The animal most at risk of extinction is the panda. Also on the critical list are Spik's macaw - there is only one left in the world - the Tonkin snub-nosed monkey, the Delacours langur, the snow leopard and the white rhino.
As I went out to buy Christmas presents for my daughter I couldn't help thinking about the greatest gift that I could give her. It is so idealistic and somehow so unrealistic a gift that it defeats every individual who thinks of it, and yet for all of us it is the most important gift to give to all the children - a plan to save the planet! But could such a millennium resolution ever be possible, and is it really necessary?
It often needs an event to make us think about making resolutions. There is no better time than the millennium to take stock of what we are doing to the planet, not as individuals, but collectively as humans. Perhaps that may be the last thing on our minds right now. By and large, it seems that we are tired of listening to the gloom and doom of our planet.
Even the media, and particularly television, are nervous of conservation programmes because these don't normally attract big audiences. There is no doubt that there is an increasing complacency with regard to environmental matters. Somehow we haven't been able to understand the enormity of the situation.
Making wildlife programmes around the world has put me in a very fortunate position to go to some of the most threatened wild places. Over the years, it has become clearer to me, and probably with little surprise, that the planet faces a deepening crisis. If the scientists are right, we are in danger of losing some of our biggest and most charismatic animals.
Today, 200 acres of rainforest disappears every minute. A lot of rainforest has given way to growing cash crops, and it is vanishing at lightning speed.
When David Attenborough and his crew went to film bats and swiftlets in caves in Borneo for the Trails of Life 10 years ago, it took them two hours to hike through the forest to get to the caves, followed by the unpleasant task of wading through bat and swiftlet droppings once inside. There they camped for several days to film the amazing swiftlets and bats hundreds of feet up on the roof of the cave.
Today that's all changed. You can drive close to the caves and walk for just 10 minutes on a boardwalk through the forest. They have also built walkways inside the caves to allow easy access, so you never dirty your feet.
It is good that the public can come to the caves but the sad truth is that this only happened because the natural forest around them had vanished and been planted with palm oil trees - an incredibly important income for Sabah in Borneo, and for Malaysia.
The scale of the deforestation can be both massive and bleak, wiping out thousands of different species within minutes. However, there is another form of logging which appears less destructive. It is called selective deforestation. It means the loggers just pick out the trees needed while keeping the rest of the forest intact. But even this can be destructive in other ways.
Local people are employed to go into these virgin forests to find the trees and mark them for logging. Huge roads are bulldozed into the forest and these searchers are able to penetrate deep into it, further than man has ever been. As a bonus, they are allowed to kill "bush-meat". They set traps to kill small antelope like duikers and bush pigs. Sadly, it also means killing monkeys and apes.
Such is the demand for these delicacies that buyers will even provide electric refrigerators in the forest to keep the meat fresh for when they pick it up. I saw this when filming mandrills in Gabon four years ago and have been told it still goes on. Most of this meat goes to the cities and larger towns.
In the same year, the film crew were upriver filming hammerhead bats and they met a boat with a slaughtered gorilla on board. It was laid out pathetically in the boat, and was offered for sale to the crew. A few days later on the same river, we were stopped again and offered a dead leopard. Of course we declined. This was done openly wherever we went.
White-nosed and moustached guenons and mandrills were all publicly displayed in villages and market towns, even railway stations. Some were hung by their tails. But this doesn't just happen in Gabon; it is happening all over Africa. Similar incidents are also happening in South and Central America and across Asia. WHEN people are poor and misplaced they need the animals in the forest to provide food. With fast-increasing populations, bush-meat is a way of surviving. Their problems cannot be ignored and in reality they are very much ours, too. Over 40 per cent of the 234 primate species are threatened with extinction. Thirteen are critically threatened, which means they will disappear if nothing is done. It is we - all of us on this planet - who have exacerbated the problem and only we can do something about it.
As primates ourselves, it is ironic that we have done more to eliminate our distant cousins then any other creature on earth - ironic but not surprising. Just as the canary was used as the indicator for predicting disaster in the mines in the 19th century, the status of the primates is a measure of how much we are destroying the last natural forests in the world.
Even war is having an impact on the endangered species. When I started making the series on primates I knew we may have problems filming some of them in certain areas. It soon became clear that the apes would prove the most difficult to film. We planned to film the mountain gorillas in Uganda in Bwindi's impenetrable forest last June. But on the very day we received our permits from the Ugandan Wildlife Authority, 14 people were massacred there. It became international headline news because white westerners were among the dead; but Ugandans are being murdered all the time.
The risks of going there were just too great for us, so we pulled out.
Increasingly, our productions are moving into war zones as these are the only places left to film magnificent creatures. We are now being trained on how to survive in these dangerous areas. It is a sad reflection of the kind of world we live in where the last bastions of wilderness are war zones. The incident at Bwindi put a dark cloud over everything we hoped for. The mountains around the borders of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda where the gorillas live is a war-zone. Few scientists can go there safely to keep an eye on the gorillas who have been ravaged by poachers in the past. We never went, but we still hope we can before it is too late.