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A man's life is both brief and yet huge.
Places and events mark you forever,
plotting your route and your relationship with the world.
This happened to me 40 years ago, in Kenya.
I was a 33-year-old Parisian,
my life nourished since childhood by a love of animals
and the dream of absolute freedom.
I'd been constrained since I was young by rules I tried to dodge.
I was a dunce at school and at home,
the dimensions of which
were never big enough for exploring the world.
I arrived here with my wife Anne and our two little children
at the heart of this wild nature.
We bought a three-year return ticket.
We bought a house ourselves helped by our African friends.
We were writing a thesis on lions.
We'd spend days watching them.
The lions taught me photography.
Observing the lives of animals changed me profoundly.
I was born of them,
born of these animals.
Thanks to them, I learned the freedom of just being.
Never had I felt so alive or so happy.
The lions weren't afraid of us. They'd never been hunted by humans.
It was an absolute dream, a discovery,
living as a family with them.
Here, "wild animal" wasn't synonymous with fear of humans.
We were accepted as part of that natural harmony.
The cycle of life played out before us.
Eat or be eaten.
Observing animals taught me how to live in the world of humans.
We watched them love each other, but also die.
Half of the lion cubs died in their first year.
With them, I lived the essentials of life.
Children, love, sex, and death.
We were at the heart of the cycle of life in the raw,
in all its insecurity,
always on the lookout,
its harmony breaking free from all our reference points.
To earn a living, I piloted hot-air balloons
taking tourists to see animals every morning.
This was a revelation which changed my life.
From up there I mapped out their routes,
the corridors taken by thousands of wildebeest,
buffalo, and zebra,
heading to the south of the Serengeti
where they would find abundant grazing.
But their greatest predator was the river Mara.
Every year, the mass annihilation of wildebeest happened again,
making a deep impression on me.
Now, as I rewatch this film 40 years later,
I see us today beating a similar path to our own impasse
and I wonder what kind of animal we are.
The kind that can make it across?
Or the kind that will all suffer the same death?
The development of Kenya between when I first set foot there
and today
perfectly illustrates our shared history of the world.
Never would I have imagined that all of these animals
would be threatened with extinction 40 years later
and that 75% of the land
would be cultivated to help feed the eight billion humans
that we now are.
And never would I have imagined that wheat, corn, and barley
would replace the antelope's grasses
or that the mechanic din of combine harvesters
would echo over this paradise of biodiversity
as they do across the whole planet.
We have sought out power in dominance and control.
The Earth found it in freedom
and the links between all things.
There, I had all that a man might dream of,
a sort of adventure kit like in a comic book.
I think now that I had the very essence of what makes a human life
and that my life couldn't have been complete
without what we experienced there.
Kenya is also the land of the first humans.
In the Rift Valley, the first traces
of our homo sapiens ancestors were found.
It became the land of the Maasai.
Cattle are their capital and their currency.
In 1980,
we believed in the promises of development.
What the West offered seemed to me the natural progress of the world.
We were all going to be rational, richer, and happier.
I knew that the way of life of the Maasai would change.
I felt a little nostalgic,
but even at that time I knew this feeling
also came from a perspective of a privileged Westerner.
But today the pastures for their cattle
have been drastically reduced because of agriculture.
They often have to venture into nature reserves
to find grazing for their herds,
and to defend themselves against lion attacks,
they've now swapped their spears for poison,
they who showed such pride in fighting lions with spears.
These vast expanses of greenhouses surround the lakes of Kenya.
Just as in Ethiopia or Chile,
green beans or flowers are mass-produced
for the tables of the world.
Delivered by planes daily, they contribute to global trade
but leave behind the very real consequences
of pesticides and toxic wastes.
And yet undeniably they provide employment
where there was none before.
Poverty is often better distributed than wealth.
I never thought when I left Kenya
that the 60,000 inhabitants of the Kibera slum
would have now increased to a million
and that one person in eight
would now be living in such conditions.
On the planet today, how many people are exiled,
migrants, or refugees?
Who'd have thought that the huge camp of Dadaab
set up in the desert to take in the refugees
from the 1991 war in Somalia
would still be there today?
It's become the biggest refugee camp in the world.
500,000 people live there
and yet no one knows about it.
Is this the promise of our progress?
Since my birth, the wealth produced and exchanged on Earth
has multiplied twenty times.
What a leap! But to what end?
So that 1% of the world's population owns as much as the other 99%?
Here, too, the signs of climate change are clear.
Kilimanjaro of the eternal snow is now almost without ice,
like wrinkled old skin.
It's not the Earth we should be killing
but our conception of progress.
Beauty is essential to my work
and I believe, as the Navajo say, "It is a balm for the soul."
Salt crystals paint living pictures in the black waters of Lake Magadi.
This beauty is dazzling.
I return to it ceaselessly.
It's like an obsession.
The optimistic young man I was in Kenya is no more.
I'm a different man today.
What I've learned through my work over these 40 years
and what the scientists tell us
threw all of my certainties into question.
Eleven years after my film Home,
I just want to relate my feelings about the world
and our inability to change our way of life
even though we know the solutions.
The scientists have announced the sixth extinction of life on Earth,
and with all of my soul as a human being,
I cannot accept it.
So, let's have the courage to face the truth
and look at ourselves with open eyes.
This is the story of Legacy, Our Heritage.
LEGACY OUR HERITAGE
Directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand
This movie is dedicated to my grandchildren.
I often ask myself this question:
When did humans become aware that they were different
from other species?
When was that awakening?
It's hard to say,
but one thing is certain:
35,000 years ago,
deep in Chauvet Cave in France, they already knew.
They knew of course that they stood upright
but ran too slowly.
And mostly they knew that they controlled their environment
better than other species.
They knew that,
among the multitude of emotions which bubbled inside them,
they felt love and friendship.
I feel a powerful connection to these humans
who lived thousands of generations ago.
Like me, like you,
they seemed sensitive to the beauty of nature.
They made an effort to freeze it in time.
