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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.

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

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

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.

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