BBC Planet Earth The Future s01e02 Episode Script
Into The Wilderness
NARRATOR: Planet Earth, the most ambitious natural history series the BBC has ever made, was filmed in many parts of the world seldom seen by people.
These wilderness areas can be stunningly beautiful and are certainly vital sanctuaries for wildlife.
But are they even more than that? This programme will explore the deeper importance of wilderness.
It will ask how it serves us now and why it isn't Just virgin territory waiting for an ever-expanding humanity to take it over.
Planet Earth showed Africa's Okavango Delta as it's never been seen before.
ATTENBOROUGH: As the water sweeps into the Okavango a vast area of the Kalahari is transformed into a fertile paradise.
A lush water world.
NARRATOR: And no humans in sight.
Is that what wilderness means? Well, wilderness is a concept that really has been developed a lot in Western society, recognising that there are certain places that have either very low human populations or are entirely devoid of people.
It's not a concept that necessarily has spread worldwide, yet it's something that I think is increasingly becoming important on an evermore overcrowded planet.
NARRATOR: Overcrowded? This programme will ask if population is the greatest threat to wilderness.
It can't be coincidence that it shrinks as humanity grows.
Ignoring population strikes me as the biggest own goal that the environment movement has ever scored.
I would argue the bigger threat is effectively the growth in our economy and the way we use our wealth.
NARRATOR: And with growing economies, we ask if a wilderness will still be protected if it turns out to contain a valuable resource like oil.
Oil and natural gas production in the north slope of Alaska under modern technology will have a tiny environmental footprint.
We can do it in modern technology.
We should do it.
To open ANWR to exploration and drilling would not be criminal, but it's the closest thing I can imagine to being criminal.
NARRATOR: We'll discover that the environmental debate has never been more heated, and not Just at the political level.
Think about it this way, if you had to decide to keep a tree standing or feed one of your children, what would you do? NARRATOR: Despite everything, there are still vast wildernesses.
For instance, the Boreal forest.
ATTENBOROUGH: This vast forest circling the globe contains a third of all the trees on Earth and produces so much oxygen it changes the composition of the atmosphere.
NARRATOR: So how much of our planet is still covered with wilderness? In fact, there is a figure.
A couple of years ago, Russ Mittermeier conducted the study that produced it.
So there are a lot of places out there that have very few people.
You have to recognise that about a third of that is ice.
I mean, Antarctica is huge.
Antarctica is about 1 4 million square kilometres, which is about one and a half times the size of the United States.
But the other two thirds, places like Amazonia and a number of other wilderness areas, also have very low human populations.
And they're rich in biodiversity, they're rich in life forms.
NARRATOR: That means that, Antarctica aside, only a quarter of the Earth's land surface is still wilderness.
We've changed most of the planet and certain types of forest have been the most damaged.
This is the kind of forest that used to characterise Europe.
Now there's Just one tiny fragment left on the border of Poland and Belarus.
LINFIELD: We went to Bialowieza on Planet Earth because it's the original primeval forest in Europe.
And perhaps 6,000, 7,000 years ago, almost all of Europe would have looked like Bialowieza looks now.
Of course, today Bialowieza, it's a tiny little forest, but it gives us an idea of what most of Europe once looked like.
NARRATOR: And despite its obvious importance, even this final fragment of forest is under threat.
There is still activity which is destroying the forest.
This kind of activity is logging, for example.
If you check satellite pictures on the Polish side of the border, you'll see big damage caused by the logging in the forest.
To stop it, we need some action, like creating big national park on the both sides of the border.
Bialowieza forest doesn't belong just to Poland, just the Polish nation, it's world treasure with many rare species, wolf, European bison, rare species of birds.
And there should be international effort to protect Bialowieza forest because some wrong decisions can really destroy this treasure.
NARRATOR: It's not Just Europe that's losing what's left of its forest.
The demand for timber and pasture has an impact everywhere.
Over the last 300 years we've lost about half of the world's forest, but the pattern of loss has been very different so much of the earlier period of loss covered the temperate forests, in both the north and the south, especially in Europe and North America.
More recently, we are finding we're losing tropical forests at a much quicker rate than previously.
NARRATOR: The Amazon forest, for instance, is still coming down.
It's losing an area the size of Switzerland every year.
MITTERMEIER: Disappearance of wilderness varies tremendously from place to place.
Even within the Amazon region certain portions are still in very good condition and are likely to be maintained over at least the next few decades.
Whereas other portions are really under the gun and are rapidly, as we speak, being converted for other uses, like cattle pasture.
And they've now come up with varieties of soy that can be grown in the Amazon.
So you're seeing, in certain places in the southern and southeastern Amazon, parts of the central Amazon, you're seeing very rapid conversion.
On the other hand, in the northern extremes, magnificent wilderness areas with very, very few people living in them.
I believe that if any tropical rainforest areas remain intact 1 00 years from now, it's going to be in that very northern portion of Amazonia.
So, even within one wilderness area, there's a great deal of variability in terms of the degree of loss.
NARRATOR: So how much wilderness, right now, is actually legally protected? McNEELY: Well, right now we have about 1 2% of the land cover as protected areas, and you might say, ''Well, okay, is 1 2% enough?'' And the answer to that is, it all depends.
If we manage the rest of the landscape in a thoughtful way, If we overuse and if we abuse the rest of the landscape, NARRATOR: Protected areas can't Just be enclosures.
Often the same big, charismatic animals that inspired the creation of the areas need to venture outside them to find food and water.
ATTENBOROUGH: Driven on by thirst, they march hundreds of miles across the parched plains.
Relying on memory, the matriarchs lead their families to those special water holes that saved them in previous years.
You know, one of the great challenges of conservation in Africa We're all attracted to these really huge species, elephants, lions, giraffe, and the problem with conservation for such very large animals is they need enormous amounts of space.
And at the best, where the animals can concentrate in the highest densities, you still need on the order of 1 5,000 square kilometres of habitat to be able to sustain one of those truly viable populations of lions.
If you have your elephants in areas, they are even bigger than that, they still tend to wander way outside of those.
So you need enormous areas.
NARRATOR: But the larger the area set aside for wide-ranging animals, the harder the area is to patrol.
Less than 1,000 Bactrian camels remain in the vast expanse of the Gobi desert.
In such a wilderness, why so few? The Planet Earth team found them suspiciously elusive.
They're about three or four kilometres away.
They spotted us from that distance and that's going to be our real problem, getting close to these animals.
They're capable of spotting us from about five kilometres, and running for 70k's in the opposite direction so this is what's going to make this filming incredibly difficult.
When you work in wildlife, you know that when an animal runs from a human, you know there's a reason why, and it's because it's being threatened by humans.
Now, what's strange about the Gobi in Mongolia is that it's vast and nobody lives there.
But animals don't run from humans without good cause and I found out just talking to people when we were out there that humans do go in there.
They go in there in four-wheel drives with guns and they try to chase down the camels.
NARRATOR: Even in a huge wilderness, a small number of people can cause big problems.
Wild dogs are in trouble even though they have enough space and they're not hunted by humans.
The wild dogs are one of the most endangered mammals in Africa and actually for a surprising reason.
They aren't directly hunted and they still have enough habitat, just about, but they have been in contact with humans and their pets.
And the main reason for their decline is that they have caught diseases from domestic dogs.
Things like canine distemper and this has caused a massive population collapse.
PACkER: Out here, there's almost no veterinary services whatsoever.
Dogs are companion animals and they have names, people look after them, but there's really not a family budget for vaccinating dogs against basic diseases like rabies, distemper.
And so the wild dogs, if one animal in the pack gets distemper, everybody else comes and sniffs and gets sneezed on and, you know, gets the disease.
They all drop dead.
NARRATOR: Craig Packer and his colleagues came up with a solution.
Vaccinate domestic dogs to protect the wild ones.
We were able to design a vaccination programme that effectively created a cordon sanitaire around the Serengeti, a vaccination zone, that separated the disease from the wildlife.
And it turned out to be a rare example of a win-win situation conservation because the local people were very pleased to have their dogs vaccinated.
Rabies is a serious threat to human life out here, and when we told them that it was good for the wildlife, they thought that was great, too, because they knew that tourists came out here to see the animals of the Serengeti.
So it wasn't like you're telling someone you're doing something wrong.
It's like, ''Well, look, if this helps you, it helps the wildlife as well.
'' NARRATOR: Where there is plenty of space, animals and people often can live together.
But more and more people are moving into wilderness areas, pushing wildlife out of the way.