But for whom?
And to what end?
What is clear is that they had no wish to depict themselves
or their species.
They chose instead to depict other species
in all their majesty and all of their splendour.
Humans have always stood apart from other species
in a particular and unexpected way.
The story I'm about to tell you is your own.
The story of each one of you.
The story of human beings,
a fantastic species which has succeeded at everything.
You'll see how this puny, little creature,
not naturally very well armed against wild animals
or bad weather,
all the same managed to control nature and conquer the entire planet.
I have a photographer's eye
and I'm able to capture something extra in a landscape,
a force that's there, but which not everyone necessarily sees.
I long thought that this force was my perfectionism,
my doggedness in seeking the perfect photograph,
the most harmonious lines, the perfect angle,
the ideal light,
but in the end,
it's quite possible that this force which emanates
from some of my pictures
is nothing other than the force which powers life itself:
energy.
For energy is not only that which powers all living creatures,
linking them all together,
it is also their raison d'être.
And this energy will be the central theme of my film.
In the beginning on Earth, there was no life.
There was only energy.
Energy caught in a loop, a prisoner of the elements,
neither transformed nor channelled.
And there was an enormous amount of energy in all of its forms,
abundant, wild, and dangerous.
The Earth in the beginning was just rock in fusion,
furious and raging.
This energy dissipated immediately into space
in the form of heat,
because nothing held it back.
Then, gradually,
water vapor produced by the burning Earth
formed a gaseous envelope around the planet,
an atmosphere.
The atmosphere let in the sun's rays,
which warmed the Earth, and then prevented the heat escaping,
just like a greenhouse.
This new heat provided the conditions conducive to life.
Without this natural greenhouse effect,
the temperature on the planet would be around -50 degrees.
And at that temperature, life as we know it is impossible.
Life on Earth only exists because of the greenhouse effect.
The accumulating clouds then unleashed diluvian rainfall,
which ended up forming the oceans.
For billions of years,
this water went through all of its stages,
cloud, rain, lakes, rivers, and oceans, ice sometimes, and then vapor again.
And this cycle of water still continues.
The water we drink today is that which cradled the first algae
and was drunk by the dinosaurs.
Water is an essential constituent of life.
In fact, it makes up almost two-thirds of the human body.
And it was the oceans that life would first appear,
diversify, and then pullulate in its myriad forms.
Our planet is called Earth.
But for the majority of its history, it could have been called "Planet Sea."
For a very long time, this life in the oceans
was limited to tiny, simply organisms, the equivalent of today's plankton.
I like this comparison:
If the history of life on Earth until today
is represented as a 24-hour period,
and it is now midnight,
then life first appeared at about 6 a.m.,
in the oceans.
But what is astonishing is that life would only emerge from the oceans
to colonise the land at about 10 p.m.
That was when plants first appeared.
For plants, this conquest of the continents
would have been unimaginably difficult,
for they had to colonize an environment so different from the sea,
where they'd been coddled in obstacle-free weightlessness,
now confronting naked, hard, sterile rock,
but this virgin territory was worth the effort.
It was abundant in that essential constituent of life,
energy.
This energy is what enables living beings to function,
to develop, to move around.
Since life first appeared, its sole raison d'être
has been to seize this energy,
and living things have become experts at exploiting it.
I have so much respect for living things
because each one is an incredible creation,
so much more sophisticated than the most refined machine
and so much more fascinating too.
Despite the surprising solution
that plants have found for their energy needs,
we relegate them all too often to the background,
and yet plants have tamed the energy of the sun.
They're the only living things which, thanks to photosynthesis,
have access to unlimited energy
which they transform into matter,
vegetal matter.
It's extraordinary to think that this vegetal matter they create
doesn't come out of the ground.
No, it comes out of the carbon in the air,
out of the sky, transformed by photosynthesis.
Then began a race upwards
in which the highest plants gained an advantage,
having more energy at their disposal.
They could reproduce more easily
transmitting to their descendants
the advantages that had worked for them,
creating generations after generation of ever-taller plants.
Thus were trees born.
In their race upwards, these magnificents representatives
of biological ingenuity
have to solve problem which to us might seem insuperable.
For a tree, in fact, is a trunk linking two crowns,
one aerial and visible made of branches and leaves
for capturing the sun's energy, and the other, just as big, underground,
made of roots for capturing water and minerals.
Trees then are not just magnificent solar-energy power stations,
they are also enormous water pumps
able to lift hundreds of litres of water a day
to heights of tens of metres.
These spectacular colossi, giants in space and in time,
can thrive for centuries, even millennia.
And all the while releasing oxygen,
which can then be used by other living beings.
Over the years, trees have increasingly fascinated me,
occupying an ever-larger place in my thoughts.
Think about it:
With the carbon they take from the atmosphere
and the energy they borrow from the sun,
they build matter, branches, trunks, roots,
and when this matter dies and falls to the ground,
it creates humus,
forming the soil in which other plants and trees will grow.
Before plants, there was no soil on Earth,
just naked and sterile rock.
It's the soil, the earth after which our planet is named,
which is the foundation of terrestrial plants,
the compost of our lives.
In fact, humus and homo, the name of our species,
have the same etymological root, meaning earth.
Fixed to the ground and immobile,
trees communicate by means of their roots
and the odours they release from their leaves.
They've also solved, in an amazing way,
one of their biggest problems.
Being anchored in the soil and unable to move,
they use animals which can move
to come into contact and reproduce by means of their flowers.
They developed fruit to attract animals
which eat them and deposit their seeds elsewhere.
This is how they came to colonize vast territories
without moving a centimetre throughout their lives.
Of course, I could speak just as enthusiastically
about other species beside trees.
For example, those which didn't develop photosynthesis: animals, our ancestors.
They came up with a much more ingenious solution
for obtaining that energy,
eating the plants or eating the plant-eaters.
All these herbivores and carnivores are doing
is salvaging the solar energy stocked in the form of matter
in living being.
