transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] You look amazing. You look beautiful. Those are the words of Victor Glover, pilot of NASA's Artemis 2 mission. He spoke those words less than a month ago on his trip to the moon, his way of describing our planet as he peered out of the window of his space capsule and took in the view. I've never seen our planet from 200,000 miles away, but I visited many different parts at eye level, and I agree with Victor. We are amazing, and we do look beautiful. As we celebrate Earth Day 2026, I wanted to share a few of my own words of appreciation for our planet. I hope they resonate with you. Enjoy. About 20 years ago, I saw an analogy on a poster in London. I scribbled it down on a notepad because it floored me at the time and has really stuck with me since. The planet Earth is 4.6 billion years old. That's a very hard number to get your head around. So instead, think of it like this, condense that 4.6 billion years into 46 years. Think of Earth as a 46 year old. Nothing is known about the first seven years of her life. We know something of the next 35 years, but not in any detail. At the age of 42, the Earth began to flower. Algae, mosses, ferns, then forests. North and South America, Africa and Europe were joined together as one continent called Pangaea. Then about a year ago, when the planet was 45, dinosaurs and the great reptiles emerged. Mammals arrived eight months ago. In the middle of last week, human like apes evolved into ape like humans. At the weekend, the last ice age enveloped the Earth. Modern humans have been around for four hours. During the last hour, we discovered agriculture. The industrial revolution began one minute ago. Our devastating impact began just a minute ago, in that 46 years. I stopped in my tracks when I read that poster. But instead of dread, instead of a catastrophe, I held on to it as fuel, like a bright reminder that things can change very fast when we want them to. And we need them to change now. We live on a planet that is unlikely in every way. The odds of it even coming into existence are so infinitely small. It's kind of mind-boggling. Never mind that we share it with bizarre and wonderful creatures we call grizzly bears and sloths, and ant colonies and 10,000 different kinds of flying animals we know as birds. Plus seasons, weather, water. There are complicated interconnected systems where species collaborate to make a place that functions, where every part plays a role and fits together. Ecosystems. Places that are constantly in flux, changing all the time. Magical and largely mysterious, providing everything creatures need for life. Nature is not only more complex than we think, but more complex than we can think, as botanist Fred Edwin Eggler once said. We share it, planet Earth, with 9 million other species at best guess. The total variety of all life on Earth, we call it biodiversity. Nine million might sound like a lot, but so far, we've only identified 1.2 million of those species. Most of them are insects, and most of those are beetles. And like ecosystems, species come and go, the waxing and waning of life. Like after the dinosaurs died, they left space. They opened up places to live, things to eat, niches to occupy. Earth's early mammals jumped right in and took full advantage of this. The numbers exploded after the dinosaurs were gone. The mammals took centre stage. Some say humans may have never emerged if the dinosaurs hadn't blinked out. It seems like we're still in this golden age of possibilities if we can just get a stronghold on some smart ways forward and fast, because we're causing species to go extinct at an unprecedented rate, somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 times the normal extinction rate of nature. And there's climate change. It's like a container ship that will take decades to stop. Biodiversity loss is more like a freight train thundering along a track. It can be stopped more quickly. It just takes public will and legislation to stop things like deforestation, abuse of the Arctic and unsustainable development. By saving wild places, we can change this. By saving wild places, we can halt and perhaps even reverse climate change. What if we looked at nature for the solutions? Our planet can help us do this. Planet Earth's forests absorb one quarter of the carbon emitted by humans every year, sucking it in like a huge natural filter. The trees in those forests breathe out the very oxygen we need to breathe in. The ocean? The ocean absorbs another quarter of the carbon we pump out into the atmosphere. What if we connected and protected the forests and the oceans by protecting the creatures that call them home, the wild animals that we love, that we're inspired by? They can become our allies. Lions, tigers and bears need the things we all need. Healthy ecosystems, clean air and water. They can represent these things in a really vivid way for us to cherish. A few years ago, I calculated something on the back of an envelope about the animals I've spent a lot of my life thinking about, bears. There are eight bear species in the world from the Arctic to the tropics. If we protected those eight bear species, we'd be protecting around one third of the Earth's land surface. It's simple. What's good for bears is good for people. Countless other inspiring creatures can help us protect important ecosystems. Grey whales swim from Alaska to Baja Mexico every year to feed and give birth. British swallows spend their winters 6,000 miles away in South Africa. And the Western Arctic caribou herd wanders an area of northern Alaska that's the size of Montana. Even the tiny hummingbird can help. They need us to protect safe, healthy habitats at both ends of their yearly migration. Canada at one end and the Yucatan Mexico at the other. Imagine saving tigers and knowing you're saving the forests they need. Which protect us humans from climate change. The answer is all around us. It's in nature how vivid and wonderful that saving these species can save ourselves. And the great thing is that nature is also full of the things that we know are good for the human mind and well-being too. Including the emotions of awe and wonder. The more resilient nature is, the more resilient we are. Saving the wild can result in a whole new existence for our species. And it is all totally doable. Research on the way we humans think is very useful. It shows that people change their habits by watching and copying others. And this should give us all hope, because little nudges like this in society lead to tipping points that can happen suddenly. This is pretty empowering for us to know, because it makes big changes feel within reach. Wherever I've traveled over the last 30 years of conservation work, I've met and worked with extraordinary people. There are so many of them, each working hard, totally dedicated to saving their species, their part of the world, and so hungry for all of us to be part of that tipping point. The things we face can seem a little overwhelming at times, but the good news is that planet Earth has had 4.6 billion years of experience we can lean on and learn from to turn things around, to pave a path for our life support system to thrive so that we can too. Saving wild animals and huge spaces could just turn out to be the most exciting opportunity on Earth. So happy Earth Day to you and our 4.6 billion year old home. Thank you for the inspiration to conservationists everywhere. Everyone working on 30 by 30, protecting 30% of the planet by the year 2030. The team at Earth Emergency, check out their fascinating documentary. Greenpeace for the poster I saw all those years ago, and Tatiana Letray. And thank you to Gordon Hempton and Quiet Parks International for the beautiful audio. Thanks to The Wild team, Matt Martin for the beautiful mix, Jim Gates and Brandon Sweeney. Take good care of each other.