BBC Planet Earth The Future s01e03 Episode Script
Living Together
LEAPE: This is a time when our planet is under assault like never before, and we are only beginning to realise how severe the consequences may be for the quality of our own lives and for the quality of our children's lives.
And, for me, the only good news in this picture is that we also see glimmers of the solution, that we can begin to see strategies that work, that it is possible to shift our economies so that it works for conservation instead of against it.
I've always felt a kind of very deep gut-wrenching sense of pain when I think about the speed with which we're laying waste the planet.
But I've always taken that kind of emotional pain and turned it into, I hope, more constructive approaches to trying to deal with these things.
Because if all you can do is get stuck on your personal pain, you'll never turn that into campaigning passion to put the thing right that is going wrong at the moment.
We've got to turn people's minds towards more positive images of the good that we can still do to help protect the natural world.
NARRATOR: How much longer can a growing, consuming, developing humanity coexist with wild animals, with raw nature? And what will happen to the animals, to nature, and to us, if we can't? Planet Earth has shown us some of the world's most spectacular inhabitants in their spectacular settings.
And few fit this description better than humpback whales.
BROWNLOW: One of the greatest privileges I've ever had is to swim with humpback whales.
These are 1 2-metre giants that could swat you with their flukes but, instead, they accept you and enable you to just gently snorkel close up to them, to get a very close and personal experience with them.
(WHALE CALLING) NARRATOR: You could almost say that the modern conservation movement was started by humpback whales.
It was recordings of their songs in the 1 960s that spearheaded the Save the Whale campaign.
And that, combined with other new awareness, the dangers of pesticides, the threat to rainforests, soon grew into ''Save the Earth''.
The man who produced those humpback recordings is Roger Payne.
Humpback whales are the whales that sing.
I mean, imagine! And these songs, they change and they use rhyme in the most complicated ones.
It's thrilling to hear.
And this is why we were able to get whales into the culture of humanity.
So important.
NARRATOR: Humpbacks not only sing, they also provide us with an annual spectacle, an event captured by Planet Earth.
ATTENBOROUGH: The humpbacks have finally arrived.
The polar seas in summer are the most productive on the planet and the whales gorge themselves round the clock.
But it may not always be this way.
Fish and krill stocks are declining so rapidly that spectacles like this may soon be part of history.
NARRATOR: So the animals that inspired 40 years of conservation are, themselves, still not saved.
Alas, humpbacks and other whales are not safe.
We are not, at this moment, where we think we are.
Everybody seems to think, ''Oh, we've the saved whales.
'' ''We have a moratorium.
'' And the answer is, ''Wrong.
'' It is being violated steadily by the whaling nations, by various loopholes which they are playing.
And the result is that whaling is about to escape all meaningful international control.
So, I'm watching my life's work undone in front of my eyes, and it's a horrible thing to watch.
(BIRDS CHIRPING) NARRATOR: Whales are not the only ones in the firing line.
Many of the world's wilderness areas are under constant threat.
We are now to the point that 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.
NARRATOR: Despite all the energy and the money that are being poured into conservation, the battles keep going on and on.
Why? Has the conservation movement been getting its message wrong? The challenges have, in some ways, got bigger.
Our consumption of natural resources, the pressure on land, the changes now taking place to the climate, pose far bigger challenges than those that have been solved.
And I think we do have to look at ways in which we can start gearing up the environmental message to be something more than simply an add-on to the way we do development and run our countries.
To make it something that's at the centre of the way in which governments and societies work, and we're still far from doing that.
I'm not sure the conservation movement's got it wrong in terms of where their focus has been.
It's just that their focus has been in one end of the spectrum.
When we do campaigns that say ''Save the Tiger'' or ''Save the Whale''and focus on a species, then it's clearly important.
What happened is, I think, the conservation movement Just stopped evolving after that.
NARRATOR: Early conservation was very stern, invariably casting humans as every wild animal's enemy.
Conservation areas were fenced in and people were kept out.
National parks, which were being set up all over the world, were typically seen as havens of protection and, in some cases, were fiercely guarded.
The strategy appeared to work, too.
It's credited with saving the elephants.
Richard Leakey was head of the Kenya Wildlife Service in the early 1 990s.
Elephants and rhinos were being heavily poached for their tusks and their horns, and numbers were falling dramatically.
Leakey's solution was to create a wildlife army.
ALL: Left, right, left.
About turn! Left, right, left The rangers became the most effective fighting force in the country.
But he also moved local tribes outside the fences, leaving the parks Just for animals and tourists.
They became guarded fortresses.
But was he right to take such a hardline approach? Leakey was right.
If you look at the '90s, when the issue of poaching, especially for ivory and for the rhino horn, he was really right in the sense that ''Who are poachers?'' The poachers were the communities and they were selling this to the middlemen.
And the situation was so bad that the population of wildlife, especially the rhino and the elephant, depleted so fast, that if drastic measures were not taken, we were going to lose them.
But that was 1 990s.
NARRATOR: The elephants thrived and the tourists got their money's worth.
But what was the effect on the local tribes people, cut off from their ancestral lands? The Masais were chased out of the park and never allowed in again.
But, to us, the Masai people, we look at it as very bad laws put in place, oppressing one side and giving one side a new way to oppress the other because wildlife are not restricted inside the park alone.
Always the wildlife come out of the park and they came to mingle together with our livestock here, causing a lot of diseases and a lot of conditions.
And, on the other side, we are not allowed to get into the park.
NDEDE: That's why I insist we need to re-engineer the whole thing.
And when we develop or design a programme to protect wildlife in this country, it should be people-sensitive.
And if there are specific promises that are made from the government's side, it should be one of the key areas that should be looked at is to make sure that these promises are fulfilled, so people don't get disillusioned.
Otherwise you're going to lose it.
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's going to give the communities of this country who live with wildlife, he's going to make policies which allow the people themself to be the protectors and the benefactors of wildlife.
NARRATOR: The World Bank was the main financial backer of Leakey's strategy.
We must empower local communities to be totally involved in both the design and the management of our protected areas.
Obviously, one of the key challenges in a protected area is indeed to keep out poachers etc, but whether or not the Bank would nowadays endorse the use of sort of a military-style empowerment, I think is a real question.
NARRATOR: Nowadays the trend is to involve people, local people, more and more.
But is conservation going too far in that direction? Should there still be some fortresses? One of the biggest problems we have with protecting these last pockets of pristine environment now is, ''Who has the right to go in there?'' We have indigenous people who might have used that land and those animals as a resource for generations.
And we'll have a situation where we have well-protected environmental areas so locked up that only an elite few can go in and visit these animals.
I think there are some parts of the world where we probably have to do that for a moment in history.
But it's not a long moment in history, it's at a time when there is particular stress.
Because I think that after a few years, yeah, maybe a decade at the most, then you start to have softer boundaries.
Because if it's Just a fortress, it will never be able to be defended long enough to be a sustainable fortress.
There are always going to be shifts of pressure around the boundaries that will make it more and more difficult to defend, both politically and practically.
And it also turns out that, you know, 80% of the world's biodiversity doesn't actually exist in national parks, it actually exists outside of national parks.
And so you're going to have to deal with the human element if you want to think about where conservation is gonna go in the future.
NARRATOR: This is RaJa Ampat, a coral reef in a remote corner of Indonesia.
It was recently brought to the world's attention as the most diverse, the richest coral reef on Earth, and the Planet Earth crew were among the first to film there, discovering behaviour that had never been seen before.
ATTENBOROUGH: And there are snakes here, too.
Lots of them.
These are banded sea kraits.
They lay their eggs on land but they hunt here in the water.
NARRATOR: Now that the world knows about RaJa Ampat, divers and snorkelers are bound to flock here, putting pressure on the reef system.
Is this a case for fortress conservation, banning tourists and keeping the reef pristine? McNEELY: It's a wonderful reef and, you know, we went snorkelling there and visiting.
A tremendous wealth of diversity of species and a great place.
Now, how was it able to maintain that status for so long? It was there, it was being protected without making it a fortress because nobody was putting pressure on it.
The reason that it would need to be protected now is because people are beginning to put pressure onto that habitat.
It may well be that there are places where we should keep people out.
You know, if the people have been out for a long time, sure, why should they go in? Because if you look at the production of fisheries, the establishment of marine protected areas where people are not allowed to fish, leads to greater production outside the protected area.
Many of the fish that people eat, a good part of their life cycle takes place in coral reefs and in mangroves.
So, they absolutely should be conserved for the benefit of the fisheries outside.
But why not to have some limited amount of tourism so that they provide also that economic benefit? And why not allow me to go snorkelling there? I greatly enJoyed that.