All living species are driven by a natural urge
more powerful than anything else, to survive so that they can reproduce.
All the energy obtained is channelled to this end.
All that energy is dedicated to survival.
If any is left over, it will go towards reproduction.
Then to surviving another year in order to reproduce again.
As soon as possible.
Hoard, eat, dominate, reproduce,
such are the driving forces of every living being on Earth.
My experience of life in Kenya
made me a humble and attentive spectator
of the beauty of this infinite cycle of energy
passing from one species to another.
Energy is everywhere,
sometimes being economized to a maximum degree,
sometimes explosive and impressive,
ceaselessly circulating from one species to another
in the networks of our ecosystems.
Humans began their story like every other species,
with the same imperative,
finding the energy to endure.
But unlike the oak or the bear,
they didn't start out with the assets of robust powerful species.
They had few weapons to fight nature.
No fangs, claws, or horns.
They didn't run very fast, swam slowly and couldn't fly.
But from the start, humans had two essential advantages
which would lift them out of their animal condition,
their intelligence and their cooperative spirit.
If one person couldn't catch a prey alone,
they would cooperate to hunt and to gather.
They also had coordinated strategies.
They invented traps, nets, and weapons.
Cooperation and intelligence.
It's not by chance that humans live in families,
communities, tribes, villages, and cities.
They seek the presence of others,
for this has been successful through the ages,
to defend themselves against predators,
to build shelters against the cold or the heat,
to fish while others made boats or repaired nets.
They took care of their children, their sick, or their old,
who could in turn be helpful.
They learned to observe nature and to copy it.
They discovered the medicinal properties of plants
and passed this knowledge down through the generations.
If I had to sum up what is common
to all the people that I've visited in my life,
from tribes in Sudan, Mali, or the Sahara,
to villages in Ethiopia or communities in India
or simply back home in France,
I'd unhesitatingly say
that it's their vision and sense of community
which have enabled them to adapt to tough, even hostile, conditions.
This is just as true for our modern societies.
Returning to our representation of life on Earth
as a 24-hour period, the first humans appeared
at about 11:58 p.m. and 43 seconds.
We've been around for barely a few heartbeats of the day.
Yet, as insignificant as our appearance might have seemed,
it changed everything.
Completely.
The life of human beings underwent a radical change
when they learned to control the energy that's stored in trees
in a particularly effective way by making fire.
The energy produced by burning wood helped them fight the cold and the damp,
keeping darkness and predators at bay.
It also killed the disease-carrying parasites
present in the meat they consumed.
By taming this source of energy,
a unique feat in the course of evolution,
humanity pushed back the constraints of nature.
In nature,
all species are kept in check by climate conditions,
such as droughts and harsh winters
or by other species,
by food becoming scarce when populations grow too large,
or by their natural enemies,
predators and parasites.
The human being's genius lay in eradicating all
of nature's forms of control,
evading bad weather,
and eliminating natural enemies
and stretching the planet's elastic resources to their limit.
For the first time in the history of Earth,
there would eventually be no force capable of restricting the growth
of a living species...
humans.
After taming fire,
humans would become masters in the art
of channelling other forms of energy.
They began in a spectacularly innovative way
by domesticating wild animals
and making use of their energy.
Taming these formidable creatures, so strong and recalcitrant,
would make possible what had hitherto been unthinkable,
long-distance transport.
What seems quite ordinary to us today, mounting a powerful animal,
was actually an incredibly daring endeavour.
With these combined energies, humans acquired a new freedom,
crossing every frontier between the possible
and the impossible.
These animals would at first enable them to go further
to spread all over the planet.
The conquest of the world could not have happened
without the strength of these animals
and the destiny of humanity would have been quite different.
Having domesticated animals,
they would now domesticate wild plants and tame the Earth,
learning how to make it give up its goodness
with a combination of labour and love,
a tender tilling.
They replanted some of their food to harvest it later,
but in greater quantity.
Humans went from a nomadic to a sedentary existence.
By settling down,
they could channel energy in a more efficient
and sustainable way.
They learned the art of managing the land
and gradually inherited great experience
in the practice of transforming landscapes
to feed their people.
I'm still fascinated by the labour of the women
and the men of every continent
who painted gigantic frescoes across the land,
creating works of art they couldn't see,
which reflected their hard work and their know-how.
This communion between the land, humans, and animals
has lasted for thousands of years,
but the methods have changed little in most countries around the world.
By inventing agriculture almost 10,000 years ago,
humans could harvest great amounts of the energy stored in plants,
and thereby better survive, grow, and develop.
Side by side,
panting and sweating together, women, men, and oxen
painstakingly ploughed the land, watered and nourished it,
took care of the fragile, young shoots which emerged,
and fought rodents, caterpillars, and disease, frost, and drought,
anything which could cast them into hunger.
But far from destroying what they subjugated,
they stimulated and encouraged, inducing germination and growth,
eventually even getting fields of rock to flower.
Life was still hard, brutal even, but it lengthened,
and was less unpredictable.
At the same time as developing agriculture,
humans optimized their exploitation of the energy
stored in animals
by becoming breeders rather than hunters.
Why go running after prey
when you can keep the creatures close at hand?
These herds of domestic animals oxen, sheep, pigs, and goats,
would soon come to take on such an importance
that they would often be their owners' most precious possessions,
their entire wealth.
Around the world I've seen this.
In a way, they're the equivalent of our bank accounts,
but with much more love and care lavished upon them
and much more risk involved.
These animals became their entire wealth.
Humans learned to live on everything that came from them,
their meat and milk of course, but also their skin,
their tendons, even their excrement, which burnt well,
providing heat and cooking fires.
Again and again, it all comes down to energy.
Every species was exploited for its qualities,
for what it offered humans,
often its strength and endurance and resilience to climatic conditions.
What fascinates me is not just that humans managed
to harness the energy of plants and animals,
but that they managed to control the entire energy transfer
from one living thing to another,
harnessing for their own benefit everything they could take.
Humans have always applied their social nature to sharing.
