Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (2:01)

Fish that use tools and eat birds.

David Remnick (2:03)

An octopus building itself, an armor of discarded shells. And amidst our astonishment at all this, it makes you think hard about human beings and our place in the world.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (2:15)

Sir David, I have to tell you, over the past weekend, a long weekend, I just watched and watched and watched the world of the ocean. It was an incredible experience and over the past I heard of that. Well, over the past 60 years, you've told the story of life on Earth from every continent, every habitat, and have probably documented as many animals as Linnaeus. What gives you the perpetual sense of awe about the natural world?

David Attenborough (2:44)

Well, I suppose infinite variety is what gives you awe. I mean, the fact that there is almost every problem has had more solutions to it by evolution than you can imagine. It doesn't matter what it is, whether it's chewing vegetation or whether it's Flying or whether it's concealing yourself. There is an infinity of answers that the natural history has produced and many of them are perfectly logical and you can sort of imagine how it happened. Quite a lot aren't. And one of the great astonishments is why there are so many of them are so beautiful. I suppose time to get too hoity toity or about it all. But I mean, why butterflies are so beautiful is a matter of awe.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (3:33)

It's a good question. And why sea slug is so beautiful.

David Attenborough (3:36)

Who knew?

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (3:37)

I have to tell you, to start this conversation, I'm a confirmed city boy. I go by the terrible rubric of I am at two with nature. Nature is not something that's natural to.

David Attenborough (3:49)

Me, but I'm the same, I'm a city boy. I was brought up in a city in Leicester in the middle of England. And perhaps it is the city people who haven't grown up with the natural world as intimately as country boys, for whom that perception of awe comes as so bewitching an emotion, a response.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (4:13)

This has been six decades of making these films. I have to ask, of all the creatures you've seen, what sticks out in your mind as the strangest and most beautiful and incomprehensible?

David Attenborough (4:27)

Well, those are conflicting adjectives. But one of the things in Blue Planet which I never cease to wonder about and take joy from is a creature called the weedy sea dragon. It occurs in the waters of South Australia. It's like a seahorse and it swims not vertically with its body vertical, but horizontally. And it's disguised as seaweed to a simply unbelievable degree. I mean its limbs and its flanks and its tail and its eyebrows and one thing another they all like, but it's a seaweed, you can't tell the difference. And then they have this wonderful dance in which the male courts the female and then the female, having got the eggs being fertilized, the female hands over the eggs to the male and he looks after them. The whole business is, is Disney esque. I mean it is quite unbelievable.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (5:24)

And very often there are creatures that, at least in your films and in reality perhaps have a real personality. At one point in this series, one of your filmmakers describes a particular octopus as having a personality. Is it like celebrity somehow? Do some animals just, you know, as they say in Hollywood, have it?

David Attenborough (5:46)

Yes, some do and some don't. And it depends on how they live their lives. I mean, it's difficult to imagine that herrings in a shoal of 10,000 can have individual personalities because they go with the Shoal. But octopus in particular, which live in a solitary way for most of their lives, they certainly have personalities, and people who've actually kept them in laboratories know that perfectly well. They're artful, they're cunning. You almost wonder at times where they got sense of humor.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (6:18)

Do they have a sense of humor? Do you think there's some wit to these, to these creatures?

David Attenborough (6:23)

I think chimps have a sense of humor, actually. I think chimps do things just for the hell of it and see what's gonna happen.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (6:29)

Are there any creatures that you can't stand?

David Attenborough (6:32)

I don't care for rats, I have to say. I mean, I've had rats run over my face when I'm asleep, and that's not fun. Where did they have rats? Not at home. Where? In the Solomons? Yes, in the Solomon Islands, sleeping on a. Yeah, it's not too good. And I've had rats leap out of the loo as you're sitting on the loo, and they come up between your thighs. That is not to be recommended either.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (6:57)

Oh, I'm having a moment. And when you're crafting a story about a creature, do you look for the animal's most essential characteristic or the characteristic which is most. You know, I hate to say the use of the word, but relatable to the person watching at home?

