My story begins in a forest,
somewhere in Tanzania.
It is a place where humans do not live.
A wild world.
In these trees can be found colobuses,
which are Old World monkeys.
At dawn, you can hear male colobuses roar.
The noise marks their authority over a territory.
Colobuses live in troops,
each in a part of the forest.
It is a way of living that must be observed.
However, Colobus isn't a warrior.
It is generally peaceful,
and simply protects its family.
Living suspended between earth and sky must give a different view of things.
Sometimes I think I could have been born a colobus in a Tanzanian forest.
It would all have been different.
But contrary to expectations, I wasn't born a monkey.
I was born human,
and Colobus's life changed dramatically.
It was a long time ago.
One day, Colobus and his family had a shock.
Their forest had disappeared,
and in its place was a tea field.
He'd never seen such a thing.
The other thing Colobus had never seen was me.
He'd never seen humans.
He was puzzled, or curious.
He watched me picking tea.
That cultivated field was mine. It was my territory.
Colobus had not understood that,
so I captured him.
Colobus found himself in another world, far from his forest.
He discovered what civilization was.
I have found him something to do: He entertains me.
That is all I can do with him.
Maybe, like lions and elephants, he too will be
a hero of documentaries or ads.
He was chased off his land, but I have a picture of him.
Millennia of civilization later,
the natural world still fascinates us.
As if Nature was still inside us, in spite of progress.
Our fascination for the living world is not new.
It goes back to the very origins of humanity.
36,000 years ago, on cave walls,
prehistoric humans painted bisons, lions and wild horses.
They were afraid of them, and subject to Nature.
Now the roles are reversed.
The wild world is in human hands.
As civilization advances, Nature has retreated.
Its existence is tolerated.
Wild animals have become refugees on Earth.
They are hungry, thirsty and afraid.
They will soon have nowhere to go.
They disappear one by one
and are replaced by a tame population that feeds
and serves.
One that is useful to humans.
Over 500 generations, or barely 10,000 years,
nearly everything has been tamed.
Farming has changed the face of the Earth.
Now it is the turn of genetics and chemistry.
Four billion years' evolution had formed life on Earth.
Progress, exhaustion, climate...
In just a few hundred years, the human race has made drastic changes.
At this rate, what will our world look like tomorrow?
There is still time to open our eyes to our surroundings.
This is the story of a journey to rebuild ties with our Earth.
Terra
It begins with a great leap in time,
to over two billion years ago.
The story has disappeared but a sanctuary remains
hidden in the Amazon forest,
between Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana.
It's a tepuy.
A sandstone plateau washed by tropical rains,
one of Earth's most ancient known rocky masses.
It is known as Roraima.
Roraima is no ordinary mountain,
it is a messenger from Time.
The story of life on Earth is sheltered in this natural fortress
from mixed species, pollution...
and human beings.
As you approach Roraima,
you see the Earth's surface as it originally was.
The ground is not fertile.
It's a realm of naked rocks, washed by water and scoria
and rich in minerals.
It is hard to imagine life flourishing in such a harsh world.
To understand, get nearer and observe more closely.
On the plateau can be seen a thin film of very ancient life.
It is lichen:
A dwarf organism that is half-plant, half-fungus.
Lichen is a pioneer,
tough and tenacious.
It is self-sufficient, needing no roots.
And it eats nothing but the carbon that floats in the air.
With the carbon, sun and water,
lichen have made a mattress for life.
Inside the lichen, bacteria are to be found.
They are the basic units of life, the origin of everything.
They are minuscule.
They still produce all vital functions,
and contain all life's genetic codes.
They live in all environments and in each body,
including my body.
At this stage in history,
they mostly colonized green algae found in lichen.
The algae are real balls of energy.
They transform carbon using sunlight.
The particular thing about lichen is what happened next.
The algae did not use the energy.
They gave it to a fungus
which fed the algae in exchange.
From that meeting on a desolate land,
life sprang forth.
Fungi appeared very early on Earth,
yet they have been overlooked in natural history.
Their realm is not that of animals and plants.
They do not eat, they decompose matter.
They have no head or branches,
but a network of filaments which can proliferate relentlessly,
and mutate, and change track.
They are called cladosporium or penicillium,
and are essential for organic decomposition,
antibiotics and ferments.
Their toughness is their strength.
