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Places and events mark you for ever,
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 little 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'd bought a three-year return ticket.
We bought our 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 learnt the freedom of just being.
Never had I felt so alive and 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 our eyes.
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,
death...
We were at the heart of the cycle of life in the raw,
in all its insecurity, always on the lookout.
Its harmony breaks free of 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 towards 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 these animals
would be threatened with extinction forty years later.
And that 75% of the land
would be cultivated
to help feed the 8 billion humans that we now are.
And never would I have imagined that wheat, corn and barley
would replace the antelopes' 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 our power in dominance and control.
The earth found it in freedom and the links between all things.
I had there 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 were found the first traces of our Homo sapiens ancestors.
It became the land of the Masai.
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 happy.
I knew that the way of life of the Masai would change.
I felt a little nostalgic,
but I saw that sadness as the selfishness
of a privileged Westerner.
But today the grazing land for their cattle
has been severely reduced because of agriculture.
They often have to venture into nature reserves
to find pasturage 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 edge the lakes of Kenya.
Like in Ethiopia or Chile, green beans or flowers
are mass produced for the tables of the whole world.
Delivered by plane every day,
they feed the spheres of international finance,
but leave behind the very real consequences
of pesticides and waste.
But they importantly 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 and refugees?
Who'd have thought that the huge camp of Dadaab,
set up in the desert to take in 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,
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.
I believe it is a balm for the soul, as the Navajo say.
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 learnt through my work over these 40 years
and what the scientists tell us
throws all my certainties into question.
11 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 6th extinction of life on Earth.
And with all 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 they were different from other species?
When was that awakening?
It's hard to say, but one thing is for sure:
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.
For whom? To what end?
What is clear is that they had no wish to depict themselves or their species.
They chose to depict other species in all their majesty
and all 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.
It's often said that I have a photographer's eye,
that 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 that 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 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 vapour 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,
then prevented the heat escaping.
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 minus 50 degrees.
And at that temperature life as we know it is impossible.
Life on Earth, then, 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 its stages:
cloud, rain, lakes, rivers and oceans, ice sometimes,
then vapour again.
And this cycle of water still continues.
The water we drink today
is that which cradled the first algae,
and which 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 in the oceans that life would first appear, diversify,
and then pullulate in its myriad forms.
Our planet is called Earth.
But for the major part of its history
it could have been called the planet Sea.
For a very long time
this life in the oceans was limited to tiny, simple 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.
They had to colonise 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 things 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.
For plants,
these species which for many of us are just a backdrop,
the energy problem was solved in an unexpected way,
through their taming of solar energy.
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 the vegetal matter they make
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 worked for them,
creating generation after generation of ever taller plants.
Thus were trees born.
In their race upwards,
these magnificent representatives of biological ingenuity
had to solve problems 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 colonise vast territories,
without moving a centimetre throughout their lives.
Of course I could speak just as enthusiastically
about other species besides 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 beings.
All living species are driven
by a natural urge more powerful than anything:
to survive so that they can reproduce.
All the energy they obtain 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 economised 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, 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 megalopolises.
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 learnt to observe nature and 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 peoples 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 about58 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 completely changed everything.
And the life of human beings underwent a radical change
when they learnt to control the energy
that's stored in trees in a particularly effective way,
by making fire.
The energy of burning wood
helped them to fight the cold and the damp,
to keep at bay darkness and predators,
and to kill the parasites in meat which made them ill.
By taming this source of energy, which only they learnt how to do,
human beings pushed back the constraints of nature.
In nature all species are kept in check by climatic conditions,
such as droughts and harsh winters,
and by other species,
by food becoming scarce when populations grow too large,
or by their natural enemies, predators and parasites.
The human beings' 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,
in particular 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,
beginning with that 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 through contact 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 a 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 learnt 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 constant labour of the women and men of every continent,
who paint gigantic frescoes across the land,
creating works of art they cannot see,
but which reflect their hard work and know-how.
This communion between the land, humans and animals
has lasted for thousands of years.
But I notice
that 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 getting even fields of rock to flower.