In Ethiopia, people and their farms are moving relentlessly up the Simien mountains.
In the Simien Highlands in particular, we're finding that agriculture is encroaching higher and higher up the mountains and barley is now being grown at about 3,500 metres.
That doesn't leave much space for the remaining habitat there and the remaining wildlife, much of which is very endemic in that part of the world.
ATTENBOROUGH: These summits, nearly three miles up, are home to some very remarkable mountaineers.
Gelada baboons.
They are unique to the highlands of Ethiopia.
(BABOONS CHATTERING) NARRATOR: But gelada baboons are running out of space.
As farms encroach into the Ethiopian highlands, the areas of alpine grass are shrinking and the gelada numbers are still okay at the moment, but you will get a situation where gelada are getting squeezed because their natural grasslands are shrinking and the only thing left is barley crops.
And we're starting to see this now, a much greater increase in human-gelada conflict where the baboons are going into barley fields raiding barley because they've run out of their preferred alpine grasses.
NARRATOR: The Simien problem exists because Ethiopia's human population is expanding.
So is the ultimate problem for wilderness worldwide that there are simply too many people? One thing that's always worried me about the environment movement for the last 30 years, is their inability to get their heads around the importance of population.
I find it staggering that that is still downgraded as an issue.
There's a sense it's somehow politically incorrect to talk about population.
But the issue of population lies absolutely at the heart of the destruction of the natural world today.
If we had to find a way of creating a sustainable future for a billion people, I can assure you it would be a great deal simpler and a lot better for the natural world than trying to find a solution for six billion people, let alone nine billion people, which will be the population of this planet by the middle of this century, by 2050.
So, ignoring population strikes me as the biggest own goal that the environment movement has ever scored.
I wouldn't like to, so to speak, to push the problem off onto overpopulation in the way that has sometimes been fashionable.
You know, people saying, ''Well, the real problem about the environment ''is that there are too many people in Africa and India,'' usually.
In other words, it's not about us.
So, overpopulation has to be seen as a global issue, not just something that we can tell other people to do something about.
Many people try to blame population as the major threat to our ecosystems.
I personally don't agree with that.
The population today is six billion people, roughly.
It's likely to go up to between eight and ten billion people by 2050, so about a 50% increase in the numbers of people.
Over that same time frame, the economic growth in the world is likely to be a factor of four.
So the threat to the environment is a combination of the number of people and their consumer patterns.
And their consumer patterns are driven very largely by their economic wealth.
And so it's not simply an issue of numbers of people.
It's the numbers of people and to what degree can they buy biological resources, energy resources, use water, etcetera.
So I would argue the bigger threat is effectively the growth in our economy and the way we use our wealth.
It is how we live on the planet, not just our total numbers, that really makes the essential difference.
If we all live on this planet the way Americans currently live, we would need three planets to support the Earth's current population.
NARRATOR: The trouble is that much of the rest of the world wants to live and spend like Americans.
The conventional view is that the economy is there to produce goods and services and the more we produce and consume, the better off we'll be.
But there's a lot of evidence to show that that's not really the case.
Consumption of goods and services only improves people's sense of satisfaction up to a fairly low threshold, beyond which it becomes counterproductive in terms of their long-term wellbeing.
Our focus on consumption is a form of psychological Junk food.
It's something that makes us feel good temporarily but in the end it makes us unhealthy.
NARRATOR: Still, consumerism would have less impact on the planet if there weren't so many people.
There are six billion of us now.
How many should there be? When one tries to get at a number, my guess is somewhere between 500 million people and one billion, no more than that.
I think that the Earth can safely support in a sustainable way, at a reasonable standard of living, about half of what it has today.
And I think that that would make people happier and it would certainly make the planet happier.
We'd have more diversity, we'd have plenty of productivity, we'd be able to maintain our cultural diversity and the world would be a much more sustainable place.
Now, choosing how to get from where we are to where we need to be is the crunch.
NARRATOR: So we Just halve the world's population.
Realistically, ethically, how? Actually, if you look at the world today, there is a fantastically good story to be told about population, which is when countries get on top of family planning, learn how to provide that magic combination of literacy and better healthcare for women and for girls, and to provide access to a range of contraceptives, that's what it comes down to.
That's what good family planning is all about.
There need be no coercion involved, there need be no intrusions onto human rights, there need be none of the cruelty that has happened in some countries.
This can be done.
NARRATOR: That may seem simple but can birth rates come down evenly, everywhere? What about Africa? PACkER: Asia, Latin America, their population rates have slowed down to the point that's getting closer to what we're used to in Europe and North America.
But Africa, family size is still very large.
Economic security is still very low, so there's an incentive for people to have very large families, and these are families that require basic natural resources for their subsistence.
So the impact of people on the natural world is still growing quite strikingly here.
NARRATOR: If Africans were better off, they might have fewer children, but those children would be able to consume more.
So where's the environmental gain? Africans have thrived on this continent for very many years without aeroplanes, without trains, without skyscrapers, without all the modern development that we think when we look at the West, that's what development means.
To me, development means staying alive, having a quality of life.
Not so much a life that is surrounded by goods, things, but a life where you can live in a clean and a healthy environment, where you can drink clean water.
Half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day.
This is totally and utterly unacceptable.
So we need economic growth, we need pro-poor economic growth.
But then what we need to couple with that is to make sure that as the demand for energy increases, that it's climate friendly, it's friendly to the local environment, it's friendly to water.
So the challenge for us, then, is how do we use our resources when they're used in the most sustainable manner possible.
ATTENBOROUGH: This river has cut the world's longest canyon system.
A 1,000 mile scar, clearly visible from space.
NARRATOR: As population grows, one of the first resources to come under pressure is fresh water.
For example, the mighty Colorado River that carved out the Grand Canyon isn't very mighty anymore.
WOMAN: Well, the Colorado actually is no longer reaching the sea in most years, and this is a very clear sign that the health of the river is in pretty bad shape.
And so there's a disconnection of ecological service here.
That river's job is to deliver fresh water and nutrients and sediment to deltas, and they're no longer doing that work and that has an implication for the species that live there.
And so, in the case of the Colorado, we see signs of diminishing productivity in the fisheries in the Upper Gulf of California.
We've gone about meeting these human needs in a very simple way, which is every time we need more water, we go out and find it.
We tap another river, we build another dam, we tap more groundwater and take more out of the natural world.
NARRATOR: Like almost every other big river in the world, the Colorado has been dammed.
You know, just 50 years ago, around 1 950, we had 5,000 large dams around the world.
Today we have 45,000 large dams around the world.
Which means we've been building two large dams every day for half a century.
So this is a very, very large change in the hydrologic environment.
NARRATOR: And dams don't always stop at generating electricity.
They also extract water for irrigation.
POSTEL: We have to take a lot of water out of the natural world in order to put it on cropland.
And this land is really important to us.
We do get 40% of our food from irrigated land, even though that land makes up less than 20% of the whole crop land base.
So it's really important land, but it requires that we intervene in a maJor way into the hydrologic cycle.
70% of all the water we take out of rivers, lakes, aquifers, goes to irrigation, so it consumes the lion's share of the water that we're taking out of the natural world.
NARRATOR: So is there really enough fresh water for six billion people and their crops? I think the good news on some of the water scarcity problems that we have, the shortages of water that we talk about, is that a lot of the shortage, a lot of the scarcity, is really all about waste and mismanagement.
And so it's not necessarily that there's not enough water, it's that we're not using it wisely enough.
NARRATOR: And water's not the only resource that people would like to raid the wilderness for.
ATTENBOROUGH: Every year, three million caribou migrate across the Arctic tundra.
Some herds travel over 2,000 miles a year in search of fresh pastures.
This is the longest overland migration made by any animal.
NARRATOR: It's not the caribou people want to exploit.
In fact, caribou and their conservation rather get in the way.
No, it's what's under the animals' hooves, oil and gas.
The US Congress is under pressure to allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR.
Oil and natural gas production in the north slope of Alaska under modern technology will have a tiny environmental footprint, especially in comparison to the oil and gas development we see elsewhere in the world, sponsored by many countries hostile to the interests of democratic states.
In the US we have the most stringent safety laws.
We have the most stringent environmental protection requirements, and, once oil and gas production is done, the most stringent reclamation requirements.
So we basically, like hikers and campers, leave no trace when we're done.
We can do it in modern technology.
We should do it.
MITTERMEIER: My personal opinion is that it's not going to resolve our oil issues.
We would be much better off just engaging in more serious conservation, better energy use, looking at a whole range of alternatives.
