Today we're living in an era in which the biggest threat to human well-being, to other species and to the Earth as we know it might well be ourselves… - David Attenborough

Ever since we arrived on this planet as a species, we've cut them down, dug them up, burnt them and poisoned them. Today we're doing so on a greater scale than ever […] We destroy plants at our peril. Neither we nor any other animal can survive without them. The time has now come for us to cherish our green inheritance, not to pillage it – for without it, we will surely perish.

Just as the human population was starting its unprecedented growth spurt in the late eighteenth century, this was published. It's a first edition of an essay on population by the English clergyman Thomas Malthus. Malthus made a very simple observation about the relationship between humans and resources and used it to look into the future. He pointed out that "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man. "Food production can't increase as rapidly as human reproduction. Demand will eventually outstrip supply. Malthus goes on to say, if we don't control human reproduction voluntarily, life could end in misery, which earned him a reputation as a bit of a pessimist. But Malthus' principle remains true. The productive capacity or the Earth has physical limits and those limits will ultimately determine how many human beings it can support. m10s58-m12s18

At a time when it's possible for thirty people to stand on the top of Everest in one day, Antarctica still remains a remote, lonely and desolate continent. A place where it's possible to see the splendours and immensities of the natural world at its most dramatic and, what's more, witness them almost exactly as they were, long, long before human beings ever arrived on the surface of this planet. Long may it remain so.