As nice a man as he appears to be, Sir David Attenborough is just as much off the mark here as those fellow atheists who blame nearly every single war on religious motivation:
Sir David, 82, said the devastation of the environment has its roots in the first words that God supposedly uttered to humankind, as detailed in Genesis 1:28: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."Come on. I thought it was now commonly believed that many pagan societies collapsed as a result of over-flogging the environment. Did all of them have gods directing them to use the earth to maximum advantage too?
Some people might suggest that he's right, in that some societies such as the Australian aborigines and Native Americans lived in harmony with the environment. This always ignores, however, both the relative technological incapacity these groups had to stuff up their environment, and the damage or change that did manage to create anyway. Changing vast swathes of forest to grassland by regular burning is somehow OK for the aborigines when they arrived on the continent; I can't imagine Bob Brown being all that enamoured of the practice if a new island continent was discovered tomorrow. (Mega-fauna would almost certainly have been better off without aborigines too.)
That all humans like to arrange things to make themselves more comfortable, have developed better technology with which to do that over the years, and can find it hard to recognise the point at which to pull back and let an overused resource recover, has much more to do with it than any religious motivation.
UPDATE: overnight it also occurred to me that non-Christian Japan probably has the worst record for overfishing in recent decades.
UPDATE 2: what about China too? Barely a Christian influence to be seen there, yet hardly a beacon of environmental rectitude.
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