Simply drilling for oil in one of the last wilderness blocks in our country is I think it's foolish, given the range of other options that are out there, and I would be very sad and actually embarrassed as an American were it to take place.
We should absolutely be drilling for oil in ANWR.
It's the most promising reserve in the United States that we have right now.
You're talking about an area that's 2,000 acres out of 1 9 million acres, over 1 9 million acres.
Potentially 1 0.
4 billion barrels of oil there.
It's not going to have any detrimental impact on the caribou.
Again, it's all so much environmental scaremongering.
In reality, we can drill for oil in ANWR and not harm the environment.
To open ANWR to exploration and drilling would not be criminal, but it's the closest thing I can imagine to being criminal.
NARRATOR: In a way, it's encouraging that there's even a debate about drilling on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
Very few people would see the operation or have their lives disturbed by it, which means there's an obJection to the idea of violating such a pristine place.
It's obviously important to many people to know that there are still unspoiled wilderness areas like the Arctic and Antarctic as shown in Planet Earth.
One of the wonderful things about Antarctica is the silence, actually.
It's often very, very, very quiet.
You never hear a combustion engine, which is a hard thing to do on most of our planet.
You also feel terribly small, the scale of everything, the scale of the ice, and the ability for the weather to change so dramatically from one day.
It can be a beautiful sunlit day one day and then suddenly, often within a matter of hours, you're actually in real danger from the weather.
In a sense, it makes man very much back in their place.
Their role in nature is put right by being in Antarctica.
NARRATOR: All of nature puts humans in their place because their place is in nature.
I think for many people, maybe all people at some level, there is something about the wonder of nature, that nature in its infinite variety and its infinite mystery, and I think that's important.
It touches people in their souls.
WILLIAMS: I think that one of the things wilderness says to us is that nature is not Just there for us to be comfortable in.
There's an element of the world around us, a profound element, and an extensive element, that is just there.
It's there for its own sake.
It is what it is.
And, in that sense, I think 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.
'' There is a very interesting relationship between wilderness and sacredness.
All the great monastic traditions, whether that's Christian, Buddhist or Daoist, all find their roots in an experience of their founders going into the desert, into the wilderness, onto the mountains and finding there something that civilisation cannot give them.
A realisation about themselves, about nature, about the divine.
In Daoism, for example, the symbol of someone who has achieved enlightenment is that of a human being alone on a mountain.
It's that sense that you are in front of something greater than yourself.
NARRATOR: Professor Wilson has coined a term for the innate human love of nature.
He calls it ''biophilia''.
There's a lot of evidence that human beings need life, they are attracted to life forms, to diversity, that a lot of their culture is drawn from the emotional response they have to living forms in nature.
I think if you look at children, you will see, right from the very, very earliest age, an interest and an excitement about the natural world and their surroundings.
It's in our nature to be concerned about the nature of life around us and to be fascinated by it.
And sadly, I think, some people lose touch with that initial love of the natural world around them altogether.
But if they do, it's a major loss.
NARRATOR: We may love the natural world through our innate biophilia but why should we really care if it disappears? What do wildernesses actually do for us in practical terms? Well, really, in many ways one of the biggest values of wilderness is the fact that they provide enormous ecosystem services for the planet.
Just simple watershed protection, the hydrological cycles.
You look at the Amazon region.
About 20% of the world's water runs through Amazonia.
And you cut down that forest and the impacts We're not exactly sure what the impacts are going to be, but you can be sure that it's going to be huge.
NARRATOR: Often, with people and forests, it's a case of ''You don't know what you've got till it's gone''.
When their environment degrades, they are unable to meet some of their most basic needs, such as the need for firewood, the need for clean drinking water, the need for food, nutritious food.
And when people are able to understand that these basic needs can easily be met by the resources in the environment, then they are more willing to work with you.
NARRATOR: And once people realise what wilderness provides for them, they may be willing to pay for its services.
The country of Costa Rica, in Central America, has come up with this concept of forests as water factories, and they're actually paying farmers who are letting their pasture land go back into forest for the water services that are being provided by these forests.
NARRATOR: So is this scheme in Costa Rica effective? Is farmland really returning to forest? SL Yes.
(SPEAkING IN SPANISH) Ulises says that he once had pasture lands that were being used to raise cattle, obviously, and he now has had the land under forestry recovery for 20 years.
The trees that he has now on this land, that used to be pasture land, are 20 centimetres in girth.
So he has seen his forest grow.
NARRATOR: It's a win-win situation.
The forest is growing back and the farmers make money.
(SPEAkING IN SPANISH) LEON: We earn a living.
We survive through the forests by way of the payments that we're getting to protect it.
So we know that it's a source of life for us, but it is also a source of life, he says, for many other organisms that live in this world.
NARRATOR: But if the payment scheme didn't exist, would Ulises be tempted to cut down the forest? (SPEAkING IN SPANISH) LEON: It would be a very sad decision, says Ulises, if I had to cut down the forest.
It would be a very sentimental decision for me.
But think about it this way, if you had to decide to keep a tree standing or feed one of your children, what would you do? NARRATOR: So while the scheme continues the payments are ensuring that forests survive outside national parks.
The amount of national parks, as such, are around 800,000 hectares and we have 500,000 hectares in forests for environmental services.
That means that about 60% of additional forest, beyond the national parks, are being kept under this scheme.
NARRATOR: That's all very well, but who pays for all this? Well, right now there are some companies that are charging an extra fee for the water bill you pay in order to compensate for the people that decide to maintain the forest.
If you depend on having clean water every day in your household for all the many uses we have, any small increase in the fare that you pay for water to make sure that the watersheds are kept in good shape is like paying insurance.
NARRATOR: So people in Costa Rica recognise the service that forests provide and are willing to pay for it.
And you could try to speculate on how much money all nature's goods and services are worth, things like fresh water, clean air, food.
One estimate made in 1 997 by economists and biologists was that the services provided humanity, scot-free incidentally, by all those bugs and weeds and, you know, possibly seemingly disposable birds and like was about, at that time, it was about 30 trillion dollars.
I've been hugely impressed by some of those economists who do these incredible calculations about how much it would cost us to do something if nature didn't do it for us for free.
So you get these sort of multibillion or multitrillion dollar assessments of what would happen if bees and other insects stopped pollinating for us, for instance, which is the one I really like because nobody actually thinks very much about pollination as a gift from nature.
But if they all stopped doing it, okay, they just went on strike, and we had to do it by human intervention, by man-made means, well, you look at the price tag for that and it's x-hundred billion dollars, or whatever it might be and you think, ''Whoa! Well, that's nice.
'' So our entire productive food enterprise is being subsidised by nature.
And it's only when you shove that price sign under some people's eyes that they think, ''Whoa, maybe this natural world is a bit more useful to us than we thought it was.
'' People want to know, ''What's in it for me? How much is it worth?'' And so the conservation movement, which has tended to be an ethical movement, has also started to look much more at the economic values of conservation and of biodiversity.
And we're finding surprising things about how valuable the ecosystems of the world are for the services they deliver to people.
ATTENBOROUGH: Most tropical shallows are barren, but these coral havens contain one quarter of all the marine life on our planet.
NARRATOR: Calculating the value of a place may help conserve it.
So if one takes reefs for instance, the money value in terms of the productivity of that area, the biological diversity, the value to local communities of that place as a breeding centre for fish, whatever it might be, for tourism and so on.
Stick a money value on it and then say to people, ''How smart do you think you're gonna be if you destroy that ''for a fraction of the ongoing economic value of that asset, ''that resource, over years and years?'' That may make a difference in the minds of some decision-makers who think that short-term liquidation of natural assets is the answer, when, really, long-term management of those assets gives a much better economic return.
NARRATOR: A price tag may help conserve a place, but can it really reflect the true value of a wilderness? I think to the extent that we begin to give it a monetary value we at least provide the signal that it is worth something and we should be careful about whether we decide to put it into another use.
The danger I see in putting a monetary value on particular ecosystems, or pieces of ecosystems, is that then you can compare that number to another one when it's almost impossible to come up with a number that really fully takes into account the total value.
NARRATOR: One trouble with putting a price tag on wildernesses is that people aren't always as practical as they think they are.
They can appreciate something's value and destroy it anyway.
ATTENBOROUGH: Krill, shrimp-like creatures.
By weight, they are the most abundant animals on the planet.
A single swarm can contain two million tons of them.
And that is a lot of fish food.
The shallow temperate seas support the greatest concentrations of fish on our planet.