And why shouldn't people have the pleasure of experiencing that? Why shouldn't the Indonesian people have the pleasure of experiencing that? As long as they don't spoil it.
NARRATOR: But tourism means development along the coast, and up to now, coastal development anywhere around the world usually means environmental degradation.
In the past 40 years, a lot of the development has been funded by a well-meaning World Bank, backing proJects designed to help countries make the most of their natural resources.
The early assumptions about development were ''Let's have lots of projects, lots of roads, lots of dams.
'' ''Infrastructure means development, it means civilisation.
'' People were moved.
All sorts of habitats were destroyed.
People's livelihoods were destroyed.
I think lots of that was enormously crass and destructive.
And countries ended up with the capacity to produce electricity they weren't using and enormous debt out of the projects.
There's been terrible errors.
I think in the past, one tried, from a World Bank perspective, to focus on big infrastructure projects, roads, dams, power plants.
And I think the evidence now suggests that many of those projects were not as successful as we would have liked.
Too many of our big infrastructure proJects did lead to the loss of biodiversity without even helping the local rural poor.
I think we're now starting to design our proJects in a much more holistic manner.
NARRATOR: That idea, developing while doing virtually no damage to the environment, is known as sustainable development and is controversial.
JUNIPER: For me, sustainable development is the most powerful idea ever invented.
It's about protecting the Earth's natural capacities at the same time as meeting human needs.
And that sounds quite a simple and straightforward idea, but it's incredible how difficult that is to get across into the mainstream policy-making process where, pretty much all the time, it's not a question of bringing these things together and doing them as a single idea, they're traded off against each other.
It's either the environment or people.
And if we're going to solve these big problems, like the mass extinction that's taking place, and the climatic change that poses so many dangers to people, we have to do away with that false choice.
It's not a question of the environment or people, it has to be both, and that's what sustainable development is all about.
When talking about sustainable development, I think it's a very clever term that's been created by the environmentalists, particularly Well, internationally.
It's sustainable, it's development.
How could anybody be against it? But in reality, environmentalists or the folks who promote sustainable development, what they're really promoting is no development.
And that's the key.
It's very thinly veiled.
They don't want any development that's of any worth to the developing nations of the world.
They want to dictate the solar panels on top of huts, you know, the wind turbines in the fields.
The inefficient things that aren't truly going to bring these people out of the energy dark ages and help them progress as a people.
Sustainable development must mean that we develop in a way that we can thrive on this continent.
And 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 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 healthy environment.
As it is now, 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.
Solutions, like renewable energy and so on, are not really solutions at all.
Perhaps 1 00 years ago, all would have been fine.
It's much, much too late now.
What kind of world is it in which there'll be no development? Everything stops right now.
It's a really stupid idea to talk about a world in which there's no development.
But that development has got to be delivered in ways that are compatible with life support systems, ecosystems, with natural services and all the rest of it.
That's what we mean by sustainability.
What I know is what is unsustainable.
When we effectively lose biodiversity, perturb the climate system, pollute our waters, degrade our land, that is clearly unsustainable in the long term.
We need to integrate our national economic planning, sectoral planning, energy systems, transportation systems, agricultural systems, by taking into account what are we doing to the Earth's environment, both the biodiversity, and the climate system, and local air quality.
So we must match our need for economic development with our need to protect ecological systems because they, in the long run, underpin a more sustainable way of life.
NARRATOR: Sustainable development, the idea that people can live alongside and protect the natural world, yet still grow economically, has only been around for a few years.
But in reality, what does it mean in countries where the wildlife is not that easy to live next to? ATTENBOROUGH: Lions don't usually hunt elephants but desperate times require desperate measures.
This herd contains calves, easier targets.
A few exhausted stragglers are still arriving.
One of them is alone.
A solitary lion stands no chance, but the whole pride is here.
There are 30 of them and they are specialist elephant hunters.
The existence of man-eaters has always captured the imagination of people but in southern Tanzania, we, in the year 2006, expect 1 00 people to be attacked by lions, in this year alone.
These are people that are being attacked and eaten as food by the lions, and it's shocking to think that that kind of conflict could still exist in the 21 st century.
But what we find is that people in southern Tanzania are so incredibly poor, that they live in grass houses.
They spend hours and hours each day in their fields where they're vulnerable to lions that have learned to eat people as food.
This is the kind of situation that is obviously intolerable.
It's unacceptable on any level that there should be that much cost in human life from direct animal conflict.
It may prove impossible to find ways for people to live in such close proximity to an animal as dangerous as a lion.
It may simply be the case that we're in the last stages of seeing animals, such as the lion, living outside any sort of protected area.
NARRATOR: To people in the West, that may seem like a shocking statement.
How can there be an Africa without lions? I think that there's an incredible disconnect now between the forces in the developed nations and the realities on the ground.
That people who claim to love animals so much are the ones that see beautiful pictures in beautiful light of a female lion playing with her cubs in the safety of their homes.
And they have no idea what that lion can do to people that have to live next to it.
They have no idea that these animals actually cause serious damage to people.
(GUN FIRING) NARRATOR: Even hunting, trophy hunting, can be called sustainable development.
In Tanzania, it's big business, bringing thousands of tourist dollars to poor areas.
How do conservationists rationalise that? Hunting species in a sustainable way will continue to be part of conservation, and should be.
That's in terrestrial systems, hunting has been a part of human management of those systems for millennia.
And as long as that hunting is consistent with protecting the essential integrity of those systems, it ought to be allowed.
(GUN FIRING) I enJoy hunting because it's a challenge for me.
I like the risk involved.
It's Just like any other sport.
People do dangerous sports 'cause they get an adrenaline rush.
That's what keeps me going, gives me a kick.
Hunters, in my opinion, are very much conservationists.
We're not trying to reduce numbers, 'cause it's our future.
But I do believe that the population of lions would increase if there was a value to them.
The people would then look after them, turn around and say, ''That animal is worth 30, 40, whatever thousand dollars to us.
'' You got to look at it like that animal you've taken is now gonna go back into the system to save the rest of them.
There'll be probably no change at the end of the day out of $50,000-$60,000 to get a big lion.
PACkER: By all of the legislation in this country, a proportion of the benefits of trophy hunting has to go into the local communities.
Then the revenue that is sustained by that really is meaningful enough to have a big impact on people's lives so that they really do care about the wildlife as a resource rather than a nuisance.
NARRATOR: Many people would see this as good business, and if it helps save lions while bringing in money, it also has to be sustainable development.
But as conservation, isn't there something missing? The conservation ethic maybe? SANJAYAN: Let's take a charismatic species like lions.
There are people who are out there who say, ''Look, I should be able to go out there and if I'm putting some money back into conservation ''to save the habitat, I should be able to shoot that lion, ''cut its head off and mount it on my office wall.
'' And there are other people who say, ''No.
'' You know, these things, just the notion of going out and trophy hunting for a magnificent, top predator like this is the, you know, antithesis of what conservation is all about.
I don't have a clear answer to that dilemma but it's the kind of argument I think that needs to happen.
Because I think the ethics of conservation is being lost sometimes.
We don't have that conversation enough.
I think the people that worry about the ethics of any kind of consumptive or even non-consumptive tourism as a mechanism for preserving wildlife, I think they're going to have a hard time convincing local people that they can eat ethics.
And when you're up against it like this, there's no point.
It's Just silly to talk about that.
People who have these high ethics are gonna have to speak with money.
It's the cheap, easy option to be pointing their fingers at anybody trying to engage people economically, because I don't think they want to contribute any money.
Here's my challenge to the people who've got this high ethical standards.
What are you doing? Where's your investment? I don't see any of those organisations working here in Tanzania.
I don't see them doing anything positive in Botswana, South Africa, kenya, that's really making a difference, that's really gonna help people to live with these kinds of species.
Put your money where your mouth is.
Get out here, this is where the action is, otherwise you're just wasting everybody's time.
NARRATOR: Trophy hunting happens outside of Africa, too.
These are the mountains of Pakistan where Western hunters pour huge amounts of money into local communities for the privilege of becoming another predator of an animal with an already precarious life.
ATTENBOROUGH: Markhor gather for their annual rut.
Males must fight for the right to breed.
But on these sheer cliffs, any slip by either animal could be fatal.
On these treacherous slopes, no hunter other than a snow leopard would have a chance of catching such agile prey.
MALIk: Trophy hunting of markhor started about four, five years ago, in earnest.
Right now you get a trophy of a markhor for $50,000.
The snow leopard, you can't hunt anymore.
Drawing the locals into the conservation element by giving them some benefits, whether it's trophy hunting, whether it's tourism, whether it's basic services when people go into the parks, made sense.
It still does.
