I have something to say to your children and grandchildren
and I need you to pass them on.
It is very simple.
We must learn to feel, think and act
in permanent harmony with nature.
Years ago,
I plunged into the Lombock Strait in Indonesia,
30 meters underwater, with this feeling of weightlessness,
surrounded by rich biodiversity, reefs, corals,
turtles, moons, and fish of all colors.
I had the intense feeling of being connected to nature.
It was a very deep mystical and spiritual experience.
At that moment, I saw a little fish with black and yellow stripes
get out of a school of fish and get right in front of me.
We looked at each other
and I felt that our consciences communicated by telepathy.
Yes, the fish had recognized me and he was talking to me.
It was a very intense spiritual sensation.
I know what you think :
“This teacher is crazy, he talks to fish! “
This is also what my students think
at university, when I tell them.
They look at each other strangely
and they say, “Oula! The teacher is crazy! “
But I’m not crazy.
To prove it, here is a scientific proof
that the puffer fish is an artist.
He works 24 hours for a week
to draw this work that you will see.
All this time to prevent the ocean current from erasing it.
This mandala we see
shows that nature has a conscience.
And that I’m not crazy.
And if I can talk to fish,
do you think indigenous peoples
can talk to birds or plants,
stones, mountains, or other natural phenomena?
I think so.
I brought you scientific evidence.
Last year, Science magazine published a study
which analyzes 2 200 different ecosystems.
Scientists say that there is a mathematical balance of 3/4
between prey and predators,
That is, for four gazelles there are three lions.
The opposite would not be viable, right?
Paradoxically, and surprisingly, this mathematical equilibrium
reproduces itself in our body, in our organic physiology.
According to Kleiber’s law,
an elephant that is a thousand times the size of a mouse
should not eat a thousand times more than the mouse,
only 3/4 more times.
Reflecting on it, the planet we live on
is made up of 3/4 water, right?
So I wonder: is it a mere coincidence?
Or does nature have an internal consciousness,
after hundreds of millions of years of common and linked evolution?
That’s the question that pushed me to study
the big story in my PhD research.
That is, all the sciences that group and unify
the history of the universe, the history of planet earth,
the story of life, and the story of the human being.
There I saw that nature has principles and strategies
that we must emulate and perfect to achieve sustainable development.
I brought you a summary.
(Video)
According to the scientific consensus, it is with the explosion of the Big Bang
that the universe emerged, 13.7 billion years ago.
The planet Earth was formed between 4.5 and 5 billion years ago.
And the miracle of life, between 3.5 and 3.8 billion years.
During the first half of this period,
the first forms of life on Earth
remained at fairly low levels of complexity.
With the appearance of free oxygen in the atmosphere,
the first complex cells, eukaryotes, developed.
With the Cambrian explosion of metazoans,
biodiversity has multiplied very rapidly,
creating a wide range of multicellular organisms,
who developed survival strategies
based on very specific energy flows,
like the food chain.
If everything seems to indicate that life comes
the depths of the oceans,
it did not reach the mainland before 450 million years ago.
With the disappearance of the dinosaurs of the Jurassic period,
66 million years ago,
began the period of mammalian hegemony,
from which come the first biped hominids.
Thanks to the traces of fossils found to date,
Australopithecus is known to be four million years old.
Homo Erectus, about two million.
Neanderthal Man and Homo Sapiens, 200,000 years old.
Nowadays, Homo Sapiens
is the only survivor of the human species
who cohabitates and coevolves on the planet Earth
with the rest of its rich biodiversity.
Since the agricultural revolution,
who domesticated animals and plants ten thousand years ago,
and, especially, since the Industrial Revolution
250 years ago,
the human being transforms the environment in an important way.
But the socio-economic system imposed by neoliberal globalization
proved to be unsustainable.
(End of the video)
The human is a species among the species.
In a group of 30 or 100 million species,
only one of them, separated from the rest,
destroys the processes of coevolution of others.
And that’s crazy.
And we are all responsible.
Life is a cosmic miracle
that we must preserve and protect at all costs.
But the human being always wants to destroy everything around him.
Since the mid-twentieth century, and for the first time in history,
the human being has the technological and nuclear possibility
to destroy everything around him.
We seem to have forgotten Hiroshima or Nagasaki
since we built the hydrogen bomb
100 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb.
To illustrate all this, it is equivalent to the thermal fusion of the stars,
which can reach 65 million degrees Celsius.
And as if that were not enough, future generations
are also threatened by the large ecological footprint
that we are doing on Pachamama, our Mother Earth.
Since the mid-90s,
the human being has exceeded the limits of biophysical regeneration of the Earth.
Between 1990 and 2020,
it is expected to lose 40% of the planet’s biodiversity.
According to the World Congress of Nature,
if all together, all the citizens of the world,
imitated the models and the lifestyle of the United States,
we would need four planets like ours.
But we do not have four planets, right?
It is therefore urgent that we learn to cooperate,
to feel, to think
and to act in harmony with nature.
In addition, the use of fossil fuels,
like oil, gas and coal,
has engendered a strong global warming.
What does it mean ?
Imagine closing the doors and windows of this room
and set the seats on which you are sitting.
Yes, yes, imagine it.
Do you know what barbarism is?
Well, that’s the scenario we leave
to our children and grandchildren.
A scenario of chronic shortage of natural resources.
They will not be able to develop with dignity.
It is urgent that we learn to cooperate.
Darwin said only the strong can survive,
those who adapt to their environment.
But he forgot to define the concept of cooperation.
Even if there is violence and predation,
various and varied excesses,
in life, in nature, what defines it
is not competition, but cooperation.
I give you an example.
Imagine millions of sperm running, fighting, fighting
to reach an egg and fertilize it.
It’s not this competition that defines life,
it is the symbiotic union between a spermatozoon and an egg,
between two different entities, creating another.
That’s it, life, cooperation.
Football, for example.
We know that one team opposes another.
But we do not realize that the winning team is the one
who is able to cooperate the eleven players
and the whole strategic team working behind.
Our body is a multicellular organism,
millions of cells cooperate
to make us what we are.
Paradoxically, nature
is the model to emulate and perfect to create sustainable societies.
After 3.8 billion years of coevolution,
nature knows what works and lasts in time.
She suffered catastrophes, glaciations, meteorites
and a constant process of trial and error.
But the human being does not stop building linear ideologies
political doctrines, like anarchism, which was a failure,
communism, which also failed,
socialism failed likewise, as did capitalism.
An Oxfam study from last year
said that 1% of the richest people on Earth
have more money than the remaining 99%.
Yes, that’s crazy.
And here is my message for your children and grandchildren.
They do not adapt to this socio-economic system
who is clinically ill
and who is a psychopath because he kills nature
to make an economic profit.
We sent the waste into space
and nuclear residues at the bottom of the sea.
Money has invaded life.
It is therefore fundamental that we learn to feel,
to think and act in harmony with nature.
Biomimicry is a new science
who imitates nature to solve human problems.
“Bio”, life, “mimicry”, imitation.
Imitation of life.
This is not new.
The native people, the natives, already lived thus,
thousands of years ago.
It’s something we all have in us.
We have this faculty.
I invite you to make an effort
imagination.
What do we do with this beluga?
How engineers, architects,
economists can inspire us?
Well, they wanted to make a plane.
What did they do with the kingfisher’s beak?
The Japanese have made a TGV.
And with this bat?
We could do a drone, right?
And with this flying squirrel?
We could learn to fly.
With termites, we could make bioclimatic buildings.
With this sunflower,
a field of solar panels.
As you know, there are millions of species in the wild.
Thus, bio-inspiration is almost infinite.
But we think that nature will always be there.
And we must go beyond the cognitive lie of GDP.
What does GDP represent?
Economists say
that we have to build and build, and grow so many percent
the economy every year.
All this drives to kill the nature to extract the raw materials
for the industry.
We must realize that the world we live in
is not a gift from our parents,
but a loan from our sons and grandsons.
What would they think if we did not do everything we could
to limit the effects of global warming
who has already started?
Imagine a dialogue in the future, with your children and grandchildren.
I would like them to tell me:
“Grandpa, at least you tried, you fought. “
And you, what would you like them to tell you?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
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