They have shared, pooled, and gifted possessions and knowledge.
They invented bartering, then an even cleverer version,
trading, which makes all kinds of exchange easier.
Their intelligence helped them discover even faster methods of transport
like boats, which slip across the water
requiring little energy input.
Thus did they conquer distance, discover other continents,
and access the inaccessible.
All over the planet, humans survived, adapted,
thrived, and spread out.
And every time,
their inventiveness took on a new aspect,
giving rise to all kinds of different,
rich, picturesque, and fascinating cultures.
Whether the land was too dry or too damp,
humans always managed to tame it, as they once tamed oxen and rice.
With fire, humans discovered metals
and their tools became increasingly powerful.
They dug the earth in search of precious rocks,
rare metals, then sources of energy.
They always used their two main assets,
their intelligence and their cooperative spirit.
And their determination to succeed at anything
led to real achievements.
No matter how difficult, no matter the time and the sacrifices,
humans eliminated all the obstacles placed before them,
meeting every challenge.
And then 150 years ago,
humans achieved a stroke of genius,
marking a total breakthrough in their existence.
The wide-scale exploitation of new forms of energy,
concentrated and excessively available,
coal and then oil.
There then followed a radical change in the scale of their success.
The industrial revolution.
They exploited this energy on a huge scale
in a more systematic, organized, and methodical way.
One-hundred fifty years out of 4.5 billion.
In our 24-hour history of the Earth,
this era began at five microseconds before midnight.
Five microseconds.
Even a blink of the eye lasts 100,000 times longer.
So, five microseconds ago,
human beings learned how to master energy
as no other living being had ever done,
changing forever the human condition.
They dug to get at the coal, the oil, and the gas.
This energy seemed limitless, so great were the reserves,
and almost free.
You just had to help yourself.
They could dig anywhere, both on land
and underwater.
This fossil energy results from the decomposition of things
that died billions of years ago,
and this is why it's called fossil fuel.
In a way, humans moved on from the energy of the living
to the energy of the dead,
that of decomposing animals and plants
an underground store of millions of years of the sun's energy.
Think about it:
Humans were no longer content
to control the energy passing from one living being to another,
as in agriculture or livestock farming.
Now they could achieve the harnessing of fossil energy
which had built up and had never been exploited,
energy that was more concentrated and powerful.
Thanks to oil, humans could work with materials
like steel, concrete, and plastic
and were able to build in a much more efficient way.
These constructions were now on an unimaginable scale,
their size matching their ambitions.
They invented machines metal giants to dig and find materials
and more energy.
There was excess in every domain,
whether for exploitation, habitation, or travel.
Humans could now, thanks to these iron giants,
move around on the land, the sea, and even in the air,
reducing the travel time to the ends of the Earth
from weeks to hours.
A return trip to the other side of the planet
takes less time than going to the next town did
two centuries ago.
The frail boats of humans had now become factory ships,
able to locate, track, and catch fish by the ton
without risking their lives each time they went to sea.
Agriculture became mechanized,
exchanging donkeys for tractors, they could work ever greater surfaces
with ever greater ease.
Oil was the technological breakthrough
that enabled us to push back the ever-looming threat of hunger.
In the fields, it made it possible to break away from the hardships
and the constant exhaustion
which were often rewarded with such modest harvests.
Oil enabled women and men
to make the transition from simply surviving
to actually living.
Humans mastered irrigation,
digging hundreds of metres underground
disturbing water that had slumbered for millennia
to fight against drought,
even in the driest places.
With their mastery of fertilizer and irrigation,
they turned deserts green.
Thanks to oil, they were able to invent new pesticides,
much more effective at fighting weeds and pests.
No more harvests almost totally lost, ravaged by insects and rats.
Farewell, famine!
All the creatures that had been stealing this energy for millennia
now had to go without.
Humans made sure that all the plants they grew
in ever larger fields would no longer be misappropriated
by any other living creature.
Manipulating oil thanks to their mastery of chemistry,
they invented new materials like plastic.
In agriculture, plastic would let them tame the sun's rays,
trapping the heat inside greenhouses.
The famous greenhouse effect.
By thus capturing solar energy much more efficiently than ever before,
humans were able to go on growing crops even when it was cold.
And, with artificial lighting, even at night.
Efficiency and productivity have been so prioritized by humans
that they've become second nature.
Almost an obsession.
Since plants don't sleep, why should agriculture?
This was the green revolution, which multiplied farming yields
while reducing the amount of labour required
thanks to mechanization,
the use of very effective fertilizers, high-performance irrigation,
and extremely powerful pesticides.
We went from 1,000 kilos of cereal produced per farmer,
to 500,000 kilos.
Yes, you heard it right: 500 times more,
in barely 150 years.
Livestock farmers too were able to change the dimensions
of their farms.
They could now efficiently manage hundreds of animals,
optimizing feeding and care,
and giving many more people access to cheaper meat.
Mechanization also made it possible
to export raw materials like wood on a much more massive scale
than had ever been possible,
making it available to everyone everywhere.
Entire forests could be transported by ship.
Food stuffs were transported by the ton,
gradually allowing hunger to be pushed back around the world.
Each region specialized, becoming more efficient,
exporting to neighbouring regions while importing their specialities.
Onto our tables came steaks from Argentina,
tomatoes from Morocco,
avocados from Mexico, prawns from Vietnam,
soy from Brazil, and rice from Thailand.
Controlling energy like never before thanks to oil,
nothing could be denied us.
We could now build an enormous city in only two years
and house millions of people there.
Concrete is the child of oil.
These technological wonders
have created an unprecedented rise in population density,
a constant reminder that, at the very core,
humans remain a deeply social species.
Populations grew and we could build ever bigger,
ever higher, ever more-organized cities.
We had the means and resources to build cities anywhere,
even in the middle of the desert.
We simply had to desalinate the water and import sand,
the world's second-most consumed resource after water,
and make concrete.
The concrete used to build the world's tallest skyscraper
in Dubai was made with sand.