The only issue with that is that if you're not going to look after the whole picture and you're just picking up on trophies with markhor on it, you're inevitably causing the locals to protect one animal at the cost of another.
Trophy hunting is one of the links.
It isn't the answer to economic growth or creating that infrastructure through trophy hunting alone.
That's Just one element.
You have education, you have relocation of villages, you have trophy hunting, you have villages, shops, schools, health units, ecotourism.
They all have to come together before you find the economic solution.
NARRATOR: So it's possible to forget any qualms about trophy hunting and see it as Just one end of the burgeoning industry of ecotourism.
Many countries poor in money are rich in natural spectacle, which attracts tourists and vast amounts of their dollars.
I think you'd be a very pessimistic person today not to welcome the growing focus on ecotourism of one kind or another because, whichever way you cut it, it's got to be a damn sight better than the Earth-trashing tourism that has dominated the global market up until now.
Tourism is now one of the world's largest industries, it's one of the fastest growing industries worldwide, therefore, the economic momentum behind it is absolutely huge.
If we can find ways of turning tourism into a positive force for conservation, then I think that's all to the good.
But it does embrace a very wide range of different activities from, for example, taking the bus and walking along the coast of England, right through to flying on a jumbo jet to the other side of the world, going in a four-by-four vehicle, disturbing wild creatures, impinging on local communities.
So there is an awful big spectrum in there in this idea of ecotourism.
PORRITT: I don't think we should be too upset about that.
This is a market place that is still forming itself.
Definitions are being made, standards are being set, experience is being learned.
I feel we will arrive at a point where genuinely sustainable tourism becomes a reality for a large number of people.
NARRATOR: In Kenya, the Masai people may not be allowed to live in the parks, but some do profit from tourism.
They run this new, luxurious eco-lodge.
In the morning you would see lions and other game walking around.
And especially the view from the loo is brilliant.
We are very lucky to have lions because that will attract more guests.
And the more we get the guests, the more revenue we get from the tourism.
NARRATOR: Tourists pay a few hundred dollars a night to stay at the lodge, but 40% of this goes to the Masai, who see it as worthwhile to protect wildlife.
There is absolutely no question that people work in their own self-interest and that self-interest is often short term and it's economic gain.
So if we can demonstrate that a local park, a protected area, has value to local people as well as to the national government, it really is a major way forward.
So what one wants to do is effectively embody the value of the national park, which has aesthetic, moral, ethical value, but to recognise that national park can be a source of income, ecotourism.
But it can also have many other values and if the local community can capture those values, they then actually help to protect that area.
And the people should see how to conserve wildlife to benefit from it as a resource, like any other resource.
Like oil in Iraq, like oil in the Arabian countries.
It's going to make sure that kenyans will see as an oil of kenya.
NARRATOR: Tourism is reaching some of the more remote places now.
Deep rainforest.
ATTENBOROUGH: This forest covers only 3% of the planet's surface, but it contains more than 50% of all its plants and animals.
(ANIMALS CALLING) The canopy is particularly rich.
There are monkeys, birds and millions of species of insects.
Exactly how many, we have no idea.
The character of the forest changes as you descend, becoming ever darker and damper, favouring different kinds of animals and plants.
NARRATOR: Rainforest tourism is well and good, but it's usually more immediately profitable just to cut the forest down.
(CHAINSAW WHIRRING) The truth is that no matter what the conservation movement does, there are some huge forces that sometimes tend to line up against what conservation is trying to do.
Massive agriculture, like the palm oil industry for example in Asia, where you can have a monoculture dominating a landscape, reducing the rainforest to essentially small chunks, is a huge challenge.
I've seen a lot of those studies that talk about how fast the rainforest is disappearing and they all differ from one another.
It's always a different rate every year, and if you consider the time when these arguments first started coming out and do the math, we should have no rainforests by now.
So I raise an eyebrow and view with a great deal of scepticism some of the reports about how fast the rainforest is decreasing.
Well, one of the most depressing things about going back to places after you haven't been there for several years is to see how some places change.
And going back to Borneo was particularly difficult because we were driving through countless miles of oil palm plantation.
As far as you could see in every direction, there was oil palm.
Just to see so much of it, and for so long, is very depressing and actually, sort of, almost brings tears to your eyes to know what it once was and what you're looking at now.
An oil palm plantation is the absolute antithesis of a rainforest.
In a rainforest, particularly in Borneo, you've got about 250 species of tree per hectare.
That's more than the whole of the British Isles.
And so you're replacing this wonderfully diverse environment with a monoculture.
All the same tree species.
So when you take just one tree and mass produce it across three quarters of an island the size of Borneo, you're obviously reducing your diversity enormously.
LOVELOCk: The tropical rainforests are quite remarkable entities.
There is a mix of species in them, a great biodiversity that has evolved to regulate the water flow of the whole system.
And there are complex and detailed interactions between the plants and animals of that great ecosystem that cannot be replaced by a simple single plantation of trees.
It just wouldn't work.
Oil palm is a plantation crop that's being grown across many tropical countries right now, and it produces large quantities of very cheap vegetable oil.
This is then traded in global commodity markets and finishes up in a wide range of products, bread, soup, crisps, lipstick.
A wide range of everyday goods that you'll buy contain palm oil.
Now the problem is it's a very destructive trade and yet, there appears to be as yet, very little being done to control it.
I think your best bet in trying to move forward in terms of conservation in that kind of environment is to engage with that industry in such a way that the expansion of that activity is limited at least to the lands that are least important for conservation.
You know, you are not going to hold back the tide, but you might be able to direct it.
NARRATOR: In the past 1 0 years, the palm oil industry has grown by 50% and shows no sign of slowing down.
So in 2004, the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil was set up.
It's a voluntary organisation that encourages the industry to be as environmentally friendly as, under the circumstances, such an industry can be.
Unilever, which uses palm oil in many of its products, is a founder member.
kEES VIS: The mission of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil is to promote the use of sustainable palm oil.
In order to do that, we needed to define what we mean with sustainable palm oil.
And in order to do that, we need to balance the interests of those who are interested in nature conservation, and the interests of those whose livelihoods depends on the production of palm oil, and the interests of those who use palm oil, put it in their products and sell it to consumers.
Palm oil creates employment for millions of people in Malaysia and Indonesia.
It's a big part of the local economy over there.
And so there are clearly very large economic interests for the producers to make sure that palm oil is an accepted product in consumer markets.
Agriculture and biodiversity cannot live side by side by definition.
Wherever there is agriculture now, there was biodiversity in the past.
Wherever there is a wheat field in northern France, there was an oak forest once.
Wherever there is a potato field in the UK, there was an oak forest once.
That's how it is, that is the footprint mankind has on nature.
The point is, we have six billion people on this planet, the number will grow to nine billion people on this planet, those people need to be fed.
In order to feed those people, we need to convert some nature to agriculture, we have no choice.
Where we do have a choice is to decide where we do that.
Not all regions are suitable for all crops.
So within the regions that are suitable for a certain crop, you need to look for those areas where you destroy the least biodiversity, if you need to convert it to agriculture.
But as a species, if we want to survive, if we want to feed the people on this planet, we need to grow crops.
It's what we have to do.
NARRATOR: As the human population grows, countries grow and expand their industrial base and more and more of the natural world inevitably disappears.
Frustrated by the refusal of the world's governments to do much about this, some people are taking matters into their own hands.
Johan Eliasch is one of the richest men in Britain.
Rich enough to buy a piece of the Amazon the size of greater London.
I acquired a piece of the rainforest last year.
I was fed up with politicians talking and I saw an opportunity to actually take action and that's why I bought this piece of rainforest.
Having followed the debate about the environment, I have become increasingly concerned because if we look at the changing weather patterns, if we look at how much of the rainforest that has been deforested over the last 50 years, it's horrendous.
The rainforest that I bought had, basically, a forestry operation.
So I shut down the sawmill and stopped anything to do with cutting trees.
The motive to save rainforests can be a good thing as long as one does the proper cost-benefit analysis.
Now if you're talking about rich elites, you know, we in the United States sometimes refer to them as armchair environmentalists, going down, buying land, putting it off limits.
In reality, these programmes have the detrimental effect of hindering economic and industrial growth in developing countries.
ELIASCH: Well, I think you have to look at the alternatives.
The alternative is that somebody else owns the land who wants to log and yes, that would create Jobs.
But then you have to weigh up It's jobs which is, in this case, very short term in thinking or preserving the environment and making sure that we don't get further climate change.
SANJAYAN: It all depends on what the ultimate goal of what they're trying to do is.
When you have an individual going to a foreign country and buying some land and saying, ''Look, I'm buying this because I think it's important for the heritage of the country.