David Attenborough (7:15)

Well, I was going to say the anthropomorphizing temptation is great, but actually we have got over the rather simplice view of this. I mean, when I was making these films 30 years ago, the idea that you credit any animal with any emotion that you might remotely call human was anathema. I mean, you thought, oh, you couldn't. Mustn't do that, or unscientific. But the fact of the matter is that if you follow individual animals, which 50 years ago was not something the way in which zoologists normally worked, they generalized all the time. But when you get to know a particular animal, then you begin to realize and study them as you do when you're making films. You suddenly realize that they are different, you know, I mean, and that's not just monkeys and apes or even octopods. That happens to me with spiders. I remember very clearly making a film about spiders. Or this was 20 years ago, I suppose. There's a spider cursed in the middle of the United States called a bolas spider, which actually it spins silk. It puts a little blob on the bottom of the throne, and then it whirls it like a bolas. I said to the cameraman, look, that's what it does. Oh boy. Go away and do it and film it and enjoy. And due course I went down there, it was in Georgia, I remember, and he had a number of milk bottles. He had 10 milk bottles in the line and he had sprigs of vegetation in each one of them and on each one of them there was a spider. He said, this one, he said, is absolutely hopeless. I mean if you show in a light, she won't do anything at all. She simply won't spoil us. The one next to it, it's not a question of light. She hates sound and if I make a click or something, she stops. This one is just bone idle, never does anything at all. But that one, she's absolute darling. You just put a butterfly, put a moth anywhere near her and she swings her bowl out and it's absolutely dead certain you get a great shot. Well, okay. Spiders with individual personalities. Come on.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (9:17)

How did you first get addicted to.

David Attenborough (9:19)

This as a kid finding fossils? I think it's one of the mysteries, isn't it, that a lot of kids love collecting things. And it's easy to be toffee nose about, you know, this rather trivial childish thing of collecting things. Actually it's very, very important. All the great naturalists were and natural scientists were collectors when they were boys. Darwin was absolutely obsessed with beetles and I'm not putting myself in the same bracket as Darwin, but just collecting fossils. In the Jurassic, on the of the rocks where I grew up outside the city of Leicester, I used to find all these amazing things. I used to knock a rock with a hammer and then suddenly it fall apart and realize that there was a most wonderfully beautiful shell, perfect in every detail and that had not seen the light of day for 150 million years. And that mine were the first eyes ever for human eyes to fall on it. Well, that's thrilling. And then when you discover that they're not all the same and that you can find a dozen different kinds and that some are rare and some aren't, that's a never ending fascination. I've never got tired of it and never cured myself.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (10:39)

Well, Darwin had a hammer, he had the ability to collect, but he didn't have the technology that you had. That making Blue Planet 2. What's gotten away? What animal has eluded your grasp or lens? Is there a quest still in front of you? I still want to find the fill in the blank.

David Attenborough (11:03)

I could easily have answered that question to you 30 years ago. There were dozens of things. I mean, I remember writing into a script, oh, 20 years ago, a sequence about snow leopards. And all I did in those days when I was writing scripts, I wrote as though everything was accessible. It was just a question of application or working it out. And then when they. They saw it, they said, look, nobody's ever filmed a snow leopard before, ever. And. And it's very, very rare, and it lives in very, very remote places. And so a blue pencil goes through that lot because you can't. There's a limit to the amount of time and money you can spend on things. But now. Or not now, but series called Planet Earth, where we have all the modern devices of tracking collars you can put on the things. We were able to get shots of this, we were able to put up not even camerame up, remote camera traps, unattended cameras switched on by the action of this man, of the animal coming along, turning it on, taking pictures of it, spraying the rocks with urine. And then after two minutes, when the animal had left, turning itself off. And we got a terrific sequence. So there are solutions out, almost everything you can think of. I mean, we can film at night, we can film at the bottom of the sea, we can speed things up, we can slow things down, and we can film from the air, we can film remotely. It's just extraordinary what even. I mean, in this series, you couldn't. We couldn't possibly have shown sea lions trapping a tuna because the only way you could see how they actually did it was from the air. Well, five years ago, we couldn't have done that. Now we have drones and we were able to send it up and get these extraordinary shots that nobody had ever seen before of sea lions doing just that, herding in these tuna into this bay, which is a cul de sac. This time, when the shoal tries to escape, he blocks them and drives them back into the next blind alley. The gang can now pick them off one by one.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (13:37)

There is no doubt that compared to all of your previous work, Blue Planet 2 makes the clearest statement about the peril that the world's oceans are in. In the final episode, you say, for years we thought the oceans were so vast and the inhabitants so infinitely numerous that nothing we could do could have.