But listen carefully: sand from Australia.
Yes, Australia.
Do you realize what this means?
It's as if nothing was out of our reach anymore.
Like ants or termites, we build energetically
for our ever-growing population.
But, unlike insects,
we're constantly improving our level of comfort,
living longer and possessing more and more things.
It's been calculated that a liter of oil
is the equivalent in energy of the work
of 100 people for an entire day.
But we are now producing more than 15 billion litres of oil a day,
The energy equivalent of physical labour
200 times the population of the planet.
Since I was born,
the health of men and women around the world has hugely improved.
Children die less often.
Many of us enjoy a richer, more plentiful, and diversified diet.
We live better, we live older,
we spend more time in education, leisure and tourism.
Every year, France welcomes more than 85 million tourists,
more than the actual population of the country.
We can now quickly nip to another continent
just to see elephants
or cruise on distant seas or the lagoons of Venice
without abandoning any of our comforts.
All of these achievements from the development of our society
seem normal to us.
We can go and visit the sacred temples of Egypt,
Cambodia or Burma
to appreciate as a family or en masse their serenity and their calm.
This sadly is where this lovely story of human success
starts to go off the rails
and I can no longer speak as if everything is just fine.
I must have the courage of the truth and tell things how they are.
That is what I'm going to try to do now.
Having eliminated practically all natural obstacles,
humans are pursuing their blind, uncontrolled race into the future.
With constraint to slow them down, they are now running totally unbalanced.
Do these people on the beach in Rio have any idea of the crises
that the planet is facing?
Bolstered by their riches,
humans haven't shared their instinct for accumulation,
reproduction and dissemination.
With the mortality rate constantly in decline,
the world's population is growing at breakneck speed.
When I was a child, there were barely 2.5 billion of us.
In just my lifetime, that number has increased threefold.
Every second, there are five more of us on Earth.
Five more...
And five more...
And by the time you've watched this film,
there'll be 20,000 more of us.
In just four days, there'll be a million more of us.
And next year, 100 million more.
We're becoming an ever-weightier burden on Earth,
our carbon footprint ever more pronounced
as we clutter our lives with things.
Pushed on by the momentum of life and the dynamics of our success,
we thought we could dominate the laws of nature,
but today the laws of nature are reminding us of their presence.
There cannot be an infinite population in a limited territory.
We cannot extract infinite resources from a finite planet.
We cannot have infinite growth in a finite world.
Today the planet isn't facing one major environmental crisis
but two,
the climate crisis and that of biodiversity.
The two crises are linked, each exacerbating the other,
and both were created by human activity.
And both have an impact on human societies.
There's a lot of talk about the ice melting at the poles,
but we don't live at the poles, so how does that actually concern us?
Well, the answer is simple.
It's essential because the ice is the best measure
of what's happening to the climate.
Its melting is easy to observe and illustrates the problem.
It's a very clear warning signal that is constantly screaming at us:
The planet is warming up far too quickly.
And the reasons are easy to understand.
For all the advantages oil has given us, we've had to pay a terrible price.
As it is burnt, it releases CO2 into the atmosphere.
The CO2 increases the greenhouse effect and therefore the air temperature.
This greenhouse effect,
which is a natural process that let earth warm up sufficiently
for life to flourish, is now too strong, much too strong.
The world's scientists are warning us that the more greenhouse gases we emit,
the more we risk a massive melting of the poles.
But the poles play an essential role in regulating the planet's climate.
Their disappearance would completely destabilise the current climate
and the melting of the ice would raise the level of the oceans.
If Greenland melted,
the sea level would rise by six metres.
If the Antarctic melted,
the scientists say it would be more like 60 metres.
The amount of land flooded would be incredible.
The oceans would advance tens, even hundreds of kilometres inland.
Our coastlines would be entirely changed.
Luckily we haven't reached that point yet,
but data shows that the pack ice is melting faster
and icebergs are breaking off.
The world's glaciers, on which more than one person in five
depends for drinking water, are actually disappearing.
Since the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago,
we've increased the global temperature by one degree,
and even by three degrees at the north pole and the south pole.
Each summer brings a new high-temperature record.
Our scientists are so worried,
it's because these masses of ice are a tipping point,
ready to topple into a chain reaction
which would precipitate melting at a faster and faster rate.
Several phenomena have recently been discovered
which could precipitate this warming and melting.
One of these is the warming of the permafrost,
a vast expanse from Canada to Siberia
and one-fifth of the world's land surface.
This great wilderness of Earth,
permanently frozen to a depth of several metres,
has trapped incalculable quantities of methane,
a gas with almost 30 times the warming power of CO2.
In thawing and releasing this gas into the atmosphere,
this permafrost is accelerating its own thawing,
which is picking up speed,
quite slowly for now, but getting faster and faster.
It's a climate bomb.
Some of you may think that these extra two degrees
don't pose much of a threat.
After all, two degrees is practically nothing.
It's easier to understand the impact of a couple of degrees
when you see the effect of temperature on your body.
Two extra degrees and you're bed-ridden with a fever.
Four extra degrees and you're dead.
The climate crisis isn't just global warming.
We ought really to call it "climate malfunction,"
with storms, hurricanes, cyclones, heat waves, floods, and fires,
ever stronger and ever more frequent.
All of this energy that we emit as CO2 into the atmosphere
comes back at us in the deadly force of storms
and cyclones.
Nothing is ever lost.
It is all just transformed.
We see these catastrophes every day.
We're getting use to them
and they're effecting more and more people everywhere.
Australian, Russians, Brazilians,
Americans, Indians, but also Europeans,
and this concerns us all.
But there's another, more insidious effect of global warming:
its effect on agriculture.
Farmed species were selected for a stable, temperate climate.
The same species were farmed in each region for millennia.
The plants in a field were finetuned,
their fertilizer, pesticides and water precisely dosed,
their genetics all identical,
the rhythm of their lives standardised.