Huge shoals migrate from their overwintering grounds in the depths to feed in these rich waters.
NARRATOR: All those fish, all that food.
The seas shown in Planet Earth are obviously valuable beyond comprehension.
They may seem infinite but these vast oceans can be damaged by Just a small amount of pollution, and that may harm us.
Everybody has always said, ''The solution to pollution is dilution.
'' So, if these things Any of these bad substances get into the ocean, they're hugely diluted down and therefore are harmless.
And that's quite right, they are.
But then a totally insidious thing happens.
They get picked up in the oils of plankton, particularly of diatoms, these little single-celled plants of which the ocean is composed.
If you are eating an animal like a swordfish, for example, and that animal is at about the sixth level of the food pyramid, that means there is ten-to-the-sixth, a million times concentration of what was in the water around it.
So that means that when you take If you ate a pound of swordfish, for example, you would be eating all of the pollutants which had been collected in a million pounds, five hundred tons, of diatoms.
That's a real problem.
NARRATOR: And in certain parts of the world, that's a particular problem.
So, for example, any woman of childbearing age, if she is nursing her infant in that tenderest of all mammalian acts, what she is actually doing is dumping her lifetime's accumulation of pollutants into that infant.
And if her milk was in containers other than her breasts, she would not be allowed to take it across a state line.
It's too polluted.
Now that exists.
That's something people have to concern themselves with.
We can dodge that bullet as a species by simply feeding formula to our children.
Not an option for a whale.
So the only conclusion you can draw is that these pollutants, as they build higher, are going to bring species to extinction.
That's a problem.
NARRATOR: Another type of pollution is affecting the natural world, too.
Greenhouse gases are changing the climate and that transforms wildernesses.
FOTHERGILL: I'd originally been to Antarctica to make Life in the Freezer about 1 2 years ago.
And there's absolutely no doubt that you can really see a number of changes.
Undoubtedly, Antarctica looks warmer.
It's greener than it was 1 0 years ago.
NARRATOR: Wildernesses are also moving as the climate changes.
Over the last, say 1 0, 20 years, it's been very easy to see climate change in Ethiopia, in that as the country's been drying out, we've seen vegetation levels rising up the mountains.
In about the last 30 years, we have seen the vegetation levels of the Simien mountains climb about 50 metres.
So in 30 years you can look at photographs and see different tree lines moving up.
It also means that the animals that survive on the alpine grasses at the very top have nowhere else to go.
I mean, they've reached the top of the plateau.
This is the Jumping-off point for these vegetation levels.
NARRATOR: ''That's too bad, ''some might say.
''But why is humanity always to blame?'' Throughout Earth's history, animals and ecosystems have adapted as the climate has changed.
What's so different now? We're looking at climate change that's happening much more quickly than ever before, which will make it much harder for ecological systems and for humans to adapt.
Over the four billion sweep of the planet's history, climate has been wildly variable.
There have been times when maybe the whole planet's been a ball of snow and ice and times when exotic tropical animals have roamed the poles.
But during all our recorded history, the last 6,000 to 8,000 years, the climate has been unusually steady.
With the dawn of the industrial revolution, say around 1 780, when we first started burning fossil fuels and at an accelerating rate, carbon dioxide levels have risen.
280 parts per million of carbon dioxide for thousands of years, up to 330 by 1 960, 360 by the '90s, 380 today.
The last time the planet came to equilibrium with greenhouse gas concentrations of the kind that we're looking toward, 500 parts per million by the middle of the century, was 20 to 40 million years ago and the oceans at that equilibrium point were about 300 feet higher.
What is still uncertain is what impact, if any, man is having on this warming.
There are so many variables that go into climate science that to make a blanket statement or try to just pinpoint one variable as being the be all end all is really short-sighted.
I mean, it was perfectly responsible for people 20 years ago to say, ''Look, we don't have the evidence.
We don't have the continuity.
''We don't have the backward look and statistics and evidence ''which can tell us enough about the rate at which we're changing ''to predict whether or not human beings are responsible.
'' Now, over that 20 years the evidence has accumulated until now, it seems to me, absolutely incontrovertible.
It's time to ignore the sceptics.
And I think the only explanation for the sceptics is that there will always be doubters of anything, any phenomenon like this, number one.
And number two, there are powerful economic forces at work.
Industries that are concerned that action on climate change may be to their disadvantage, and so, in the end, not that surprising that some voice doubts.
The President's made clear that the surface of the Earth is warming and there's great consensus on that, and that humans are contributing to the problem.
And so the issue that we face is what's the extent of potential change? What are the real downsides of that? What are the potential upsides of that? And how do we reduce our emissions? But people still want to get to their jobs, they still want to take their kids to school and we have to find the transitional strategies that gets us out of a petroleum-based economy, ultimately.
NARRATOR: It is getting harder to be a sceptic, not only because the science is more convincing but because people everywhere are watching their own landscapes change with the climate.
ATTENBOROUGH: The Mara River, snaking across the plains of East Africa.
As the land flattens out, rivers slow down and lose their destructive power.
Now they are carrying heavy loads of sediment that stains their waters brown.
NARRATOR: But East Africans have noticed something about the Mara.
Nowadays, it's often the only river for miles around that flows in the dry season.
Most of the others are empty.
I'm not sure that the majority of people in this country understand the global concept of climate change, but they do understand what they are observing locally.
The Green Belt Movement holds seminars, and in every class of about 1 00 people if I ask, ''How many of you know of a river ''that was flowing when you are young child, but is no longer flowing?'' More than 60% of the people will raise their hands up.
So people understand what's happening at the very local level.
NARRATOR: People in Arizona have noticed changes, too.
SANJAYAN: I went to Southern Arizona some months ago, and I was in a room full of ranchers.
I mean, these are guys wearing cowboy hats and they've got their cattle dog and they've got their cowhide Jackets, right? I watched them listen to a talk on climate change.
And the guy up there was saying to them, ''Hey, do you know last year was the first year in Southern Arizona ''that there was no frost on the ground?'' And every cattleman in that room nodded his head.
And I thought to myself, ''You know what? These guys get climate change.
''They get climate change better than any politician out here.
'' Because if there's no frost on the ground, it means they're going to have a hell of a fire season.
And it's going to have a major impact on how they're going to be able to graze their cattle that year.
NARRATOR: So how will wildernesses around the world change with global warming? And how will that affect people? McNEELY: One of the things that is most likely to happen is changes in the distribution of rainfall.
Why that's important is that rainfall drives the productivity of ecosystems.
So if you have greater rainfall, you're going to be able to expand agricultural land, for example.
In areas where you have less rainfall agriculture land is going to be less productive and may in fact be used only for pastoralism, for grazing.
Where you see the change in land use is where you see conflict.
And if we look historically at times of rapid climate change, these are times of conflict between human cultures.
NARRATOR: If climate change does alter the places that people rely on for food and water, there could be more conflict in the future.
Recent studies by military entities, like the Pentagon for example, which is, you know, well-known studies, you know, have demonstrated that tomorrow wars, the wars of tomorrow, will be triggered by environment.
They have referred to climate change, for example, as being one of the most important threats to the US security.
And the scarcity of water in the future will be one of the main reason to trigger war and international conflict.
NARRATOR: Is the beautiful planet Earth we were shown in the series doomed by its dominant animal species, or will that species start to make better use of its collective big brain? We are now the most powerful species the world has ever seen, and we now have it in our hands to destroy pretty well anything.
And we should therefore take on the moral responsibility of being a steward of the planet on which we happen to have developed.
We can forecast population growth, we can forecast climate change, we can forecast extinction, immigration of species, all kinds of things like that.
That really does give us a unique ability today to take a problem that is a 1 00-year, 500-year problem and break it into manageable bite-sized chunks.
Now if that sounds like a paradox, you know, it can't be done, well, of course it can be done.
We've been talking about it everywhere and intensively now for many years, on how to reduce energy consumption with alternative sources, how to grow more food better in the areas that are already under cultivation.
We can handle this and end up with a better quality of life and carrying through as much of the natural world that we inherited as we can.
There are other countries who are beginning to take on board more of these ideas of balancing the natural and the social including The country of Bhutan has recently declared that their national policy goal is gross national happiness rather than gross national product.
I think that's the bottom line.
We can consume less and be better off than we are.
We live with a terrible paradox.
We love nature, we are totally dependent on nature and we destroy nature.
I think what we need now to realise is that we can, in fact, undo a lot of what we're doing.
It turns out that most of the major problems that we face are actually solvable, that the solutions are simple, and that these solutions can take place using basic scientific information that we already have.
