Veteran BBC naturalist David Attenborough has aged into the role of noble elder of the conservation movement. How does he cope with the fact that ecology is in retreat all around us, asked George Monbiot, journalist and fellow Brit, in an interview published by The Guardian.

“How does it affect you, seeing those changes?” Monbiot asked.

Attenborough responded, “Well, you feel apprehensive for the future, of course you do. […] I don’t have a rosy view of life, of the future. I look at my grandchildren and think, ‘What are they going to have to deal with?’, of course I do. How could you not?”

“But what about the emotional impact?” Monbiot asked. “Does [Attenborough] not get depressed? Does he have a mechanism for avoiding depression? He answered by bouncing the issue on to someone else.”

“I once asked exactly the same question of Peter Scott [the British conservationist, who died in 1989],” Attenborough replied. “And he said: ‘Well, you can only do what you can do.’ So what I do is what I can, but I wish to goodness I had done a tenth of what Peter did.”

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— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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