11/18/18

I know you you've said you're not altogether much of a meat eater, you're not sort of ideologically vegetarian, but you're not much meat eater. How do you approach that? How do you think we should approach that?

We are omnivores, so biologically, if you could have a biological morality, you can say, yes we evolved to eat pretty well everything. But now we've got to a stage in our own social evolution in which that is no longer practical.

I think also actually that as you get older, you eat less meat, I certainly do. And it's not for ideological reason, I just don't eat as much meat as I did.

And I'm bolstered in making that move by the knowledge that actually that is helpful. In the long run, population growth has to come to an end.

There are some reasons for thinking that will happen almost inevitably. One of the reasons the population has increased as fast as it has is that people like me are living longer than we did.

And so there are more and more people just because the expectancy of life has increased. But it is very alarming at the rate we are going and although people will say, in the long run we are going to stabilise.

They're going to stabilise, as far as I can see, at a rather higher level than the Earth can really accommodate. I don't know if you heard in August Cassian Harrison, the editor of BBC Four,

said the BBC no longer wants TV shows in which white, middled aged men stand up and explain things. Now I'm sure he didn't have you in mind. Well, he might have done, because that's what I do.

He said, those days passed. Do you think they passed? Should they pass? No I don't. I don't think they passed.