All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.
Interpretation
Fewer people make environmental issues easier to address, while more people complicate and worsen these challenges.
David Attenborough's quote highlights the relationship between population growth and environmental degradation. He argues that as the global population increases, the solutions to environmental problems become increasingly complex and difficult to achieve, suggesting that a smaller population would ease the burden on natural resources and ecosystems.
In practice
During a lecture on climate change, one might quote Attenborough to emphasize the impact of overpopulation on environmental efforts.
I don't think we are going to become extinct. We're very clever and extremely resourceful - and we will find ways of preserving ourselves, of that I'm sure. But whether our lives will be as rich as they are now is another question.
I'm against this huge globalisation on the basis of economic advantage.
I would be absolutely astounded if population growth and industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn't changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for denial.
There's a small worm called Loa Loa Filariasis. This parasite can survive in one environment exclusively- namely, underneath the skin and inside the eyes of human beings. Children and the elderly in tropical regions (usually the poorest) are the most widely affected. A painful, slow death is virtually certain. The worm can actually live in the host for 17 years before the host finally dies.
The fundamental issue is the moral issue.
It is vital that there is a narrator figure whom people believe. That's why I never do commercials. If I started saying that margarine was the same as motherhood, people would think I was a liar.
Give me strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is.
There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.
O cricket from your cherry cry_x000D_ _x000D_ No one would ever guess_x000D_ _x000D_ How quickly you must die.
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.
In wilderness I sense the miracle of life.
Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.