Life was still hard, brutal even,
but it lengthened, enjoyed better support,
and was less unpredictable.
At the same time as developing agriculture,
humans optimised 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 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 on them,
and much more risk involved.
These animals being their entire wealth,
humans learnt 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'd 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, organised and methodical way.
150 years, out of 4.5 billion.
In our 24-hour history of 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 learnt how to master energy
as no other living being had ever done,
changing for ever the human condition.
They dug to get at coal, oil and gas.
This energy was almost 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 millions of years ago.
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 billions 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 were achieving the exploit
of harnessing the fossil energy which had built up
but had never before been exploited.
Energy that was incredibly more concentrated and powerful.
Thanks to oil,
humans could work with materials like steel, concrete and plastic,
and were able to build
much more, in a much better way.
These constructions were now on an unimaginable scale,
their size matching the 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 two centuries ago.
Humans' frail barks had now become factory boats,
able to locate, track and catch fish by the tonne,
without risking their lives each time they went to sea.
Agriculture became mechanised.
Exchanging donkeys for tractors,
they could work ever greater surfaces with ever greater ease.
Oil was the magic potion which banished ever-present hunger,
the extreme insecurity and the constant exhaustion
which were rewarded with such modest harvests.
Oil enabled women and men to make the transition
from simply surviving to actually living.
Humans totally mastered irrigation,
digging hundreds of metres underground,
waking up water that had slumbered for millennia,
to fight against drought,
even in the driest places.
With their mastery of fertiliser 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 their 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 prioritised by humans
that they have become second nature.
Almost an obsession.
Since plants don't sleep,
it makes sense to grow them constantly.
This was the Green Revolution,
which multiplied farming yields
while reducing
the amount of labour required,
thanks to mechanisation,
the use of very effective fertilisers,
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 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,
optimising feeding and care,
giving many more people access to cheaper meat.
Mechanisation also made it possible to exploit raw materials, like wood,
on a much more massive scale than had ever been possible before,
making it available to everyone everywhere.
Entire forests could be transported by ship.
Foodstuffs were transported by the tonne,
gradually allowing hunger to be pushed back around the world.
Each region specialised, 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, rice from Thailand...
Controlling energy like never before, thanks to oil,
nothing could now 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 technical feats concentrate us so,
that it has become impossible to forget that we're a very social species.
Populations grew,
and we built ever bigger, ever higher, ever more organised 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 construct the world's tallest skyscraper, in Dubai,
was made with sand - listen carefully - from Australia.
Yes, Australia.
Do you realise?
Nothing is denied us.
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 litre 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 the physical labour
of 200 times the population of the planet.
Since I was born in Paris,
the health of men and women around the world has hugely improved.
Children die young less often,
many of us enjoy a richer, more plentiful and diversified diet,
we live better and 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 France.
We can now quickly nip to another continent,
just to see elephants...
or cruise on distant seas or the lagoons of Venice,
without abandoning our comforts.
And all 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.
You've got the picture.
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 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 ahead,
with no constraint to slow them down.
They are running now totally unbalanced.
Do these people on this beach in Rio
have any idea of the crisis that the planet is facing?
Bolstered by their riches,
humans haven't shed 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,
five more,
five more...
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.
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 own success,
we thought we could dominate the laws of nature.
But today they're 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.
Both were created by human activity,
and both have an impact on human societies.
There's a lot of talk of the ice melting at the poles.
But we don't live at the poles,
so how does that actually concern us?
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 which 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 have 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
because on a planet-wide scale the effects can be dramatic.
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 show that the pack ice is melting faster,
and icebergs are breaking off.
The world's glaciers,
on which more than 1 person in 5 depends for drinking water,
are gradually 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 South Pole.
Each summer brings a new high-temperature record.
The reason the scientists are so worried
is 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.
From Canada to Siberia,
this is an immense expanse, 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 bedridden 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, heatwaves, floods, and fires,
ever stronger,
ever more frequent.
All this energy that we emit in the form of CO2 into the atmosphere
comes back at us in the deadly force
of the storms and cyclones.
