People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.

Its about cherishing the woodland at the bottom of your garden or the stream that runs through it. It affects every aspect of life.

I don't run a car, have never run a car. I could say that this is because I have this extremely tender environmentalist conscience, but the fact is I hate driving.

The climate, the economic situation, rising birth rates; none of these things give me a lot of hope or reason to be optimistic.

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?

This last chapter .. may have given the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur.

All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.