With their supplies, they can resist drought, breathe any gas,
live almost anywhere, latch onto anything.
They don't move, but use the wind to disperse their countless spores.
They are so light that over the generations
they have come to conquer the whole planet.
Bacteria, fungi, algae and lichen
gave birth to the Earth's soil,
its humus, its fertile compost.
These days, the soil contains an infinite network of those tiny fungi.
We can't see them, but they are there,
living in symbiosis with plant roots.
Hidden solidarity beneath the earth
is at the root of a vast kingdom:
The plant kingdom.
Outside, life no longer crawls, it is going upwards.
It is a race towards the light.
Any way of beating others is good,
even using them by winding around them.
There are 300,000 plants on Earth.
All give their leaves up to the sun.
The race creates a canopy, a thick green roof,
and soon the sun no longer reaches the ground.
So bromeliads and epiphytes
climb to the upper branches,
and enjoy rain and sun.
Plants charge up the trees,
filling them with life like Towers of Babel.
A quarter of the world's biodiversity is in primary forests.
In Amazonia, 16,000 different species of trees exist.
A cloud of life, suspended more than 40 meters up,
pierced by tall trees
like clumsy giants, whose roots fight to hold them straight.
Primary forest is a wonder of Nature.
The greenery uses carbon from the air
to make into trunks and leaves.
In return, it produces oxygen.
It's a miracle that began 350 million years ago
in the Carboniferous period.
Through photosynthesis,
life influenced climate and created a separate world in the Sun's galaxy.
The Earth became a living planet.
However, nothing about its origins predicted that would happen.
At first, Earth was above all unbearable.
A world of embers and fire.
Today there are still 1,500 active volcanoes,
but barely 100 reach a state of eruption like Bardarbunga in Iceland.
It's a volcano that has effusive eruptions,
and is called "red", the color of its over 1000-degree lava.
Volcanoes always blow hot
and their CO2 is still added to the planet's atmosphere.
Their sulphur clouds still screen the sun's rays.
Over time, Earth has been through terrible extinctions
linked to volcanoes.
Life collapsed, burned, suffocated.
But each time, it resisted.
The secret of life on Earth
is, in fact, the ocean.
It is the caldron and crucible of everything.
At a greater or lesser distance, all life comes from water.
Algae became plants;
Crustaceans, insects
and fish, the forerunners of land vertebrates.
Humans' distant ancestors, in turn,
will have looked like this sea iguana
the last of which live in the Galapagos.
They are tetrapods, belonging to the aquatic vertebrates,
descendants of fish.
"Tetrapod" means "four feet".
They will have been used to paddle and then, one day, to walk.
One day the furnace disappeared.
The rain was no longer acid.
The climate was temperate,
the atmosphere, charged with oxygen.
These Galapagos iguanas are enjoying the sun's heat.
They carry on from sea animals
that learnt how to breathe out of water.
With each generation, organs evolved.
Some have kept both gills and lungs.
The mutation foretold the next era:
Conquering the land.
Tens of thousands of species left the oceans.
A long journey from their known world
to the primary forests.
It took the adventurers 200,000,000 years
to reach that new world.
The first arrivals weren't the strongest
but in fact the smallest, such as salamanders:
The amphibians.
Frogs come from that family.
There are 5,500 known species of them in the world.
Most of those nestle in the heart of the Amazon forest.
The Waterfall frog is small,
about the size of a postage stamp.
It has suckers on its feet to stick to tree leaves.
Frogs are fragile. Their skin absorbs everything.
They contain vital substances: Poisons and even natural anesthetics.
They are wonderful heirs of the evolution of species.
Another very ancient group of conquerors is the crocodiles.
They have hard skin and terrible jaws,
but they aren't actually as strong as all that.
They depend on their natural environment.
Any change in temperature will soon exhaust them.
So they have learnt to live patiently...
This patience has helped with camouflage
and the art of concealment,
and produced an extraordinary variety of shapes and sizes.
The Matamata turtle lives in the Amazon's flood forest.
It can hold its breath for several hours,
hidden like a leaf.
Anacondas can lie for days in ambush, waiting for prey to come and drink.
The enormous snake slides between trees, ready to drown it.
Snakes have always fascinated humans.
They are found in myths worldwide,
as inspiration for dragons.
In the Amazon, the swamp never stays for long.
