60 Minutes - 9/27/2020: Florida's Amendment, The Wall, Sir David

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

On this week's "60 Minutes," Sharyn Alfonsi reports on the North Dakota company, Fisher Sand and Gravel, which built two walls for WE BUILD THE WALL, then leveraged those jobs to earn billions of dollars in government contracts with support from President Trump. At 94-years-old, Sir David Attenborough hasn’t slowed down because of his age or the pandemic. He talks to Anderson Cooper about his new film and book. As many as 1.4 million Floridians who committed felonies had their voting rights restored by Amendment 4, but legal issues over the amendment mean hundreds of thousands won't get to cast their ballot in the Presidential election. Lesley Stahl has the story. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. Wendy's most important deal of the day

has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $5. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, English muffin sandwiches, value iced coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Do you know what percentage of the Florida population had been denied the vote? Up until Amendment 4, approximately 10% of the voting age population was denied the franchise. Desmond Meade came up with Amendment 4. A felon himself, convicted of drug and firearms possession, he couldn't vote for 30 years. Florida disenfranchised more people than the population of over 10 states and U.S. territories and over 40 countries in the world. We really believe with our patent pending system, we can bring sexy back to construction.

This man's promises of high speed construction at low cost got President Trump's attention, and his company was recently awarded about $2 billion worth of contracts to build a border wall. 60 Minutes has been investigating the company and its record of building, and let's just say we found some holes in it that taxpayers will want to know about. The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel. In his stunning new film, Sir David Attenborough celebrates nature's wonders, a warning against humans overrunning the natural world itself. You call the film a witness statement.

A witness statement is given when a crime has been committed. Yeah, well, a crime has been committed. And it so happens that I'm of such an age that I was able to see it beginning. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard.

When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. President Trump campaigned this past week in Florida, a crucial swing state he won by a narrow margin in 2016. Then, two years later, Florida voters, in a brief bipartisan moment, approved an amendment to the state's constitution that restored voting rights to as many as 1.4

million residents who'd been barred from voting because they had a prior felony conviction. Amendment 4 had only two conditions. Those convicted of murder or felony sexual assault did not qualify, and felons first had to complete, quote, all terms of sentence, including parole or probation. It was the single largest addition to the country's voting population in half a century. But then things got complicated. Do you know what percentage of the Florida population had been denied the vote? Up until Amendment 4, approximately 10 percent of the voting age population was denied the franchise. Desmond Meade came up with Amendment 4. A felon himself, convicted of drug and firearms possession, he couldn't vote for 30 years. Florida disenfranchised more people

than the population of over 10 states and U.S. territories and over 40 countries in the world. And how many of them were African Americans? One in every four could not vote because of a prior felony conviction. Well, tell us what some of the felonies are in Florida that make it unusual. Releasing helium-filled balloons in the air is a third-degree felony in Florida. Then you have things such as catching a lobster whose tail is too short, disturbing turtle nesting eggs, driving with a suspended license. Those are the type of crimes that if a person is convicted of, they would actually lose the right for the rest of their life.

Most of the convictions in Florida are from more serious crimes, but the history of disenfranchisement in the state goes back to the years after the Civil War. Now we know that the original intent of these policies were to keep the newly freed slaves from being able to participate in democracy. But like a tumor left unchecked, it just grew and it infected everybody. Well, tell us about you. You committed crimes.

You had a drug addiction. Tell us your story. Well, Leslie, you know, I always start my story back in August of 2005 when I was standing in front of railroad tracks in South Florida waiting on a train to come so I can jump in front of it. I was homeless. I was addicted to crack cocaine. I was unemployed, recently released from prison.

And I didn't see any light at the end of the tunnel. And so I waited, and I waited there. So the train never came? The train never came. In one of the busiest tracks in Dade County, the train did not come that day. So he moved into a homeless shelter and went to school, college, then law school. And in May of 2014, I graduated with a law degree. He has the diploma, but he can't practice because he's a felon.