We can start the process.
We need to do that.
It's really important.
These wilderness areas can be stunningly beautiful and are certainly vital sanctuaries for wildlife.
But are they even more than that? This programme will explore the deeper importance of wilderness.
It will ask how it serves us now and why it isn't Just virgin territory waiting for an ever-expanding humanity to take it over.
Planet Earth showed Africa's Okavango Delta as it's never been seen before.
ATTENBOROUGH: As the water sweeps into the Okavango a vast area of the Kalahari is transformed into a fertile paradise.
A lush water world.
NARRATOR: And no humans in sight.
Is that what wilderness means? Well, wilderness is a concept that really has been developed a lot in Western society, recognising that there are certain places that have either very low human populations or are entirely devoid of people.
It's not a concept that necessarily has spread worldwide, yet it's something that I think is increasingly becoming important on an evermore overcrowded planet.
NARRATOR: Overcrowded? This programme will ask if population is the greatest threat to wilderness.
It can't be coincidence that it shrinks as humanity grows.
Ignoring population strikes me as the biggest own goal that the environment movement has ever scored.
I would argue the bigger threat is effectively the growth in our economy and the way we use our wealth.
NARRATOR: And with growing economies, we ask if a wilderness will still be protected if it turns out to contain a valuable resource like oil.
Oil and natural gas production in the north slope of Alaska under modern technology will have a tiny environmental footprint.
We can do it in modern technology.
We should do it.
To open ANWR to exploration and drilling would not be criminal, but it's the closest thing I can imagine to being criminal.
NARRATOR: We'll discover that the environmental debate has never been more heated, and not Just at the political level.
Think about it this way, if you had to decide to keep a tree standing or feed one of your children, what would you do? NARRATOR: Despite everything, there are still vast wildernesses.
For instance, the Boreal forest.
ATTENBOROUGH: This vast forest circling the globe contains a third of all the trees on Earth and produces so much oxygen it changes the composition of the atmosphere.
NARRATOR: So how much of our planet is still covered with wilderness? In fact, there is a figure.
A couple of years ago, Russ Mittermeier conducted the study that produced it.
So there are a lot of places out there that have very few people.
You have to recognise that about a third of that is ice.
I mean, Antarctica is huge.
Antarctica is about 1 4 million square kilometres, which is about one and a half times the size of the United States.
But the other two thirds, places like Amazonia and a number of other wilderness areas, also have very low human populations.
And they're rich in biodiversity, they're rich in life forms.
NARRATOR: That means that, Antarctica aside, only a quarter of the Earth's land surface is still wilderness.
We've changed most of the planet and certain types of forest have been the most damaged.
This is the kind of forest that used to characterise Europe.
Now there's Just one tiny fragment left on the border of Poland and Belarus.
LINFIELD: We went to Bialowieza on Planet Earth because it's the original primeval forest in Europe.
And perhaps 6,000, 7,000 years ago, almost all of Europe would have looked like Bialowieza looks now.
Of course, today Bialowieza, it's a tiny little forest, but it gives us an idea of what most of Europe once looked like.
NARRATOR: And despite its obvious importance, even this final fragment of forest is under threat.
There is still activity which is destroying the forest.
This kind of activity is logging, for example.
If you check satellite pictures on the Polish side of the border, you'll see big damage caused by the logging in the forest.
To stop it, we need some action, like creating big national park on the both sides of the border.
Bialowieza forest doesn't belong just to Poland, just the Polish nation, it's world treasure with many rare species, wolf, European bison, rare species of birds.
And there should be international effort to protect Bialowieza forest because some wrong decisions can really destroy this treasure.
NARRATOR: It's not Just Europe that's losing what's left of its forest.
The demand for timber and pasture has an impact everywhere.
Over the last 300 years we've lost about half of the world's forest, but the pattern of loss has been very different so much of the earlier period of loss covered the temperate forests, in both the north and the south, especially in Europe and North America.
More recently, we are finding we're losing tropical forests at a much quicker rate than previously.
NARRATOR: The Amazon forest, for instance, is still coming down.
It's losing an area the size of Switzerland every year.
MITTERMEIER: Disappearance of wilderness varies tremendously from place to place.
Even within the Amazon region certain portions are still in very good condition and are likely to be maintained over at least the next few decades.
Whereas other portions are really under the gun and are rapidly, as we speak, being converted for other uses, like cattle pasture.
And they've now come up with varieties of soy that can be grown in the Amazon.
So you're seeing, in certain places in the southern and southeastern Amazon, parts of the central Amazon, you're seeing very rapid conversion.
On the other hand, in the northern extremes, magnificent wilderness areas with very, very few people living in them.
I believe that if any tropical rainforest areas remain intact 1 00 years from now, it's going to be in that very northern portion of Amazonia.
So, even within one wilderness area, there's a great deal of variability in terms of the degree of loss.
NARRATOR: So how much wilderness, right now, is actually legally protected? McNEELY: Well, right now we have about 1 2% of the land cover as protected areas, and you might say, ''Well, okay, is 1 2% enough?'' And the answer to that is, it all depends.
If we manage the rest of the landscape in a thoughtful way, If we overuse and if we abuse the rest of the landscape, NARRATOR: Protected areas can't Just be enclosures.
Often the same big, charismatic animals that inspired the creation of the areas need to venture outside them to find food and water.
ATTENBOROUGH: Driven on by thirst, they march hundreds of miles across the parched plains.
Relying on memory, the matriarchs lead their families to those special water holes that saved them in previous years.
You know, one of the great challenges of conservation in Africa We're all attracted to these really huge species, elephants, lions, giraffe, and the problem with conservation for such very large animals is they need enormous amounts of space.
And at the best, where the animals can concentrate in the highest densities, you still need on the order of 1 5,000 square kilometres of habitat to be able to sustain one of those truly viable populations of lions.
If you have your elephants in areas, they are even bigger than that, they still tend to wander way outside of those.
So you need enormous areas.
NARRATOR: But the larger the area set aside for wide-ranging animals, the harder the area is to patrol.
Less than 1,000 Bactrian camels remain in the vast expanse of the Gobi desert.
In such a wilderness, why so few? The Planet Earth team found them suspiciously elusive.
They're about three or four kilometres away.
They spotted us from that distance and that's going to be our real problem, getting close to these animals.
They're capable of spotting us from about five kilometres, and running for 70k's in the opposite direction so this is what's going to make this filming incredibly difficult.
When you work in wildlife, you know that when an animal runs from a human, you know there's a reason why, and it's because it's being threatened by humans.
Now, what's strange about the Gobi in Mongolia is that it's vast and nobody lives there.
But animals don't run from humans without good cause and I found out just talking to people when we were out there that humans do go in there.
They go in there in four-wheel drives with guns and they try to chase down the camels.
NARRATOR: Even in a huge wilderness, a small number of people can cause big problems.
Wild dogs are in trouble even though they have enough space and they're not hunted by humans.
The wild dogs are one of the most endangered mammals in Africa and actually for a surprising reason.
They aren't directly hunted and they still have enough habitat, just about, but they have been in contact with humans and their pets.
And the main reason for their decline is that they have caught diseases from domestic dogs.
Things like canine distemper and this has caused a massive population collapse.
PACkER: Out here, there's almost no veterinary services whatsoever.
Dogs are companion animals and they have names, people look after them, but there's really not a family budget for vaccinating dogs against basic diseases like rabies, distemper.
And so the wild dogs, if one animal in the pack gets distemper, everybody else comes and sniffs and gets sneezed on and, you know, gets the disease.
They all drop dead.
NARRATOR: Craig Packer and his colleagues came up with a solution.
Vaccinate domestic dogs to protect the wild ones.
We were able to design a vaccination programme that effectively created a cordon sanitaire around the Serengeti, a vaccination zone, that separated the disease from the wildlife.
And it turned out to be a rare example of a win-win situation conservation because the local people were very pleased to have their dogs vaccinated.
Rabies is a serious threat to human life out here, and when we told them that it was good for the wildlife, they thought that was great, too, because they knew that tourists came out here to see the animals of the Serengeti.
So it wasn't like you're telling someone you're doing something wrong.
It's like, ''Well, look, if this helps you, it helps the wildlife as well.
'' NARRATOR: Where there is plenty of space, animals and people often can live together.
But more and more people are moving into wilderness areas, pushing wildlife out of the way.
In Ethiopia, people and their farms are moving relentlessly up the Simien mountains.