When the rain stops, the water runs off into the rivers
and animals look for other flooded areas.
They say forest summons rain.
Torrential rain,
sometimes a real downpour, which results in these huge rivers.
Without trees, the Iguazu Falls, in Brazil, would not exist.
Water, like life, never pauses for thought.
How many species are there?
How many have changed life?
Deep in the heart of Iguazu
we can discover one of the wonders of life's story.
200,000,000 years ago,
a species shared a common ancestor with the crocodile family.
It left the water and headed for the sky,
first becoming lighter and more nimble.
No doubt the first ones were happy to jump forward,
before the big final leap.
This is the story of birds.
Flying allowed them to live in a new world.
Like the great dusky swift, which lives at the heart of Iguazu
to escape from their predators.
There are nearly 10,000 bird species.
They are the planet's last living dinosaurs.
Forest is the memory of all experiences of life on Earth.
It is an open-air book,
where you learn to fly, crawl or indeed swim,
and that contrary to appearances,
primary forests' soil is not rich
but often poor and acidic.
Thus some plants are carnivores. One such is drosera.
Drosera covers itself in dew, to trap its prey.
It's a trick.
Insects are attracted by its smell and even its look.
The trap shuts, thanks to sensitive hairs
which give off a signal.
The animal is then digested by the sap.
The Venus flytrap takes between two and three weeks
to digest a prey.
Then one day it throws away an empty skeleton
and waits for its next prey.
But to reproduce, plants needed another trick.
In this green, almost monochromatic world,
eyes were used to looking only for contrasts.
As sight improved,
an incredible revolution took place:
The revolution of color.
Plants needed to be in touch with each other in order to reproduce.
But how, since they're firmly rooted?
Some plants came up with a brand-new strategy:
Charm.
Plants dressed up in bright colors.
They put out scents and flavors.
That is how flowers were born.
Flowers' job was to attract things that fly, crawl or walk:
In short, manipulate foragers to use them without their knowing.
It's called pollination.
As it gathers pollen, the insect carries it
between male and female flowers.
Job done.
Another way life takes advantage of the alliance between species.
But even more than the butterfly
the best plant and animal love story
is that of the hummingbird.
It is a bird that only feeds on flower nectar.
Its beak and tongue are designed to go deep between petals.
There are over 300 species of hummingbird,
each made for a shape of flower.
Hummingbirds' hearts beat fast:
Up to 1,200 beats per minute.
All that comes from nectar,
which is so energy-rich that they can achieve unique feats.
This bird is a champion mover,
but make no mistake, the flower is in charge.
In the mating season each year,
seduction is the game in Central American forests.
The winner is, without a doubt, the marvelous spatuletail.
It is a very rare species, living only in tropical mountain areas.
Adult males have two feathers shaped like spatulas
with which they do an incredibly fast dance.
The forest is the stage for a feather ballet.
After the mating season,
the parents teach their children the famous color code,
the key to obtaining food,
and the cycle will begin over.
The forest teaches us
that living things cooperating
is more important than it seems.
Amazonia's leafcutter ants are arthropods.
They have a distinctive feature:
They grow a fungus.
They can choose species, take cuttings
and multiply them.
They feed on the fungus, which means they have stores all year round
even in adverse seasons.
Some ants do nothing while others work hard,
but these insects are the origin of life in society,
where each being has a place
and a role in a group.
Thus the colony is a super-organism,
able to survive famines
and even to break down whole trees.
The birth of societies was a turning point.
The end of an era of solitude
when all had to survive, resist, and hang on to life on their own.
That was 200,000,000 years ago.
That was when the mammal saga began.
It's our family,
that of human beings.
Mammals like this Brazilian capuchin
are warm-blooded vertebrates.
They suckle their young and live in clans.
And that changes everything.
Family life brought lots of unexpected prospects
for play and mutual aid.
It was a great leap in evolution.
Group living fostered culture, and passing it on.
Ingenuity and curiosity
led to the first tools being created.
The capuchins' experience was striking.
It prefigured the stage of dramatic change for the world.
The time of humans would come.
They would take two million years to stand up and organize.
Like capuchins, they too would use stone.
Tools.
A new adventure was to begin on Earth.
They had to close the great jungle book
and dive into darkness.
My own story begins here, that of Homo Sapiens.
Learned humans, who bequeathed their paintings to posterity.