And unlike in the vast majority of states, he couldn't vote. So he used his law school training to help write Amendment 4, building statewide support, winning endorsements from the ACLU, but also the conservative Koch brothers. The amendment passed in 2018 with nearly two-thirds of the Florida vote. When Amendment 4 passed, did you register to vote? The first night that it passed, I went on the Internet and I registered, yes. Pastor Clifford Tyson was politically active back in college before committing robberies and theft. That was long ago. Still, he thought he'd

never get a chance to vote. But last year, he cast a ballot in the primary for mayor of Tampa. When they handed me my ballot, I started crying. I'm 64 years old. I remember when my grandmothers and my mom, them, had to vote and what they had to go through, getting all the way to the polls even after they had their rights, and then they would have to count the jelly beans in the jar just to go in. They weren't allowed to vote if they couldn't guess how many jelly beans were in a jar? Yes.

Desmond Meade also got emotional when he registered. This represents me being a citizen again. But the euphoria was short-lived. Several months later, after a reported 12,600 felons registered, mostly as Democrats, Florida's Republican legislature passed a law called SB 7066 to clarify the amendment. Why did it need clarification? We needed to parse through the law and figure out what all terms of sentence meant, which means any portion of the sentence that is contained within the four corners of the sentencing document. Republican state Senator Jeff Brandes, who helped write the law,

says it defines all terms of sentence as more than just time served, parole and probation. It also means that felons have to pay their financial penalties. And so, out of nearly one and a half million felons who regained the right to vote, 774,000 lost the right because of debt. If you have some money, you get to vote. If you don't have money, you don't get to vote. Is that right? Well, that's not really the question in Florida.

The question in Florida is, are you a felon? And if you are a felon, have you completed all terms of your sentence? Part of that sentence included fines, fees, and restitution. All we've said is they must complete all terms of their sentence, which is exactly what the voters voted for in the state of Florida. I think a lot of them didn't quite understand this part about paying off. Then the question is, was the constitutional amendment ambiguous? Possibly. You're not setting

them up for success. Early on, advocates of the amendment also said that financial obligations are part of the sentence because Florida lets felons pay their debts long after their probation and parole are over. But the new law says so long as that debt is still owed, felons can't vote. How much does the average ex-felon owe in terms of money? From what we've seen in our efforts, the majority of folks anywhere in the neighborhood of around $1,500. And can most of these ex-felons afford that? No, I would say that they couldn't. Isn't it unconstitutional to make someone pay to vote?

The 24th Amendment, I believe, made that unconstitutional, that you should not. But unfortunately, that's what we're facing here in Florida. The new law mandates that felons certify they're good to vote. In other words, that they've paid up. Lying on the form, well, in Florida, that's a felony. But here's the rub. A lot of these felons can't find out how much they owe in fees, fines, and restitution, like Pastor Tyson. Right now, do you have any outstanding fees or fines or any money you owe? Ms. Stahl, nobody knows. This is the problem. There was no way of tracking who paid what for the last 40 years. That's because each of Florida's 67 counties has its own archive of sentencing documents. This one's in Hillsborough County.

With no one centralized system, records can be missing, conflicting, inaccurate, or scattered. And restitution to victims is often not tracked at all. We saw old debts handwritten on index cards. Some are only available on microfiche. You have two individual felonies in both counties, right? We visited a hotline in Orlando run by felons who help other felons figure out how much they owe so they can register to vote. Clearing one case can take up to three weeks. Do you have any other counties where you might have received felony convictions in? So if they have four separate felonies in four separate counties, two of those counties may be very helpful. Ensure whatever information you need, how can we help? While the other two

are just draconian and slow and seemingly unwilling to help us in our quest to help these returning citizens. Pastor Tyson sued Florida to get his right to vote back after trying in vain to figure out how much he owed. I'm represented by about 30 lawyers between the Brennan Law Group, NAACP, array of people, and they can't find out. This is crazy. It's crazy, but it's designed. To me, it's like a poll tax.

Okay, voter suppression. Whose vote are they trying to suppress? Black and brown, lower income voters, it affects them most. What do you say to people who argue that the law, SB 7066, is kind of like the roadblocks that were put up for black voting back in Jim Crow days, where there were literacy tests and poll taxes and jelly bean tests, all kinds of hurdles to voting. I have worked every year to try to improve the lives of those people involved in the criminal justice system in Florida. And even in this piece of legislation, I have tried to create opportunities for individuals who can't pay or have some financial difficulty paying to go back to the court and convert them to community service or to go to the court and ask for those fines and fees to be reduced.

