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

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

Birds are the most popular group in the animal kingdom. We feed them and tame them and think we know them. And yet they inhabit a world which is really rather mysterious.

All the modern devices we have enable us to investigate things and have enabled us to do better.

Now, I find that very difficult to reconcile with notions about a merciful God.

Climate change will affect the whole of humanity, while terrorist attacks will only affect a small section of humanity. Of course, you wouldn't say that if you were related to someone who had been beheaded or blown up or murdered. But humanity is facing a very big, slow, long, drawn-out threat, and that is to do with the way the weather is changing and the size of the population.

I'd like to see the giant squid. Nobody has ever seen one. I could tell you people who have spent thousands and thousands of pounds trying to see giant squid. I mean, we know they exist because we have seen dead ones. But I have never seen a living one. Nor has anybody else.