They were done 36,000 years ago in the Chauvet Cave.
Homo sapiens owe their survival to wits.
Probably the same power that led them to represent what they saw.
1,000 drawings and paintings, done in iron oxide and charcoal,
since humans had mastered fire.
14 animal species can be identified,
including dangerous ones such as lions,
mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses and bears.
They didn't draw themselves.
They drew other living things.
They were aware they existed.
Homo sapiens no doubt wondered a lot and received no replies.
So they filled the gaps with art,
expression and culture.
A whole network of highly complex stories and codes.
Later, this awareness allowed humans to think up domestication,
agriculture and animal rearing.
But for then, animal flesh was what kept them alive.
They needed heat and food.
Skins to clothe themselves.
They had to kill much larger animals.
And one mystery remained unsolvable:
Death.
The subject exercised the minds of early humans.
Thus, no doubt, was shamanism born.
A dialogue between humans and the spirits of Nature.
It's an arrangement with our conscience.
Hunting thus became an exchange.
Killing prey was negotiated with the spirits of the forest.
It was nothing but life.
Water singing in the river, rocks on either side of it.
Trees had souls, good or bad,
threatening or kindly.
You could talk to them
and they talked back.
Those so-called "animist" beliefs
were widespread in prehistory.
In awareness and belief,
homo sapiens was above all tuned into the living world.
From early on, humans cooperated with animals in hunting,
and especially with grey wolves.
Wolf is a clannish animal.
It, too, hunts for food.
The two had to tame and learn to respect each other.
For thousands of years, we hunted together.
The cooperation was worthwhile, and that is why it was there,
but it was uncertain.
Wolves were domesticated 15,000 years ago.
They were the first.
They gave birth to the dog family.
However, the wolf branch has remained entirely wild,
which set the animal apart in human memory.
In children's tales, it plays the role of mistrusted ally.
Wild wolves became our enemies.
Another animal had come to serve humans.
They say cows came into my life when they came into my field.
It was the start of domestication.
"Domesticate" meant nourish,
protect these beasts and control their reproduction.
It was difficult,
but successful.
Now, there are over a billion cattle in the world,
all descendants of a small group of aurochs
domesticated in the Middle East
ten thousand years ago.
Relations between humans and the natural world changed drastically.
Cows provided a rich source of food,
their leather was used
and above all, they were used for work in the fields.
It was the age of agriculture.
Agriculture is also a form of domestication,
that of plants.
Humans learnt to select and reproduce rice,
poppies, oats and wheat,
of which there were thousands of native varieties on Earth.
In spite of technical progress, animals are still with us.
They are the strength of those who have little.
Today, there are 1,350,000,000 small farmers in the world.
Humans were breeders,
and masters, too.
Domestic animals brought prosperity.
They made us proud.
They ended up at the heart of human beliefs
because humans had to offer to their god
the most precious thing they had.
Animals became offerings.
Still today, animals are sacrificed to divine powers.
Several million Indians and Nepalese travel to the tiny village of Gadhimai
in the lowlands of Nepal.
They come to make a wish to the Hindu goddess of power,
Gadhimai.
But for it to be heard,
the bad spirits must be offered a life to turn them away from the goddess.
For those who have made the journey,
that animal was often the family's only wealth.
A death in exchange for a better life.
200,000 animals - Buffalo, but also goats...
were sacrificed during the 2014 Gadhimai Festival.
It was the last one.
Sacrifice will no longer happen.
Indian and Nepalese public opinion finally got it banned for good.
Gadhimai is a symbol, a shocking picture.
But in the end, doing away with it makes no difference.
I hold the power of life or death over the planet.
Humanity is capable of sacrificing life but also celebrating it.
Spring brings festival time
which punctuates periods of feast or famine.
Each year in India is held the Holi festival,
where people pray for fertile land to return.
In the state of Utar Pradesh, Holi is even linked to Krishna,
the supreme Hindu god.
Rich and poor, men and women,
castes mix at the spring full moon
for two days' dancing and rejoicing.
They celebrate the love of life.
Each color has a precise meaning.
Green is for harmony, orange for optimism,
blue for energy
and red for love and joy.
Plant spirits and shamanism have disappeared.
The gods have changed aspect, but the belief remains.
Spring remains one of Planet Earth's miracles.
