デヴィッド・アッテンボロー卿とオバマ大統領フルインタビュー (Sir David Attenborough and President Obama: The Full Interview)

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Sir David Attenborough: Today is my 89th birthday,
and to my very considerable surprise I find myself in
the place that I've never been to before and which it
is a great, great privilege to visit.
The White House, with the President of the United States.
The Oval Office is surely one of the most famous rooms
in the whole world, where history has been enacted.
The home of arguably the most powerful man in the world.
So to go to it is a huge privilege, and perhaps a
rather daunting one at that.
All I can say here was that it was not made to seem
daunting, and the President of the United States spoke
to me in as friendly a tone as I could possibly imagine.
Friendly and hospitable and genuine.
It was an extraordinary experience which I shall
never forget.
The President: Well, Sir David Attenborough, thank
you so much for being here.
As I was telling you on our walk over, I had been a huge
admirer of your work for a very long time.
I have to say, though, that when I heard that you had
gone down, you had dove into the Great Barrier Reef again
-- 60 years after the first time you did it?
Sir David Attenborough: Yes.
The President: That impressed me.
Sir David Attenborough: But I was in the -- in a sub.
I mean, I was in a very, very remarkable research sub.
And we went down to over 300 meters.
The President: Oh, so you were (inaudible).
Sir David Attenborough: And that was just mind-blowing,
of course.
The President: Absolutely.
I -- tell me how the Great Barrier Reef looked to you
today compared to the first time that you went there,
and what's your -- what story does that tell us
about how we're doing in conserving these
incredible treasures?
Sir David Attenborough: Well, of course, the whole
population of Australia has increased a very great deal.
So the population up the east coast of Queensland has
grown, and so has industry.
And wherever there are human beings, wherever there's
industry, there are consequences.
And the consequences on the coast are likely to be not
too good for the reef, though -- which is quite true.
And the Australians are addressing that.
The real problem on the Reef is the global one, which is
what is happening with the increase in acidification
and the rise in the ocean temperature.
And the Australians have done research on coral now,
and they know for sure that if they go up beyond a
degree or a degree and a half, and so on, it will
kill coral, will kill the species of coral.
And what they're concerned about now is -- I mean, that
seems almost inevitable -- what it seems now is, can
they -- can they find the right species to maintain
the Reef's population?
The President: Right.
So really there's a mitigation strategy that
they're trying to come up with.
But what we're seeing is global trends that depend on
the entire world working together.
Sir David Attenborough: Yes.
The President: And, sadly, it seems as if we haven't
made as much progress as we need to on climate change now.
Given the work that you've done, though, the good news
is that there are some areas where we have made progress.
We've been able to -- here in the United States, for
example, with the Clean Air, Clean Water Act to clean up
areas that 20, 30, 40 years ago seemed like they'd
never recover.
And once we took some sensible steps, it turns out
that nature was fairly resilient.
But it required us being fairly intentional and
really go after the problem in a serious way.
Sir David Attenborough: It certainly -- the resilience
of the natural world is -- gives you great hope, really.
If you give nature half a chance, it really takes it
and works with it.
But we are throwing huge problems at it.
The President: Right.
Sir David Attenborough: And the rising in temperature,
in global temperature is a very, very serious worry
indeed, it seems to me.
And what concerns me is, when we're sitting in
Europe, we see what you did by saying, "We're going to
put a man on the moon in 10 years."
Supposing you said, "In 10 years, the United States
will organize -- and the world -- and energize the
world to find a solution, to find a way of producing
energy with no problems."
That is to say, exploiting the sunshine to a degree,
and finding ways of storing electricity, because if you
did that, so much -- problems would be solved.
The President: Well, that's what we're -- that's what
we're going to be shooting for.
I mean, we've made enormous investments.
We doubled our investment in clean energy here in the
United States; I just last year came back from China
with an agreement from the Chinese to work with us on
reducing emissions.
But we're not moving as fast as we need to.
And the -- part of what I know from watching your
programs and all the great work you've done is that,
you know, these ecosystems are all interconnected, and
that if just one country is doing the right thing but
other countries are not, then we're not going to
solve the problem.
We're going to have to have a global solution to this.
Sir David Attenborough: And the -- and the solutions are
global; have to be global.
And that has been the huge encouragement over the past
10 years, that the United States and indeed China --
two vast, important nations -- have actually agreed to
take these steps.
That's surely what will go down in history
as EPOL-making.
But it's -- but the job is not yet done.
The President: No, we're far from it.
Not -- but let me -- let me backtrack for a second.
How did you get interested in nature and wanting to
record it?
When you think back after the story of your career,
what is it that led to such a deep fascination with how
the natural world works?
Sir David Attenborough: Well, I've never met a child --
The President: Who's not fascinated?
Sir David Attenborough: -- who's not interested in
natural history.
So the -- I mean, the -- just the simplest thing; a
five-year-old turning over a stone and seeing a slug and
says, "What a treasure!
How does it live?
What are those things on the front?"
Kids love it, kids understand the natural
world, and they're fascinated by it.