'' And there is some plan down the road to transition that ownership of the land into some local entity that can manage it in perpetuity, I think that's a noble thing to do.
What I would argue is, if indeed an entity in the north wanted to buy land in a developing country, one would not only want to look at the importance for biodiversity, conservation and protection, but also, what are the implications for the people that live on that land? One would want to look at the social issues as well as the environmental issues before one would move ahead with such a proJect.
NARRATOR: The conservation vision is always struggling against another, more seductive vision.
That of a world based on Western lifestyles.
I go to other countries and start telling them about conservation, I'm always cognisant in the back of my mind that they're thinking, ''Well, that's great for you to say that, ''but, you know, you guys have all these things in the US ''and you're well developed and all that, ''and now you're trying to prevent us from doing the same thing.
'' I mean, these are real human aspirations that there's no way you're gonna stop, or stem the tide.
I just don't believe that you need to make the exact same mistakes we made, in getting people who are at a very poor standard of living to the next step.
It is impossible and unacceptable and just won't work, to say to the poor of China and India, ''You can't have what we've got.
'' So the only way that we can get a deal with the people of the world to preserve human civilisation is to say, ''It's not any longer going to be economic growth for economic growth's sake.
''It's a more equitable world where everyone has the basic things that human beings need,'' and then we cease to find the meaning of life out of more and more economic growth and more and more consumption.
Because in our kind of society, where that's what's happening, it's not only plundering the world and unsustainable, it's making people miserable.
I think we need a change of heart.
I think we need to see ourselves in another kind of context.
Instead of seeing ourselves as fundamentally, to use the old phrase, brains on stalks, living in this artificial world, in this bubble, we need to see ourselves as part of a system, answerable to other parts of that system and I would say also, of course, answerable to God.
Now, that's something which doesn't come easily in the Western world.
I think it's absolutely imperative for anyone in a position of religious responsibility in the Western world to hammer on that theme as loudly and consistently as they possibly can.
Two forces that have guided human social development through the ages has been, you know, economic growth and how do you make yourself richer, and religion.
I mean, these are the two big engines that have developed and forced us into where we are today, or shaped us into where we are today.
You know, religion is starting to play a bigger and more vocal role in talking about protecting God's creation, and I wholeheartedly welcome that engagement.
Well, the way that religion can contribute to environment is that it owns a lot of the planet to start with.
We estimate that the 1 1 major religions we work with own about 7 to 8% of the habitable surface of the planet.
Forests, farms, urban sites, you name it.
So, when we talk about religion, yes, at one level we can think about them preaching and teaching, because all the faiths have immensely profound statements and teachings about how we should treat nature.
But they also are in the business of the environment.
They actually buy, they sell, they own, they control and they influence.
And not only that, they carry authority.
If they say, ''Do this,'' they're gonna be listened to in a way that no government, and certainly no NGO is going to be listened to.
NARRATOR: All it took was a plea by the Dalai Lama to make a dramatic change in the attitude of Tibetan Buddhists.
What happened is that tens of thousands of people in response to the Dalai Lama's message across Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, India have ripped their furs off their robes.
Burnt their fox hats, burnt their fur blankets.
Burnt it.
And these are extremely poor people.
They have very little money.
So it's a bit like us setting fire to our car because we think it's wrong to drive cars in terms of financial value.
And they're doing it with a huge smile on their face.
It is really seeing people at their very best.
They embraced the responsibility and I think their behaviour really sets the standard for everybody else in the world.
I have never seen anything like this happen before.
It is absolutely staggering.
I can't say what the Dalai Lama's influence in his area is.
I don't think there is any influence in our areas.
Religion doesn't play any part in any sort of superstition or otherwise, with these animals.
I think the religion of stomach is the essence here.
I don't think religion has anything to do with conserving animals, at least in our part of the world.
I'm intrigued to see the way now in which some of the world's major faiths and religions are beginning to understand that they have a serious leadership role.
To use their teaching, their holy texts, if you like, their authority, their inherent wisdom, to draw out better messages about the responsibility of human kind, in terms of acting as stewards and all the rest of it.
Is it going to come in time? I don't know.
I'm pretty critical, looking back at how pathetically disengaged the world's maJor religions have been.
They've Just stood by and watched as our industrial Juggernaut has laid waste to this astonishingly beautiful created world.
And I'm glad they're gonna be out there now raising their voice in defence of that, of our planet, our home, of God's Earth, if you like, in a Christian sense.
But I think they've left it a bit late in the day, I must admit.
25 years ago, as I remember very well, the World Wildlife Fund organised a big conference of multi faiths, of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism.
They all got together and determined that all those religions carried within them the moral precept that they ought to care for the environment and for the creatures with which we share the world.
I suppose in a way, the problem is that the world by and large has turned away from religions and they are having less effect than they did.
I'd hope that, in relation to the whole question about the environment and ecology, I could help to keep open some of the really big questions, the questions about what is human nature in this.
It's not just a practical problem about how do we avoid disaster, but how do we imagine our humanity freshly, and I think religion has a unique perspective to offer there.
PAYNE: Up until now, science has ruled the roost in terms of what takes place in conservation around the world.
We need to expand that.
We need to bring in the humanities, poetry, art, music, dance, everything.
Anything that will make a difference on how people view this problem because this problem matters.
It matters to their lives, it matters to their hearts, it matters in every way.
What we need is more responsible media.
And then I think this makes it possible for people to become interested in something, to become passionately concerned and then to do something.
If they get interested and passionately concerned and don't do anything, then they are falling back and down.
And my feeling is they have to move, we have to move.
I think the media has a really important role in conserving wildlife in the future.
I mean, if you look back at the history of wildlife filmmaking from the very beginning, undoubtedly the awareness that has risen over the years, and introducing animals to people, is phenomenal.
And every generation, there is a new generation, and every time we are showing people new animals.
ATTENBOROUGH: This series will take you to the last wildernesses and show you the planet and its wildlife as you have never seen them before.
I don't have any doubt at all in my own mind that all the programmes, radio, TV programmes, that have been made about the natural world over the last 30 years, have had an incredible impact on people.
They really have.
And they've helped people to understand our part in the natural world, to get a feel for its beauty, its diversity and so on.
So, a big tick in that box, a very positive impact, if you like.
But there's also a downside to that.
I think people have been turned into passive voyeurs of nature rather than engaged participants in cohabiting with nature.
I sometimes think that the natural history programming has left people with a sense that it's all okay out there and, ''Look, if it's on the box, it must be fine and it'll be fine tomorrow.
'' When, in fact, even as the programme makers have been out there capturing this stuff on film, they know that it's disappearing under their very eyes.
But luckily, we're not just making programmes like Planet Earth, there are a range of different programmes dealing with the problems as well.
And the combination, I think, is vital.
Vital in conservation, globally.
Fifty years ago, nobody cared tuppence about whaling, for example.
And it was only the underwater pioneers, people like Cousteau and so on who started the movement, that suddenly people, having seen those things They could only have seen it on television, there was nowhere else.
They don't see it in the cinema.
Where else are they going to see it? Suddenly there's a worldwide movement that says ''Save the Whale''.
Had it not been for people like Cousteau, I don't think there would be such a movement.
So, that's the justification of doing those sort of films.
NARRATOR: Throughout the world, awareness of environmental issues has grown immensely.
A lot of people now know what the problems are, and what's more, most of them know about the solutions.
So can we, after all, be optimistic? I have to be optimistic about the future.
I have to believe that my daughter, and if she has children, her daughters or sons, will actually live in a world at least as good as the world we have today.
But I have to be equally honest, business as usual will not realise that world.
If we continue with the energy policies and energy practices of today, if we continue with our deforestation policies that we have today, if we carry on in the way we are today, the world tomorrow will be a worse place for our children and our grandchildren.
I have two sons, who are 1 7 and 1 9, and I worry about their future.
I worry about the planet that we are leaving to them.
And I am a conservationist, so I am by nature an optimist.
Because you have to believe it's possible to turn around the trends that you see on this planet.
And I think we can, but we need to get going.
I would definitely say I'm optimistic about what I can do and what I can stimulate other people to do on this issue.
I don't think anyone has ever created a revolution or a movement, who's a pessimist.
You just don't get very far.
And I truly believe that we can live in a world that is better than it is today, and that our individual contributions can add up to something better.
We're constantly told that our planet is a very small one, but it isn't.
And I think you learn that when you work on a series like Planet Earth.
Sure, when we went to a lot of the places we did see destroyed areas, we did see fragmentation, environmental damage.
But we also saw incredible wildernesses, species that, while they may be threatened, are still there.
I mean, when you've got wild Bactrian camels still surviving in a place like the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, there is still hope.
And everywhere where you go, there are people that care about these places, and care about the species.
