Many of them are very unglamorous, hardworking, fantastically common, of course, without which there would be no way in which the energy of the sun was translated into available energy for all other organisms.
Each of these creatures plays a role in its ecosystem.
Some of those roles are quite important.
But if you think in terms of a brick wall, we are systematically knocking out bricks, and sooner or later the wall collapses.
NARRATOR: This is biodiversity, the planet's full, wide range of life forms, and it benefits every single species, including the human one.
How? The whole planet Earth is a system and we, human species, are only part, a very small part, of the systems.
There are literally millions of species out there.
We may not know them, we may not know their value, but we want to conserve them.
There are a very wide range of practical reasons as to why we need to conserve this planet's biodiversity.
For a start, all of our food ultimately derives from biological systems.
So do a lot of our medicines.
A lot of our industrial products are based upon chemicals that we've taken from nature, for example.
Biodiversity is very much part, therefore, of the global economy, very much part of our well-being.
I don't think there's a single compelling reason of an economic kind that compels us to preserve biological diversity.
But in so far as there are reasons, one says we want to preserve all these This gene pool because maybe we can use it.
Very human-centred.
Maybe we can be clever enough to just understand the molecules ourselves.
The second says we depend on the services ecosystems give.
Pollinating, cleaning water, and as we reduce the number of species we can't be sure they will continue to deliver those services.
Maybe we could be clever enough to live in an impoverished world.
The third reason is a straight ethical reason that says we have a responsibility of stewardship.
And how strong that is depends on the luxury you have to enJoy it.
We are getting an immense amount of value from wild creatures left alive and the more of them there are, the better job is done.
One estimate made in 1 997 was that the services provided to humanity, scot-free incidentally, by all those bugs and weeds and, you know, seemingly disposable birds and the like, was about 30 trillion dollars.
But in holding water in the watersheds, filtering it, purifying it, pollination, and cleansing the atmosphere, in restoring soil and on and on through the other ecosystem services, we are getting an immense amount of value.
We should have a lot of respect for the system, for the natural system, for the biodiversity.
Don't worry if you don't know what good they are for.
You didn't create it, so you don't know what it is for.
Just let it be.
Because, who knows, someday down the road, our future generations might find that they can survive because of that aspect of biodiversity.
NARRATOR: But if all species matter, and many, many are endangered, how do conservationists decide which to conserve first? I think, in this business, with limited resources, and with, frankly, an overabundance of critically-endangered species, we, inescapably, have to make choices.
We have to make hard Judgements about what investments will yield the biggest returns for conservation.
And that means we make choices about what species to invest in, and about what strategies make the most difference.
Generally speaking, what we spot are places where there are large numbers of endangered species together.
So to save one, typically means you save them all.
This is the basis of the ''hot spot'' concept of conservation.
NARRATOR: One of the hotter hot spots, a place with an intense concentration of species, is the Congo basin.
WWF's strategy here is to use anti-poaching patrols ostensibly to protect one species.
Elephants.
But because it's a hot spot, a lot of others get protection into the bargain.
This place is as special as any in all of central Africa.
It's really a jewel of the Congo basin.
You can't go anywhere and see animals like you can here.
We've got a team of 50 guards run by four unit chiefs.
And they are conducting patrols every day in the park and the reserve.
And we should really give thanks to nationals like those guards that are working every day here at Dzanga-Sangha to try and protect these animals.
They are doing an exceptional job under very harsh and unforgiving and thankless circumstances.
NARRATOR: Maybe they are.
But they're being paid by a large conservation organisation to do it.
Is that really a viable long-term solution? Is this the best way forward? Just maintaining this costly anti-poaching effort? If we don't keep these anti-poaching teams mobilised in the reserve on a daily basis, this amazing place, it's going to disappear in a matter of months, literally months.
NARRATOR: In Kenya, not everyone agrees that the large conservation organisations have all the best solutions.
Omar says, ''If I am the director or the person in charge ''of conservation of wildlife in this country, ''one, I will no longer depend on the rangers with bullets ''to protect wildlife.
'' But he is going to give the communities of this country who live with wildlife, he is going to make policies which allow the people themselves to be the protectors and the benefactors of wildlife.
NARRATOR: There is some evidence from another part of Africa, the Simien Highlands of Ethiopia, that solutions found from within are the only ones that will work in the long term.
When the walia ibex numbers got down to 1 50, it was when Ethiopians themselves started turning around saying, ''Hang on, this animal is so iconic to our culture, to our nation, we put it on flags, ''this is when we draw the line.