I owe spring to these bees, instead.
They are guided by flavors,
manipulated by flowers that want them to forage.
In a bee colony, scout bees go over the land.
When they find the flowers they want, they tell the others.
If one of them goes round in a circle,
it means the flower is close to the hive.
If it moves forward, buzzing,
it is showing where a further-off copse is in relation to the sun.
The workers come and feel that bee
to see if her scent shows the discovery is worthwhile.
Then they begin a dance.
It is a vote,
to decide whether to go and gather nectar.
That is where I come in.
I supply the bees flowers.
Millions of flowers.
In exchange, they pollinize the fruit trees
such as these Californian almonds.
I offer them abundance,
but it comes at a price.
Drinking from the same flowers
can be dangerous.
Bees are sometimes poisoned
by the pesticides used on these trees.
I sacrifice some of this precious worker army
because life seems to me to be an unending resource.
Each year, over 50,000 hives
are imported by truck from all over the States.
That comes to nearly ten billion bees.
They stay a few weeks, long enough to pollinize the trees.
4 out of 5 almonds sold in the world come from the state of California.
This masterpiece of rational farming
brings in 15 billion dollars per year.
There isn't enough water for more.
Farming uses three-quarters of the world's stocks.
When water becomes too scarce, trees are even torn out:
Quicker, more profitable.
There is a deep change in our relationship to life.
It is no longer mystical,
it has become economical.
In the name of agricultural productivism much may be done:
Levelling mountains, diverting rivers...
No one wanted to burn forest down
but no one wanted to be hungry, either.
The primary forests have almost vanished.
A third of the world's surface has been developed for agriculture.
In ten thousand years, the face of the Earth has changed.
Every day, 400,000 humans are born and 160,000 die.
That makes 240,000 more humans to feed on Earth.
Every day.
The world's population has passed the seven billion mark.
The economy is chasing perpetual growth.
Performance and intelligence push humanity on.
Education, culture...
Human society is a concentration of brains.
At the same time, a huge gap is opening between humans and living things.
Humans' towns are ever bigger,
ever more fantastic.
They are the center of a vast network everything converges on.
This progress also changes our diet.
Rich societies no longer make do with wheat and rice.
Demand for meat is soaring.
A growth sector running at full speed,
breeding has in its turn become a globalized industry.
The three biggest exporters are India, Brazil and Australia.
In this vast country, space is not lacking.
The farms are as much as a million hectares.
Cowboys use helicopters to push cows.
Near Darwin, in the Northern Territory,
ranches often possess 50,000 head of cattle.
The cows are selected for their natural resistance.
They are Brahman and Angus cross-breeds,
and can live alone all year.
Everywhere, barbed-wire fences channel them towards the ranches.
Once a year, these vast herds are brought together, branded
and inspected before sale for export
to the Asian and European markets.
Australia exports over 1,500,000 tonnes equivalent carcass of beef.
The animals are not even counted.
Alive or cut into pieces, they are weighed.
Animals have become products.
Cows are products.
The United States were pioneers in this commodifying of life.
Now, with the need for profitability,
living free and family farms are no longer considered.
The systems is based on fattening pens with up to 100,000 animals.
A grass-free diet,
based on maize and growth hormones.
They even eat animal bone meal,
made from ground-up animal carcasses.
It is a cocktail of proteins that forces the animals' growth.
It is known as intensive breeding.
Feeding is supervised by scientists,
but basically they are force-fed
to produce more meat, more quickly, more cheaply,
for profit.
So I shut my eyes to it.
Cows and also goats have become machines for synthesizing raw materials.
At one end, water and fodder are put in,
at the other, 700 million tonnes of milk come out per year.
The animals suffer, but must produce more.
And the market lowers its price.
Automation reduces labor costs,
and cuts humans off even more from animals.
I want to eat meat,
but I would rather not see the animals must die.
So I close my eyes.
Each year, humans kill and cut up 60,000,000,000 animals.
Sixty billion lives.
Nearly ten times the human population.
In a single year.
Only industrial abattoirs and intensive industries
can keep up with an ever-increasing demand for meat.
The work of death is optimized.
It's slaughter on a vast scale.
Assembly-line work was invented in abattoirs
at the end of the 19th century.
Efficient and rational,
it was taken up in car factories.
