us president—electjoe biden has been further outlining us efforts to combat the coronavirus pandemic under his forthcoming presidency. while congratulating president trump for finally signing the covid relief stimulus package, mr biden once again pledged to deliver 100 million shots in his first 100 days in office. the uk registered another record breaking surge in coronavirus cases — up by more than 53 thousand in a single day. english hospitals are now treating more covid patients than at the peak of the first wave. 0ne senior medical officer has expressed ‘extreme concern‘ at the situation. croatia has been hit by its strongest earthquake for decades. latest reports say seven people died in the quake. seismologists say the tremor — of magnitude six—point—four — had its epicentre about 50 kilometres from the capital, zagreb. hundreds of soldiers have been deployed to help the rescue operation. now on bbc news... it's hardtalk

with stephen sackur. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. the covid—19 pandemic has inflicted huge economic damage, but it has offered the natural world a little bit of respite — room to breathe. but what will come next? will it be a return to the old ways of resource exploitation and consumption? my guest today is one of the uk's best known naturalists and environmental campaigners, chris packham. are we humans capable of fundamentally changing our priorities? chris, thanks so much for inviting me to your home,

but also this woodland, which i know means so much to you. yes, well, this is my ecological home, there's no question of that. i love this patch of woodland. i feel more connected to this place than anywhere else on earth. it's an environment that i grew up in, this oak hazel, a bit of ash, a bit of yew woodland. and i'm comfortable here with all the colours, the sounds, the smells. it's a wonderful place to be able to spend my time. and i've spent more of it here this spring than ever before. i was going to say, the coronavirus pandemic has affected us all. how has it actually affected your life? my mother always used to say, "you've got to find some good in some bad." and we've had terrible bad this spring and summer. but i've found good here because i've come to this place on a twice daily basis at least, and i've reconnected with nature in a way that i haven't done since my teens.

because i had the capability to do that consecutively. so i've walked down this avenue of trees that we are strolling down now every day, and i've looked at all those little nuances, you know, changes in flower composition, changes in the length of the grass, changes in the sound made by different species of buzzing insects. and to have experienced that every day, to move through that process of growth and progress has been simply extraordinary. it was never an opportunity that i thought would be afforded me again. you of course are a naturalist, and this is your environment. there is a lot of talk generally about people in this time of pandemic, whether it be out of choice or necessity, sort of reconnecting with the earth, with the environment around them in a way that they normally do not do. do you have any gut feeling that that is changing anything about our relationship with the planet? i think it could and it should.

and we have an opportunity to make that happen. many people who aren't naturalists were stopped dead in their tracks. they were locked down. outside of their windows, spring was exploding, and we had a very nice, warm, dry spring. they went into their gardens, into those green spaces where they were taking exercise. they heard birdsong, they saw things that they had the time to stop and listen, which is different from hearing, and they had the chance to look rather than see. but how far do you take this thought that there is something positive about the impact of the coronavirus pandemic? because i noticed, for example, that a group that you've expressed some admiration and support for, extinction rebellion, are saying that this virus represents a huge opportunity — it's a phrase they've used, and they talk about this being a moment when the human race must realise that it can change its relationship

with the planet, and change it now. do you go as far as that? well, as my mother said, "find some good in the bad." and extinction rebellion are saying that this has stopped us dead in our trucks, it's not something we would've wanted or wished for, but it has therefore given us no choice but to manifest an opportunity to think again about how we were interacting with the natural world. and let's face it — as best we know at the moment, this whole pandemic is a result of the fact that we were abusing the natural world, we were perhaps trafficking different animals from parts of that world alive in the markets where we were mixing them in an unnatural situation. and this disease has crossed into humans, which is something which we have feared for a long time. but how far do you take this thought? because it strikes me that the danger is, a lot of people watching this programme around the world will have lost theirjobs, will find their own families in an economic crisis saying, "it's fine for this guy who's obsessed with nature to talk about seizing the positives, but frankly the negatives are overwhelming. and i need myjob back,

