Sir David Attenborough

Whereas other species depended on physical changes over generations, we could produce an idea that brought significant change within a generation. Tricks such as finding the plants that yield water even during a drought, crafting a stone tool for skinning a kill, lighting a fire or cooking a meal, could be passed from one human to another during a single lifetime. It was a new form of inheritance that didn’t rely on the genes which an individual received from its parents. So now the pace of our change increased.

Wherever I went, I found wilderness: sparkling coastal seas, vast forests, immense open grasslands. Year after year I explored such places with cameras, recording the wonders of the natural world for the viewers back home.

The top driver of continuing deforestation, which doubles that of the next three greatest cases combined, is beef production. Brazil alone devotes 170 million hectares of its land, an area seven times the size of the United Kingdom, to cattle pasture. Much of that area was once rainforest. The second driver is soy. Growing soy uses some 131 million hectares, much of it in South America.