An eye from another world; a smell-detector, investigating the path ahead. We don't often see a snail that way, and that's because we've only recentl… - David Attenborough

I don't know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, "Why don't you admit that the hummingbird, the butterfly, and the Bird-of-Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?" And I always say, "Well, when you say that, you've also got to think of a little boy sitting on a riverbank, like here, in West Africa, that's got a little worm, a living organism, that's in its eye and boring through its eyeballs and is slowly turning it blind. The creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm." Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate and so therefore [sic] when I make these films, I prefer to show what I know to be the facts, what I know to be true, and then people can deduce what they will from that.

Since I started filming in the 1950s, on average, wild animal populations have more than halved. I look at these images now and I realize that, although as a young man I felt I was out there in the wild experiencing the untouched natural world... it was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying.

It seems to me that an understanding of the natural world is crucial for all of us – after all we depend upon it for our food, for the air we breath and, some would say, for our very sanity. Its a relationship that we're stretching to breaking point as we continue to grow in numbers. m44s31-m44s57