In the Simien Highlands in particular, we're finding that agriculture is encroaching higher and higher up the mountains and barley is now being grown at about 3,500 metres.
That doesn't leave much space for the remaining habitat there and the remaining wildlife, much of which is very endemic in that part of the world.
ATTENBOROUGH: These summits, nearly three miles up, are home to some very remarkable mountaineers.
Gelada baboons.
They are unique to the highlands of Ethiopia.
(BABOONS CHATTERING) NARRATOR: But gelada baboons are running out of space.
As farms encroach into the Ethiopian highlands, the areas of alpine grass are shrinking and the gelada numbers are still okay at the moment, but you will get a situation where gelada are getting squeezed because their natural grasslands are shrinking and the only thing left is barley crops.
And we're starting to see this now, a much greater increase in human-gelada conflict where the baboons are going into barley fields raiding barley because they've run out of their preferred alpine grasses.
NARRATOR: The Simien problem exists because Ethiopia's human population is expanding.
So is the ultimate problem for wilderness worldwide that there are simply too many people? One thing that's always worried me about the environment movement for the last 30 years, is their inability to get their heads around the importance of population.
I find it staggering that that is still downgraded as an issue.
There's a sense it's somehow politically incorrect to talk about population.
But the issue of population lies absolutely at the heart of the destruction of the natural world today.
If we had to find a way of creating a sustainable future for a billion people, I can assure you it would be a great deal simpler and a lot better for the natural world than trying to find a solution for six billion people, let alone nine billion people, which will be the population of this planet by the middle of this century, by 2050.
So, ignoring population strikes me as the biggest own goal that the environment movement has ever scored.
I wouldn't like to, so to speak, to push the problem off onto overpopulation in the way that has sometimes been fashionable.
You know, people saying, ''Well, the real problem about the environment ''is that there are too many people in Africa and India,'' usually.
In other words, it's not about us.
So, overpopulation has to be seen as a global issue, not just something that we can tell other people to do something about.
Many people try to blame population as the major threat to our ecosystems.
I personally don't agree with that.
The population today is six billion people, roughly.
It's likely to go up to between eight and ten billion people by 2050, so about a 50% increase in the numbers of people.
Over that same time frame, the economic growth in the world is likely to be a factor of four.
So the threat to the environment is a combination of the number of people and their consumer patterns.
And their consumer patterns are driven very largely by their economic wealth.
And so it's not simply an issue of numbers of people.
It's the numbers of people and to what degree can they buy biological resources, energy resources, use water, etcetera.
So I would argue the bigger threat is effectively the growth in our economy and the way we use our wealth.
It is how we live on the planet, not just our total numbers, that really makes the essential difference.
If we all live on this planet the way Americans currently live, we would need three planets to support the Earth's current population.
NARRATOR: The trouble is that much of the rest of the world wants to live and spend like Americans.
The conventional view is that the economy is there to produce goods and services and the more we produce and consume, the better off we'll be.
But there's a lot of evidence to show that that's not really the case.
Consumption of goods and services only improves people's sense of satisfaction up to a fairly low threshold, beyond which it becomes counterproductive in terms of their long-term wellbeing.
Our focus on consumption is a form of psychological Junk food.
It's something that makes us feel good temporarily but in the end it makes us unhealthy.
NARRATOR: Still, consumerism would have less impact on the planet if there weren't so many people.
There are six billion of us now.
How many should there be? When one tries to get at a number, my guess is somewhere between 500 million people and one billion, no more than that.
I think that the Earth can safely support in a sustainable way, at a reasonable standard of living, about half of what it has today.
And I think that that would make people happier and it would certainly make the planet happier.
We'd have more diversity, we'd have plenty of productivity, we'd be able to maintain our cultural diversity and the world would be a much more sustainable place.
Now, choosing how to get from where we are to where we need to be is the crunch.
NARRATOR: So we Just halve the world's population.
Realistically, ethically, how? Actually, if you look at the world today, there is a fantastically good story to be told about population, which is when countries get on top of family planning, learn how to provide that magic combination of literacy and better healthcare for women and for girls, and to provide access to a range of contraceptives, that's what it comes down to.
That's what good family planning is all about.
There need be no coercion involved, there need be no intrusions onto human rights, there need be none of the cruelty that has happened in some countries.
This can be done.
NARRATOR: That may seem simple but can birth rates come down evenly, everywhere? What about Africa? PACkER: Asia, Latin America, their population rates have slowed down to the point that's getting closer to what we're used to in Europe and North America.
But Africa, family size is still very large.
Economic security is still very low, so there's an incentive for people to have very large families, and these are families that require basic natural resources for their subsistence.
So the impact of people on the natural world is still growing quite strikingly here.
NARRATOR: If Africans were better off, they might have fewer children, but those children would be able to consume more.
So where's the environmental gain? Africans have thrived on this continent for very many years without aeroplanes, without trains, without skyscrapers, without all the modern development that we think when we look at the West, that's what development means.
To me, development means staying alive, having a quality of life.
Not so much a life that is surrounded by goods, things, but a life where you can live in a clean and a healthy environment, where you can drink clean water.
Half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day.
This is totally and utterly unacceptable.
So we need economic growth, we need pro-poor economic growth.
But then what we need to couple with that is to make sure that as the demand for energy increases, that it's climate friendly, it's friendly to the local environment, it's friendly to water.
So the challenge for us, then, is how do we use our resources when they're used in the most sustainable manner possible.
ATTENBOROUGH: This river has cut the world's longest canyon system.
A 1,000 mile scar, clearly visible from space.
NARRATOR: As population grows, one of the first resources to come under pressure is fresh water.
For example, the mighty Colorado River that carved out the Grand Canyon isn't very mighty anymore.
WOMAN: Well, the Colorado actually is no longer reaching the sea in most years, and this is a very clear sign that the health of the river is in pretty bad shape.
And so there's a disconnection of ecological service here.
That river's job is to deliver fresh water and nutrients and sediment to deltas, and they're no longer doing that work and that has an implication for the species that live there.
And so, in the case of the Colorado, we see signs of diminishing productivity in the fisheries in the Upper Gulf of California.
We've gone about meeting these human needs in a very simple way, which is every time we need more water, we go out and find it.
We tap another river, we build another dam, we tap more groundwater and take more out of the natural world.
NARRATOR: Like almost every other big river in the world, the Colorado has been dammed.
You know, just 50 years ago, around 1 950, we had 5,000 large dams around the world.
Today we have 45,000 large dams around the world.
Which means we've been building two large dams every day for half a century.
So this is a very, very large change in the hydrologic environment.
NARRATOR: And dams don't always stop at generating electricity.
They also extract water for irrigation.
POSTEL: We have to take a lot of water out of the natural world in order to put it on cropland.
And this land is really important to us.
We do get 40% of our food from irrigated land, even though that land makes up less than 20% of the whole crop land base.
So it's really important land, but it requires that we intervene in a maJor way into the hydrologic cycle.
70% of all the water we take out of rivers, lakes, aquifers, goes to irrigation, so it consumes the lion's share of the water that we're taking out of the natural world.
NARRATOR: So is there really enough fresh water for six billion people and their crops? I think the good news on some of the water scarcity problems that we have, the shortages of water that we talk about, is that a lot of the shortage, a lot of the scarcity, is really all about waste and mismanagement.
And so it's not necessarily that there's not enough water, it's that we're not using it wisely enough.
NARRATOR: And water's not the only resource that people would like to raid the wilderness for.
ATTENBOROUGH: Every year, three million caribou migrate across the Arctic tundra.
Some herds travel over 2,000 miles a year in search of fresh pastures.
This is the longest overland migration made by any animal.
NARRATOR: It's not the caribou people want to exploit.
In fact, caribou and their conservation rather get in the way.
No, it's what's under the animals' hooves, oil and gas.
The US Congress is under pressure to allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR.
Oil and natural gas production in the north slope of Alaska under modern technology will have a tiny environmental footprint, especially in comparison to the oil and gas development we see elsewhere in the world, sponsored by many countries hostile to the interests of democratic states.
In the US we have the most stringent safety laws.
We have the most stringent environmental protection requirements, and, once oil and gas production is done, the most stringent reclamation requirements.
So we basically, like hikers and campers, leave no trace when we're done.
We can do it in modern technology.
We should do it.
MITTERMEIER: My personal opinion is that it's not going to resolve our oil issues.
We would be much better off just engaging in more serious conservation, better energy use, looking at a whole range of alternatives.
