this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories at the top of the hour as newsday continues, straight after hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. the golden age of the explorer is inextricably linked with the golden age of empire. people inspired to travel where none had travelled before, charting territory and encountering peoples who were subsequently often subjugated and exploited. well, my guest is one of the world's great

modern—day explorers. but robin hanbury—tenison�*s motivation was never conquest. instead, he committed himself to the protection of indigenous peoples and their lands. have his efforts made a difference? robin hanbury—tenison, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. let's start with this word explorer. do you think it's past its sell—by date, now that all of our planet is surveyed, satellite—tracked, we map it we know it? is exploration a thing of the past?

absolutely not. the word is grossly overused by all sorts of people. i mean, windows explorer, for a start. it's all over the media all of the time, all sorts of people are calling themselves explorers. but for me, explorers, partly in the old victorian tradition that you were talking about, but also today, are people who change the world, who actually examine this extraordinary planet that we live on, and reveal it to the outside world, to everybody, the way it actually ticks and hangs together. and if that involves some hacking and hewing through trackless wastes, so much the better. well... that's part of it. at heart, it's about going into the unknown, isn't it? so do we need to change what we think of as the unknown? because in the past, it was about geographical territory. maybe we should think differently. yes, absolutely. now we are beginning to realise, just as telescopes are getting more and more powerful and people are looking into outer space and getting interested in that, which i regard as a complete waste of time, so microscopes

are getting more powerful and we're beginning to realise just how incredibly diverse and infinite the life on this planet is and how little we understand it. that's where the future of exploration lies. let's talk about your personal exploration journey, because it always intrigues me what motivates people to undertake missions which do involve a great deal of hardship and deprivation. you didn't come from a family that was poor. you were educated at one of the poshest schools in england. so you obviously made a deliberate choice to put yourself in very difficult situations, travelling to the far corners of the globe. why? well, i grew up in a wild and wonderful part of ireland where i had a sort of swallows and amazons upbringing, living alone in a treehouse in the woods during the school holidays, from the horrible schools i was sent to. but so i learnt about solitude. i learnt about wilderness and about living rough. and i think exploration, i will say, it starts with showing off. i was a fairly weedy child

and i wanted to show that i was as tough as anybody else and could climb trees and do all that. and that morphed into becoming an explorer by travelling to places that other people hadn't been. going up, exploring rivers and remote areas and so on. but a psychologist might listen to that and think, well, he obviously subconsciously was trying to escape something as well. yes. and...but also i was influenced by a very dominant mother. if you look into the history of explorers, you'll find most of them didn't have a father and had dominant mothers. so you're trying to impress your mother as well. all that is how it starts. but if you're very lucky, like i was, you again morph from being a show off to having a cause. and i got two causes which have dominated my life ever since. the first famous explorations you did were in south america. you and i think a couple of friends decided you were going to traverse the continent, in fact, both ways. you did the width at the widest point of south america and then

you went from sort of north to the bottom of the continent as well. yes. at that point, were you driven by more than this sort of desire to do something no man had done before? or was it a competitive show—offy thing at that point? at the beginning, that's all it was. and then because we travelled 6,000 miles, made the first and then, because we travelled 6,000 miles, made the first crossing, land crossing through the amazon basin, which is now... the amazon rainforest is half the size it was when we did that. hah? half. it has halved since, in 1958, i made the first crossing. 60 years. yeah. and that is terrifying. and in those days, there were lots of tribes in the area, which we met, and that began to influence my thinking. we received lots of hospitality from people, different cultures completely, and the rainforest was fascinating and huge. and then the second journey was by river, to prove you could go by river from the mouth of the orinoco to the river plate,

which i did, started out with someone called sebastian snow. and then, he went mad and went home and i had to carry on by myself. and that was another cathartic experience of being alone in the wilderness for so long. but it made me think about all these things, and was the germ of starting survival international and starting the rainforest movement. well, we'll get to survival international and what it's meant to you in your life, in a moment. but as you were undertaking these first forays into the deep wild, were you beginning to feel a little bit guilty about some of the things you were doing? for example, you were forging tracks through virgin territory, which have since become roads and you were making contact with people who had not been contacted before, and you since then have obviously ruminated a great deal on whether that is wise, so is there a degree of guilt? a huge amount of guilt. you're absolutely right. finger right on the button, there. now, there are roads, where there was nothing before. we went 6,000 miles, of which 4,000 miles had never had a vehicle on it.