But the election's coming up. There is a cutoff for registration October 5th. And a lot of these people cannot find out to this day what they owe. Well, I think that's where we need to be working with local clerks of court and moving this process along as quickly as possible. In May, a judge ruled in Pastor Tyson's favor, saying that Florida has created an unconstitutional pay-to-vote system. But this month, an appellate court reversed that judgment, Florida has created an unconstitutional pay-to-vote system.

But this month, an appellate court reversed that judgment, saying the law is legitimate and constitutional. Both sides expect this will end up in the Supreme Court. But for now, even though Amendment 4 passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, most felons in Florida won't get to vote in November. So Desmond Meade is raising money to pay off the debts of felons who want to vote from people like John Legend, LeBron James, and Michael Jordan, as well as Michael Bloomberg, who has raised a reported $16 million for the effort. If the courts, the state of Florida, want to hold our democracy hostage in Florida,

we've got patriots around this country that's going to step up and say, you know what, we're going to pay these people fines and fees. We're going to free democracy. We're going to pay the ransom. He's collected at least $23 million, which he estimates will clear over 20,000 felons. That's led Florida's Republican attorney general to question whether the donations are an illegal incentive to vote. Desmond Meade paid off his debt, so last month in the Florida primary, he finally got to vote. Here's something special. I'm going to read you what you said at the time.

When I went in there to vote, I didn't just take my family in there with me. I brought all of my ancestors that were hung on trees, that were burned, that was bitten by dogs, that was sprayed by fire hoses. I brought their spirit with me in there. Our people went through that. We've been constantly fighting.

Amendment 4 was nothing but a continuation of the civil rights fights. And we're still fighting. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s,

including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. This summer, federal agents arrested President Trump's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, on a yacht off the coast of Connecticut. Bannon and three others are accused of defrauding donors to We Build the Wall, a conservative fundraising campaign that raised millions of dollars to privately build sections of wall on the border with Mexico. Prosecutors say the defendants took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fund for their own personal use. They've pled not guilty. Before the arrest, We Build the Wall had completed two walls, less than a mile in New Mexico and three miles in Texas. Tonight, you will hear about the contractor who built both of those walls,

Fisher Sand and Gravel, out of North Dakota, and how they leveraged those jobs to earn billions of dollars in government contracts with support from President Trump. Last month, reports surfaced that one of their private walls was falling apart, so we went to Mission, Texas to see for ourselves. We drove over the flood levee down a dusty road that dead ends at a sugar cane farm. And there it was. The so-called wall looks more like a fence.

Its steel spine curves three miles down the banks of the Rio Grande and stretches upwards of 18 feet high. It sits on private property, so the only way for us to get a better look is from the water. From here, it appears fine. But Javier Pena, an attorney who represents neighboring landowners, noticed erosion from summer storms was quite literally covered up. He hired engineers to inspect it. What have you seen? Massive erosion. There's cracks in the foundation. The foundation is crumbling. There was an eight-foot hole under the fence. There are these trenches all along the wall of the sand just washing away. From the experts that have actually reviewed the site.

There is no differing opinions. What is the opinion? That it's not a question of whether it will fail, it's when it's going to fail. And it's already started to fail. To understand why this is happening, Pena says you have to go back to the fall of 2019 when a character called Form and Mike from Florida, a mouthpiece for We Build the Wall's fundraising drive, showed up in Mission, Texas. We're building three and a half miles of wall.

The people of Texas are rising up because We Build the Wall and Fisher Industries are going forward with this build. We Build the Wall was founded by Iraq War veteran Brian Colfage, a triple amputee. They wanted to raise a billion dollars to, quote, build Trump's wall. They targeted Mission, Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, one of the busiest illegal border crossing areas in the country. All along the border, we're here building. You got to help out. They had started producing the videos promoting this project and they were on the property. They started clearing the property before anyone really knew what was going on.