The food industry just meets an absurd demand:
Producing ever more, to be sold ever more cheaply.
The job of slaughter is testing,
so people try not to think about it.
Each worker's action is cut off from the sequence that gives it meaning.
You don't kill, you just press a button.
You don't cut up a pig, you just remove a part of it.
So we don't eat animals,
we eat escalopes, steaks, bits... Anonymous parts,
as though no life had ever existed.
Ten thousand years, that's just 500 human generations.
It has taken only that time for forest to disappear and savannah to retreat.
Wild species have been pushed back
to the farthest reaches of the globe.
In some cases, conflicts between humans and animals have multiplied
and nature reserves have been created.
Botswana has one of the world's biggest parks,
on the delta of the Okavango River.
Here, humans are scarcer than animals
and life is different.
People visit these sanctuaries, a bit like zoos, but bigger.
You can go on a safari to see the last of the wild animals.
There is an admission charge
and in return, the territory is managed.
The reserve thus becomes a sort of open-air natural history book,
surveyed with curiosity.
And what an incredible show!
On this flat land,
the river splits into hundreds of canals scattered with islands
and meanders that spread into the far distance
over 15,000 square kilometers.
Okavango is an exceptional territory.
All of a sudden, you're on a wild planet.
So you understand how 25 million years of evolution
have given giraffes long necks,
so that they can reach the high acacia leaves.
You watch elephants at your leisure:
The acacias depend on them.
Elephants sow the seeds in their dung,
ensuring the trees reproduce throughout the region.
Okavango has 200,000 elephants.
They live in clans, led by the oldest females,
who are the memory of lands and seasons.
The clans spend their days looking for food and watering places.
With their ivory tusks, they strip the trees' bark
and rip up their roots for food.
However it may look, these vast pachyderms are sensitive.
Their trunks can lift a trunk, or stroke,
or communicate with a clan member.
Watching these wild animals is captivating,
but these entertainments are living beings.
Putting nature into sanctuaries doesn't do much.
It's a precautionary measure
to slow the end of a world,
a world that still fascinates me.
My story is linked to these animals, more than I want to admit.
It awakens a memory, an invisible thread
linking my existence to all living things.
I know that,
but I also know I need more space.
200,000 elephants, that's half the elephants in all Africa.
There are too many of them for just the Okavango territory.
But this delta is all that is left.
So these animals must learn to live as refugees.
Botswana has banned all hunting
but the elephants are free to migrate to nearby countries.
Namibia sells licenses to kill.
The licenses are legal, and aim to regulate populations.
How much do they reckon the surplus is?
The numbers vary constantly.
What doesn't change is the principle:
I sacrifice elephants
to protect the last of them.
And when it happens that hippopotamuses or elephants
bring in less than the land they live on
what will happen?
The Okavango Delta is not a deprived land.
It is a lush delta, thanks to the river's water.
That very water now threatens the reserve.
Angola and Namibia, upriver,
need it to irrigate an immense rice-growing project.
If the project succeeds, this delta is likely to become a desert.
And yet, you have to understand the people
who need water for their farming.
How to choose: protecting elephants
or feeding humans?
As the date approaches, efforts are made to protect the animals.
South African reserves are the last refuge for rhinoceroses.
Some reserves are too small for them, or are closing,
so the animals have to be moved to new reception centers.
A strong sedative stops the rhino's muscles.
Its eyes must be bound and its ears plugged.
This giant might die of a heart attack if it realized
it was going to fly!
Such place transfers are rare
and are carried out by specialists: Vets and scientists
who devote their lives to this wildlife.
I promised myself I would succeed, but my efforts are pathetic.
I am fighting against my own creation.
I save with one hand,
and with the other I slaughter.
Elephants are killed for their tusks,
rhinos for their horns.
These great animals, veterans of the history of life,
are easy targets for poachers
with their automatic weapons, off-road vehicles and radios.
There are only 20,000 rhinoceroses left in the world, mainly in Africa.
It is a protected species, we thought it was safe.
But in 2014,
in just one year, 1,500 of them fell to traffickers' bullets.
Ground to a powder, rhinoceros horn is used in traditional Asian medicines.
High demand means rates rocket.
At 50,000 euros per kilo,
rhinoceros horn is now more expensive than gold.
As elephants die, so the price of ivory rises.
The more I kill, the more I get.
I speculate on the scarcity of life.