i need the economy to kick start again, and frankly, i need the old ways to come back. so don't tell me that they can't come back." well, i'm with you all the way until you got to "old ways". because i'm saying, here's an opportunity to generate new ways — newjobs, new economies. here's an opportunity to think that we can create a more sustainable existence for ourselves and other species on this planet, and we have the knowledge and technology, and now we've been forced into an opportunity to think about taking that. and here, we have an opportunity to put in play all those jobs to generate those economies, retrain people so that they can experience a similar quality to life that they had before, but one which is not a result of damaging the very world that they want to prosper in. chris, i want to talk to you about an emotion that you've discussed and you clearly have felt — and that is fear. you've talked about how

you felt fearful as a young person growing up in the 1970s, and you've said, "i felt fear of the coming decade then, but now, ifeel a deeper, more profound fear." what is that fear? well, i suppose in the subsequent period of time, i, we have become better educated as to what might manifest, a realisation of those fears, certainly in terms of the environment, etc. we've come a long way in our terms of understanding the impacts of those in terms of science, a much better understanding of it. and i've matured as a person — i suppose my life is moving closer to the end than the beginning, and i'm more conscious of my own mortality, and the less available time that i have to make a positive difference.

you have said that you feel that things have become so much worse for the natural world under your watch, and you feel that that represents a failure. there is no ambiguity about that. as a child, when i was interested in wildlife, we were all a lot less aware of the threats of the declines, of the changes in distribution in a negative aspect. but there's no excuse for my generation that graduated in the early ‘80s to have been at any stage unaware of what's been going on. so yes, on my watch as a conscious conservationist, we've seen — i've presided over colossal losses in terms of our biodiversity. and we aren'tjust talking about the mega fauna in terms of tigers and rhinos, and elephants and so on. we're talking about the creatures which would've inhabited this garden. you know, i'm sat in a beautiful part of the new forest with no swallows. no nightingales, no spotted fly catchers. i rent the house from a lady who lived here in the 1970s, and she tells me that

when i was listening to the clash and the sex pistols, she was listening to nightingales in this garden. right now, i know you are particularly angry about the fate of birds of prey in those parts of the united kingdom where commercial game shooting, particularly grouse shooting, is prevalent. and you appear to be accusing those behind that industry of deliberately killing endangered birds of prey, including eagles. it makes you angry, but how far are you prepared to go to try and change this? firstly, there is no doubt that there is active persecution — and most of that persecution is focused within the driven grouse shooting fraternity. i'm not anti—shooting — there are lots of creative, sustainable, legal shooters out there. many people see you as fundamentally anti—shooting — indeed, they characterize you as a man who wants to put hundreds, if not thousands of people out of work.

well, they ought to read my biography more closely. i've only ever campaigned, both in the uk and overseas about illegal and — what i see as unsustainable — shooting. shooting in the uk is very poorly regulated. it has been able to expand some practices without any regulation, and they've got to a point where we need to challenge them. and all i'm doing is asking the shooting fraternity to ask themselves, "is what we do sustainable?" and there are laws against it, there are codes of conduct to which all the big estates in game keepers have signed up. you know, you appear to have not been satisfied with an industry which is making efforts to change the way... no, no, ithink, stephen, they're saying they're making efforts, but we've seen no improvement with those sorts of voluntary measures in, say, the last a0 years. you have, i noticed, since i last came here — i noticed this time,

quite a lot of cctv on the driveway up to your rather isolated house. you've talked about threats, intimidation that have come with your campaigning work — particularly on this issue, but we'll talk about others too. are you now living with a real sense of fear for your own safety? i fear for the safety of my stepdaughter and my partner, who spend time at the house here. to be quite honest with you, all of the intimidation spurs me on. that's what it comes down to. i think a tiny minority of people have knee—jerked when they've failed to fully understand what i'm asking for. and what i'm asking for is for them to change their minds. and you know the human species is remarkably intelligent, adaptable, and resourceful — but it's not good at changing its minds. you and i are not very good at changing our minds sometime, we need to be pushed into that, and we are resistant to it. and what i'm saying to those