The company clearing the riverbank to build the private wall was Fisher Sand and Gravel. Tommy Fisher, the company's CEO, had been trying, and failing, to land a lucrative border wall contract from the government since 2017 when the Trump administration began soliciting wall design concepts. Fisher was one of the companies to put up a prototype. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security said it had design flaws. A second bid was also rejected. Frustrated, Tommy Fisher took another approach. We really believe with our patent-pending system, we can bring sexy back to construction.

He became a fixture on Fox News, the president's favorite network at the time. At times sounding less like a contractor and more like a contestant on a reality show, pandering to an audience of one. You know, hopefully the president will see this as well. And he's a guy who says he can cut through bureaucracy. Two weeks after that appearance on Fox in April of 2019. I don't know if you heard about this contractor that said he can build the whole wall for a lot cheaper than anybody else. Yes, we're dealing with him actually. It's Fisher. Comes from North Dakota. Recommended

strongly by a great new senator, as you know, Kevin Cramer. By May of 2019, Tommy Fisher had the president's attention, but still couldn't land a contract to build the government's wall. The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees border wall construction, pointed to the company's lack of experience building border walls. To prove they could, Fisher teamed up with We Build the Wall, first in New Mexico and later here on the banks of the Rio Grande Admission. Building on the banks of any river is difficult, but building on the raging Rio Grande

is especially challenging, made more complicated because the U.S.-Mexico border runs straight down the middle of it, so any plans to build on it must be approved by the International Boundary and Water Commission, or IBWC. Fissure Sand and Gravel didn't get that approval before they started bulldozing. What steps did they skip? All of them. What should they have done? They should have gone to the IBWC, to the EPA, and presented their plan, an actual plan. What about this idea that, you know, this is private money being used on private land and a landowner can do whatever he wants? They absolutely can do whatever they want on their property as long as it doesn't affect other people's property.

And you think the wall infringes on other... It clearly does. The way the bollards are built, it's going to cause clogging of that wall. So those bollards, the trash or debris could get stuck in there and then the water's going to change. It's a giant rake, just like a rake in your yard, and it's going to catch all that debris and redirect that water. Pena filed a lawsuit on behalf of a neighboring wildlife refuge called the National Butterfly Center, which feared the wall would cause flooding to its property. The U.S. government also sued on behalf

of the IBWC. Good walls make good neighbors, but this wall did not. We've got rogue priests running around, anti-Trump, anti-wall. We Build the Wall's Brian Colfage launched attacks against anyone who opposed their wall, falsely saying the National Butterfly Center was the site of a rampant sex trade and that the Army Corps of Engineers was part of the deep state. He even took aim at Father Roy Snipes, a local priest who opposed the Trump wall, accusing him of promoting child trafficking. Also, not true. We build the wall.

People came after you personally. Isn't that something? I didn't even know who they were. They're coming after the local priest. Yeah. I guess they're not from around here because from around here we can, even mom and dad can disagree about things without being mean and nasty. Last December, Brian Colfage bragged in an interview that We Build the Wall had a direct line to the White House. We have Chris Kobach and Steve Bannon and a lot of people that are tied in with the Trump administration. So we're able to back channel things to the Trump administration and let them

know what we're doing. But what they were doing was falling apart. A recent engineering inspection after summer storms revealed deep gashes under the foundation of the wall. That's Mariana Trevino Wright, who runs the Butterfly Center, lying underneath it. This was a normal, seasonal rainfall. And what happened to the wall? The foundation washed out from under enormous sections of it. His attorney said after this that this is just a normal part of new construction. If you walked out of your new house and had a 30-foot hole under your home foundation,

would you consider that normal? There's the end of the wall right there. There's nothing to stop. You can just walk it around. The Fisher wall doesn't attach to anything on either side. We were there while part of the federal government wall project was being built directly behind Fisher's wall on top of the levee to protect it from flooding. Rudy Karish is the recently retired station chief for the border patrol in the Rio Grande Valley. So you were the station chief when Tommy Fisher started building his private wall. Yes. Did at any point you get a chance to look at the specs before it was built? No. It should not be placed directly on a river to where when you get a heavy rainstorm, you have a probability of having that fence washed away.