And while they still exist, I think we should all feel hopeful that they can continue to live and survive in these incredible places.
And, for me, the only good news in this picture is that we also see glimmers of the solution, that we can begin to see strategies that work, that it is possible to shift our economies so that it works for conservation instead of against it.
I've always felt a kind of very deep gut-wrenching sense of pain when I think about the speed with which we're laying waste the planet.
But I've always taken that kind of emotional pain and turned it into, I hope, more constructive approaches to trying to deal with these things.
Because if all you can do is get stuck on your personal pain, you'll never turn that into campaigning passion to put the thing right that is going wrong at the moment.
We've got to turn people's minds towards more positive images of the good that we can still do to help protect the natural world.
NARRATOR: How much longer can a growing, consuming, developing humanity coexist with wild animals, with raw nature? And what will happen to the animals, to nature, and to us, if we can't? Planet Earth has shown us some of the world's most spectacular inhabitants in their spectacular settings.
And few fit this description better than humpback whales.
BROWNLOW: One of the greatest privileges I've ever had is to swim with humpback whales.
These are 1 2-metre giants that could swat you with their flukes but, instead, they accept you and enable you to just gently snorkel close up to them, to get a very close and personal experience with them.
(WHALE CALLING) NARRATOR: You could almost say that the modern conservation movement was started by humpback whales.
It was recordings of their songs in the 1 960s that spearheaded the Save the Whale campaign.
And that, combined with other new awareness, the dangers of pesticides, the threat to rainforests, soon grew into ''Save the Earth''.
The man who produced those humpback recordings is Roger Payne.
Humpback whales are the whales that sing.
I mean, imagine! And these songs, they change and they use rhyme in the most complicated ones.
It's thrilling to hear.
And this is why we were able to get whales into the culture of humanity.
So important.
NARRATOR: Humpbacks not only sing, they also provide us with an annual spectacle, an event captured by Planet Earth.
ATTENBOROUGH: The humpbacks have finally arrived.
The polar seas in summer are the most productive on the planet and the whales gorge themselves round the clock.
But it may not always be this way.
Fish and krill stocks are declining so rapidly that spectacles like this may soon be part of history.
NARRATOR: So the animals that inspired 40 years of conservation are, themselves, still not saved.
Alas, humpbacks and other whales are not safe.
We are not, at this moment, where we think we are.
Everybody seems to think, ''Oh, we've the saved whales.
'' ''We have a moratorium.
'' And the answer is, ''Wrong.
'' It is being violated steadily by the whaling nations, by various loopholes which they are playing.
And the result is that whaling is about to escape all meaningful international control.
So, I'm watching my life's work undone in front of my eyes, and it's a horrible thing to watch.
(BIRDS CHIRPING) NARRATOR: Whales are not the only ones in the firing line.
Many of the world's wilderness areas are under constant threat.
We are now to the point that 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.
NARRATOR: Despite all the energy and the money that are being poured into conservation, the battles keep going on and on.
Why? Has the conservation movement been getting its message wrong? The challenges have, in some ways, got bigger.
Our consumption of natural resources, the pressure on land, the changes now taking place to the climate, pose far bigger challenges than those that have been solved.
And I think we do have to look at ways in which we can start gearing up the environmental message to be something more than simply an add-on to the way we do development and run our countries.
To make it something that's at the centre of the way in which governments and societies work, and we're still far from doing that.
I'm not sure the conservation movement's got it wrong in terms of where their focus has been.
It's just that their focus has been in one end of the spectrum.
When we do campaigns that say ''Save the Tiger'' or ''Save the Whale''and focus on a species, then it's clearly important.
What happened is, I think, the conservation movement Just stopped evolving after that.
NARRATOR: Early conservation was very stern, invariably casting humans as every wild animal's enemy.
Conservation areas were fenced in and people were kept out.
National parks, which were being set up all over the world, were typically seen as havens of protection and, in some cases, were fiercely guarded.
The strategy appeared to work, too.
It's credited with saving the elephants.
Richard Leakey was head of the Kenya Wildlife Service in the early 1 990s.
Elephants and rhinos were being heavily poached for their tusks and their horns, and numbers were falling dramatically.
Leakey's solution was to create a wildlife army.
ALL: Left, right, left.
About turn! Left, right, left The rangers became the most effective fighting force in the country.
But he also moved local tribes outside the fences, leaving the parks Just for animals and tourists.
They became guarded fortresses.
But was he right to take such a hardline approach? Leakey was right.
If you look at the '90s, when the issue of poaching, especially for ivory and for the rhino horn, he was really right in the sense that ''Who are poachers?'' The poachers were the communities and they were selling this to the middlemen.
And the situation was so bad that the population of wildlife, especially the rhino and the elephant, depleted so fast, that if drastic measures were not taken, we were going to lose them.
But that was 1 990s.
NARRATOR: The elephants thrived and the tourists got their money's worth.
But what was the effect on the local tribes people, cut off from their ancestral lands? The Masais were chased out of the park and never allowed in again.
But, to us, the Masai people, we look at it as very bad laws put in place, oppressing one side and giving one side a new way to oppress the other because wildlife are not restricted inside the park alone.
Always the wildlife come out of the park and they came to mingle together with our livestock here, causing a lot of diseases and a lot of conditions.
And, on the other side, we are not allowed to get into the park.
NDEDE: That's why I insist we need to re-engineer the whole thing.
And when we develop or design a programme to protect wildlife in this country, it should be people-sensitive.
And if there are specific promises that are made from the government's side, it should be one of the key areas that should be looked at is to make sure that these promises are fulfilled, so people don't get disillusioned.
Otherwise you're going to lose it.
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's going to give the communities of this country who live with wildlife, he's going to make policies which allow the people themself to be the protectors and the benefactors of wildlife.
NARRATOR: The World Bank was the main financial backer of Leakey's strategy.
We must empower local communities to be totally involved in both the design and the management of our protected areas.
Obviously, one of the key challenges in a protected area is indeed to keep out poachers etc, but whether or not the Bank would nowadays endorse the use of sort of a military-style empowerment, I think is a real question.
NARRATOR: Nowadays the trend is to involve people, local people, more and more.
But is conservation going too far in that direction? Should there still be some fortresses? One of the biggest problems we have with protecting these last pockets of pristine environment now is, ''Who has the right to go in there?'' We have indigenous people who might have used that land and those animals as a resource for generations.
And we'll have a situation where we have well-protected environmental areas so locked up that only an elite few can go in and visit these animals.
I think there are some parts of the world where we probably have to do that for a moment in history.
But it's not a long moment in history, it's at a time when there is particular stress.
Because I think that after a few years, yeah, maybe a decade at the most, then you start to have softer boundaries.
Because if it's Just a fortress, it will never be able to be defended long enough to be a sustainable fortress.
There are always going to be shifts of pressure around the boundaries that will make it more and more difficult to defend, both politically and practically.
And it also turns out that, you know, 80% of the world's biodiversity doesn't actually exist in national parks, it actually exists outside of national parks.
And so you're going to have to deal with the human element if you want to think about where conservation is gonna go in the future.
NARRATOR: This is RaJa Ampat, a coral reef in a remote corner of Indonesia.
It was recently brought to the world's attention as the most diverse, the richest coral reef on Earth, and the Planet Earth crew were among the first to film there, discovering behaviour that had never been seen before.
ATTENBOROUGH: And there are snakes here, too.
Lots of them.
These are banded sea kraits.
They lay their eggs on land but they hunt here in the water.
NARRATOR: Now that the world knows about RaJa Ampat, divers and snorkelers are bound to flock here, putting pressure on the reef system.
Is this a case for fortress conservation, banning tourists and keeping the reef pristine? McNEELY: It's a wonderful reef and, you know, we went snorkelling there and visiting.
A tremendous wealth of diversity of species and a great place.
Now, how was it able to maintain that status for so long? It was there, it was being protected without making it a fortress because nobody was putting pressure on it.
The reason that it would need to be protected now is because people are beginning to put pressure onto that habitat.
It may well be that there are places where we should keep people out.
You know, if the people have been out for a long time, sure, why should they go in? Because if you look at the production of fisheries, the establishment of marine protected areas where people are not allowed to fish, leads to greater production outside the protected area.
Many of the fish that people eat, a good part of their life cycle takes place in coral reefs and in mangroves.
So, they absolutely should be conserved for the benefit of the fisheries outside.
But why not to have some limited amount of tourism so that they provide also that economic benefit? And why not allow me to go snorkelling there? I greatly enJoyed that.
And why shouldn't people have the pleasure of experiencing that? Why shouldn't the Indonesian people have the pleasure of experiencing that? As long as they don't spoil it.