Nothing is lost, it is all just transformed.
We see these catastrophes on TV practically every day.
We're getting used to them.
And they're affecting more and more people, everywhere.
Australians, Russians, Brazilians,
Americans, Indians, but also Europeans.
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 farmed in each region for millennia.
The plants in a field
are fine-tuned,
their fertiliser, pesticides and water precisely dosed,
their genetics all identical,
the rhythm of their lives standardised.
These varieties of cereals, vegetables and fruit
therefore perform particularly well in the current climatic conditions.
On the other hand,
if the conditions change they'll become completely ill-adapted.
But the climate upheavals are too swift and brutal for these pampered plants,
which are starting to be affected.
The regions which farm produce adapted to certain climates
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 with which faming supplies us.
We all tend to forget this.
And it concerns all living species.
For while life is accustomed to change,
biodiversity isn't adapted to such rapid modifications.
Biodiversity is the diversity, the richness, of the living world.
Over two million known species,
but many millions of species still to be discovered.
All these species are interlinked and even depend on each other.
Trees, insects,
birds, mammals, humans...
The countless species interacting with an ecosystem
depend on their connection to others.
Yes, you and I are part of our biodiversity.
And, above all, we need it in order to survive.
Absolutely everything we eat and drink
is this biodiversity.
Meat and fish, fruit and vegetables, of course,
but also the microorganisms which make cheese and yoghurt,
bread made with wheat, beer, and wine.
Biodiversity also supplies us
with our materials, like cotton, wool, or wood,
or most of our medicines, traditional and modern.
Biodiversity
modulates our climate,
by absorbing the CO2 in the atmosphere, for example.
It's biodiversity too which purifies our air and our water,
fertilises 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 it,
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 a bit like wiping a hard disc
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
that I can't stop myself quoting them.
Here they are, in four stages of my life,
and you'll see that they're not as abstract as all that.
Since 1972, when I was 25,
the population of the world has doubled,
and we've eliminated almost two thirds of animal populations.
Today, if we combine all mammals,
96% are humans and their livestock.
Only 4% are wild animals.
Since 1982, when I was 35,
we have doubled our extraction of natural resources from the earth,
and we're now chucking 8 million tonnes of plastic into the sea every year,
the equivalent of a dustbin lorry's amount
tipped into the sea every minute.
This material can take centuries to decompose,
and in the meantime it fills the stomachs of rivers, fish,
and birds.
I find these images inconceivable,
impossible to look at...
They're an irrefutable symbol.
We live in a civilisation of rubbish.
In 1992 I was 45,
and I learnt, 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.
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 up 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 tonnes of pesticides and herbicides
to kill insects and weeds.
75% of flying insects have 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 realise that our animal nature,
which is still at the heart of humans, drives us to consume ever more.
That our hyper high performance has reached such a stage
that nothing can now resist it,
and that, without resistance, the machine is 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 a 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 this manhandling, the mortality rate is enormous.
But never mind, you can always rent more next year.
Elsewhere, our 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 which then produce all our milk,
the calves are crammed together in their thousands,
in fear and suffering,
without us giving a thought to their sensibilities or 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 feed the world,
and contributes to the greenhouse effect.
Despite health warnings,
consumers are urged by lobbies to eat meat every day.
In 40 years the amount of meat consumed in the world has tripled,
contributing to the very real health crisis of obesity.
Yet it's a simple calculation.
While one farmed hectare can provide food for two carnivores,
it could feed fifty vegetarians.
Over 100 billion animals are killed every year for their meat,
a billion in France alone.
Yet nothing is curbing this zeal to produce ever more cheap meat.
Here in China
these are not social-housing blocks.
They're the buildings of a multi-storey pig farm.
From their birth to their slaughter,
these poor creatures never leave these ultra-modern pigsties.
Not for a second of their miserable lives
do they see the sky or smell the earth.
Our pâté sandwich
is more often the unspeakable and prolonged suffering
hidden behind these clean walls
than the consumption of an animal that lived a healthy life on a farm.