Simply drilling for oil in one of the last wilderness blocks in our country is I think it's foolish, given the range of other options that are out there, and I would be very sad and actually embarrassed as an American were it to take place.
We should absolutely be drilling for oil in ANWR.
It's the most promising reserve in the United States that we have right now.
You're talking about an area that's 2,000 acres out of 1 9 million acres, over 1 9 million acres.
Potentially 1 0.
4 billion barrels of oil there.
It's not going to have any detrimental impact on the caribou.
Again, it's all so much environmental scaremongering.
In reality, we can drill for oil in ANWR and not harm the environment.
To open ANWR to exploration and drilling would not be criminal, but it's the closest thing I can imagine to being criminal.
NARRATOR: In a way, it's encouraging that there's even a debate about drilling on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
Very few people would see the operation or have their lives disturbed by it, which means there's an obJection to the idea of violating such a pristine place.
It's obviously important to many people to know that there are still unspoiled wilderness areas like the Arctic and Antarctic as shown in Planet Earth.
One of the wonderful things about Antarctica is the silence, actually.
It's often very, very, very quiet.
You never hear a combustion engine, which is a hard thing to do on most of our planet.
You also feel terribly small, the scale of everything, the scale of the ice, and the ability for the weather to change so dramatically from one day.
It can be a beautiful sunlit day one day and then suddenly, often within a matter of hours, you're actually in real danger from the weather.
In a sense, it makes man very much back in their place.
Their role in nature is put right by being in Antarctica.
NARRATOR: All of nature puts humans in their place because their place is in nature.
I think for many people, maybe all people at some level, there is something about the wonder of nature, that nature in its infinite variety and its infinite mystery, and I think that's important.
It touches people in their souls.
WILLIAMS: I think that one of the things wilderness says to us is that nature is not Just there for us to be comfortable in.
There's an element of the world around us, a profound element, and an extensive element, that is just there.
It's there for its own sake.
It is what it is.
And, in that sense, I think 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.
'' There is a very interesting relationship between wilderness and sacredness.
All the great monastic traditions, whether that's Christian, Buddhist or Daoist, all find their roots in an experience of their founders going into the desert, into the wilderness, onto the mountains and finding there something that civilisation cannot give them.
A realisation about themselves, about nature, about the divine.
In Daoism, for example, the symbol of someone who has achieved enlightenment is that of a human being alone on a mountain.
It's that sense that you are in front of something greater than yourself.
NARRATOR: Professor Wilson has coined a term for the innate human love of nature.
He calls it ''biophilia''.
There's a lot of evidence that human beings need life, they are attracted to life forms, to diversity, that a lot of their culture is drawn from the emotional response they have to living forms in nature.
I think if you look at children, you will see, right from the very, very earliest age, an interest and an excitement about the natural world and their surroundings.
It's in our nature to be concerned about the nature of life around us and to be fascinated by it.
And sadly, I think, some people lose touch with that initial love of the natural world around them altogether.
But if they do, it's a major loss.
NARRATOR: We may love the natural world through our innate biophilia but why should we really care if it disappears? What do wildernesses actually do for us in practical terms? Well, really, in many ways one of the biggest values of wilderness is the fact that they provide enormous ecosystem services for the planet.
Just simple watershed protection, the hydrological cycles.
You look at the Amazon region.
About 20% of the world's water runs through Amazonia.
And you cut down that forest and the impacts We're not exactly sure what the impacts are going to be, but you can be sure that it's going to be huge.
NARRATOR: Often, with people and forests, it's a case of ''You don't know what you've got till it's gone''.
When their environment degrades, they are unable to meet some of their most basic needs, such as the need for firewood, the need for clean drinking water, the need for food, nutritious food.
And when people are able to understand that these basic needs can easily be met by the resources in the environment, then they are more willing to work with you.
NARRATOR: And once people realise what wilderness provides for them, they may be willing to pay for its services.
The country of Costa Rica, in Central America, has come up with this concept of forests as water factories, and they're actually paying farmers who are letting their pasture land go back into forest for the water services that are being provided by these forests.
NARRATOR: So is this scheme in Costa Rica effective? Is farmland really returning to forest? SL Yes.
(SPEAkING IN SPANISH) Ulises says that he once had pasture lands that were being used to raise cattle, obviously, and he now has had the land under forestry recovery for 20 years.
The trees that he has now on this land, that used to be pasture land, are 20 centimetres in girth.
So he has seen his forest grow.
NARRATOR: It's a win-win situation.
The forest is growing back and the farmers make money.
(SPEAkING IN SPANISH) LEON: We earn a living.
We survive through the forests by way of the payments that we're getting to protect it.
So we know that it's a source of life for us, but it is also a source of life, he says, for many other organisms that live in this world.
NARRATOR: But if the payment scheme didn't exist, would Ulises be tempted to cut down the forest? (SPEAkING IN SPANISH) LEON: It would be a very sad decision, says Ulises, if I had to cut down the forest.
It would be a very sentimental decision for me.
But think about it this way, if you had to decide to keep a tree standing or feed one of your children, what would you do? NARRATOR: So while the scheme continues the payments are ensuring that forests survive outside national parks.
The amount of national parks, as such, are around 800,000 hectares and we have 500,000 hectares in forests for environmental services.
That means that about 60% of additional forest, beyond the national parks, are being kept under this scheme.
NARRATOR: That's all very well, but who pays for all this? Well, right now there are some companies that are charging an extra fee for the water bill you pay in order to compensate for the people that decide to maintain the forest.
If you depend on having clean water every day in your household for all the many uses we have, any small increase in the fare that you pay for water to make sure that the watersheds are kept in good shape is like paying insurance.
NARRATOR: So people in Costa Rica recognise the service that forests provide and are willing to pay for it.
And you could try to speculate on how much money all nature's goods and services are worth, things like fresh water, clean air, food.
One estimate made in 1 997 by economists and biologists was that the services provided humanity, scot-free incidentally, by all those bugs and weeds and, you know, possibly seemingly disposable birds and like was about, at that time, it was about 30 trillion dollars.
I've been hugely impressed by some of those economists who do these incredible calculations about how much it would cost us to do something if nature didn't do it for us for free.
So you get these sort of multibillion or multitrillion dollar assessments of what would happen if bees and other insects stopped pollinating for us, for instance, which is the one I really like because nobody actually thinks very much about pollination as a gift from nature.
But if they all stopped doing it, okay, they just went on strike, and we had to do it by human intervention, by man-made means, well, you look at the price tag for that and it's x-hundred billion dollars, or whatever it might be and you think, ''Whoa! Well, that's nice.
'' So our entire productive food enterprise is being subsidised by nature.
And it's only when you shove that price sign under some people's eyes that they think, ''Whoa, maybe this natural world is a bit more useful to us than we thought it was.
'' People want to know, ''What's in it for me? How much is it worth?'' And so the conservation movement, which has tended to be an ethical movement, has also started to look much more at the economic values of conservation and of biodiversity.
And we're finding surprising things about how valuable the ecosystems of the world are for the services they deliver to people.
ATTENBOROUGH: Most tropical shallows are barren, but these coral havens contain one quarter of all the marine life on our planet.
NARRATOR: Calculating the value of a place may help conserve it.
So if one takes reefs for instance, the money value in terms of the productivity of that area, the biological diversity, the value to local communities of that place as a breeding centre for fish, whatever it might be, for tourism and so on.
Stick a money value on it and then say to people, ''How smart do you think you're gonna be if you destroy that ''for a fraction of the ongoing economic value of that asset, ''that resource, over years and years?'' That may make a difference in the minds of some decision-makers who think that short-term liquidation of natural assets is the answer, when, really, long-term management of those assets gives a much better economic return.
NARRATOR: A price tag may help conserve a place, but can it really reflect the true value of a wilderness? I think to the extent that we begin to give it a monetary value we at least provide the signal that it is worth something and we should be careful about whether we decide to put it into another use.
The danger I see in putting a monetary value on particular ecosystems, or pieces of ecosystems, is that then you can compare that number to another one when it's almost impossible to come up with a number that really fully takes into account the total value.
NARRATOR: One trouble with putting a price tag on wildernesses is that people aren't always as practical as they think they are.
They can appreciate something's value and destroy it anyway.
ATTENBOROUGH: Krill, shrimp-like creatures.
By weight, they are the most abundant animals on the planet.
A single swarm can contain two million tons of them.
And that is a lot of fish food.
The shallow temperate seas support the greatest concentrations of fish on our planet.
Huge shoals migrate from their overwintering grounds in the depths to feed in these rich waters.
NARRATOR: All those fish, all that food.
