Sir David Attenborough - Greatest Speech Ever | Creators for Nature

Charles Darwin whose astonishing understanding of the natural world led to what has been called the greatest idea in human history, the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin revealed that all species have evolved over time to best exploit the conditions in which they live. He further realised that these conditions are not simply those of geography and climate but also their relationship to other lives that live alongside. From the delicate codependencies of bees and orchids to the dramatic connecting cheetah and gazelle, all life on earth is both product and contributor to its place in space and time. This complex web of life of which we're part has been millennia in the making. Whilst Darwin's insights explain how this web came about, over 200 years later we are still only beginning to understand its interconnections and which of these connections are the most vital. Yet we do know for certain is that these connections can break. From the dinosaurs to other spectacular fossils, we have all tonight been within touching distance of astonishing fragments of ecosystems long gone. As far as we know there have been five major extinction events on our planet, events caused by changes so severe that many species simply can't adapt and as such die out. Right now we are in the midst of the earth's sixth mass extinction, one every bit as profound and far-reaching as that which wiped out the dinosaurs. It's almost impossible to grasp as we go about our lives that the rest of life on earth is experiencing destruction on the scale of that wrought by a colossal asteroid collision. But consider these facts. 96 percent of the mass of mammals on our planet today are us and the livestock that we've domesticated. Only four percent is everything else, from elephants to badgers, tigers to bats. 70 percent of all birds are now domesticated poultry, mostly chickens. One of the things Darwin's work has taught us is that we break nature's connections at our peril, yet break them we do at ever greater speed. The impacts of our growing population and our consumption now directly threaten our own future. Nature once determined how we survive, now we determine how nature survives. Follow our planet, visit ourplanet.com and watch the series on Netflix.