and we barged thisjeep right the way through the rainforest, crossing rivers and building rafts and doing all that. now, there are bloody great roads all through there, and i feel incredibly guilty about that. not that — they didn't build the roads because i went there first. they were going to happen anyway. i showed it could be done. so there's a guilt in that. i don't think i can feel really responsible for what — the dreadful things that have happened in brazil, but i do feel guilty about it. and we were meeting tribes, some of whom had... they weren't first contacts, but they'd had very little contact with anybody else. they were virtually uncontacted people. and the result of contact of that sort has always been catastrophic, and disastrous for those people. and that's why we started survival international. did you think that, as a young man, did you think at the time that you were putting these people at risk? as you say, very little contact with any human beings outside their own societies before you came along with yourjeep, you could have transmitted diseases to them. absolutely. and one has to be very careful nowadays to take the right precautions.

we didn't know about that in those days. that was new. so, yes, ifeel guilty about that. and at the same time, it was a very extraordinary experience to see those things and meet those people and start worrying about their future. and in fact, the friend i crossed the continent with, richard mason, was, on a subsequent expedition, killed by an uncontacted tribe, who weren't supposed to be in the area, but they were doing all the right things. but he was on his own and he got ambushed and clubbed to death. and that, again, was a somewhat cathartic experience to try and think why that should happen. there's a motto that the brazilian indian protection service had — die if you must, but never kill. and he was subscribed to that. we talked about it a lot and we understood that if such a situation should arise, you don't kill. and he was armed and probably could have shot, but he got killed. and so, we had worried about the whole story of what was going to happen to these people.

and much later, that same indian protection service became corrupted totally and was exposed by the great norman lewis in 1969 in a sunday times colour supplement, the biggest ever. and that was that expose. it was what launched survival international, the fact that a tribe a year was dying out because because of our behaviour. well, let us get then to survival international. it has become a very well—known campaigning group around the world. it has offices around the world. it's fundamentally committed to the protection of the rights of indigenous peoples and the lands in which they live. absolutely. why is it that it never appears to have had a leadership which draws in and involves the indigenous peoples themselves? it's run, always been run by people like you, from outside. the result of what we started has been a huge growth in indigenous movements in the countries themselves. that is what we want to see. we don't want to be there organising things from outside. we help people to start their movements. brazil now has very powerful

indian lobby groups, mps, members of parliament, and others, who fight on behalf of their people, for themselves. that's how it should be. and the same all over the world, now. we are merely an organisation who promote in international forums the rights of indigenous people. but why shouldn't your own important and influential organisation, in the end, evolve so that the leadership and the voices that represent it are from the indigenous peoples themselves? i take your point that you work with many other groups that are indigenous, but why can't you integrate them into your influential group as well? because it seems, you know, the optics of it are somehow wrong. it's a bit like having a civil rights movement in the united states that was only run by white people. that's a good point. but that's just not the way the world works. we had our office in london. we were people who had... anthropologists and travellers and people who had written

about this subject and who are able to influence the world and, i mean, to artificially import a brazilian indian to be the head of the organisation... we've just got a new director, who's excellent, and is running things from london. but to artificially bring somebody in who probably english is not theirfirst language, and hasn't got the experience to, to put the message across, would be slightly difficult, ithink. it seems to me there are p words that may be relevant here — patronising, paternalistic. i mean, can you sit here with me and say that you truly understand the needs of, and know what is in the best interests of very different indigenous peoples throughout the world ? cos you've worked with groups in south america, you've worked with groups in asia, different parts of asia, you've worked with many, many different indigenous peoples. they're not monolithic at all. do you really know? yes, i can, because they tell