'' It really was the beginning of conservation generated from within Ethiopia and so since then, even in the last, say, 1 0 or 1 5 years, we've seen the number of walia ibex come back from about 1 50 to 600, and that's one of the best good-news stories that I've heard out of African conservation.
NARRATOR: The head count of the Amur leopard is much more disturbing.
Because of habitat loss and poaching, there are Just 30 left in the wild.
With extinction so close, conservation becomes desperate.
Here in New Orleans, at the Audubon Zoo, we have a pair of the Amur leopards and our long-term strategy with them is to work with what we call the Species Survival Plan.
It is a plan that is part of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, which is our, kind of, parent organisation here in the United States.
And the Amur leopard is one of the high-priority animals.
What's happened recently, and some of the work that we're doing involving cloning, has allowed us to now not necessarily take eggs and sperm, but we're able to take tissue samples from these animals, put this tissue sample into culture and where it was once maybe 1 00 cells, we can now grow thousands of cells.
And each one of those cells contains the complete copy of DNA of this animal.
So we can freeze these cells and, let's say, 50 years from now, scientists go into those liquid nitrogen containers and they pull out the DNA from tigers, Amur leopards, rhinos.
That DNA is alive and it's able to be used to produce embryos that then could result in babies, in offspring.
So, what I'm hoping we leave in our lifetime is this living library for the future.
For, 50 years from now, the scientists can say, ''Oh, my gosh, you know, we're about to lose ''this little rusty spotted cat from Sri Lanka or this Amur leopard.
''But you know what? We have the DNA.
We have the science behind this ''to be able to at least bring the numbers up of this species so they won't go extinct.
'' I think we have to be very careful about producing something which is a facsimile of a wild animal, from something which is able to exist in the wild.
And one of the problems of keeping animals in conventional zoos, the selective pressures are very great, and you're actually moving that animal towards domestication.
It may look the same, but it may not have the skills or the behavioural attributes or the physiology to survive in the wild.
You know, it's funny when people say we may be playing God, we may be controlling, we may be taking charge of, kind of, these species' destinies.
But, you know, man played God a long time ago.
I think, and I believe, God gave us stewardship over these animals, and what we're doing is using the capabilities that we have as humans to not destroy animals any longer, but to try to protect them, to preserve them, to bring them back.
Should we go to the extreme of thinking about captive-breeding programmes and, you know, storing embryos or germ cells from a particular species? I think that is something that we probably should do.
But it is not going to be anything more than the smallest fraction of what conservation really ought to be.
I guess my thinking is, someday we may have to populate another planet.
You know, if you look back a hundred years ago, we were in horses and buggies, and if somebody had said, ''Hey, we're going to be on the moon ''in a number of years before this next century is over,'' everybody would've laughed.
And in 1 96 3, where were we? We were on the moon.
So, if we try to look out 1 00 years from now, we are going to have technology that we can't even think about right now, but if we try to populate another planet, what better way than to take animals in some frozen form, perhaps, to the moon, to Mars? That's pretty futuristic thinking, but something's going to have to be done.
And what we do in the laboratory, I believe at least, is a safety net.
And so if we can't release animals back to the wild today because of our shrinking habitats, even though we'd like to, maybe there'll be another option some day.
NARRATOR: Tigers on the moon.
Well, well.
But the point is, it's tigers that are getting the attention.
Or leopards.
Or elephants.
Of all the endangered species, why do we always concentrate on the big, beautiful, charismatic ones? The good thing about doing species conservation is that when you latch on to charismatic species, often people sit up and realise that's going on.
And they will give money and they will write letters and they will take direct action in order to save it.
There is something about a panda that touches people and I can't tell you exactly what it is.
But it is something which just That reaches people at a different level than other species do.
And in that sense, it's a very important ambassador for the wild.
It is something that reminds people that they relate to the natural world, in some way that's beyond the clinical or statistical.
And I would say pandas, because of their charisma, also matter because they are such an effective symbol for conservation worldwide and because they draw so many people to that cause.
ATTENBOROUGH: I think you have to be very careful about Just making an appeal to the emotions.
The appeal should be to logic.
The appeal should be to rational thinking.
We might emotionally feel that small baby animals with big eyes and snub noses have a better case for survival than, say, fish.
That may or may not be the case, but it's not because we should feel emotionally attached to the one, and not emotionally attached to the other.
Our concentration on highly-endangered species, especially very glamorous, large endangered species, that's a morally tricky one, but probably politically sound.