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 boats contain all the facilities for gutting
and conditioning.
The fish are prepared and frozen on the boat,
which 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 every hour.
It's not surprising that over 90% of all marine predators
have been wiped out.
These industrial and intensives means of farming and fishing
only enrich very few people.
Most humans still live in poverty,
without exhausting the land or emptying the sea.
250 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 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 the chance of 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 are all quite simply refugees.
They're increasingly numerous
and come from an ever growing number of countries.
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 crises and even wars.
And the rich countries will be hit by the ricochets.
Whatever we might think,
the real migratory crisis has not yet begun.
It will violently affect those fleeing,
but also those in the receiving countries.
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 by solar panels.
But all these wonderful initiatives
haven't replaced the 100 million barrels of oil we consume every day.
100 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 try to come up with solutions.
All of them symbolise the hopes of humanity.
And I think they know it.
I don't for a second doubt their good faith or sincere commitment.
These conferences at least gather the world's leaders
to consider this vital subject.
Unfortunately,
they're more like 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,
is in the famous Paris Agreement, signed in 2015.
180 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 prime 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 is 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 dollars 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 it's our planet which is at the 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.
This isn't fiction,
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 and 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?
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 thirteen,
and she spoke at the United Nations on behalf of all the world's children.
And almost 30 years later,
it was 15-year-old Greta Thunberg
who spoke at the United Nations.
She is so raw and awkward,
but is so touching and moving.
And above all else she is 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, 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 images
of these empty cities, devoid of human beings.
Yet scientists had warned us of the risks of a pandemic.
It's a bit like with 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 these pandemics came from viruses in wild animals,
which have adapted to humans.
Our industrial-scale livestock farming and interconnected world
merely amplify the phenomenon.
This invisible danger has become visible.
And, confronted with this new reality,
we have 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 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've lost around 70%
of mammals, fish, birds, amphibians, and reptiles.
70% 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 me, 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 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 makes us so powerful and rich
is now killing us.
Yes, it's killing us, 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
that you have to believe.
Their solution?
We need to reduce the world's consumption of fossil fuels
by 5% every year
to avoid exceeding the 2 degrees fixed by the Paris Agreement.
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, therefore, show great courage
in facing the enormity of this overwhelming task,
and acknowledge that there is no miracle solution.
There's no alternative.
Decarbonise our lives.
Not to commit to doing this
means being complicit.
And I'm in no position to lecture you,
because for 4/5 of my life I ignored all that.
Take a good look at these faces 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 are 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 at 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 convictions of the world in their faces?
Can you feel the love they're radiating?
So imagine what we could do, all together.
For the only sustainable energy is love.
For my legacy
is quite simply the love of life.
There are SOLUTIONS, it's up to you to CHOOSE.
For we are the CITIZENS,
we are the BUSINESSES,
we are the STATE
Let us listen to the SCIENTISTS and learn about CLIMATE CHANGE
LET US ONLY VOTE for POLITICIANS
who put ECOLOGY at the core of their PROGRAMMES
Let us VOLUNTEER
and MAKE COMMITMENTS by joining ASSOCIATIONS
Let us STOP EATING INDUSTRIAL meat
Let us EAT food that is LOCAL,
in SEASON, ORGANIC, UNPROCESSED,
and NOT wrapped in PLASTIC
Let us SAVE with banks that practise SUSTAINABLE FINANCE
Let us ISOLATE our HOMES
Let us buy SECOND-HAND
and REPAIR our things to avoid OVERCONSUMPTION
Les us TRAVEL by TRAIN, BUS,
BIKE, CAR-SHARING,
or ELECTRIC VEHICLES
FLYING must ONLY BE a means of transport
in EXCEPTIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES
When we BUILD, instead of CEMENT
let us PREFER WOOD, EARTH,
STONE, and FIBRES.
Let us CALCULATE our CARBON FOOTPRINT
to learn how to REDUCE it
Let us not SEE these as CONSTRAINTS
TAKING ACTION makes you HAPPY
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