I mean, a kid builds a sandcastle on the edge of the ocean. They know what's going to happen. Karish wasn't the only one at Customs with concerns about Fisher's work. In a leaked memo about the private walls, customs officers reported Fisher inflated claims about the quality and speed of his work due to lack of experience. We wanted to ask him about that, but Tommy Fisher did not respond to our request for an interview. Earlier this month, he did speak to the Washington Post and told him that he paid $20 to $30 million to build the wall in Mission and that his partners at We Build the Wall only sent him a single payment for a million and

a half dollars, far short of what he was expecting. He says he cut ties with the group even before Steve Bannon and Brian Colfage were arrested for fraud. He's denied any involvement and hasn't been charged. But Tommy Fisher's showcase wall seems to have paid off. Despite questions about his partners and the quality of his work, Fisher Sand and Gravel has been awarded almost $2 billion in government contracts to build miles of wall. And we live in a very divided country right now. And We Build the Wall, Colfage, and Fisher took advantage of that, found a way to target that fight and profit off of it. And when you say profit, it's not just filling the coffers of We Build the Wall. I mean, Fisher now has almost $2 billion of contracts to build more walls. Of taxpayer-funded contracts to build more walls when this wall is already falling down.

So how did that happen? Three former administration officials tell 60 Minutes that President Trump, quote, pressured government officials to direct wall contracts to Fisher Sand and Gravel. Those same sources say that on March 7, 2019, the president summoned DHS officials and Lieutenant General Todd Semonite, who ran the Army Corps of Engineers, to the Oval Office. Sources inside the room say the president wanted to know why Tommy Fisher, who promised he could build the wall cheaper and faster, wasn't selected to build it and, quote, exploded into a tirade. They say DHS officials explained to the president that it was inappropriate for the president to influence the bidding process. But according to those sources, the, quote,

pressure continued with a handwritten note from the president, an email from his personal secretary, and calls from his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Administration officials did not respond to our request for a comment. Fisher Sand and Gravel was awarded the single largest border wall contract, $1.3 billion. Congressman Benny Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, is the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. What is the problem with the president advocating for a specific contractor? It's against the procurement regulations of the federal government. Fishers Sand and Gravel has a checkered past. In 2009, the company admitted to tax fraud. They've racked up thousands of

environmental and safety violations in six states and almost $2 million in fines. Do those things figure in typically when you're deciding who should get a contract? Fisher could potentially have been debarred from bidding on any fellow contracts, but they weren't. The president made no bones about his support for Fisher. And guess what? Fisher got the contract. It speaks for itself. Sources also told us that Republican Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota had been aggressively trying to steer contracts to Fisher Sand and Gravel. They say Senator Kramer demanded sensitive

information from the Army Corps of Engineers about competing bids. When some of those documents you request gives an individual a potential unfair advantage in the procurement process, then I think that has to be reviewed. We asked the inspector general to look at it. Senator Kramer says he was just exercising congressional oversight and gave Fisher no information. The Department of Defense inspector general's investigation is ongoing. They need to look at Tommy Fisher's and Brian Kolfage's and Bannon's own words when they say that they were working back channels with the Trump administration to get these contracts. You know, they might say, that's just politics.

That's not politics. That's corruption. That's the swamp that Trump claimed he was going to be draining. For nearly 70 years, Sir David Attenborough has been exploring the planet, taking hundreds of millions of television viewers on eye-opening journeys through the natural world. Jungles and island archipelagos, deserts and deep under the sea, no place has been too remote, no animal too elusive for Sir David and his talented team of filmmakers to document. The man known as a national treasure in his native Britain is 94 years old now,

but age and the pandemic haven't slowed him down. He's coming out with a new book and a remarkable and stunning new film, A Life on Our Planet, which premieres on Netflix next week. They are what he calls a witness statement, a first-hand account of what he's seen happen to the planet and a dire warning of what he believes awaits us if we don't act quickly to save it. The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel. In his new film, Sir David Attenborough's voice is the same, sonorous and soulful, reassuringly familiar.