These varieties of cereal, vegetables and fruit
therefore perform particularly well in the current climatic conditions.
However, if the conditions change, they'll become completely ill-adapted...
where the climate upheavals are too swift and brutal
for these pampered plants.
Many regions may see their yields shrink
and have to change crops or even abandon their plantations.
We are then risking a malfunction in the world's food supply.
This is worrying because our daily lives and very civilisation
depend entirely on the food which farming supplies us.
We all tend to forget this.
And it concerns all living species,
for while life is accustomed to change,
biodiversity cannot adapt to such rapid modifications.
Biodiversity is the diversity, the richness of the living world.
There are over two million known species,
but there are many millions of species still to be discovered.
All of these species are interlinked and dependent on each other.
Trees, insects, birds, mammals, humans,
countless species interacting with an ecosystem
dependent on their connection to others.
Yes, you and I are part of this biodiversity.
We need in order to survive.
Absolutely everything we eat and drink comes from this biodiversity,
meat, fish, fruit and vegetables
but also the microorganisms that make cheese and yogurt,
bread made with wheat, beer, wine...
Biodiversity also supplies us
with our materials, cotton, wool or wood,
and most of our medicines, traditional and modern.
Biodiversity modulates our climate
by absorbing the CO2 in the atmosphere, for example.
It's biodiversity which purifies our air and our water,
fertilizes our land and pollinates our crops.
It is what constitutes the very bedrock of our existence as living beings.
And even if we think we're disconnected from nature,
even if we've lost the capacity to marvel at its wonder,
we are intrinsically connected.
We depend entirely on the good health
of the ecosystems around us for the planet to work.
Living species, whether farmed for our food or wild,
are the intravenous drips which since the dawn of time
have kept the human race alive.
Yet we're killing off a thousand species every year.
Every extinction is irreversible, each one an irreplaceable loss.
It's like wiping a hard disk
that's been working for millions of years
without knowing what was on it.
And as well as all the species already gone,
a million more are currently threatened with extinction.
A million.
I know that these figures don't move everyone,
but some are so important I can't stop myself quoting them.
Here they are in four stages of my own life.
Since 1972 when I was 25, the population of the world has doubled
and we've eliminated almost two-thirds of animal populations.
Today, 96% of the mammals on the planet are human and their livestock.
Only 4% are wild animals.
Since 1982 when I was 35,
we have double our extraction of natural resources from the Earth
and now we are throwing eight million tons of plastic
into the sea every year,
the equivalent of a full garbage truck dumping into the sea every minute.
This material can take centuries to decompose.
In the meantime,
all this plastic waste pollutes our rivers
and ends up in the stomachs of fish and birds.
And I find these images inconceivable, impossible to look at.
But they're an irrefutable symbol,
we live in a civilisation of rubbish.
In 1992, I was 45 and I learned at the first Earth Summit in Rio
that we'd lost half of the world's natural forests
and half of the ice caps.
Aware of the harm we were doing to our environment,
I began a work that would change my life,
Earth from Above.
And now I'm approaching my 75th birthday
and 75% of the Earth's surface has been severely altered.
Half of the inhabitable world is used for farming,
and most of this farming has gone insane.
It alone uses 70% of the world's fresh water
and a third of this land isn't used to feed us
but to feed our livestock.
Every year, we spread around five million tons of pesticides
and herbicides to kill insects and weeds.
Seventy-five percent of flying insects has disappeared,
even in the protected areas of Europe.
And in France, we've lost 30% of our passerine birds.
I could give you dozens of such figures.
It takes but a moment's thought to realize the animal nature,
still deeply seeded in our human minds, is driving us to consume always more,
that our hyper-productivity
has reached the stage where nothing can resist it
and that, without resistance, the machine is now out of control.
A powerful example of our excesses is in California,
where the world's almond production is concentrated.
The industrialisation of agriculture is on such a scale here
that to pollinate the trees, bees are brought in by truck.
As hundreds of billions of bees
are needed to pollinate these gigantic fields
and there aren't enough in California,
they are rented for the season
and even sometimes imported from Australia.
With all of this manhandling,
the mortality rate of the bees is enormous.
"Never mind, we can always bring more next year"
seems to be the general philosophy.
Elsewhere domesticated animals, which helped us out of poverty,
are raised and slaughtered in conditions which show our lack of humanity.
In these meat factories, taken at birth from their mothers,
the calves are crammed together in their thousands
in fear and suffering,
without us giving a thought to their sensibilities
or their intelligence,
Our greed and pursuit of profit have made us
totally lose sight of the importance of life.
We treat animals like plants.
We have to make them grow quickly.
To mass produce cheap meat,
the animals are crammed together to be fattened
and pumped full of hormones and antibiotics.
This intensive livestock farming uses water and grain
which could otherwise feed the world
and contributes to the greenhouse effect.
Despite health warnings,
consumers are urged by lobbies to eat meat every day.
In the 40 years, the amount of meat consumed in the world has tripled,
contributing to the very real health crisis of obesity.
Yes, it's a simple calculation.
While one farmed hectare can provide food for two carnivores,
it could feed 50 vegetarians.
Over 100 billion animals are killed every year for their meat,
a billion in France alone,
yet nothing is curbing the zeal to produce ever more cheap meat.
Here in China, and these are not social-housing blocks,
they're the buildings of a multi-story pig farm.
From their birth to their slaughter,
these poor creatures never leave these ultra-modern pig sties.
Not for a second of their miserable lives
do they see the sky or smell the earth.
What we eat
is more often the result of unspeakable and prolonged suffering
than that of an animal that lived a healthy life.
As the poet Lamartine wrote,
"We don't have two hearts, one for animals and one for humans,
"we have one heart or we have none."
Industrial fishing has also drifted into troubled waters.
Using satellite and radar, it's now possible
to locate any shoal of fish,
however deep it might be, and catch every last one.
Gigantic factory ships contain all the facilities
for gutting and conditioning.
The fish are prepared and frozen on the boat,
but can remain at sea for months, emptying the ocean.