The President: So you (inaudible).
Sir David Attenborough: So the question is, how did
you lose it?
How did anyone lose the fascination?
The President: (laughs) yeah.
Sir David Attenborough: And certainly I never lost it --
The President: Yeah.
Sir David Attenborough: -- but if you do lose it, and I
imagine there are lots of other attractions that can
-- may divert your attention, you've lost a
very, very great treasure.
The President: They -- at what point did you decide
that you wanted to make it your life's work to record it?
Sir David Attenborough: I don't think I ever dared say
it was a night's work, because when I -- when I
started, there wasn't any television.
And all I knew is, I wanted to try and understand the
way the world works, the natural world works; it was
a great fascination.
And so I took Zoology and Natural Sciences
at university.
But then I had to go into the navy; it was the end of
the war and I was conscripted into the navy
for a couple of years.
And then I got -- when I came out, I didn't think I
was cut out to be a proper scientist.
(laughs) but anyway, I went into television managed to
-- I was going to say, manipulate television to
allow me to go and see these wonderful things, which is
what I've been doing ever since, pretty well.
The President: When you think of your favorite trips
or your favorite discoveries, or places in
the world that you wish you could take everybody to so
that they could really appreciate what this
marvelous gift we've got is, what comes to mind?
Sir David Attenborough: Well, I think you would
agree with me that the moment you first dive on a
-- on a coral reef, with tanks so that you are
weightless, that being weightless is enough to make
a memorable event for you.
But when you can do it on a reef, with this multitude of
multicolored organisms, the like of which you've never
seen before, and you can just -- with a flick of your
fin, you can go down or you can go up, and then you can
see these great sharks and things coming in from the
ocean -- that, surely, has to be one of the
great sensations.
It's a new world.
The President: Well, the -- you know, going up in Hawaii
-- it was one of the things that taught me not only to
appreciate nature but also that you had to care for it.
And because we spend so much time outside -- and I think
there was part of the native Hawaiian culture that is
true of many native cultures -- this sense of needing to
care for the environment that you're in, that
sometimes we lose when we live in big cities.
The interesting thing is, though, my daughters -- I
find Malia and Sasha, whose -- they're 16 and 13 now.
They're much more environmentally aware this
generation than I think some previous generation.
They do not dispute, for example, the science around
climate change.
They think it's self-apparent that we've got
a problem and that we should be doing something about it.
Sir David Attenborough: Yeah.
Yeah.
I absolutely agree.
Some of the letters I get -- they bring tears to the eyes
--from kids of all ages.
And the young people -- they care, they know that this is
the world that they're going to grow up in, they're going
to spend the rest of their lives in.
But I think it's -- I think it's more idealistic than that.
They actually believe that humanity -- human species --
has no right to destroy and despoil, regardless.
The President: Right.
Sir David Attenborough: They actually feel that
very powerfully.
The President: They do.
Yeah.
What -- when you think about four years from now, what
are the - what are the prospects for this blue
marble that we live on in the middle of space.
Do you get that we're going to be able to get ahead of
these problems?
Do you think that -- you know, with the prospects of
climate change, rising populations -- that it's
realistic for us to be able to get a handle on these
issues and reverse some of the problems?
Or are you more pessimistic?
Sir David Attenborough: I believe that, if we find
ways of generating and storing power from renewable
resources, we will make the problem with oil and coal
and other carbon problems disappear.
Because, economically, we will (inaudible) to use
these other methods.
And if we do that, a huge step will have been taken
towards solving the problems of the earth.
The President: Well, I think you're right about that,
that there's got to be an economic component to this.
I -- you know, my father was from Kenya.
And I still remember the first time I went to Masai
Mara, and the Serengeti and saw the Great Migration.
And it's like going back into the Garden of Eden when
you see the wildebeest and zebras, and
you're transported.
But I remember talking to the rangers out there and,
you know, they're dealing with issues of poaching and
other problems.
But the principle problem, initially, that they had was
that the populations around the parks didn't feel any
economic incentive to help preserve it.
And when the National Parks started to work with the
local farmers and saying to them, "There's ways for you
to do well while still conserving this great
treasure that we have," that's when you
got cooperation.
And I think, all too often, we pose this as an economic
development versus environment problem rather
than recognizing that there's a way of marrying
those two concerns.
Sir David Attenborough: That indeed is the case, but the
trouble is that, as fast as you find solutions along
those lines, the problem grows bigger --
The President: Yeah.
Sir David Attenborough: -- because of the increasing
population in Kenya.
It is very, very considerable.
And it's very difficult if you're growing a family and
you want to grow your own food and so on, and you can
see all that space occupied by elephants or whatever.
Say, "What about us?"
The President: Right.
Exactly.
And that's --
Sir David Attenborough: And population's growth is one
of the huge problems.
The President: Yeah.
Well, the -- which is why we're spending a lot of
time, including working with my wife around the issues of
girls' education.
Turns out that when young women are getting proper
schooling and see opportunity, they're less
likely to have children early.
