In the West, that's what's happening. The birth rate has been dropping steadily and still is. But there is still a vast amount of the world where that's not the case. And that is where the big population growth is taking place.

Nature isn't positive in that way. It doesn't aim itself at you. It's not being unkind to you.

We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves — and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.

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

The notion of ever more old people needing ever more young people, who will in turn grow old and need even more young people, and so on ad infinitum, is an obvious ecological Ponzi scheme.

I am an ardent recycler. I would like to think that it works. I don't know whether it does or not.

I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.