Unmarketable fish are caught accidentally,
as are turtles and dolphins.
Hundreds of thousands are killed every year.
The ocean beds are dredged by trawling nets
which destroy everything over thousands of hectares,
a bit like harvesting strawberries with a bulldozer.
At the same time we're killing hundreds of millions of sharks a year,
more than 10,000 sharks every hour.
It's not surprising that over 90% of all marine predators
have been wiped out.
These industrial and intensive means of farming and fishing
only enrich very few people.
Most humans still live in poverty.
Two-hundred fifty million farmers
have only animals to help them work their land
and a billion have nothing but their own physical strength.
More than 90% of those who fish do so on a small scale.
All over the world I've filmed women and men
who haven't benefited from the different energy revolutions,
and who work as hard as people did centuries ago.
We know that a person in Bangladesh
emits 30 times less CO2 than an American.
But don't kid yourself:
in an era when the internet
makes images of our paradise available everywhere,
The inhabitants of developing countries want only one thing: to be developed
and live the dream they see every day on their television screens.
Children who know of the opulent way we live
yet have practically nothing
are more numerous in every country I travel to.
How can we consume less and save more
while giving everyone a chance at a better life.
For many humans,
it's not just about fleeing poverty or war.
It's increasingly about fleeing an environmental crisis.
But whether the cause is climate, economics or politics,
they're all quite simply refugees.
They're increasingly numerous and come from an ever-growing number
of countries.
There were only 20 million refugees in 2019.
I say only because the UN predicts 250 million climate refugees
in 2050.
In the poorest countries,
the climate crisis and the biodiversity collapse
will cause famines, economic crisis and even wars.
And the rich countries will be hit by the ricochet.
Whatever we might think,
the real migratory crisis has not yet begun.
In my film, Home, already 11 years ago, I repeated several times
that it was far too late to be pessimistic
and I proclaimed renewable energy as the ultimate solution
for fighting climate change.
Around the world I've seen wind farms sprout up like forests of hope.
But these efforts haven't been accompanied by a reduction
in our consumption of fossil fuels,
coal, gas and oil.
They haven't replaced fossil fuels.
They've been supplementary,
added on.
I also said,
"Let's look to the sky and learn to harvest the sunshine.
"Let's create our own photosynthesis
"because the sun in one hour gives us as much energy
"as all of humanity consumes in a year."
Around the world, I've seen thousands of hectares
taken over my solar panels,
but all of these wonderful initiatives
haven't replaced the 100 million barrels of oil
that we consume every day.
One-hundred million barrels, and this figure increases every year.
Another mirage: The COPs, these major international conferences
which bring together the countries that signed
the UN agreement to fight climate change.
They've taken place every year since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.
I've often been present.
Behind the windows in the UN building in New York,
hundreds of diplomats study the increasingly alarming reports
of the world's scientists and they try to come up with solutions.
All of these solutions symbolize the hopes of humanity
and I think they know it.
I don't for a second doubt their good faith
or their sincere commitment.
These conferences at least gather the world's leaders
to consider this vital subject.
Unfortunately, they're more like the meetings of apartment co-owners
who don't get on,
where the selfishness of every nation comes to the fore
and each country ends up doing just what it wants.
An example, which to me is the most striking and revelatory,
the famous Paris Agreement signed in 2015.
One-hundred eighty countries committed to reduce the emissions
which contribute to climate change,
but to make sure the producing countries would sign,
the words coal, oil, gas and fossil fuel did not even appear in the treaty
as if they were afraid of naming the enemy
that's going to kill us.
Never has a COP succeeded in reducing CO2 emissions.
This failure is the symbol of our addiction to growth.
Coal, the most polluting fuel, is still, despite everything,
the world's primary source of electricity production.
They talked of the end of oil,
but they extract more and more, like this shale gas,
which is poisoning the soil of America.
With this new energy source, the US is once more
the world's main producer of oil and gas,
driving down the price per barrel.
It's never been so cheap.
And that's in no way good news for the environment.
With 40% of its people not believing in climate change,
America, the world's richest and most polluting country,
is I think the symbol of our inconsistency.
Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of our growth
and as such are unconditionally protected
by international finance.
The banks lend with interest over $650 billion a year
to companies which explore new reserves of fossil fuels.
The banks are therefore dependent on their debtors
and on the growth of the fossil-fuel industry...
So it's hard to change the model
when it might cause colossal financial losses
or even bankruptcies.
So, what's to be done?
Curing finance of its addiction to coal, oil and gas
is one of the challenges to be taken up.
To be honest,
I do see the banks making encouraging moves to get out of coal,
but still too timidly to reverse the trend.
They must go further and invent a new model
of finance at the service of the planet,
whereas today our planet is in service of finance.
In 2020, gigantic wildfires impossible to control
ravaged Australia, Siberia and especially California,
where almost 300,000 people had to be relocated.
San Francisco's millions of inhabitants
who saw their city turn red in the middle of the day
because of the burning forests
no doubt really understood what climate change means.
These Mad Max-style end-of-the-world images
should make them think.
Should make us think.
It's not fiction.
It's not the movies, it's reality.
How I hate telling you all this.
It breaks my heart.
It's so desperate.
These aren't the stories a grandfather wants to tell his grandchildren,
but I don't want to lie to you.
I'm too old for that.
I have no right,
I feel obliged to tell you the truth, to have the courage to face that truth.
Could this be our legacy?
My legacy?
That I'll leave to my grandchildren?
And yet our children are often a lot more clear-headed than us.
Thirty years ago in 1992,
I was gripped by the words of Severn Suzuki.
She was 13,
and she spoke at the United Nations on behalf of all the world's children.
We are a group of 12- and 13-year-olds trying to make a difference.
We've raised all the money to come here ourselves,
to come 5,000 miles to tell you adults you must change your ways.
Coming up here today, I have no hidden agenda.
I am fighting for my future.
Losing my future is not like losing an election
or a few points on the stock market.
I am here to speak for all generations to come.