NARRATOR: But tourism means development along the coast, and up to now, coastal development anywhere around the world usually means environmental degradation.
In the past 40 years, a lot of the development has been funded by a well-meaning World Bank, backing proJects designed to help countries make the most of their natural resources.
The early assumptions about development were ''Let's have lots of projects, lots of roads, lots of dams.
'' ''Infrastructure means development, it means civilisation.
'' People were moved.
All sorts of habitats were destroyed.
People's livelihoods were destroyed.
I think lots of that was enormously crass and destructive.
And countries ended up with the capacity to produce electricity they weren't using and enormous debt out of the projects.
There's been terrible errors.
I think in the past, one tried, from a World Bank perspective, to focus on big infrastructure projects, roads, dams, power plants.
And I think the evidence now suggests that many of those projects were not as successful as we would have liked.
Too many of our big infrastructure proJects did lead to the loss of biodiversity without even helping the local rural poor.
I think we're now starting to design our proJects in a much more holistic manner.
NARRATOR: That idea, developing while doing virtually no damage to the environment, is known as sustainable development and is controversial.
JUNIPER: For me, sustainable development is the most powerful idea ever invented.
It's about protecting the Earth's natural capacities at the same time as meeting human needs.
And that sounds quite a simple and straightforward idea, but it's incredible how difficult that is to get across into the mainstream policy-making process where, pretty much all the time, it's not a question of bringing these things together and doing them as a single idea, they're traded off against each other.
It's either the environment or people.
And if we're going to solve these big problems, like the mass extinction that's taking place, and the climatic change that poses so many dangers to people, we have to do away with that false choice.
It's not a question of the environment or people, it has to be both, and that's what sustainable development is all about.
When talking about sustainable development, I think it's a very clever term that's been created by the environmentalists, particularly Well, internationally.
It's sustainable, it's development.
How could anybody be against it? But in reality, environmentalists or the folks who promote sustainable development, what they're really promoting is no development.
And that's the key.
It's very thinly veiled.
They don't want any development that's of any worth to the developing nations of the world.
They want to dictate the solar panels on top of huts, you know, the wind turbines in the fields.
The inefficient things that aren't truly going to bring these people out of the energy dark ages and help them progress as a people.
Sustainable development must mean that we develop in a way that we can thrive on this continent.
And 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 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 healthy environment.
As it is now, 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.
Solutions, like renewable energy and so on, are not really solutions at all.
Perhaps 1 00 years ago, all would have been fine.
It's much, much too late now.
What kind of world is it in which there'll be no development? Everything stops right now.
It's a really stupid idea to talk about a world in which there's no development.
But that development has got to be delivered in ways that are compatible with life support systems, ecosystems, with natural services and all the rest of it.
That's what we mean by sustainability.
What I know is what is unsustainable.
When we effectively lose biodiversity, perturb the climate system, pollute our waters, degrade our land, that is clearly unsustainable in the long term.
We need to integrate our national economic planning, sectoral planning, energy systems, transportation systems, agricultural systems, by taking into account what are we doing to the Earth's environment, both the biodiversity, and the climate system, and local air quality.
So we must match our need for economic development with our need to protect ecological systems because they, in the long run, underpin a more sustainable way of life.
NARRATOR: Sustainable development, the idea that people can live alongside and protect the natural world, yet still grow economically, has only been around for a few years.
But in reality, what does it mean in countries where the wildlife is not that easy to live next to? ATTENBOROUGH: Lions don't usually hunt elephants but desperate times require desperate measures.
This herd contains calves, easier targets.
A few exhausted stragglers are still arriving.
One of them is alone.
A solitary lion stands no chance, but the whole pride is here.
There are 30 of them and they are specialist elephant hunters.
The existence of man-eaters has always captured the imagination of people but in southern Tanzania, we, in the year 2006, expect 1 00 people to be attacked by lions, in this year alone.
These are people that are being attacked and eaten as food by the lions, and it's shocking to think that that kind of conflict could still exist in the 21 st century.
But what we find is that people in southern Tanzania are so incredibly poor, that they live in grass houses.
They spend hours and hours each day in their fields where they're vulnerable to lions that have learned to eat people as food.
This is the kind of situation that is obviously intolerable.
It's unacceptable on any level that there should be that much cost in human life from direct animal conflict.
It may prove impossible to find ways for people to live in such close proximity to an animal as dangerous as a lion.
It may simply be the case that we're in the last stages of seeing animals, such as the lion, living outside any sort of protected area.
NARRATOR: To people in the West, that may seem like a shocking statement.
How can there be an Africa without lions? I think that there's an incredible disconnect now between the forces in the developed nations and the realities on the ground.
That people who claim to love animals so much are the ones that see beautiful pictures in beautiful light of a female lion playing with her cubs in the safety of their homes.
And they have no idea what that lion can do to people that have to live next to it.
They have no idea that these animals actually cause serious damage to people.
(GUN FIRING) NARRATOR: Even hunting, trophy hunting, can be called sustainable development.
In Tanzania, it's big business, bringing thousands of tourist dollars to poor areas.
How do conservationists rationalise that? Hunting species in a sustainable way will continue to be part of conservation, and should be.
That's in terrestrial systems, hunting has been a part of human management of those systems for millennia.
And as long as that hunting is consistent with protecting the essential integrity of those systems, it ought to be allowed.
(GUN FIRING) I enJoy hunting because it's a challenge for me.
I like the risk involved.
It's Just like any other sport.
People do dangerous sports 'cause they get an adrenaline rush.
That's what keeps me going, gives me a kick.
Hunters, in my opinion, are very much conservationists.
We're not trying to reduce numbers, 'cause it's our future.
But I do believe that the population of lions would increase if there was a value to them.
The people would then look after them, turn around and say, ''That animal is worth 30, 40, whatever thousand dollars to us.
'' You got to look at it like that animal you've taken is now gonna go back into the system to save the rest of them.
There'll be probably no change at the end of the day out of $50,000-$60,000 to get a big lion.
PACkER: By all of the legislation in this country, a proportion of the benefits of trophy hunting has to go into the local communities.
Then the revenue that is sustained by that really is meaningful enough to have a big impact on people's lives so that they really do care about the wildlife as a resource rather than a nuisance.
NARRATOR: Many people would see this as good business, and if it helps save lions while bringing in money, it also has to be sustainable development.
But as conservation, isn't there something missing? The conservation ethic maybe? SANJAYAN: Let's take a charismatic species like lions.
There are people who are out there who say, ''Look, I should be able to go out there and if I'm putting some money back into conservation ''to save the habitat, I should be able to shoot that lion, ''cut its head off and mount it on my office wall.
'' And there are other people who say, ''No.
'' You know, these things, just the notion of going out and trophy hunting for a magnificent, top predator like this is the, you know, antithesis of what conservation is all about.
I don't have a clear answer to that dilemma but it's the kind of argument I think that needs to happen.
Because I think the ethics of conservation is being lost sometimes.
We don't have that conversation enough.
I think the people that worry about the ethics of any kind of consumptive or even non-consumptive tourism as a mechanism for preserving wildlife, I think they're going to have a hard time convincing local people that they can eat ethics.
And when you're up against it like this, there's no point.
It's Just silly to talk about that.
People who have these high ethics are gonna have to speak with money.
It's the cheap, easy option to be pointing their fingers at anybody trying to engage people economically, because I don't think they want to contribute any money.
Here's my challenge to the people who've got this high ethical standards.
What are you doing? Where's your investment? I don't see any of those organisations working here in Tanzania.
I don't see them doing anything positive in Botswana, South Africa, kenya, that's really making a difference, that's really gonna help people to live with these kinds of species.
Put your money where your mouth is.
Get out here, this is where the action is, otherwise you're just wasting everybody's time.
NARRATOR: Trophy hunting happens outside of Africa, too.
These are the mountains of Pakistan where Western hunters pour huge amounts of money into local communities for the privilege of becoming another predator of an animal with an already precarious life.
ATTENBOROUGH: Markhor gather for their annual rut.
Males must fight for the right to breed.
But on these sheer cliffs, any slip by either animal could be fatal.
On these treacherous slopes, no hunter other than a snow leopard would have a chance of catching such agile prey.
MALIk: Trophy hunting of markhor started about four, five years ago, in earnest.
Right now you get a trophy of a markhor for $50,000.
The snow leopard, you can't hunt anymore.
Drawing the locals into the conservation element by giving them some benefits, whether it's trophy hunting, whether it's tourism, whether it's basic services when people go into the parks, made sense.
It still does.
The only issue with that is that if you're not going to look after the whole picture and you're just picking up on trophies with markhor on it, you're inevitably causing the locals to protect one animal at the cost of another.