in the shooting fraternity is that what you're doing now doesn't have contemporary sustainability. you may be doing something which you consider a tradition — and it may have been viable in the past, but it's not viable any more. i need you to stop and think about it, measure it, quantify it, see if it is sustainable and, if it isn't, change your mind. since we last met, and i was last here 5—6 years ago, it seems to me you've become more of an activist than a campaigner. well, the world's a worse place to live in. i'm running out of time, i've got to step up my game. are you taking less joy in the world than you were then? oh, no, not at all. this little tatty patch of unkempt former lawn has given me enormous joy this spring. i've come out here — before i've come out, i've opened that window and listened to the rich, fluid songs of a song thrush, which sang all the way through spring and early summer whilst it was still dark. and, as the dawn crept up, i've come our and i've knelt with damp, dewey knees in that tangle of wild flowers and stuck my nose

into an insect‘s business. and i can tell you, it's been so uplifting. let me flip the focus away from the natural world, which obviously stirs so much passion in you, to yourself. look inward a little bit. you, again, since we've last met, have chosen to speak out very publicly about your own mental health issues and your midlife diagnosis with asperger‘s, on the autistic spectrum. you've talked about it as a gift, as an asset which has helped you. in what ways? well, i think in some ways it is a gift. it's just that when you open it, you don't always get what you want. sometimes it's the shiny package which allows you to see and sense the world in a different way. sometimes it's an intellectual asset which allows you to think not outside the box, because there is no box — there are no boundaries to your thinking. sometimes it allows you to develop levels of creativity — physical, artistic, mental —

that you can't have. but of course, sometimes you open the box and it presents you with all sorts of challenges, many of which are brought about socially. and, in order to deal with those, you have to have a management system, a functional management system that will will allow you to maximise your capability to fulfil your life, you know, to have sustainable relationships, to work in teams, as we all have to do in some way, shape or form, and that always did and continues, to some extent, to present challenges. but i think one of the... i'll stop you there, i'm tempted to ask why on earth you've chosen to work in television for more than 25—30 years? it's a medium where you're exposed, where you have

to communicate with huge numbers of people. it puts you in a very public place — and yet, you're a person who's always said, "i hate parties, i hate many aspects of socialisation, i much prefer being on my own, i prefer animals to people" — why on earth are you in telly? well, because when i graduated from university as a very angry young punk rocker with a fixated interest on the natural world, there weren't an enormous number of employment opportunities. but there probably were a few that were less difficult for somebody with asperger‘s than this? i thought about working in museums, actually. i like collections and i like the idea of taxonomy, of classifying and ordering things. that's part and parcel of the condition. and i did give that some serious thought. but the other thing you've got to think of is — i'm looking at you today, i'm very conscious of the fact

that i have to do that, and i'm conscious of the fact that, in orderfor us to have a good conversation, i have to look at you. so i can do that and i can train myself to do that. most times times i'm just looking down the lens of a camera, it'sjust a glass blob. and that's easier? the glass blob is easier? it is much easier, and the only thing happening over here — audrey hepburn could be pole dancing and i wouldn't even notice. because you know what it's like, you're focused on that one task, which is communicating what you want to do. and, in terms of a broader audience, i think one of the other traits that you have to — that i have to acknowledge is that, you know, there is a fearlessness and a tremendous sense of refuting injustice. generally people with my condition don't like people getting away with things. my mother used to say, "you never know when to stop, chris. you always go that one step too far. you always say that last thing that really, you should've kept to yourself." and that's part and parcel of my character.