David Remnick (13:55)

An effect on them.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (13:56)

But now we know that was wrong. When you finish this project, you and your colleagues, a lot of colleagues, do you leave it with a sense of optimism or the opposite?

David Attenborough (14:11)

I don't think that either. Optimism or pessimism are the most appropriate words, really, because making a global generalization is a difficult thing to do. What it leaves me with is the thought that I can see problems that have got to be solved, and I think they have to be solved. We have to face up to them and have to do something about them. And that I couldn't look my grandchildren in the eyes if they said, granddad, you could see that was happening. You didn't tell anybody, or you didn't do anything about it, or you didn't mention it, that would be terrible. And I have no alternative. But you have to speak about this sort of thing. And there are things that can be done. There are instances for us to realize that we can do things. I mean, after all, we have saved the whales. It was pioneers who 20, 30 years ago got together the maritime nations of the world and saying, if we go on killing whales at the rate we're doing, we're going to exterminate them. And human beings from all around the world governments got together and said, okay, then, we will actually sort out this question. And indeed, in this last program, we explained that sperm whales, which were on the verge of disappearing, nobody knew where they'd gone or how many had gone, have suddenly come back. And around the waters of Sri Lanka there are now actually great numbers of sperm whales. Quite extraordinary, which is a marvelous demonstration that if you give the natural world just half a chance, it bounces back in an extraordinary way. That is what gives you optimism, what gives you pessimism, of course, is the fact that there are people still people who denied that it's happening.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (15:57)

Some of them are in very high.

David Attenborough (15:58)

Office, some of them are in very high office.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (16:01)

So, David, how does this immersion in the natural world, in the animal world, in the ocean, affect your day to day view of human beings? How is it different than most of us walking along 8th Avenue or wherever we are?

David Attenborough (16:23)

Well, I suppose I mustn't talk about elevating or putting down, but you do realize that we're one. You do realize that the natural world, that life, this mysterious thing which nobody's actually able to identify, you can't define it. The difference between something that was just living five minutes ago and is not anymore is very difficult to define. But you know when other things have it and you know when they don't and we are the same, you know, from that point of view. And that's what that sort of mortality is, what links us all.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (17:09)

I guess that's what I was going to ask is how does it make you view the end of things for yourself or for your friends or for humanity?

David Attenborough (17:17)

Well, you know, you'll. Yeah. I mean, the things affect you in the same way as they affect you when you see watching any other kind of animal. And the closer it becomes, the more you're aware of it. And people say, do you think about death? Of course I think about death. Think about death every time you get up in the morning. But it's a matter of luck, isn't it? I mean, entire luck. I have, after all, contemporaries of mine who can't walk. I have contemporaries who can't even remember things. Well, I can't remember things, but I mean, most seriously, they can't remember things. And that is entirely a matter of luck. And so I can do these things and not to do them if you can do them seems to be an act of extraordinary ingratitude.

David Remnick (18:08)

Sir David, thank you very much.

Interviewer (possibly Michael Barbaro or a New Yorker Radio Hour host) (18:10)

It's been an absolute pleasure.

David Attenborough (18:12)

Thank you very much. Okay.

David Remnick (18:15)

David Attenborough is the host of Blue Planet 2, which debuts this week. Now we'll turn for a moment to another great admirer of the natural world in a very different form, the poet Mary Oliver. From geese to crabs to insects to nearly an entire book about her dog, Oliver has turned again and again to animals and to the wilderness to look for meaning. A new collection of Mary Oliver's work, called Devotions, has just been published. Here's Mary Oliver reading from her work in 2012 at the 92nd Street Y in New York.