Dazzling in their variety and richness. But his message is uncharacteristically alarming. The way we humans live on Earth is sending it into a decline. Human beings have overrun the world. We're replacing the wild with the tame. Our planet is headed for disaster. You call the film a witness statement. A witness statement

is given when a crime has been committed. Yeah, well, the crime has been committed. And it so happens that I'm of such an age that I was able

to see it beginning. And so it isn't that I enjoy saying doom, doom, doom. On the contrary, I'd much rather enjoy thrill, excitement, doom, doom, doom on the contrary. I'll enjoy it. I'll take thrill, excitement, pleasure, joy, joy, joy, joy. But if you've got any sense of responsibility, you can't do that.

Sir David spoke to us via Zoom near his home in London, where he's been living in isolation due to the pandemic. I imagine you living in a house full of things that you have collected from travels around the world, a sort of cabinet of curiosities. Well, that is true, in a sense. I mean, certainly I've got a cellar full of rock, lots of rocks. And sometimes you pick it up and you say, good Lord, what on earth is this? Or indeed, why on earth would I bother to pick this up? He studied geology and zoology in college and was working

as a producer at the BBC in 1954 when he convinced his bosses to let him loose and start traveling the world. He was just 28 years old. Wherever I went, there was wilderness, sparkling coastal seas, vast forests, immense grasslands. You could fly for hours over the untouched wilderness. It was the best time of my life. David Attenborough became a household name in 1979 with his groundbreaking BBC series Life on Earth, which was seen by an estimated 500 million people worldwide. I know it sounds like a publisher's slogan, but it is the greatest story ever told. The story of how life developed on this planet and led to you and me sitting here talking across an ocean.

Viewers were drawn in by Edinburgh's enthusiasm and sense of wonder. This was his first filmed encounter with endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda. It was really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolise all that is aggressive and violent, when that's the one thing that the gorilla is not, and that we are. I remember it very vividly. They ended up, two of them, sitting on me, two babies sitting on me. Was I alarmed? Was I frightened? Was I concerned that the mother of those two

baby twins was going to turn on me? Not at all. Not for a microsecond. It was the biggest compliment I can remember receiving. You were being accepted into that family. And it was unforgettable. Unforgettable moments in the wild is what Sir David Attenborough has become known for. Boo! There's barely a corner of the earth he hasn't been to, or a species he hasn't shown us in a new way. He's done more than just bring the natural world into our homes.

He's helped us make sense of it. They are on parade. Given it a story. She's seen enough. Full of characters and complexity. Not to mention excitement. Take a look at this from BBC's Planet Earth 2. A snake's eyes aren't very good.

So if the hatchling keeps its nerve, it may just avoid detection. I saw that on a plane, and I started talking to the person next to me in my seat, saying, you have to watch this. This is extraordinary. They thought I was crazy. Well, I mean, it's... The job of a narrator for natural history films is a bit of a dottle.

A bit of a dottle? A bit of a piece of cake. How's that? It's really pretty easy because the animals are so fantastic. Sir David has always been an animal advocate. In the early 1960s, he was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund. But in his films, he rarely focused on the destruction of their habitat or climate change.

You were skeptical of climate change. I think that's interesting because I think it makes your warnings now all the more powerful. Yes, certainly so. And if you're going to make a statement about the world, you'd better make sure this isn't just your own personal reaction. And the only way you can do it, do that, is to see the work of scientists around the world who are taking observation as to what's

happening. That's what's happening to temperature, what's happening to humidity, what's happening to radioactivity, what's happening ecologically. You've said that climate change is the greatest threat facing the planet for thousands of years. Yes. Even the biggest, the most awful things that humanity has done and so-called civilizations have done

pale to significance when you think of what could be around the corner unless we put ourselves together. Deserts in Africa have been spreading. have done, pale to significance when you think of what could be around the corner unless we put ourselves together. Deserts in Africa have been spreading. There could be whole areas of the world where people can no longer safely live. The hottest temperatures yet recorded in Death Valley, and yet we are such optimists that we say we go to bed at night and say, oh, well, that was exceptional, gosh, that was interesting, wasn't it? That was the highest temperature, good Lord.