us what they want and we do what they say is... needs doing. they tell us about the abuses... do you speak their languages? i speak the common language that they will all speak, which is spanish and portuguese in south america, and malay in indonesian and southeast asia. and nearly always, somebody will speak one of those languages. i can't learn all the indigenous languages, obviously, but it is they who tell us what the problem is and we interpret it in that way. i mean, for instance, in india at the moment, there are appalling factory schools where indigenous children are taken from the tribe and educated to be good little indians, and all their cultural traditions are taken away, they're beaten if they speak their own languages. it's just like what used to happen in canada and australia and is now all coming out. this appalling idea that you have to make everybody like us, and make them good little americans or good little indians. and that is, is one of the things we can expose. isn't, isn't the truth, though,

that many of the tribes and the indigenous peoples that you have worked with over the years live in very difficult circumstances? they are, to our eyes, living in poverty. they're living with very difficult health conditions. their life expectancy is often much lower than we see in the industrialised, developed world. and isn't there a sense in which there are clear ways in which controlled and limited contact, particularly in the field of health care, could enormously help these people? but those effects are all the result of them being — having their land taken away and being made destitute. when left, when given their land and made able to look after their own affairs, that is not the case. they are... yes... in terms of life expectancy, you're telling me that when, you know, back in the late �*60s and early �*70s, when you really were going to these places in the amazon where people had barely met or set eyes upon an outsider like yourself, at the time, their life expectancy was as high as can

be seen in the western world? yes, when i was with the yanomami, i remember being taken by an 80—year—old man who said there was some honey that he wanted to collect, and he climbed this iso—foot tree by himself, and cut the branch down that the honey was in. and, i mean, farfitter than anybody would be in the western world. in their own environment, given a chance to have their own land and their own culture, they're obviously healthier and better than we are and live longer. i mean, this myth of the tribal life being nasty, brutish and short is the result of us bringing diseases, to which they have no resistance, from the old world to the new. but can i come back to the potential contradictions? you were best friends with a man from borneo who was a hunter—gatherer in the forest, who i believe has just died, but that man changed his life because of the contact with you. i mean, i understand

that you were emailing with him not so long ago. not something that he would have done in his hunter—gatherer culture. so, again, it seems he embraced change when your message to many of these peoples around the world is that we shouldn't change you, you should entirely retain the identity, character and culture you had before any contact. no, that's oversimplification. they should change at their own rate, change if you want to, or not if you don't want to. we had endless conversations a0 years ago, when i first met him, when he was a full hunter—gatherer, and his family had never met an outsider before. and they lived this wonderful hunter—gathering life, which is very sustainable, and how we all lived for the first few 100,000 years of our existence. and he and i discussed at length whether he should settle. huge pressure from the government to settle, opportunity for the children to go to school, opportunity to have medicines. we had a big expedition with doctors on it and nurses, and they came and camped

outside our base camp, and they were treated by the doctors for minor ailments that they had. and i travelled with him and we got to know each other very, very well. but i've always felt a huge guilt about what happened later, which was that he and all the other nomadic groups who were in the area gradually came in and were settled in a village. and life has not been easy for them ever since. but wasn't that a choice they made? it was a choice they made because i didn't tempt them into the camp. i said, "come and work with me and see what, what goes on." but we discussed the difficulties and i said, "it's going to be as hard for you to... "..to transition to this sort of life, as it would be for me "to live like you do." which i'm obviously hopelessly incompetent at doing. but isn't there a danger that survival international�*s philosophy and approach does treat indigenous peoples in the most remote parts of the world as something akin to museum pieces? yes, this is an attack that has

