I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that we almost let this one pass.
Not only did he pretty much define the natural history genre, he oversaw BBC2 from its early days through the advent of colour, and is responsible for introducing the so-called "personal view" documentary form to British television, with such series as Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (the producers of which would later produce Carl Sagan's Cosmos), and his own Life on Earth.
He's just labouring under an obsolete theory of population dynamics. 40 years ago, it wasn't unreasonable to think that there were simply too many people in the world and that we were headed for disaster. A lot of older thinkers believed that providing long-term food aid to famine-stricken regions was essentially an act of cruelty, because you were just dragging out the inevitable.
Since then, we learned that the most effective way to control population is a) to reduce infant mortality and b) to provide education. The Ethiopian birth rate was over 7 for most of the 1970s and 1980s, but is now 4.64 and falling fast. In Addis Ababa, the rate is now below replacement at 2.1.