Oh, well, that's the end of that. Not at all. Wait. Wait another few months. Wait another year. See you again. Over the years, Sir David has repeatedly visited Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Now, Coral Reef is one of the most dramatic and beautiful and complex manifestations of life you can find anywhere. But on his last trip, he was stunned by what he saw. And we went on this reef, which I knew,

and it was like a cemetery, because all the corals had died. They died because of a rise in temperature and acidity. There are still people who are going to see this and say, well, look, it's not that bad and... Who are these people who are saying this? And technology will evolve to

come up with some sort of a solution that we can't even imagine. No. We live in a finite world. Ultimately, we depend upon the natural world for every mouthful of food that we eat, and indeed every lungful of air that we breathe. I mean, if it wasn't for the natural world, the atmosphere would be depleted from oxygen tomorrow. If there were no trees around, we would suffocate.

I mean, and actually, in the course of this particular pandemic that we're going through, I think people are discovering that they need the natural world for their very sanity. People who never listened to the birdsong are suddenly thrilled, excited, supported, inspired by the natural world. And they realize that they are not apart from it. They are part of it. So by saving nature, we are saving ourselves? Oh, without question.

You say in the film, we're not just ruining the world, we've destroyed it. Is it that far gone? It's not beyond redemption. Redemption, he says, depends on a complete shift to renewable energy and an end of our reliance on fossil fuels. The fossil fuel industry does not want the world to move off fossil fuels. No, it doesn't. But in fact, we know ways in which we can get from the sun up there

just a tiny fraction of the amount of energy that sprays on this earth 24 hours a day, one way or another, for nothing. If we could solve the problems of storage and transmission, the world is ours. We have all the power we need. Why should we go on poisoning life on Earth? It sounds simple when you say it. So it is. Sir David also wants to see what he calls a rewilding of the planet, giving plants and animals on land and in the ocean, time and space to bounce back. The World Wildlife Fund says that two-thirds of the Earth's wildlife has disappeared in the past 50 years. Repopulation of the oceans can happen like that in a decade if we have the will to do it. But we require everybody to agree that.

If you were to pick up the phone and speak with President Trump or President Xi of China or Prime Minister Modi in India, what would you say? I would say that the time has come to put aside national ambitions and look for an international ambition of survival. It seems politically the tide is moving in the opposite direction from that, of nations more looking inward and not as being part of a larger international community. That's what's going to sink us in the end. That's what's going to sink us.

Can you be optimistic at all? We don't have an alternative. I mean, what good is it to say, oh, to hell with it, I don't care? You can't say that. Not if you love your children, not if you love the rest of humanity. How can you say that?

It's the young that Sir David now puts his faith in, and they, it seems, have faith in him. Just listen to the reception he received last year when he popped up on stage at Britain's largest music festival. Thank you very much. There is a huge movement around the world of people from all nations, young people who can see what is happening to the world and demanding that their government should take action. That's the best hope that I have. Obviously my generation failed.

We've allowed it to happen. We've allowed this to happen, Sir David Attenborough says, despite being the smartest creatures that have ever lived. Now, he warns, we need more than just intelligence. We need wisdom. After all, this planet is all we have. There is nowhere else to go. Do you believe there's life elsewhere?

No, not really. But also, I think that that's a, I mean, it's an interesting theoretical question, but it's a theoretical question. Why would I want to go and live on the moon when I've got this world of badgers and thrushes and jellyfish and corals? Why would I want to go and live in the moon? Because there's nothing else there but dust. I'd say, well, thank you very much. I'll stay where I am and watch hummingbirds.

Next Sunday on 60 Minutes, comedian Jerry Seinfeld has spent a career observing the absurdities of life. Now John Weredian Jerry Seinfeld has spent a career observing the absurdities of life. Now, John Wertheim asks Seinfeld about finding comedy in the age of COVID. The first thing they told us, remember, they don't say it anymore, but they said, don't touch your face. Okay, so we're going to stop the whole world and you can't do this, but don't do this. How do you not do this when they tell you we're shutting down the world, but don't go, oh my God. Oh my God. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition

of 60 Minutes.