The naturalist is frightened by the number of people in the world and says the human race needs to be reduced
Camilla Long, Times Online 19 Apr 09;
Bending gingerly over a deep, green pond in the garden of his home in Richmond, southwest London, Sir David Attenborough and I are inspecting a great crested newt. “Triturus!” he says, pointing. “Look. Looook . . . ” – the bosky voice creeps past gas mark 4 – “he is waaafting his hormones at her. And in a minute . . . ” The animal (unfortunately I had been looking at a reed) flicks in the water. “She’s off! Whuuuhnderful!”
It is the first proper day of spring, and after a short scuffle with the double doors we have come outside “the posh way” – ie, not through the kitchen – cantered briskly onto the lawn, past a large mossy patch on the patio (“Don’t step on that or you’ll end up in a sewer”) and straight up to the pond to see his new toys.
At 82, Attenborough is a vision in taupe, with talcum-powder features, a surprisingly firm handshake and a manner that is occasionally brusque, shading to sarcastic (“Yes, it’s a bird”). His daughter Susan offers me a drink of water, before disappearing into an office. “She lives three-quarters of an hour away,” he says, alighting on a small garden seat. “My wife died 12 years ago, so she comes here and restocks the fridge and, as she puts it elegantly, mucks me out.”
I had been hoping his house would be something like the set of the film Jumanji – parting aspidistras and parakeets going “eek, eek” – but it is in fact a spartan dwelling, with African pots, gently crisping books, Danish furniture and the cool, desiccated hush of a fossil room at the Natural History Museum. He has lived here for 55 years, “although there’s not much wildlife”.
Nevertheless, we are constantly being distracted by robins (“Hello, darling”), butterflies (“Oh gosh, look at that! A blue butterfly. The first of the season”) and blackbirds.
“Turdus merula,” I say. “Well done,” he says, thrilled. You can see how he nearly became a teacher.
Attenborough is not here to discuss wild-life. He is here to discuss humans, and how there are far too many of them. Earlier last week, when it was announced that he had become a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), he explained that “there are three times as many people in the world as when I started making television programmes 56 years ago. It is frightening. We can’t go on as we have been. We are seeing the consequences in terms of eco-logy, atmospheric pollution and in terms of space and food production”.
He is the first to admit the problem is a thorny one. “Indeed; indeed it is,” he says, “but we can make sure women have the choice as to whether they have children. If you spread literacy, education, a decent standard of living, the population increase drops. That’s why the notion, the ability, to restrict population growth should be around. I don’t believe women want to have 12 children where eight of them die, as they did in this country 150 years ago. Now they have a choice, and that is the reason we have an almost static population here – if you discount immigration.” But isn’t it a bit too late for all this, now that the global population is nearly 7 billion and rising fast? “Oh yes, yes,” he says.
Besides, what’s the ideal figure for human life on Earth? Attenborough is a little soft-focus on details. “I don’t know how you’d calculate . . . optimum-ness, but certainly, the mere fact of what we’re doing to the natural world makes it perfectly clear we’re way past it. Half the world’s starving.”
He has seen this for himself countless times in “African slums, South American slums. Little kids playing with open sewers, rats, filth, disease, poverty, terrible”. The best number of children is “obviously two and a half”, he adds, laughing. “I don’t know about the right number.” He wouldn’t put a limit on the number of children a woman may have, as they do in China, but “obviously, having a large number of children is putting a strain on things”.
So what’s a large number? Attenborough has two: Susan, who is unmarried, and Robert, an anthropologist, who has two children. The great naturalist pauses to think. “Five. The fact is,” he sighs, “the human race ought to be reduced.”
You can’t just get rid of people, though. “No, no,” he says. “Well, you say that, but you do get rid of people – there are famines, and people are very good at getting rid of each other. I’m not for a micro-second suggesting that’s a good thing, but there are all sorts of diseases and disasters that can happen to humanity.”
So if we don’t take control of the problem ourselves, then nature or self-interest will. None of this is really applicable to Britain, of course. Here the problem is not overpopulation, but the ageing population.
“Yes, it presents great economic problems,” says Attenborough. “It’s a question of the lesser of two evils.” He will be 83 next month: presumably he wouldn’t like it if there was no one to look after him? “Of course you wouldn’t, because you’re selfish . . . It’s that blue butterfly again!” He pauses. “What was I saying?”
Keeping the population down. Getting old. Closing our borders? “We have to keep our borders open: it’s a worldwide problem,” he says. “You want a free movement of people round the world because that’s the only way you’re going to stop wars. Because if you put walls around yourself, you tend to think you’re the only people who are important, and that people on the other side of the wall are the enemy. And you only realise they aren’t the enemy if you travel among them.”
The most charming people he has met, he says, are “the Cambodians”, although he doesn’t like going back to places, because “it’s not as it was. I went to Bali in the Fifties and there was only one hotel on the whole island. I slept on the beach, with turtles coming up and nesting, and now on that beach there are a dozen 30-storey hotels. So going back is not much . . .” He looks sad.
