In many Western European countries, economic prosperity came with the devastation of the environment. What would you say to people in Central and Eastern Europe who think we should go the same way - become rich first, and then take care of the environment? It has cost us billions to put the environment back. So look at your environment, and see those parts of it that are still in order. And pay people to protect them. And then you can have the prosperity without the problems in the future. Twenty thousand farmers in Britain went bankrupt last year. And more will go bankrupt next year. Now, is that good news for the future? Eastern Europe can provide the best organic food in Europe. Yet, there are big supermarket chains, for example in Poland, and they all know they don't want you to farm organic food. They want you to farm like we do. Because they buy cheaper from you than we buy from farmers in Britain. That's why our farmers go bankrupt. … We have created so many problems in the rich part of Europe. And now we are paying for all those problems. You needn't make the same mistakes. … We are rich. But we are not rich enough to put things back in their working order. This is being done by people power - people who are giving their time. In one NGO I worked with, we had a million people's days given to us for free, to look after our nature reserves. No one is being paid. But some mistakes have already been made in this part of the world. Can we do something about them? Yes. Just look at how the Ceausescu regime in Romania drained the swamps in the mouth of the Danube. The wetlands in the mouth of the Danube are the kidneys of one fifth of Europe. They protect the sea from all the eutrophic materials, all the nutrients and fertilisers. They filter this pollution out. They cleanse the water. As soon as the [old] regime drained those, the water just simply went straight into the sea. There were so many nutrients in the Black Sea that it collapsed. Because, if you get more nutrients, you get more plankton. The light can't penetrate the plankton. And since the light couldn't penetrate more than 60 meters down in the Black Sea, around the Ukraine, it died. I made a film on that. Since Ceausescu has gone, the farmers cannot afford the fertilisers, and all those wetlands are now rehabilitated, with help from the NGOs. And we have got fish back in the Black Sea. Do you consider climate change a major challenge to the world today? It's hard to say. We all know that the Earth's temperature is going up a little bit. And we know that, if the temperatures go up, it must then evaporate more water from the ocean. ... But shall we feel it in our life time? Nobody knows. I do not believe that the sea levels are going to come up very quickly. But we are definitely disrupting the climates and the catchments of the world. In your talk at the Central European University you said "Globalisation is our only hope." Do you mean to say that globalisation is a positive thing? I mean globalisation that is done in the proper way. We do need a global reality of how the world is being screwed up, either by war or in the environment. … It's costing us millions to put the landscape back in working order because we went too far. All the Eastern bloc countries - they have not gone too far. So you should become rich much quicker than we do.

David Bellamy has been the voice of nature and conservation for people from Western Europe - and many parts of Central and Eastern Europe as well. His BBC programme on nature reached a large audience, making him a high-profile spokesman for the environment all over the world. Bellamy recently gave a lecture at the Central and Eastern European University in Budapest, and then spoke to Bulletin Editor Pavel Antonov about issues of importance to this region and the world.