Home Page #2

---

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,

have been built in 20 years.

Hundreds more are under construction.

Today, over half of the world's

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,

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,

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes