"Listen to me, please." "You're like me, a homo sapiens, a wise human." "Life, a miracle in the universe, appeared around 4 billion years ago." "And we humans only 200,000 years ago." "Yet we have succeeded in disrupting the balance so essential to life." "Listen carefully to this extraordinary story, which is yours, and decide what you want to do with it." "These are traces of our origins." "At the beginning, our planet was no more than a chaos of fire, a cloud of agglutinated dust particles, like so many similar clusters in the universe." "Yet this is where the miracle of life occurred." "Today, life, our life, is just a link in a chain of innumerable living beings that have succeeded one another on Earth over nearly 4 billion years." "And even today, new volcanoes continue to sculpt our landscapes." "They offer a glimpse of what our Earth was like at its birth, molten rock surging from the depths, solidifying, cracking, blistering or spreading in a thin crust, before falling dormant for a time." "These wreathes of smoke curling from the bowels of the Earth bear witness to the Earth's original atmosphere." "An atmosphere devoid of oxygen." "A dense atmosphere, thick with water vapor, full of carbon dioxide." "A furnace." "The Earth cooled." "The water vapor condensed and fell in torrential downpours." "At the right distance from the sun, not too far, not too near, the Earth's perfect balance enabled it to conserve water in liquid form." "The water cut channels." "They are like the veins of a body, the branches of a tree, the vessels of the sap that the water gave to the Earth." "The rivers tore minerals from rocks, adding them to the oceans' freshwater." "And the oceans became heavy with salt." "Where do we come from?" "Where did life first spark into being?" "A miracle of time, primitive life forms still exist in the globe's hot springs." "They give them their colors." "They're called archeobacteria." "They all feed off the Earth's heat." "All except the cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae." "They alone have the capacity to turn to the sun to capture its energy." "They are a vital ancestor of all yesterday's and today's plant species." "These tiny bacteria and their billions of descendants changed the destiny of our planet." "They transformed its atmosphere." "What happened to the carbon that poisoned the atmosphere?" "It's still here, imprisoned in the Earth's crust." "Here, there once was a sea, inhabited by micro-organisms." "They grew shells by tapping into the atmosphere's carbon now dissolved in the ocean." "These strata are the accumulated shells of those billions and billions of micro-organisms." "Thanks to them, the carbon drained from the atmosphere and other life forms could develop." "It is life that altered the atmosphere." "Plant life fed off the sun's energy, which enabled it to break apart the water molecule and take the oxygen." "And oxygen filled the air." "The Earth's water cycle is a process of constant renewal." "Waterfalls, water vapor, clouds, rain, springs, rivers, seas, oceans, glaciers..." "The cycle is never broken." "There's always the same quantity of water on Earth." "All the successive species on Earth have drunk the same water." "The astonishing matter that is water." "One of the most unstable of all." "It takes a liquid form as running water, gaseous as vapor, or solid as ice." "In Siberia, the frozen surfaces of the lakes in winter contain the trace of the forces that water deploys when it freezes." "Lighter than water, the ice floats." "It forms a protective mantle against the cold, under which life can go on." "The engine of life is linkage." "Everything is linked." "Nothing is self-sufficient." "Water and air are inseparable, united in life and for our life on Earth." "Sharing is everything." "The green expanse through the clouds is the source of oxygen in the air." "70% of this gas, without which our lungs cannot function, comes from the algae that tint the surface of the oceans." "Our Earth relies on a balance, in which every being has a role to play and exists only through the existence of another being." "A subtle, fragile harmony that is easily shattered." "Thus, corals are born from the marriage of algae and shells." "Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, but they provide a habitat for thousands of species of fish, mollusks and algae." "The equilibrium of every ocean depends on them." "The Earth counts time in billions of years." "It took more than 4 billion years for it to make trees." "In the chain of species, trees are a pinnacle, a perfect, living sculpture." "Trees defy gravity." "They are the only natural element in perpetual movement toward the sky." "They grow unhurriedly toward the sun that nourishes their foliage." "They have inherited from these miniscule cyanobacteria the power to capture light's energy." "They store it and feed off it, turning it into wood and leaves, which then decompose into a mixture of water, mineral, vegetable and living matter." "And so, gradually, soils are formed." "Soils teem with the incessant activity of micro-organisms, feeding, digging, aerating and transforming." "They make the humus, the fertile layer to which all life on land is linked." "What do we know about life on Earth?" "How many species are we aware of?" "A tenth of them?" "A hundredth perhaps?" "What do we know about the bonds that link them?" "The Earth is a miracle." "Life remains a mystery." "Families of animals form, united by customs and rituals that are handed down through the generations." "Some adapt to the nature of their pasture and their pasture adapts to them." "And both gain." "The animal sates its hunger and the tree can blossom again." "In the great adventure of life on Earth, every species has a role to play, every species has its place." "None is futile or harmful." "They all balance out." "And that's where you, homo sapiens, wise human, enter the story." "You benefit from a fabulous 4-billion-year-old legacy bequeathed by the Earth." "You are only 200,000 years old, but you have changed the face of the world." "Despite your vulnerability, you have taken possession of every habitat and conquered swathes of territory, like no other species before you." "After 180,000 nomadic years, and thanks to a more clement climate, humans settled down." "They no longer depended on hunting for survival." "They chose to live in wet environments that abounded in fish, game and wild plants." "There where land, water and life combine." "Even today, the majority of humankind lives on the continents' coastlines or the banks of rivers and lakes." "Across the planet, one person in four lives as humankind did 6,000 years ago, their only energy that which nature provides season after season." "It's the way of life of 1.5 billion people, more than the combined population of all the wealthy nations." "But life expectancy is short and hard labor takes its toll." "The uncertainties of nature weigh on daily life." "Education is a rare privilege." "Children are a family's only asset as long as every extra pair of hands is a necessary contribution to its subsistence." "Humanity's genius is to have always had a sense of its weakness." "The physical strength, with which nature insufficiently endowed humans, is found in animals that help them to discover new territories." "But how can you conquer the world on an empty stomach?" "The invention of agriculture turned our history on end." "It was less than 10,000 years ago." "Agriculture was our first great revolution." "It resulted in the first surpluses and gave birth to cities and civilizations." "The memory of thousands of years scrabbling for food faded." "Having made grain the yeast of life, we multiplied the number of varieties and learned to adapt them to our soils and climates." "We are like every species on Earth." "Our principal daily concern is to feed ourselves." "When the soil is less than generous and water becomes scarce, we are able to deploy prodigious efforts to extract from the land enough to live on." "Humans shaped the land with the patience and devotion the Earth demands in an almost sacrificial ritual performed over and over." "Agriculture is still the world's most widespread occupation." "Half of humankind tills the soil, over three-quarters of them by hand." "Agriculture is like a tradition handed down from generation to generation in sweat, graft and toil, because for humanity it is a prerequisite of survival." "But after relying on muscle-power for so long, humankind found a way to tap into the energy buried deep in the Earth." "These flames are also from plants." "A pocket of sunlight." "Pure energy." "The energy of the sun, captured over millions of years by millions of plants more than 100 million years ago." "It's coal." "It's gas." "And, above all, it's oil." "And this pocket of sunlight freed humans from their toil on the land." "With oil began the era of humans who break free of the shackles of time." "With oil, some of us acquired unprecedented comforts." "And in 50 years, in a single lifetime, the Earth has been more radically changed than by all previous generations of humanity." "Faster and faster." "In the last 60 years, the Earth's population has almost tripled." "And over 2 billion people have moved to the cities." "Faster and faster." "Shenzhen, in China, with hundreds of skyscrapers and millions of inhabitants, was just a small fishing village barely 40 years ago." "Faster and faster." "In Shanghai, 3,000 towers and skyscrapers have been built in 20 years." "Hundreds more are under construction." "Today, over half of the world's 7 billion inhabitants live in cities." "New York." "The world's first megalopolis is the symbol of the exploitation of the energy the Earth supplies to human genius." "The manpower of millions of immigrants, the energy of coal, the unbridled power of oil." "America was the first to harness the phenomenal, revolutionary power of "black gold"." "In the fields, machines replaced men." "A liter of oil generates as much energy as 100 pairs of hands in 24 hours." "In the United States, only 3 million farmers are left." "They produce enough grain to feed 2 billion people." "But most of that grain is not used to feed people." "Here, and in all other industrialized nations, it is transformed into livestock feed or biofuels." "The pocket of sunshine's energy chased away the specter of drought that stalked farmland." "No spring escapes the demands of agriculture, which accounts for 70% of humanity's water consumption." "In nature, everything is linked." "The expansion of cultivated land and single-crop farming encouraged the development of parasites." "Pesticides, another gift of the petrochemical revolution, exterminated them." "Bad harvests and famine became a distant memory." "The biggest headache now was what to do with the surpluses engendered by modern agriculture." "But toxic pesticides seeped into the air, soil, plants, animals, rivers and oceans." "They penetrated the heart of cells similar to the mother cell shared by all forms of life." "Are they harmful to the humans they released from hunger?" "These farmers in their yellow protective suits probably have a good idea." "Then came fertilizers, another petrochemical discovery." "They produced unprecedented results on plots of land thus far ignored." "Crops adapted to soils and climates gave way to the most productive varieties and easiest to transport." "And so, in the last century, three-quarters of the varieties developed by farmers over thousands of years have been wiped out." "As far as the eye can see, fertilizer below, plastic on top." "The greenhouses of Almeria, Spain, are Europe's vegetable garden." "A city of uniformly sized vegetables waits every day for hundreds of trucks to take them to the continent's supermarkets." "The more a country develops, the more meat its inhabitants consume." "How can growing worldwide demand be satisfied without recourse to concentration camp-style cattle farms?" "Faster and faster." "Like the life cycle of livestock, which may never see a meadow." "Manufacturing meat faster than the animal has become a daily routine." "In these vast foodlots, trampled by millions of cattle, not a blade of grass grows." "A fleet of trucks from every corner of the country brings tons of grain, soy meal and protein-rich granules that will become tons of meat." "The result is that it takes 100 liters of water to produce 1 kilogram of potatoes," "4,000 liters for 1 kilo of rice and 13,000 liters for 1 kilo of beef." "Not to mention the oil guzzled in the production process and transport." "Our agriculture has become oil-powered." "It feeds twice as many humans on Earth, but has replaced diversity with standardization." "It gives many of us comforts we could only dream of, but it makes our way of life totally dependent on oil." "This is the new measure of time." "Our world's clock now beats to the rhythm of indefatigable machines tapping into the pocket of sunlight." "The whole planet is attentive to these metronomes of our hopes and illusions." "The same hopes and illusions that proliferate along with our needs, increasingly insatiable desires and profligacy." "We know that the end of cheap oil is imminent, but we refuse to believe it." "For many of us, the American dream is embodied by a legendary name." "Los Angeles." "In this city that stretches over 100 kilometers, the number of cars is almost equal to the number of inhabitants." "Here, energy puts on a fantastic show every night." "The days seem no more than a pale reflection of nights that turn the city into a starry sky." "Faster and faster." "Distances are no longer counted in miles, but in minutes." "The automobile shapes new suburbs, where every home is a castle, a safe distance from the asphyxiated city centers, and where neat rows of houses huddle around dead-end streets." "The model of a lucky-few countries has become a universal dream preached by TVs all over the world." "Even here in Beijing, it is cloned, copied and reproduced in these formatted houses that have wiped pagodas off the map." "The automobile has become the symbol of comfort and progress." "If this model were followed by every society, the planet wouldn't have 900 million vehicles, as it does today, but 5 billion." "Faster and faster." "The more the world develops, the greater its thirst for energy." "Everywhere, machines dig, bore and rip from the Earth the pieces of stars buried in its depths since its creation..." "Minerals." "As a privilege of power, 80% of this mineral wealth is consumed by 20% of the world's population." "Before the end of this century, excessive mining will have exhausted nearly all the planet's reserves." "Faster and faster." "Shipyards churn out oil tankers, container ships and gas tankers to cater for the demands of globalized industrial production." "Most consumer goods travel thousands of kilometers from the country of production to the country of consumption." "Since 1950, the volume of international trade has increased 20 times over." "90% of trade goes by sea." "500 million containers are transported every year." "Headed for the world's major hubs of consumption, such as Dubai." "Dubai is a sort of culmination of the Western model, a country where the impossible becomes possible." "Building artificial islands in the sea, for example." "Dubai has few natural resources, but with oil money it can bring in millions of tons of material and workers from all over the planet." "Dubai has no farmland, but it can import food." "Dubai has no water, but it can afford to expend immense amounts of energy to desalinate seawater and build the world's highest skyscrapers." "Dubai has endless sun, but no solar panels." "It is the totem to total modernity that never fails to amaze the world." "Dubai is like the new beacon for all the world's money." "Nothing seems further removed from nature than Dubai, although nothing depends on nature more than Dubai." "Dubai is a sort of culmination of the Western model." "We haven't understood that we're depleting what nature provides." "Since 1950, fishing catches have increased fivefold from 18 to 100 million metric tons a year." "Thousands of factory ships are emptying the oceans." "Three-quarters of fishing grounds are exhausted, depleted or in danger of being so." "Most large fish have been fished out of existence since they have no time to reproduce." "We are destroying the cycle of a life that was given to us." "At the current rate, all fish stocks are threatened with exhaustion." "Fish is the staple diet of one in five humans." "We have forgotten that resources are scarce." "500 million humans live in the world's desert lands, more than the combined population of Europe." "They know the value of water." "They know how to use it sparingly." "Here, they depend on wells replenished by fossil water, which accumulated underground back when it rained on these deserts." "25,000 years ago." "Fossil water also enables crops to be grown in the desert to provide food for local populations." "The fields' circular shape derives from the pipes that irrigate them around a central pivot." "But there is a heavy price to pay." "Fossil water is a non-renewable resource." "In Saudi Arabia, the dream of industrial farming in the desert has faded." "As if on a parchment map, the light spots on this patchwork show abandoned plots." "The irrigation equipment is still there." "The energy to pump water also." "But the fossil water reserves are severely depleted." "Israel turned the desert into arable land." "Even though these hothouses are now irrigated drop by drop, water consumption continues to increase along with exports." "The once mighty River Jordan is now just a trickle." "Its water has flown to supermarkets all over the world in crates of fruit and vegetables." "The Jordan's fate is not unique." "Across the planet, one major river in ten no longer flows into the sea for several months of the year." "Deprived of the Jordan's water, the level of the Dead Sea goes down by over one meter per year." "India risks being the country that suffers most from lack of water in the coming century." "Massive irrigation has fed the growing population and in the last 50 years, 21 million wells have been dug." "In many parts of the country, the drill has to sink every deeper to hit water." "In western India, 30% of wells have been abandoned." "The underground aquifers are drying out." "Vast reservoirs will catch monsoon rains to replenish the aquifers." "In the dry season, local village women dig them with their bare hands." "Thousands of kilometers away,"