How the world has changed since his youth. The son of a university principal, he says his childhood in Leicester was “idyllic, a time in the Thirties when you could just get on your bicycle and be out in the country in half an hour, go youth-hostelling for three weeks at 14 and nobody saw any problems”. These days, he adds, “you have to go a long way to get rid of human beings and see the natural world as it is”. He knows he’s been lucky.
Even getting into television was pure chance. “I was a trainee at Alexandra Palace. There were two studios and everyone did everything. They were short of an interviewer one day – ‘Would you do it?’ ‘Sure’.” The rest is natural history.
“However, I happened to discover 40 years later that they had concluded, ‘He could be a perfectly pleasant chap, might be a perfectly good producer, but he shoul-dn’t be used again as an interviewer on camera because his teeth are too big’.”
Attenborough says he is not bothered about his looks – “You’d like to think people are impressed by what you said, not what you look like” – but I think he just comes from that sort of background: long on heroic achievement, short on emotion. I can see from some of the pictures in his autobiography, Life on Air, that he was very handsome when he was younger, I say.
“Is the tense right?” he titters quietly.
Generally, he is extremely modest, refusing to acknowledge his status as a beloved icon at all. A few years back he was voted “the most trusted celebrity” by a magazine.
“Did you see the criteria?” he explodes. “The people they considered were rather bogus, with reputations because of the mass media.” People only really watch his programmes for the animals, he says. “If I didn’t have king penguins, birds of paradise, gibbons or gorillas . . . ”
At first, he tells me he’s not bothered about getting old – “I ignore it,” he says, stiffly – but later he admits the only thing he would change about his life would be to shed some years. He certainly doesn’t like the idea of not working. He’ll go on “until the voice goes. Voices do go. You get croaky. Teeth are quite important: if you lose your teeth, you sound funny”.
So he’s doing some radio scripts for the summer, and working on the natural history series The Frozen Planet. Next month he is off to the Antarctic – “and after that, the Arctic”, he says gleefully. It’ll all be wonderful, “provided nothing goes wrong. In the Arctic, if it goes wrong, you’re not just in mild trouble. In the jungle you can get lost and all sorts of silly things and walk out the other side, but in the Antarctic . . . Dropping a glove can mean losing your fingers”. Besides, he says, “I’m not doing that Captain Scott stuff – you have to be posh to a degree.”
He doesn’t strike me as the sort to demand first class – but how does he keep his carbon footprint down with all that travel-ling? “Well, I don’t see what . . . I don’t think . . . You have to be realistic about this. Being sensible with energy means only use it when you need to. You can’t suddenly suggest we’re going to stop moving around.”
Does he worry about infirmity? “Oh yes, of course. Losing your marbles. It’s happening to my contemporaries. I can think of all kinds of inadequacies, like not being able to put down a coherent sentence. I’ve had that all my life, but I now tell myself that it’s because I’m old.”
Also, “My knees are rubbish,” he says. “I can’t climb trees and look for birds’ nests as much as I used to” – I’m impressed that’s still on the menu at all – “but there you go. If you’re sitting here in your eighties, you can’t very well say that everyone should be snuffed out in their seventies.”
What is his position on euthanasia? “Gosh . . . I think it is desperate that people with terminal illness and in extreme pain shouldn’t be able to control their future. There should be legal clauses sufficient for it not to be abused, however.”
Would he consider it for himself? “It seems dreadful even to speculate,” he says.
His older brother, Richard – Lord Attenborough, the film-maker – is recovering from a coma after a fall at home. “Oh, he’s getting on reasonably but it’s a long job,” he says. “We’re very” – he corrects himself – “prettyclose; I go and see him in hospital fairly regularly. Three times in the past five days.”
I’ve always been slightly astonished that Dickie and David are even related. “We’ve enjoyed one another’s careers,” he says, “but neither of us would wish to have the other one’s. I wouldn’t be in a feature film for all the tea in China. But then he wouldn’t want to go travelling in the Borneo rainforest.”
The younger Attenborough lives alone, with no pets. When the children were young the family kept “snakes, monkeys, lemurs, chameleons, monkfish . . . all sorts. Now, if you live by yourself, you can’t properly deal with them”.
Jane, his wife of more than 40 years, died suddenly in 1997 from a brain haemor-rhage. He doesn’t talk about this, and he certainly doesn’t want to write about it. “I don’t think I’m very good at it; I find it quite hard, being mawkish,” he says. “And why would you want other people to know about it?”In his autobiography, he covers his marriage in minimal space. Does he miss her? “Oh come on. Forty years.” He looks at me like an angry koala. “What else do you want while I’m at it?”
A photographer appears, just in time, to take his picture. “Hate it,” he says, springing up. “Don’t you?”
If tonight is an ordinary night, he’ll be at home – perhaps watching Porridge or Yes Minister, playing the piano or thinking about the next development in the garden.
There’s something stoic about his existence. Take his attitude to money: he is “hopeless”, he says. “But I have my spending money.” He pauses. “I am very like the Queen, from many points of view.”
Life on Air (revised and updated edition) by David Attenborough is published by BBC Books on 7 May, priced £20. Copies can be ordered for £18 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135
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