Mary Oliver (18:52)

The summer Day. Who made the world? Who made the swan and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper? I mean, the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand. Who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down, who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes? Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

David Remnick (20:18)

Ruth Franklin wrote our review of Oliver's book Devotions, and she's here with David Haglin, the literary editor of newyorker.com.

David Hagland (20:27)

Ruth, I'm curious. When did you first read Mary Oliver's work? And do you remember whether you liked her work? Right away, or did it take a while?

Ruth Franklin (20:38)

You know, I don't have a distinct memory of the first time. I did have a boyfriend in college who was a big fan of Mary Oliver and pressed her on me. So I'm suspecting that must have been it. I did always respond to just the directness of her approach. It feels so immediate and sort of focused on you as the reader.

David Hagland (21:00)

It's so unguarded. I think there's something. And I admit that for me, I. Sometimes it sort of takes me aback. It's not what I'm used to with poetry. One of my favorite poets is Wallace Stevens, who once said that poetry should resist the intelligence almost successfully. Which is just not at all her approach, I don't think.

Ruth Franklin (21:22)

Yeah, in general, I think that is what makes her work so almost universally appealing. Is that, you know, you don't feel like you need to have a degree in poetry in order to understand Mary Oliver.

David Hagland (21:34)

Although that's also maybe why she hasn't gotten the critical acclaim that you might expect from a writer who's won. She has won some very big prizes and is enormously popular, as poets go. But there is a kind of looking down one's nose at her from some critics, maybe. I don't know if you'd put it that way.

Ruth Franklin (21:54)

You know, I think of them as sort of more academic poetry critics, you know, who are more interested in a kind of hermetic, almost coded kind of poetry.

David Hagland (22:04)

Do you think that the. She's very frank about her interest in God and in prayer. And, you know, for a particular kind of secular critic, maybe that's off putting as well.

Ruth Franklin (22:18)

Yeah, I think it probably is. I mean, as in the poem we just heard this Summer Day. There's this sort of introduction to the poem where we have a nature scene with a grasshopper. One nice detail that I read somewhere in an article about her, I don't remember where now, is that there was a real grasshopper that she used as a model, as it were, for that poem. The grasshopper was eating a slice of birthday cake at a picnic, I think. As though we have this little scene and then there's an abrupt switch in the middle of the poem. And suddenly she starts talking about prayer. But, of course, you know, if you're familiar with Mary Oliver, you know that that's in the background more or less all the time.

David Hagland (23:00)

The summer day is typical of her work in another way. In that it's largely about the natural world. And at least for me, living in New York City, it does feel like A window into a kind of that I maybe don't get to enjoy as often as I would. And I wonder if to some extent people kind of feel like opening a collection of Mary Oliver is like taking a walk outside.

Ruth Franklin (23:32)

Yeah. You know, I think if Mary Oliver were here with us, she would probably scold you for saying that because of course, it's quite possible to experience the natural world even here in New York City, you know, that that's something her poetry kind of exhorts the reader to do is to find, you know, find that moment of beauty in nature. If it's, you know, if we can call it the sublime or the spiritual or just something we might not have noticed, you know. What does she say? Attention is the beginning of devotion. That her poetic method as she presents it is very much about that kind of directed attention which presumably one could experience anywhere.

David Hagland (24:18)

Let's give the last word to Mary Oliver. Here she is reading another one of her poems, Mornings at Blackwater.

Mary Oliver (24:27)

For years, every morning I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it assuaged me from the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say is that the past is the past and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond or the river of your imagination or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world and live your life.

David Remnick (25:18)

Mary Oliver reading Mornings at Blackwater. The poem appears in the new collection Devotions. We heard Ruth Franklin speaking about Oliver's work with the New Yorker's David Hagland. And I'm David Remnant. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us today and I hope you'll join us again. Till then, stay in touch with us on Twitter ewyorkerradio.

Narrator/Announcer (25:41)

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Mytha Le and Stephen Valentino, with help from Bernard Schwartz, Calla Leah, Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Torina Endowment Fund.