a journalist recently talked to you and made a comparison between you and greta thunberg and said it's interesting that you're both on the asperger‘s spectrum, and you both have this desire to be truth tellers above all else, and are not interested in social convention or pragmatic approaches to problems, but just want to drill down to what they see as the truth without artifice. i think if you were to ask me, and i always have to answer honestly, "what had hurt me most in my life?" it wouldn't be the teeth that i've had removed or the cartilage that i've ripped up. it would be the lies that i've been told by other people. you know, lying is not something which people, perhaps like greta and i, are entirely comfortable with. it's not that we can't understand other people lying, we learned to understand them lying. it's not that we can't to lie ourselves — we do tell lies, it's part

and parcel part of the way humans interact, lying. but i think that the truth, for me, as i see it and know it, and understand it at that point in time has to out. but do you therefore see most of the rest of us as serially dishonest, both to each other and ourselves? i can be frequently disappointed by other humans. i'm disappointed by myself to a far greater degree, but we've already talked about my sense of failure when it comes to protecting the natural world. i've had other reasons to, you know, manifest a sense of failure in myself. but yes... but this strikes me as really important, for you as a campaigner and a leader on environmental issues. because it's not much fun for other people to think that you judge them as, well, judge them badly or negatively. the message seems to be that a lot of human beings frankly, as you see it, tell lies

to themselves and others. they do, and it's part and parcel of the way we exist. we are natural born liars. we do that to control our environment. it's one of the reasons why we've got a big brain — it allows us to remember who we've lied to, who's lied to us, who has lied to each other. and in our society, that for us is one of the ways that we, you know, control the balance of power. we do that naturally, i don't think that's an unpleasant thing, but a biological phenomenon. you know, we are a long—lived social animal. we have a big brain which allows us to remember who lied to who, who we can lie to and get away with, and who can we lie to and they suss us out. and that's very much part and parcel of who humans are. i don't look down upon, you know, humanity for that behavioural trait.

you don't look down on people? i can look down on individuals, of course, who don't — we all do that, who don't meet our standards of whateverwe'rejudging, music, art, politics or anything else. but collectively as a species, i have enormous admiration for humans. you know, we did produce van gogh and rothko, and jackson pollock. we did build notre dame. we did go to the moon... there's another aspect of your view of humanity that i'm interested in. and you've talked about it, made documentaries about it, and that is the question of, how many humans this planet can sustain? we are currently at over 7 billion... 7.4, yeah. you made a documentary which suggested that that could well get to 10 billion, and you were very worried about it. i've read a lot of demographic experts in recent months saying, "actually, the trends" — and they use the word jaw—dropping — "the trends

are jaw—dropping in a different direction, that many countries, including japan could see the population of their country half by the end of the 21st century. actually, we may never get to 10 billion, we may stick at around 8.8 billion." do you think in retrospect, you and others who talk about the dangers of overpopulation got it wrong? one of the things that i want to be really clear about is that, when i've talked about overpopulation, considering humans as organisms irrespective of their colour, race, political belief, so on and so forth — what it is intrinsically linked with is consumption. because you and i survive on the resource poverty of millions of other people in the world. we at this point in time in the uk consume two extra planets‘ worth of resources. if we were in the united states, we would be consuming four extra planets‘ worth of resources right now. and the only reason that we can

get away with that — and we are getting away with it — is because of a lack of parity, the poverty gap. because people in somalia are using a tiny, tiny fraction of the earth‘s resources, and we‘re using them all. so it‘s notjust about numbers of humans, it‘s how those humans are behaving. and what gives me gravest concern, of course, therefore is not the burgeoning population of sub—saharan africa because, unfortunately, they are very, very poor. they aren‘t using a lot of resources at this point in time. no, because their aspirations are just as great as ours. and why would they not be? of course, why wouldn‘t they be? so surely, the logic of your message is... that we should lead the way. we should lead the way. at this point in time, we have the capacity to cut our consumption and develop means of living a fulfilling life without consuming as much. in a way, we have to make