Smaller families, population stabilizes, and so it
actually ends up helping not only those young women to
succeed and look after their children, but it also helps
the --
Sir David Attenborough: (inaudible)
The President: Yeah, yeah, the environment (inaudible).
Sir David Attenborough: So this -- so you have to have
a literate, informed population with medical
understanding of what the problems are and
what's available.
And then the population -- the birth rate falls.
It's not the end of the story, but its falling is a
start for this solution.
The President: Right.
The internet's been a powerful tool, though, for
this generation, I think, to become aware of all the
wonders of the world.
You know, when you were starting off, maybe you'd
get a program on, once every so often.
Now on your telephone you can see, you know, glaciers
and the Amazon and --
Sir David Attenborough: Well, it is an extraordinary
paradox, isn't it?
That the United Nations tells us that over 50
percent of the human population on the planet are
urbanized, which means that, to some degree, they are cut
off from the natural world.
The President: Right.
Sir David Attenborough: And are, for some people, are
totally cut off.
They don't see a wild creature from dawn until
dusk, unless it's a rat or a pigeon.
The President: Right.
Sir David Attenborough: And yet at the same time mass
media can get -- inform those people what the
natural world is, and if -- unless they don't understand
-- if they don't understand about the workings of the
natural world, they won't take the trouble to protect it.
That's one of the roles that the media should have of
maintaining a link between the population and the --
and understanding what goes on in the natural world.
Because why should they give up money on taxes, come to
that, to protect the natural world, unless they actually
care about it?
The President: Right.
The -- have you had a chance to travel much in the --
through our National Parks in the United States?
You know, one of my predecessors, Teddy
Roosevelt, started the National Parks and what a
legacy that's been.
Sir David Attenborough: Yeah.
I mean -- United States was the model for the world, in
Yosemite and so on, and the founding of those great
National Parks.
Yes indeed have I traveled there, and boy, what a
wonderful time one has there.
And great lodges and great tracks, and the space!
Still, it doesn't matter how -- all these visitors come
and yet you can still be alone up there in the Yukon
or wherever.
The President: It's one of the great, I think, secrets
of the United States; it is how big it is, and there are
big chunks of it that are still undisturbed.
And when you fly over the country, you're reminded
about what a blessing it is.
There aren't many places with such low density, where
you can just walk for miles.
Sir David Attenborough: Well, to have in your own
country the Okefenokee Swamp down there and the Glasses
of Alaska up there, and the Yosemite and the Rockies
over there -- oh, gosh.
The President: Yeah, well, that's part of the reason
why what we've been doing is trying to initiate ways to
get more children and young people to use the parks.
And, as you said, so many of these kids are growing up
cut off.
They're sitting on the couch, they're playing
video games.
If they experience nature, it's through a
television screen.
And just getting them out there so that they're
picking up that rock and finding that slug.
They're seeing that bird with colors that --
Sir David Attenborough: And they all need a bit
of self-reliance.
I mean, it's very, very difficult, if you've never
been outside, to find yourself in a forest.
I mean, I've been humiliated enough in the Amazon forest
and losing myself in that.
I mean, and you really do feel an idiot.
The local people, tribes people, look at you, and you
think, "You're lost!
Where were you brought up?"
(laughs) the answer's not in the forest.
The President: Yeah.
Sir David Attenborough: But kids can learn, and they
love it when they do.
The President: And if you were to think about how we
could raise awareness, because you've been a great
educator as well as a great naturalist, how do you --
how do you think we can reach the public around
these issues?
Not only to make them aware of the dangers of an issue
like climate change, but also to feel a sense of
agency and capacity to change it?
Another way of asking this is, maybe, what do you think
are some of the most stubborn misconceptions
about nature that lead us not always to get out in
front of these problems?
Sir David Attenborough: I think only unfamiliarity.
And I don't see how you can hope to take somebody else
to spend the first 16 years of his life surrounded by
bricks and mortar, and then suddenly put him in the
middle of the rainforest and expect him to find his way
or know how to live, or indeed how to survive and
find food.
So I'm not sure that that is absolutely necessary anyway.
I think what is required is an understanding and a gut
feeling that you understand that the natural world is
part of your inheritance.
It is -- this is the planet on which we live; it's the
only one we've got.
And we've got to protect it.
And people do feel that deeply and instinctively,
and it is after all -- the natural world is where you
go in moments of celebration and moments of grief.
It is the greatest prop and stay to humanity's own
feeling for himself, itself, herself, ourselves.
The President: Well, you know, if you think about,
you know -- in all the world's religions, you know,
when you're seeking wisdom, you're seeking to hear God,
you're in the desert or you go to great waters or you go
up to great mountain peaks.
You know, recapturing that sense of wonder and the
amazement of the natural world and its powers.
You know, that's what speaks to what's deepest in us.
And, you know, the -- what's critically important to
making sure that we're passing that onto future
generations -- you and I, we've been blessed to be
able to see it and experience it and be moved
by it.
And I want to make sure that my daughters and their
children are experiencing that same thing.