The Big Issue met up with Sir David Attenborough in London in March. It seems like an age ago now, in those days before lockdown. Yet despite the global pandemic and his 94th birthday on 8 May, the world’s most famous naturalist is refusing to slow down. Rather, he’s renewing his fight to save the planet for the next generations.
“I couldn’t live…” he begins, then stops. “If I was seriously – seriously – convinced that there was no hope of actually dealing with the problems, I don’t know what I’d do.
“We’re in an unprecedented situation,” he tells us. “We know quite a lot about the history of the world. We go back 500 million years and there is no species with anything like the power homo sapiens have over the natural world. There is nothing remotely like the situation we’re in at the moment. There’s no moral to be taken from what happened in the past. We’ve got a completely blank sheet of paper in front of us.”
For our full interview with David Attenborough, download the new digital magazine: issuu.com/thebigissueaustralia