Max Nicholson

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 1995

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is a man who spans our century. Aged 91, Max Nicholson has enjoyed careers in conservation, politics, journalism and the Civil Service.

But his great passion remains ornithology. As a tiny boy, his parents took him one rainy afternoon to see the stuffed birds in the Natural History Museum, and there his great obsession was born. He was a conservationist before anyone understood the idea of ecology. He's played major parts in the founding of the Nature Conservancy Council, the World Wildlife Fund and Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Symphony No 6 In F Major Op 68 by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard De Chardin Luxury: Binoculars

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 1995, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a conservationist in a life which spans our century, he's now
0:36.2	91, bird watching has been his passion.
0:39.8	It was with him at school where he preferred it to sport and in his work where he rose to be one of the most
0:44.7	influential advisors to the post-war Labour government.
0:48.4	He was a director general of Nature Conservancy and he helped found the World Wildlife Fund.
0:53.0	Mysteriously though he has no knighthood, no peerage, but few doubt his stature.
0:59.0	Gongs, he says, mean very little to me.
1:02.0	All my life is about improving learning and
1:04.6	understanding and then applying that understanding to correct the many
1:08.6	horrible things in the world. He is Max Nicholson.
1:13.4	I think I've quoted you correctly to yourself, Max.
1:16.8	What are the horrible things in the world that come to your mind?
1:20.8	There's so many, it's hard to know where to start but I think what I would call malign technology
1:28.0	technology has been used in a malign way it's been used to destroy a lot of the environment. It has been used to destroy a lot of people's lives.
1:39.1	What kind of technology have you seen though come through during the course of the 20th century which you believe
1:44.0	to have led to these horrible things?
1:46.0	Well almost all of it, the military technology, the transport technology, the... the
1:53.4	the enormous number of things which are made by means of processes involving pollution.
1:59.4	We churn out an enormous number of horrible things and
2:08.6	we in the environmental movement have been able to stop some of the worst of them but only the most
	...

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