The seas shown in Planet Earth are obviously valuable beyond comprehension.
They may seem infinite but these vast oceans can be damaged by Just a small amount of pollution, and that may harm us.
Everybody has always said, ''The solution to pollution is dilution.
'' So, if these things Any of these bad substances get into the ocean, they're hugely diluted down and therefore are harmless.
And that's quite right, they are.
But then a totally insidious thing happens.
They get picked up in the oils of plankton, particularly of diatoms, these little single-celled plants of which the ocean is composed.
If you are eating an animal like a swordfish, for example, and that animal is at about the sixth level of the food pyramid, that means there is ten-to-the-sixth, a million times concentration of what was in the water around it.
So that means that when you take If you ate a pound of swordfish, for example, you would be eating all of the pollutants which had been collected in a million pounds, five hundred tons, of diatoms.
That's a real problem.
NARRATOR: And in certain parts of the world, that's a particular problem.
So, for example, any woman of childbearing age, if she is nursing her infant in that tenderest of all mammalian acts, what she is actually doing is dumping her lifetime's accumulation of pollutants into that infant.
And if her milk was in containers other than her breasts, she would not be allowed to take it across a state line.
It's too polluted.
Now that exists.
That's something people have to concern themselves with.
We can dodge that bullet as a species by simply feeding formula to our children.
Not an option for a whale.
So the only conclusion you can draw is that these pollutants, as they build higher, are going to bring species to extinction.
That's a problem.
NARRATOR: Another type of pollution is affecting the natural world, too.
Greenhouse gases are changing the climate and that transforms wildernesses.
FOTHERGILL: I'd originally been to Antarctica to make Life in the Freezer about 1 2 years ago.
And there's absolutely no doubt that you can really see a number of changes.
Undoubtedly, Antarctica looks warmer.
It's greener than it was 1 0 years ago.
NARRATOR: Wildernesses are also moving as the climate changes.
Over the last, say 1 0, 20 years, it's been very easy to see climate change in Ethiopia, in that as the country's been drying out, we've seen vegetation levels rising up the mountains.
In about the last 30 years, we have seen the vegetation levels of the Simien mountains climb about 50 metres.
So in 30 years you can look at photographs and see different tree lines moving up.
It also means that the animals that survive on the alpine grasses at the very top have nowhere else to go.
I mean, they've reached the top of the plateau.
This is the Jumping-off point for these vegetation levels.
NARRATOR: ''That's too bad, ''some might say.
''But why is humanity always to blame?'' Throughout Earth's history, animals and ecosystems have adapted as the climate has changed.
What's so different now? We're looking at climate change that's happening much more quickly than ever before, which will make it much harder for ecological systems and for humans to adapt.
Over the four billion sweep of the planet's history, climate has been wildly variable.
There have been times when maybe the whole planet's been a ball of snow and ice and times when exotic tropical animals have roamed the poles.
But during all our recorded history, the last 6,000 to 8,000 years, the climate has been unusually steady.
With the dawn of the industrial revolution, say around 1 780, when we first started burning fossil fuels and at an accelerating rate, carbon dioxide levels have risen.
280 parts per million of carbon dioxide for thousands of years, up to 330 by 1 960, 360 by the '90s, 380 today.
The last time the planet came to equilibrium with greenhouse gas concentrations of the kind that we're looking toward, 500 parts per million by the middle of the century, was 20 to 40 million years ago and the oceans at that equilibrium point were about 300 feet higher.
What is still uncertain is what impact, if any, man is having on this warming.
There are so many variables that go into climate science that to make a blanket statement or try to just pinpoint one variable as being the be all end all is really short-sighted.
I mean, it was perfectly responsible for people 20 years ago to say, ''Look, we don't have the evidence.
We don't have the continuity.
''We don't have the backward look and statistics and evidence ''which can tell us enough about the rate at which we're changing ''to predict whether or not human beings are responsible.
'' Now, over that 20 years the evidence has accumulated until now, it seems to me, absolutely incontrovertible.
It's time to ignore the sceptics.
And I think the only explanation for the sceptics is that there will always be doubters of anything, any phenomenon like this, number one.
And number two, there are powerful economic forces at work.
Industries that are concerned that action on climate change may be to their disadvantage, and so, in the end, not that surprising that some voice doubts.
The President's made clear that the surface of the Earth is warming and there's great consensus on that, and that humans are contributing to the problem.
And so the issue that we face is what's the extent of potential change? What are the real downsides of that? What are the potential upsides of that? And how do we reduce our emissions? But people still want to get to their jobs, they still want to take their kids to school and we have to find the transitional strategies that gets us out of a petroleum-based economy, ultimately.
NARRATOR: It is getting harder to be a sceptic, not only because the science is more convincing but because people everywhere are watching their own landscapes change with the climate.
ATTENBOROUGH: The Mara River, snaking across the plains of East Africa.
As the land flattens out, rivers slow down and lose their destructive power.
Now they are carrying heavy loads of sediment that stains their waters brown.
NARRATOR: But East Africans have noticed something about the Mara.
Nowadays, it's often the only river for miles around that flows in the dry season.
Most of the others are empty.
I'm not sure that the majority of people in this country understand the global concept of climate change, but they do understand what they are observing locally.
The Green Belt Movement holds seminars, and in every class of about 1 00 people if I ask, ''How many of you know of a river ''that was flowing when you are young child, but is no longer flowing?'' More than 60% of the people will raise their hands up.
So people understand what's happening at the very local level.
NARRATOR: People in Arizona have noticed changes, too.
SANJAYAN: I went to Southern Arizona some months ago, and I was in a room full of ranchers.
I mean, these are guys wearing cowboy hats and they've got their cattle dog and they've got their cowhide Jackets, right? I watched them listen to a talk on climate change.
And the guy up there was saying to them, ''Hey, do you know last year was the first year in Southern Arizona ''that there was no frost on the ground?'' And every cattleman in that room nodded his head.
And I thought to myself, ''You know what? These guys get climate change.
''They get climate change better than any politician out here.
'' Because if there's no frost on the ground, it means they're going to have a hell of a fire season.
And it's going to have a major impact on how they're going to be able to graze their cattle that year.
NARRATOR: So how will wildernesses around the world change with global warming? And how will that affect people? McNEELY: One of the things that is most likely to happen is changes in the distribution of rainfall.
Why that's important is that rainfall drives the productivity of ecosystems.
So if you have greater rainfall, you're going to be able to expand agricultural land, for example.
In areas where you have less rainfall agriculture land is going to be less productive and may in fact be used only for pastoralism, for grazing.
Where you see the change in land use is where you see conflict.
And if we look historically at times of rapid climate change, these are times of conflict between human cultures.
NARRATOR: If climate change does alter the places that people rely on for food and water, there could be more conflict in the future.
Recent studies by military entities, like the Pentagon for example, which is, you know, well-known studies, you know, have demonstrated that tomorrow wars, the wars of tomorrow, will be triggered by environment.
They have referred to climate change, for example, as being one of the most important threats to the US security.
And the scarcity of water in the future will be one of the main reason to trigger war and international conflict.
NARRATOR: Is the beautiful planet Earth we were shown in the series doomed by its dominant animal species, or will that species start to make better use of its collective big brain? We are now the most powerful species the world has ever seen, and we now have it in our hands to destroy pretty well anything.
And we should therefore take on the moral responsibility of being a steward of the planet on which we happen to have developed.
We can forecast population growth, we can forecast climate change, we can forecast extinction, immigration of species, all kinds of things like that.
That really does give us a unique ability today to take a problem that is a 1 00-year, 500-year problem and break it into manageable bite-sized chunks.
Now if that sounds like a paradox, you know, it can't be done, well, of course it can be done.
We've been talking about it everywhere and intensively now for many years, on how to reduce energy consumption with alternative sources, how to grow more food better in the areas that are already under cultivation.
We can handle this and end up with a better quality of life and carrying through as much of the natural world that we inherited as we can.
There are other countries who are beginning to take on board more of these ideas of balancing the natural and the social including The country of Bhutan has recently declared that their national policy goal is gross national happiness rather than gross national product.
I think that's the bottom line.
We can consume less and be better off than we are.
We live with a terrible paradox.
We love nature, we are totally dependent on nature and we destroy nature.
I think what we need now to realise is that we can, in fact, undo a lot of what we're doing.
It turns out that most of the major problems that we face are actually solvable, that the solutions are simple, and that these solutions can take place using basic scientific information that we already have.
We can start the process.
We need to do that.
It's really important.