Trophy hunting is one of the links.
It isn't the answer to economic growth or creating that infrastructure through trophy hunting alone.
That's Just one element.
You have education, you have relocation of villages, you have trophy hunting, you have villages, shops, schools, health units, ecotourism.
They all have to come together before you find the economic solution.
NARRATOR: So it's possible to forget any qualms about trophy hunting and see it as Just one end of the burgeoning industry of ecotourism.
Many countries poor in money are rich in natural spectacle, which attracts tourists and vast amounts of their dollars.
I think you'd be a very pessimistic person today not to welcome the growing focus on ecotourism of one kind or another because, whichever way you cut it, it's got to be a damn sight better than the Earth-trashing tourism that has dominated the global market up until now.
Tourism is now one of the world's largest industries, it's one of the fastest growing industries worldwide, therefore, the economic momentum behind it is absolutely huge.
If we can find ways of turning tourism into a positive force for conservation, then I think that's all to the good.
But it does embrace a very wide range of different activities from, for example, taking the bus and walking along the coast of England, right through to flying on a jumbo jet to the other side of the world, going in a four-by-four vehicle, disturbing wild creatures, impinging on local communities.
So there is an awful big spectrum in there in this idea of ecotourism.
PORRITT: I don't think we should be too upset about that.
This is a market place that is still forming itself.
Definitions are being made, standards are being set, experience is being learned.
I feel we will arrive at a point where genuinely sustainable tourism becomes a reality for a large number of people.
NARRATOR: In Kenya, the Masai people may not be allowed to live in the parks, but some do profit from tourism.
They run this new, luxurious eco-lodge.
In the morning you would see lions and other game walking around.
And especially the view from the loo is brilliant.
We are very lucky to have lions because that will attract more guests.
And the more we get the guests, the more revenue we get from the tourism.
NARRATOR: Tourists pay a few hundred dollars a night to stay at the lodge, but 40% of this goes to the Masai, who see it as worthwhile to protect wildlife.
There is absolutely no question that people work in their own self-interest and that self-interest is often short term and it's economic gain.
So if we can demonstrate that a local park, a protected area, has value to local people as well as to the national government, it really is a major way forward.
So what one wants to do is effectively embody the value of the national park, which has aesthetic, moral, ethical value, but to recognise that national park can be a source of income, ecotourism.
But it can also have many other values and if the local community can capture those values, they then actually help to protect that area.
And the people should see how to conserve wildlife to benefit from it as a resource, like any other resource.
Like oil in Iraq, like oil in the Arabian countries.
It's going to make sure that kenyans will see as an oil of kenya.
NARRATOR: Tourism is reaching some of the more remote places now.
Deep rainforest.
ATTENBOROUGH: This forest covers only 3% of the planet's surface, but it contains more than 50% of all its plants and animals.
(ANIMALS CALLING) The canopy is particularly rich.
There are monkeys, birds and millions of species of insects.
Exactly how many, we have no idea.
The character of the forest changes as you descend, becoming ever darker and damper, favouring different kinds of animals and plants.
NARRATOR: Rainforest tourism is well and good, but it's usually more immediately profitable just to cut the forest down.
(CHAINSAW WHIRRING) The truth is that no matter what the conservation movement does, there are some huge forces that sometimes tend to line up against what conservation is trying to do.
Massive agriculture, like the palm oil industry for example in Asia, where you can have a monoculture dominating a landscape, reducing the rainforest to essentially small chunks, is a huge challenge.
I've seen a lot of those studies that talk about how fast the rainforest is disappearing and they all differ from one another.
It's always a different rate every year, and if you consider the time when these arguments first started coming out and do the math, we should have no rainforests by now.
So I raise an eyebrow and view with a great deal of scepticism some of the reports about how fast the rainforest is decreasing.
Well, one of the most depressing things about going back to places after you haven't been there for several years is to see how some places change.
And going back to Borneo was particularly difficult because we were driving through countless miles of oil palm plantation.
As far as you could see in every direction, there was oil palm.
Just to see so much of it, and for so long, is very depressing and actually, sort of, almost brings tears to your eyes to know what it once was and what you're looking at now.
An oil palm plantation is the absolute antithesis of a rainforest.
In a rainforest, particularly in Borneo, you've got about 250 species of tree per hectare.
That's more than the whole of the British Isles.
And so you're replacing this wonderfully diverse environment with a monoculture.
All the same tree species.
So when you take just one tree and mass produce it across three quarters of an island the size of Borneo, you're obviously reducing your diversity enormously.
LOVELOCk: The tropical rainforests are quite remarkable entities.
There is a mix of species in them, a great biodiversity that has evolved to regulate the water flow of the whole system.
And there are complex and detailed interactions between the plants and animals of that great ecosystem that cannot be replaced by a simple single plantation of trees.
It just wouldn't work.
Oil palm is a plantation crop that's being grown across many tropical countries right now, and it produces large quantities of very cheap vegetable oil.
This is then traded in global commodity markets and finishes up in a wide range of products, bread, soup, crisps, lipstick.
A wide range of everyday goods that you'll buy contain palm oil.
Now the problem is it's a very destructive trade and yet, there appears to be as yet, very little being done to control it.
I think your best bet in trying to move forward in terms of conservation in that kind of environment is to engage with that industry in such a way that the expansion of that activity is limited at least to the lands that are least important for conservation.
You know, you are not going to hold back the tide, but you might be able to direct it.
NARRATOR: In the past 1 0 years, the palm oil industry has grown by 50% and shows no sign of slowing down.
So in 2004, the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil was set up.
It's a voluntary organisation that encourages the industry to be as environmentally friendly as, under the circumstances, such an industry can be.
Unilever, which uses palm oil in many of its products, is a founder member.
kEES VIS: The mission of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil is to promote the use of sustainable palm oil.
In order to do that, we needed to define what we mean with sustainable palm oil.
And in order to do that, we need to balance the interests of those who are interested in nature conservation, and the interests of those whose livelihoods depends on the production of palm oil, and the interests of those who use palm oil, put it in their products and sell it to consumers.
Palm oil creates employment for millions of people in Malaysia and Indonesia.
It's a big part of the local economy over there.
And so there are clearly very large economic interests for the producers to make sure that palm oil is an accepted product in consumer markets.
Agriculture and biodiversity cannot live side by side by definition.
Wherever there is agriculture now, there was biodiversity in the past.
Wherever there is a wheat field in northern France, there was an oak forest once.
Wherever there is a potato field in the UK, there was an oak forest once.
That's how it is, that is the footprint mankind has on nature.
The point is, we have six billion people on this planet, the number will grow to nine billion people on this planet, those people need to be fed.
In order to feed those people, we need to convert some nature to agriculture, we have no choice.
Where we do have a choice is to decide where we do that.
Not all regions are suitable for all crops.
So within the regions that are suitable for a certain crop, you need to look for those areas where you destroy the least biodiversity, if you need to convert it to agriculture.
But as a species, if we want to survive, if we want to feed the people on this planet, we need to grow crops.
It's what we have to do.
NARRATOR: As the human population grows, countries grow and expand their industrial base and more and more of the natural world inevitably disappears.
Frustrated by the refusal of the world's governments to do much about this, some people are taking matters into their own hands.
Johan Eliasch is one of the richest men in Britain.
Rich enough to buy a piece of the Amazon the size of greater London.
I acquired a piece of the rainforest last year.
I was fed up with politicians talking and I saw an opportunity to actually take action and that's why I bought this piece of rainforest.
Having followed the debate about the environment, I have become increasingly concerned because if we look at the changing weather patterns, if we look at how much of the rainforest that has been deforested over the last 50 years, it's horrendous.
The rainforest that I bought had, basically, a forestry operation.
So I shut down the sawmill and stopped anything to do with cutting trees.
The motive to save rainforests can be a good thing as long as one does the proper cost-benefit analysis.
Now if you're talking about rich elites, you know, we in the United States sometimes refer to them as armchair environmentalists, going down, buying land, putting it off limits.
In reality, these programmes have the detrimental effect of hindering economic and industrial growth in developing countries.
ELIASCH: Well, I think you have to look at the alternatives.
The alternative is that somebody else owns the land who wants to log and yes, that would create Jobs.
But then you have to weigh up It's jobs which is, in this case, very short term in thinking or preserving the environment and making sure that we don't get further climate change.
SANJAYAN: It all depends on what the ultimate goal of what they're trying to do is.
When you have an individual going to a foreign country and buying some land and saying, ''Look, I'm buying this because I think it's important for the heritage of the country.
'' And there is some plan down the road to transition that ownership of the land into some local entity that can manage it in perpetuity, I think that's a noble thing to do.