Recreational hunting makes 200 million dollars a year in Africa.
It is organized in the name of species regulation.
But in fact, it is killing for sport.
For the sad glory of trophies.
Until a wild animal is seen as in danger
it can be killed and its body exhibited.
In Denver, a federal warehouse keeps the animals captured on US territory.
Thousands of ornaments, clothes, accessories and drugs
snatched from a living world.
A sad inventory, bearing witness to possession, cruelty
and domination.
30,000 years after Chauvet, Denver is a new sort of cave
but this time, its walls tell of immense madness:
My madness.
No region is spared.
Even in the north, in the Arctic region, life is on borrowed time.
The realm of polar bears,
the biggest carnivores on Earth.
This legendary animal is now protected by law.
It is even a symbol.
It showed the world the melting ice fields,
a sign that climate was changing.
But in the end, laws and symbols do not mean much when you are a bear.
Laws and symbols do not protect human life either.
The Nenets are disappearing too.
They have always lived in Siberia, keeping pace with the cold,
with herds of wild reindeer.
Nature is like a language to them.
Every detail counts:
Changes in tree direction, lichen, snow...
Each year, they migrate north in summer
and south in winter, and down the Yamal peninsula,
the land of their ancestors.
The Nenets had survived the Tsars and the Russian Revolution.
This time, the unthinkable stands before them.
The whole climate is changing.
The Nenets are seeing their kingdom melt year on year.
More even than that, what is catching them up
is industrial civilization.
The march of progress is an unstoppable machine.
It is like these nuclear ice-breakers which cross the Arctic.
Whatever the conditions
Russia, the heavy industry champion, opens the way to its ships.
No need any longer to read wind, or ice:
You can come to Siberia any time.
The aim is to reach the port of Dudinka and load some nickel.
It is a scarce mineral on Earth.
This is one of the world's biggest mines,
alongside a metallurgy complex:
Norilsk Mine.
Nickel is used to make alloys.
All aspects of metallurgy use it.
It even goes into coins.
The site is beyond the Arctic Circle
and is in the dark for 4 months out of 12.
In spite of the cold, as little as -50 degrees,
170,000 people live all year in this concrete town,
which struggles with freezes and thaws.
Living here is an exploit, but real life does go on here.
People play ice hockey here, they dance here...
In the heart of winter, you must stay indoors.
In any case, you don't come here on holiday!
You come to serve a mine.
Norilsk is just one cog in a vast machine,
the one that pushes humanity on in a mad race
that is also grandiose.
Even if it poisons the whole planet.
In the morning, people look not at the sun
but at the smoke, to find out which sector will be toxic.
Each year, the site injects into the atmosphere 2,000,000 tonnes of gas,
mainly carbon and sulphur.
This discharge, with thousands of others,
will be carried around the planet by wind and tides.
In a century 50,000 synthetic molecules have been created.
They didn't exist before humans.
Today, that chemistry is invading the entire planet.
What is this man breathing in, barely protected by his cloth?
For whom is he sacrificing his own life?
Awareness of the danger does not stop us carrying on.
90% of farming land is drenched in pesticides.
Millions of tonnes of fertilizer are injected in the soil.
This intensive chemistry kills 200,000 people every year
amongst the production workers
and the farmers who use it.
The pollutants are everywhere in living plant and animal tissues
and now, human ones too.
They simply climb up the food chain.
As of now, half of Europeans have in their blood synthetic molecules
coming from herbicides.
More than a third of the planet's agricultural land is damaged
and has had to be abandoned.
This chemistry wasn't designed as a threat to us
nor to destroy life,
on the contrary, it was meant to improve it.
But we didn't have hindsight to distinguish progress from danger.
After chemistry, hope now lies in genetics.
The dream is there, within reach.
Growing plants everywhere,
maybe even ending world hunger,
thanks to genetically modified organisms.
With OGMs, we no longer domesticate species,
we go into their vital functions
in order to modify them.
Cotton has thus been modified, to diffuse its own insecticide.
Maize, to resist butterflies.
Soya, to bear greater doses of herbicide.
You almost wonder why the plants couldn't do it naturally!
GMO farming has spread like wildfire.
It has been legalized in 29 countries.
There is still doubt about their danger to health,
and yet the whole world eats GMOs without knowing.
GMOs are used as food in intensive farming.