If we were to let go of those creatures that figure so much in people's love of nature, figure so much in the historical imagination, as it were the people's favourites, then I think that the cause would be lost because I think it would be hard to make a case then for the defence of the stinging nettle which we need just as much.
Arguably, it's the little things, the invertebrates, the grotty things in the soil, that actually are more important to the functioning of ecosystems, but they attract less emotional resonance with us.
Given that we are going to lose species, I and others would like us to take a more analytic view, that we try to evaluate what will preserve the greatest amount of independent evolutionary history of life on Earth.
NARRATOR: The grasslands of Assam, India.
What is the focus of conservation here? Elephants? Rhinos? Tigers? No.
It's a tiny pig, the pygmy hog.
We chose the pygmy hog because it appealed, particularly to Gerry Durrell, as one of the little brown jobs that no one else was looking after.
And, of course, it turns out to be taxonomically unique and is well worth, on any criteria, specific effort to keep it alive in the wild.
Now, the pygmy hog is probably part of a large food chain of other predators.
Tigers undoubtedly eat them, pythons and things like that.
And I would argue that if you lose that pygmy hog, you lose that bite-sized pig, a lot of other things may suffer as well.
There is a very strong culture in all those range states of burning grasses every year.
Is it accidental? Is it deliberate management? And, of course, it's both.
In some ways we're having to play catch-up, I think, with some rather stereotyped old-fashioned views about burning grasslands.
If the stuff is tall and dead at the end of the dry season, if you burn it, then the green stuff comes up easier.
QED, it must be better.
Well, there's a huge cost to a lot of species of just burning the place.
Obviously, all your invertebrates, tortoises, pygmy hogs, all get roasted.
We've got to have a much more holistic view now about the management of those ecosystems.
NARRATOR: But people, poor people, burn the grassland to improve the grass, the grazing.
That's their livelihood.
Do we in the West, with the so-called solutions for conservation of wildlife in third world countries, put the needs of the wildlife before the needs of the people? Do pigs matter more than people? Will our solutions for the wildlife ever work if they're not solutions to poverty? I really worry about the progress we'll make as conservationists unless we start to deal with the poverty in these countries.
You just can't go to somebody who's trying to feed their children and talk about the conservation of a wolf or a whale.
It just doesn't mean anything.
And so we can deal with some of the symptoms and try and stick some Band-Aids on these last few pockets of environment, but it really is not going to be addressing the core problem, and that is the poverty that surrounds a lot of these environments.
You're not talking about the Western world, you're not talking about even Eastern cities, you're talking about remote villages.
And without these people coming into an economic cycle of some sort, where they benefit directly, indirectly, in any other way, these people are never going to be in a position to look after that animal.
And if they don't, you can't enforce it.
We people sitting outside cannot enforce something on a local who has to live with life and death every day.
You can't ask him to look to the future.
Wildlife mean different things to different people.
To the large-scale landowners, wildlife is an asset because they can crop it, they can trade in it, they can manage it.
It can become a very good laboratory for them to research on wildlife.
And to the small-scale holder, who have got a small plot and is trying to have some of these annual crops, wildlife is such a menace.
There's a fear of, you know, wildlife coming and destroying the crop which is a year's hard labour.
NARRATOR: So maybe in the end, conservation is only a wealthy Western concern, a luxury.
A fantasy, even.
Can we really believe that by investing money in some other animal species, we're going to save the planet? Save ourselves? When there are hungry humans out there, can we Justify spending money on wildlife conservation? You bet your life.
The expenditure of a few thousand, up to even a few million, if it can bring a species through, that has so much to give us, if we can keep it alive in every sphere of human consciousness, aesthetic, scientific, relation to the environment, yeah, that's a very good investment.
It's sure better an investment than conducting wars.
If you look at the amount of money that we've been able to generate for all kinds of other things, like invading Iraq, for example, now, what has that cost? What tiny proportion of that would it take to ensure that those species do in fact survive? Miniscule.
We're not talking huge amounts of money here.
We're talking about targeted investments, ways of ensuring that the welfare of the people who live around these species is also improved, so also developing the human capacity to conserve.
NARRATOR: It wasn't by design that the Planet Earth series featured a lot of animals that were critically endangered.
They were chosen because they represented something.
Migrating grazers, resourceful predators, each integral to a larger machine, an ecosystem.
The animals Just turned out to be endangered, too.
So what does it mean for their ecosystems? In our next programme, we'll be asking the experts about the health of the planet's working engines, the oceans, the forests, the tundra.
We'll look at what happens to them when their components die out, when the climate changes, when human societies grow out of control and elbow in.
We'll look at the future of ecosystems.