What I would argue is, if indeed an entity in the north wanted to buy land in a developing country, one would not only want to look at the importance for biodiversity, conservation and protection, but also, what are the implications for the people that live on that land? One would want to look at the social issues as well as the environmental issues before one would move ahead with such a proJect.
NARRATOR: The conservation vision is always struggling against another, more seductive vision.
That of a world based on Western lifestyles.
I go to other countries and start telling them about conservation, I'm always cognisant in the back of my mind that they're thinking, ''Well, that's great for you to say that, ''but, you know, you guys have all these things in the US ''and you're well developed and all that, ''and now you're trying to prevent us from doing the same thing.
'' I mean, these are real human aspirations that there's no way you're gonna stop, or stem the tide.
I just don't believe that you need to make the exact same mistakes we made, in getting people who are at a very poor standard of living to the next step.
It is impossible and unacceptable and just won't work, to say to the poor of China and India, ''You can't have what we've got.
'' So the only way that we can get a deal with the people of the world to preserve human civilisation is to say, ''It's not any longer going to be economic growth for economic growth's sake.
''It's a more equitable world where everyone has the basic things that human beings need,'' and then we cease to find the meaning of life out of more and more economic growth and more and more consumption.
Because in our kind of society, where that's what's happening, it's not only plundering the world and unsustainable, it's making people miserable.
I think we need a change of heart.
I think we need to see ourselves in another kind of context.
Instead of seeing ourselves as fundamentally, to use the old phrase, brains on stalks, living in this artificial world, in this bubble, we need to see ourselves as part of a system, answerable to other parts of that system and I would say also, of course, answerable to God.
Now, that's something which doesn't come easily in the Western world.
I think it's absolutely imperative for anyone in a position of religious responsibility in the Western world to hammer on that theme as loudly and consistently as they possibly can.
Two forces that have guided human social development through the ages has been, you know, economic growth and how do you make yourself richer, and religion.
I mean, these are the two big engines that have developed and forced us into where we are today, or shaped us into where we are today.
You know, religion is starting to play a bigger and more vocal role in talking about protecting God's creation, and I wholeheartedly welcome that engagement.
Well, the way that religion can contribute to environment is that it owns a lot of the planet to start with.
We estimate that the 1 1 major religions we work with own about 7 to 8% of the habitable surface of the planet.
Forests, farms, urban sites, you name it.
So, when we talk about religion, yes, at one level we can think about them preaching and teaching, because all the faiths have immensely profound statements and teachings about how we should treat nature.
But they also are in the business of the environment.
They actually buy, they sell, they own, they control and they influence.
And not only that, they carry authority.
If they say, ''Do this,'' they're gonna be listened to in a way that no government, and certainly no NGO is going to be listened to.
NARRATOR: All it took was a plea by the Dalai Lama to make a dramatic change in the attitude of Tibetan Buddhists.
What happened is that tens of thousands of people in response to the Dalai Lama's message across Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, India have ripped their furs off their robes.
Burnt their fox hats, burnt their fur blankets.
Burnt it.
And these are extremely poor people.
They have very little money.
So it's a bit like us setting fire to our car because we think it's wrong to drive cars in terms of financial value.
And they're doing it with a huge smile on their face.
It is really seeing people at their very best.
They embraced the responsibility and I think their behaviour really sets the standard for everybody else in the world.
I have never seen anything like this happen before.
It is absolutely staggering.
I can't say what the Dalai Lama's influence in his area is.
I don't think there is any influence in our areas.
Religion doesn't play any part in any sort of superstition or otherwise, with these animals.
I think the religion of stomach is the essence here.
I don't think religion has anything to do with conserving animals, at least in our part of the world.
I'm intrigued to see the way now in which some of the world's major faiths and religions are beginning to understand that they have a serious leadership role.
To use their teaching, their holy texts, if you like, their authority, their inherent wisdom, to draw out better messages about the responsibility of human kind, in terms of acting as stewards and all the rest of it.
Is it going to come in time? I don't know.
I'm pretty critical, looking back at how pathetically disengaged the world's maJor religions have been.
They've Just stood by and watched as our industrial Juggernaut has laid waste to this astonishingly beautiful created world.
And I'm glad they're gonna be out there now raising their voice in defence of that, of our planet, our home, of God's Earth, if you like, in a Christian sense.
But I think they've left it a bit late in the day, I must admit.
25 years ago, as I remember very well, the World Wildlife Fund organised a big conference of multi faiths, of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism.
They all got together and determined that all those religions carried within them the moral precept that they ought to care for the environment and for the creatures with which we share the world.
I suppose in a way, the problem is that the world by and large has turned away from religions and they are having less effect than they did.
I'd hope that, in relation to the whole question about the environment and ecology, I could help to keep open some of the really big questions, the questions about what is human nature in this.
It's not just a practical problem about how do we avoid disaster, but how do we imagine our humanity freshly, and I think religion has a unique perspective to offer there.
PAYNE: Up until now, science has ruled the roost in terms of what takes place in conservation around the world.
We need to expand that.
We need to bring in the humanities, poetry, art, music, dance, everything.
Anything that will make a difference on how people view this problem because this problem matters.
It matters to their lives, it matters to their hearts, it matters in every way.
What we need is more responsible media.
And then I think this makes it possible for people to become interested in something, to become passionately concerned and then to do something.
If they get interested and passionately concerned and don't do anything, then they are falling back and down.
And my feeling is they have to move, we have to move.
I think the media has a really important role in conserving wildlife in the future.
I mean, if you look back at the history of wildlife filmmaking from the very beginning, undoubtedly the awareness that has risen over the years, and introducing animals to people, is phenomenal.
And every generation, there is a new generation, and every time we are showing people new animals.
ATTENBOROUGH: This series will take you to the last wildernesses and show you the planet and its wildlife as you have never seen them before.
I don't have any doubt at all in my own mind that all the programmes, radio, TV programmes, that have been made about the natural world over the last 30 years, have had an incredible impact on people.
They really have.
And they've helped people to understand our part in the natural world, to get a feel for its beauty, its diversity and so on.
So, a big tick in that box, a very positive impact, if you like.
But there's also a downside to that.
I think people have been turned into passive voyeurs of nature rather than engaged participants in cohabiting with nature.
I sometimes think that the natural history programming has left people with a sense that it's all okay out there and, ''Look, if it's on the box, it must be fine and it'll be fine tomorrow.
'' When, in fact, even as the programme makers have been out there capturing this stuff on film, they know that it's disappearing under their very eyes.
But luckily, we're not just making programmes like Planet Earth, there are a range of different programmes dealing with the problems as well.
And the combination, I think, is vital.
Vital in conservation, globally.
Fifty years ago, nobody cared tuppence about whaling, for example.
And it was only the underwater pioneers, people like Cousteau and so on who started the movement, that suddenly people, having seen those things They could only have seen it on television, there was nowhere else.
They don't see it in the cinema.
Where else are they going to see it? Suddenly there's a worldwide movement that says ''Save the Whale''.
Had it not been for people like Cousteau, I don't think there would be such a movement.
So, that's the justification of doing those sort of films.
NARRATOR: Throughout the world, awareness of environmental issues has grown immensely.
A lot of people now know what the problems are, and what's more, most of them know about the solutions.
So can we, after all, be optimistic? I have to be optimistic about the future.
I have to believe that my daughter, and if she has children, her daughters or sons, will actually live in a world at least as good as the world we have today.
But I have to be equally honest, business as usual will not realise that world.
If we continue with the energy policies and energy practices of today, if we continue with our deforestation policies that we have today, if we carry on in the way we are today, the world tomorrow will be a worse place for our children and our grandchildren.
I have two sons, who are 1 7 and 1 9, and I worry about their future.
I worry about the planet that we are leaving to them.
And I am a conservationist, so I am by nature an optimist.
Because you have to believe it's possible to turn around the trends that you see on this planet.
And I think we can, but we need to get going.
I would definitely say I'm optimistic about what I can do and what I can stimulate other people to do on this issue.
I don't think anyone has ever created a revolution or a movement, who's a pessimist.
You just don't get very far.
And I truly believe that we can live in a world that is better than it is today, and that our individual contributions can add up to something better.
We're constantly told that our planet is a very small one, but it isn't.
And I think you learn that when you work on a series like Planet Earth.
Sure, when we went to a lot of the places we did see destroyed areas, we did see fragmentation, environmental damage.
But we also saw incredible wildernesses, species that, while they may be threatened, are still there.
I mean, when you've got wild Bactrian camels still surviving in a place like the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, there is still hope.
And everywhere where you go, there are people that care about these places, and care about the species.
And while they still exist, I think we should all feel hopeful that they can continue to live and survive in these incredible places.