so often been made on us, and it's absolutely untrue. human zoos, the idea that we were trying to isolate people. we have never done that. we have always allowed people to make their own choices about how to live their lives. and, for instance, with education, what has been the traditional colonial past has been to impose the dominant language on them and insist that they must speak that. and that's the way to be educated, whereas education should be in their language. and we're making huge progress on that. and this is happening all over the world now. lots of people are being taught in their language, their language is being revived, and they learn to communicate with the outside world, which they need to do in order to be able to deal and trade with people and lead lives. and, indeed, if necessary, if they want to, go to university, to do all sorts of things, or not, as they choose. and they are the best guardians of the environment, they're the best conservationists. and they are constantly being taken off their land by idealists who believe that wilderness should be left alone as wilderness and that these people should be somehow

civilised by us. and that's a terrible mistake. right, butjust a final point on this. and it comes from actually a respected journal, science. a few years back, professors walker and kim hill wrote a piece directly addressing the best way of organising the relationship between the developed world, a globalising economy, and the peoples in the most remote parts of the world. and they said the assumption that isolated populations are viable in the long term, which is your assumption, is fundamentally flawed. usually, it's not the case. and they also say that interviews with indigenous peoples indicate that when they're not told to be frightened of the world outside, they can get very positive social interactions and economic interactions, with controlled contact. there are still over 100 tribes who are uncontacted. that's another whole

different story. these people have made it quite clear they do not wish to have contact with the outside world and they want to continue their way of life independently. one of the things we do is to prove that they're there, and then lobby the government to recognise their existence and give them that right to their land and their independence. that's one of the extreme cases. that's uncontacted people. and we do a lot of work on that. but that's a very small proportion of the people. most have been contacted and most are suffering the problems of contact. do you care about protecting the flora and fauna, too, as well as the people, the indigenous peoples? of course. because, you at survival international, over years, have been extremely critical of conservationists, world wildlife fund, other groups that argue for the creation of protected areas of land where, for example, hunting is completely banned, even if it involves banning hunting for indigenous peoples.

but protecting the flora and fauna is vitally important, isn't it? well, of course i'm passionate about that. i've been a passionate environmentalist all my life and there is a great dichotomy here to be discussed. but the greatjuggernaut of environmentalism and conservation, which has created national parks for the last couple of hundred years all over the world, like the great ones in america, which involved removing the tribal people. and they now realise that the environment which was created by the original plains indians in yosemite and places like that was actually the environment that we try to, that we recognise and respect today. and that was created by the people living in harmony with their environment and understanding it far better than we... we are onlyjust beginning to realise how badly we manage places than they did. and so, we are criticising some elements of the conservation movement, which has a sort of blind desire to remove people everywhere from the land. of course people do bad things, but the indigenous people, the sort of people that survival represents, on the whole, are looking

after it better than anybody else could. as you say, you have been a conservationist over six decades or so. and your most recent book, taming the four horsemen, considers how the planet can be sustained, how we need to adapt to all of the challenges facing the planet. indeed, on page four, you actually talk about the very severe threat of a pandemic. now, you wrote it before covid, then covid happened, covid actually happened to impact you very personally. you got desperately ill very early in the pandemic. what lessons do you personally, and should we all as a species, take, do you think, from covid? it has been an extraordinary two years. the world has changed radically, partly thanks to covid. it's the sort of silver lining of covid that people now recognise nature and no vapour trails, and listening to birds and so on, there's so much talk about that now. what happened to me was that i was the first person really to go down with it very badly, i wasn't expected to live. we can't know that. but you were very early. i was. i was right on...

was it february, 2020, or...? yeah. march, 2020. and i was in a coma forfive weeks and they couldn't wake me up and i was extremely ill. i think the doctor said you had a 95% chance of dying... 5% chance of living, yeah. and three times, they rang my family up to say that. and if i did recover, i would have severe brain damage, which i hope i haven't. well, we see no evidence! yeah, we'll take a vote on that. but i was, they couldn't get me out of my coma, and itjust happened that derriford hospital, that i was in, was the first hospital in britain to have a healing garden attached to the intensive care unit. and i was wheeled out into that. and the first memory i have from that hallucination time, when i was suffering, when i was in a coma, was waking up in that garden. i was only the second person to be wheeled into it. and i rememberwaking up, seeing the sun and smelling the flowers and saying in a croaky voice through my tracheostomy tube, "i'm going to live." and i did. and so i've become evangelical now about hospital gardens being a way of showing