that their aspirations. i want to end by making this very, very personal. because you talk with such passion and, in fact, perhaps the most passionate thing you‘ve talked about today was this area of wild grasses and flowers right in front of our noses, which you described... which has been distracting because it‘s full of bugs and butterflies, and ijust saw a moth fly across here that i haven‘t seen all summer. so yeah, difficult to keep my eyes off that. and when you talk like that, i get an almost spiritual sense from you. yet you‘ve always said that religion means nothing to you. but is there something that connects you to the world around you that you would describe in a way as being spiritual? i‘ve always been fascinated by religions because i need to understand humans in order to, you know, get them to do what i need to do. so when i have been fortunate enough to travel, i‘m drawn to churches, monasteries and temples — largely because they last longer in the landscape in many parts.

but there isn‘t a spiritual cell in my body. i think we forget that we are living on this little blue jewel floating in all of that blackness at a unique moment in even our planet‘s history. and we are conscious enough to be able to see and enjoy all of that beauty. how on earth can we countenance destroying it? and yet, here we are. well, that‘s what made me set my alarm clock 50 minutes earlier this morning. that‘s what gets me out of bed. i can‘t countenance it being destroyed. i‘ve got to get up, stand up for that natural world. you know, i‘ve got to be the voice of the song thrush and the voice of the poisoned eagle. and, you know, the voice

of that oak tree which is being cut to facilitate a vainglorious railway project. we have to end there, but chris packham, thank you so much for being on hardtalk. pleasure, thank you. hello. winter is finally turning white for some of us. not all of us going to see the snow over the next few days. the potential is still there for a bit more to come our way, though. it‘s certainly staying cold enough, but that frosty sharp

frost at times overnight, icy conditions where we‘re seeing some showers of rain, sleet, hail, yes, some snow, notjust on hills but at times to lower levels, with that risk of disruption. there are coming our way some fairly weak weather disturbances, but they‘re within a flow of air coming down from the north, which means the moisture out of these disturbances will be falling as rain but also sleet and snow in places. and we‘ll have had a few wintry showers overnight, into first thing in the morning. there‘s a sharp frost out there, maybe —9 in a few spots in scotland, icy conditions around and still some of these showers falling as snow, maybe notjust on hills, into the north, northwest of scotland, northern ireland. a few of these wintry showers running down towards north wales, north west england, the northwest midlands, and then we see an area of rain but turning to sleet and snow potentially for south wales, more especially running eastwards across parts of southern england during wednesday. some uncertainty about how far north it‘ll get, how much sleet and snow there will be within this. it‘ll be a cold day, yes, but much of the eastern side of the uk will stay dry and get to see a bit of sunshine. what rain, sleet and snow

there is will continue to pull across parts of southern england overnight and into thursday morning before clearing. as thursday begins, we‘re getting some of these snow showers pushing in towards eastern parts of scotland, and it‘s those that are going to move further south during thursday, again giving the potential for some snow and ice in places, and notjust on hills, and the chance of some disruption as a result. so, this system will take its rain, sleet and snow showers out of scotland and into parts of england and wales as we go through thursday. the tendency for a lot of that to turn back to rain if you are seeing some snow away from hills during thursday, and where you don‘t get to see any rain, sleet and snow, quite a bit of cloud, maybe a few sunny spells, but it‘ll be cold. that weather system still around overnight and into friday, new year‘s day, the start of 2021. it will tend to die out during friday but still with a good deal of cloud, especially through england and wales, and patchy rain, sleet and hill snow out of that. and little less cold on friday, but temperatures staying below average well

into the start of 2021.

this is bbc news. my name‘s mike embley with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. the us president—electjoe biden criticises his predecessor‘s vaccine rollout and pledges 100 million jabs in his first 100 days. turning this around is going to ta ke turning this around is going to take time. we might not see improvement until we are well into march as it will take time for our covid response plan to begin to produce visible progress. another record breaking surge in uk cases — up by more than 53,000 in a single day. anti—abortion protests in argentina, before the senate holds an historic vote on legalising terminations. we‘ve a special report from iraq — and the british army interpreters facing death