Beef is now a soya product
or a derivative of maize.
OGMs haven't solved the problem of world hunger:
The seeds are patented and can't be reproduced.
They can only be used once, and then you have to buy some more.
I wonder where this forced march I am imposing on life will end.
All in the name of profit.
When I look at Bangladesh, it seems chaos is not very far off.
In these plains of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra
farming is still done by hand, using age-old methods.
Output is low and harvest uncertain.
All is ruled by the river's whims,
and tides and monsoon.
Land is moved by the currents,
stones and rocks are rare.
Endlessly, people rebuild dikes
and move onto new sand islands to build houses and schools.
People live with little: Subsistence fishing and farming.
All comes from the river.
Bangladesh has a population of 160 million.
160 million people who depend entirely on farming
and therefore on the climate.
It can't be seen yet,
but climate change will make this all vanish.
Low-lying land will quickly be submerged by the ocean,
the water polluted,
and all human life chased off this land.
Everything built here
is ephemeral.
Dhaka, the country's capital,
is one of the world's most crowded
with 40,000 inhabitants per square kilometer.
Built at water level, it cannot last long
exposed to any climate change.
Bangladesh's farmland is retreating,
nibbled at by erosion and made salty by the ocean.
Like everywhere else, farmers with no land move to town
to look for a job in a workshop or textile factory
supplying the whole world.
Bangladesh too is caught in the wheels of this industrialized planet
which is causing this climate deregulation.
The industrial power can't be seen in Dhaka
but in the south, on the beaches of Chittagong,
on one of the world's biggest ship-demolition sites.
Chittagong is a vision.
It looks like globalization washed up.
These freighters and tankers
fly the flags of all nations.
They were used for international trade.
No longer useful, they seem abandoned.
These monumental pieces, symbols of industrial power,
are taken apart more or less by hand.
Thousands of tonnes of steel must disappear
as cheaply as possible,
before the climate carries away these beaches, and people.
How do different humanities coexist on Earth?
How do the chemicals of some change others' lives?
Why are people hungry here, but not over there?
Chittagong is 10,000 kilometers from Manhattan,
but no doubt one of those freighters was chartered by a shipper here.
No doubt also, another office buys cereal from Bangladesh
to sell it to another country.
And another gets cotton, wood or fodder.
Living plants are ordinary goods
that are haggled over in offices.
Common goods, sold in their millions of tonnes.
Maybe in another skyscraper, the trade is in agricultural land.
Millions of hectares sold with its lichen,
its root and all its invisible living things.
But a telephone here, in this town,
can also order a forest to be protected or a species safeguarded.
No doubt an office is already working, here
on avoiding world hunger.
Anticipating and organizing are also part of human societies.
Understandings between windows can create solutions for tomorrow.
But time is short. No more must be wasted.
In forty years, half the wild animals have disappeared.
They estimate that 60,000 plant species will vanish
between now and 2050.
And there are unforeseen factors.
How to protect the Saiga antelopes,
if half of them die in less than a month
because it got too hot?
Can we stop the last African lions from disappearing,
hit by new, unheard-of illnesses?
The rate is 100 times higher than is natural.
Factors combine.
If you add climate pressure,
everything has come together for massive species extinctions.
How can we not fear that after animals, plants, other living things,
next on the list is humans, ourselves?
So we will close our eyes this time for good.
Sometimes starlings come together in vast groups
and fly in formation.
It's like life on Earth.
A masterpiece of creation, beauty and harmony.
Since humans have existed
the story of life has been shaped by their awareness.
Once more considering the life around us,
reviving attention and respect for other living beings
can yet make a huge difference.
So now I remember:
"wild" does not mean "barbarian".
Wild isn't the opposite of civilized.
Wild simply means
they who live in the forest.
Defending wildness, defending forests,
is like defending my history.
My planet.
My inner home.
The more I observe the wild world, the more I understand.
It is the marker that is not on my path.
Alone, battling my civilization,
I have managed to conquer hunger and protect my family.
But the race is losing me now.
So if I learn again to live in harmony
now, with that wildlife,
I will become human again
for myself, for my family
and I will protect my own species.
The love of other living things is somewhere in me.
That is what speaks to my childish soul.
That is what squeezes my heart with the emptiness of death.
So let me open my eyes upon the world
and look at it with respect.