the healing power of nature, which actually worked for me, and works for everyone. and what is becoming more and more aware — partly as a result, i say, of covid. but do you think, to use the terrible cliche, that covid is a wake—up call for us all, that there is something desperately out of kilter between our, that is human as a species, humanity's relationship with the planet? and i just wonder whether we all need to reflect on that? and maybe you, robin hanbury—tenison, need to reflect on it, too. you've talked about guilt in this interview, but you, after all, have spent a life jetting around the world to go and visit remote places. do we all need to think at this point in the planet's history about whether we can continue to behave in the way we have in the past? yes and yes. you couldn't be more right about that. i was ready, just before this covid thing happened, to make an announcement that i was going to give up all long—haul travel. really? i've been incredibly lucky. i've lived in a sort of goldilocks era when it was acceptable to travel long distances and explore

the areas that you saw, instead of the victorian travellers who had to take two or three years to do everything, and then more years to explore. we've, we've had a wonderful period during which we were able to do it. it's jolly unfair. lots of young people all say they want to do it, too. and i have to say, i think long—haul flights, without a very good reason, are now out until they have electric planes, and it all becomes acceptable again, but perhaps that day will come. so, robin hanbury—tenison, former explorer? no, there is still all of britain and europe to explore, and i'm beginning to realise how little i understand about that. and i can keep campaigning for these good causes and for the environment to be better understood. robin hanbury—tenison, it's been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you very much. thank you.

hello there. after the very wet weather across england on tuesday, conditions look much better for the next couple of days. thanks to a ridge of high pressure, we should see plenty of dry and sunny weather. but it won't be completely sunny right across the board, there will be a few showers mainly across scotland and northern ireland. that's yesterday's low, clearing away toward scandinavia. this weak weather front will bring some showers to scotland and northern ireland through the day, but this ridge of high pressure will continue to build in. so, a much better—looking day for much of england and for wales, as well. a bit of cloud to start the day across eastern areas, maybe the odd shower, any mist should clear away, too, plenty of sunshine into the afternoon. same, too, for eastern scotland, but northern and western scotland, and into northern ireland will see more cloud and a few showers around, so the mid—to—high teens here, could see highs of 21—22 celsius further south. now through wednesday night, it stays dry with clear spells across england and wales,

allowing some mist and dense fog patches to develop. it'll turn a bit cooler, as well, for many areas, i think single—figure values across central and northern areas, particularly under any clear skies. and we'll continue with just 1—2 showers across the north, thanks to this weather front. but you can see the ridge of high pressure will be a little bit stronger, more dominant across the country on thursday. so i think thursday's actually shaping up to be the driest and sunniest day of the week across the board. we'll start off with that mist and fog around, quite a fresh feel to things — but with all the sunshine, temperatures will begin to rise into the afternoon, allowing a bit of fair weather cloud to bubble up here and there. top temperatures 22—23 celsius across central, southern, and eastern areas. a bit more cloud, though, starting to push into the northwest of the country, and that heralds a change. a new area of low pressure in this weather front will be sweeping into western areas on friday. so it'll be turning breezy up and down the west coast, around irish sea areas and towards western scotland, northern ireland, western england, and wales, some heavy rain here — but actually, central and eastern england,

eastern scotland should stay dry all day with some sunny spells. it will be a breezier day for all, particularly across northern and western areas. where we have the rain, then, mid—teens, ithink, the best further east in the sunshine, again it'll feel very pleasant, may be 21—23 celsius. into the weekend, then, we've got some complicated areas of low pressure, a bit of uncertainty to the detail of the forecast. but it looks like low—pressure wants to be nearby, so there's always the chance of some cloud and rain both saturday and sunday, and a little bit of sunshine, too.

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