Tonight’s 60 Minutes was truly outstanding. Three excellent stories: ‘How many of Florida's felons will be able to vote?’, ‘Why a private section of the border wall is allegedly failing’, and then they went to the Sir David Attenborough interview that blew me away.
The legendary wildlife filmmaker tells Anderson Cooper why urgent action on climate change is crucial and why we need to save nature in order to save ourselves.
Attenborough: The way we humans live on Earth, is sending it into a decline. Human beings have overrun the world. We're replacing the wild with the tame... Our planet is headed for disaster.
Anderson Cooper: And technology will evolve to come up with some sort of a solution that we can't even imagine?
Sir David Attenborough: No. We live in a finite world.
Ultimately we depend upon the natural world for every mouthful of food that we eat and indeed every lung full of air that we breathe. I mean, if it wasn't for the natural world the atmosphere would be depleted from oxygen tomorrow.
If there were no trees around, we would suffocate. I mean-- and actually, in the course of this particular pandemic that we're going through, I think people are discovering that they need the natural world for their very sanity. People who have never listened to a bird song, are suddenly thrilled, excited, supported, inspired by the natural world. And they realize they're not apart from it. They are part of it.
Anderson Cooper: So, by saving nature, we are saving ourselves.
Sir David Attenborough: Oh, without question.
Anderson Cooper: You say in the film, "We're not just ruining the world, we've destroyed it." Is it- is it that far gone?
Sir David Attenborough: It's not beyond redemption.
Redemption, he says, depends on a complete shift to renewable energy and an end of our reliance on fossil fuels.
Anderson Cooper: The fossil fuel industry does not want the world to move off fossil fuels.
Sir David Attenborough: No, it doesn't, but in fact we know ways in which we can get from the sun up there just a tiny fraction of the amount of energy that sprays on this earth 24 hours a day one way or-- or another, for nothing. If we can solve the problems of storage and transmission, the world is ours. We have all the power we need. Why should we go on poisoning life on earth?
Anderson Cooper: It sounds simple when you say it.
Sir David Attenborough: So it is.
Sir David also wants to see what he calls a "rewilding" of the planet, giving plants and animals on land and in the ocean time and space to bounce back. The World Wildlife Fund says that two thirds of the earth's wildlife has disappeared in the past 50 years.
I live across the street form a Nature Conservancy where some of this "rewilding" is starting. I watched a Redtail Hawk catch, and eat a mouse on that land today. It was a magnificent sight to see the wild creatures living their lives in the ancient patterns of life that are so rapidly disappearing from our planet.
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