I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children
around the world whose cries go unheard.
I am here to speak for the countless animals
dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go.
I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in our ozone.
I am afraid to breath the air
because I don't know what chemical are in it.
And almost 30 years later, it was 15-year-old Greta Thunberg
who spoke at the United Nations.
This is all wrong.
I shouldn't be up here.
I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.
Yet you all come to us young people for hope.
How dare you?
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words!
And yet I'm one of the lucky ones.
People are suffering!
People are dying!
Entire ecosystems are collapsing!
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction
and all you can talk about is money
and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.
How dare you?
She is so raw and awkward,
but is also touching and moving.
And above all else, she's so right.
She endures the suffering of those who understand.
And I think it's indecent to make fun of her
because it's not up to her and our children
to bear the weight of the world.
It's up to me.
And to all of us.
How can a world which ignores its children
hope to have a future?
How can we hear 30 years apart the same warning message,
the same call for help,
and do nothing?
We haven't listened to our children.
And today,
we've been brought low by something much smaller.
A virus.
As I'm finishing writing this film,
I'd never have imagined showing you these sci-fi imagines
of these empty cities,
devoid of human beings.
Yet scientists had warned us of the risks of a pandemic.
And just like climate change, we don't want to believe it.
A pandemic every ten years?
That's where we're heading if we don't radically change
our relationship to biodiversity.
Through deforestation and the capture and sale
of wild animals,
humans have created the perfect cocktail
for the outbreak of new pandemics:
HIV, Ebola, bird flu and now Covid-19.
All of these pandemics came from viruses in wild animals
which have adapted to humans.
Our industrial-scale livestock farming and inter-connected world
merely amplify the phenomenon.
This invisible danger has become visible
and confronted us with a new reality.
We've been able to sacrifice our economy.
All around the world at the same time, we decided to stop everything.
And we all accepted these constraints
in order to save our lives.
It is therefore vital that we protect biodiversity
and rethink our relationship with the natural world,
for the reality is that we're wiping out everything
that isn't human on Earth.
Take heed.
According to the WWF, in 50 years, we'll have lost around 70% of mammals,
fish, birds, amphibians and reptiles.
Seventy percent of living creatures.
It's incredible.
And today,
faced with this unimaginable loss,
how is it possible not to think of every living creature around us
as something precious and sacred?
So...
what can we do to fight climate change?
It's actually quite simple.
It is imperative that we decarbonise our lives
in every way that we can.
This means reducing our consumption of oil, coal and gas,
for this carbon-loaded energy is hiding everywhere,
in our food, our clothes, our travel, our homes.
Everything we consume every day is full of oil, full of carbon.
There is no other solution,
even if this seems impossible.
For this energy, which make us so powerful and rich,
is now killing us.
Yes, it's killing us, It's as simple as that.
We have to confront this truth together.
And it's not my truth,
it's the truth of thousands of scientists.
We have to listen.
Their solution?
We need to reduce the world's consumption
of fossil fuels by five percent every year
to avoid exceeding the two degrees fixed by the Paris Agreement.
REDUCE FOSSIL-FUEL CONSUMPTION BY 5% EVER YEAR
And I'm mostly talking about the rich nations
because 70% of CO2 emissions
are produced by barely 10% of the world's population.
And that includes me.
What an injustice.
If we do nothing,
by the year 2070,
a third of humanity
may be living in regions as hot and uninhabitable
as the Sahara.
So, by 2070,
a third of humanity, which will mean over 3 billion people,
will be unable to live in their own region.
Three billion.
That's a lot of people.
We must there show great courage
in facing the enormity of this overwhelming task
and acknowledge that there is no miracle solution.
There's no alternative.
We must decarbonise our lives.
Not to commit to doing this means being complicit.
And I'm in no position to lecture you because for four-fifths of my life
I ignored all of that.
Take a good look at these face we filmed around the world.
I now know that my quest for beauty was right there,
in these faces,
so present,
so obvious.
We're going to have to confront our destiny all together,
with them.
We're all equal in the face of suffering and death.
I think that we all share deep down love for one another.
Remember what it is that makes us strong:
intelligence and cooperation.
Can you feel that they are members of our family?
Of your family?
Let us tell our children that they're arriving on Earth
almost at the start of a story, not its disillusioned end.
They are in the very first chapters of a long and fabulous saga.
They must know they have a job to do with the children,
their children and their children's children.
Do you see all the conviction of the world in their faces?
Can you feel the love they're radiating?
So, imagine what we could all do, all together?
For the only sustainable energy is love.
For my legacy is quite simply the love of life.
THERE ARE ANSWERS, THE CHOICE IS UP TO YOU.
WE ARE THE PEOPLE,
WE ARE THE COMPANIES,
WE ARE THE GOVERNMENTS
LISTEN TO SCIENTISTS AND LEARN ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
VOTE ONLY FOR POLITICIANS WHO RUN ON AN ECOLOGY PLATFORM
VOLUNTEER WITH ORGANISATIONS
DON'T EAT INDUSTRIALLY RAISED ANIMALS
EAT LOCAL, SEASONAL, ORGANIC AND NON-PROCESSED FOODS
WITHOUT PLASTIC PACKAGING
PLACE YOUR MONEY IN BANKS THAT PRIORITIZE SUSTAINIBILITY
INSULATE HOMES AND BUILDINGS
BUY SECOND-HAND AND MEND OLD POSSESSIONS
TO STEM OVERCONSUMPTION
TAKE TRAINS, BUSES, BIKES,
OR PRACTICE CARPOOLING OR USE ELECTRIC VEHICLES
PLANES SHOULD BE TAKEN ONLY OCCASIONALLY
REPLACE CEMENT IN CONSTRUCTION WITH WOOD, EARTH,
STONE AND FIBER
CALCULATE YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT TO FIND WAYS TO REDUCE IT
DON'T THINK OF THESE AS CONSTRAINTS
MAKING A DIFFERENCE MAKES US HAPPIER
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