Chris Packham: I'm often confronted by things which make me sad - but they never rob me of hope

 

Chris Packham: "I constantly change the way I think" (photo: BBC)

You can't keep celebrity naturalist Chris Packham off the TV. He returns on Monday July 13  (9pm) with a new five-part BBC-2 series, Evolution. The second of  the 60-minute episodes will focus on how birds - for instance, the Ostrich - have evolved from prehistoric creatures. Here, he talks about the show.

Introduce us to this news series.

It is the exploration of  a concept which to many people is quite impenetrable. They believe that it happens very slowly over vast periods of time, and they may even think that it's stopped. But evolution is a dynamic process. There's a pattern. There's a mechanism, but also it involves chance. And automatically through evolution we've come up with this diverse, beautiful, fascinating collection of life as we have it at the moment.

What is the purpose of  evolution?

It  is about the need for all life to try and avoid competition, to find its own way of doing things so that it can maximise its potential. Over a period of time - and that could be five minutes, it could be a year, it could be a million years - if resources change, then life has to change to be able to take advantage of those resources.  Nature has an inbuilt programme which allow species to change. Some will fail and become extinct. Others will then take advantage of the gap that they've left.

Did making the series change the way you see or think about the natural world?

I constantly change, and I constantly change the way I think about the natural world, because I care about it. And often I'm confronted by things which make me sad. But they never rob me of hope.

Meanwhile, writing for The Sun, celebrity farmer, broadcaster and columnist Jeremy Clarkson has this to say in today's edition: